Constitutional Implications of Global Environmental Change

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Constitutional Implications of Global
Environmental Change

• SHEILA JASANOFF
• with
• JIM DRATWA
• MYANNA LAHSEN

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Constitutional Theories

• United States
• Bruce Ackerman, constitutional moments
• International law debates
• post-sovereign order
• European Union
• constitutional convention
• Empire (Hardt and Negri)
• Unwritten constitutionalism

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Non-formal constitutionalism

• Constitutionalism with a small c
• a form of rule which both empowers a government
  to carry out the range of functions associated
  with the modern interventionist state and
  excludes arbitrary and despotic forms of rule.
• Neil Walker

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Environment and Constitutionalism

• New coalitions (Lahsen)
• epistemic communities
• New discourses (Dratwa)
• risk society, unknown unknowns
• precautionary principle
• Visual strategies (Jasanoff)
• Earth in the balance
• Million globes campaign of Seattle NION

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Brazilian Climate Change EpiComm

• 1992 Rio Earth Summit instigated by climate
  scientists -- who
• view national policy as too self-seeking and
  economist
• favor environmental education and literacy
• identify with IPCC and find Bush policy of
  seeking NAS review insulting

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Other Views at the Inter-American Institute

• . A person ... from Chile after nine years
  of this, said There it is! There is the U.S.
  motive for IAI. I knew they were up to something,
  I knew there was a larger political motive. It
  took eight years, but now it has been revealed.
  ... Now, I was there from the word go. I know
  the motives, I know every iota of thinking behind
  it. There is no conspiracy. There is no hidden
  purpose. There is no political agenda... But it
  was never ever perceived that way by the other
  players... I suddenly realized Oh my God, they
  have been sitting there ..., these pals of mine,
  wondering what devious thing I was up to.

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Constitutional Roles of the Precautionary
Principle

• 5 levels or dimensions
• inherent
• imported spill-over
• diversely distributed/advocated
• contested
• constituted by-and constitutive of-polities
  (e.g., EU)

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Precautionary Principle (PP) and Climate Change
(CC)

• Inherent in any initiative to address
  anthropogenic climate change to the extent that
  scientific uncertainty is used as a resource to
  shape/undermine such initiative.
• Spilling over from other policy-areas such as the
  Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, so that the PP
  finds its way into the CC regime (e.g., the COP-9
  decision on GM trees used for sinks).

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Precautionary Principle (PP) and Climate Change
(CC)

• Explicitly featured/advocated in some actors'
  positions and policies (e.g. by the EU, in
  international settings such as COP meetings and
  in domestic European climate policies).
• Contested as such and in its instantiations (cf.
  the phrase no regrets used with very different
  meanings by EU and US in 1980s).
• Co-production of the global CC regime, CC
  episteme, and CC PP.

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Dissension on Kyoto or Other Precautionary Action

• internationally
• within the EU
• between Aznars Spain and European Commission
• within EU member states
• Belgium, with Flanders Region playing a
  US/Spanish part
• within the European Commission
• between Commissioners de Palacio and Prodi or
  Wallström

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Planet Earth Image and Imagination
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Politics of Planet Earth

• In the middle of the 20th century, we saw our
  planet from space for the first time. Historians
  may eventually find that this vision had a
  greater impact on thought than did the Copernican
  revolution of the 16th century, which upset
  humans self-image by revealing that the Earth is
  not the centre of the universe. From space, we
  see a small and fragile ball dominated not by
  human activity and edifice but by a pattern of
  clouds, oceans, greenery and soils (World
  Commission of Environment and Development 1987,
  308).

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Erasing Sovereignty

• We are too small and our statecraft too feeble to
  be seen by a spacecraft between the Earth and the
  Moon. From this vantage point, our obsession
  with nationalism is nowhere in evidence. The
  Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to
  multitudes something well known to astronomers
  On the scale of worldshumans are inconsequential
  (Sagan 1994, 5-6).

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Erasing Power Politics as Ecology

• On the grounds for U.S. withdrawal from the Law
  of the Sea Convention
• The internationalists tendency to favor
  collective over individual action is combined
  with the codifiers tendency to wish to see the
  world in neat static terms. Above and beyond
  practical considerations, there is an aesthetic
  antipathy to the disaster of non-uniformity,
  and a general distrust of the possible benignness
  of self-regulating, dynamic processes (Darman
  1978).

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Discourses of Resistance

• Restoring the individual
• The luxury emission levels of one US citizen
  in 1996 were equal to the survival emissions of
  19 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 17 Maldivians, 49 Sri
  Lankans, 107 Bangladeshis, 134 Bhutanese or 269
  Nepalis (CSE, Green Politics, 2000).
• Equity, economics, ecology
• Clean Development Mechanism ?? Cheap Development
  Mechanism (the cost of sinks projects in
  tropical countries could be as low as US 0.1 per
  tonne of carbon stored as against us 100 per
  tonne of stored carbon for similar projects in a
  non-tropical country (CSE).

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Life Environmentalism vs. Natural
Environmentalism

• You talk very little about life, you talk too
  much about survival. It is very important to
  remember that when the possibilities for life are
  over, the possibilities for survival start. And
  there are peoples here in Brazil, especially in
  the Amazon region, who still live, and these
  people who still live dont want to reach down to
  the level of survival (World Commission on
  Environment and Development, 1987, 40).

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Other Images, Other Ecologies
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Human Place in Nature

• Indias ecosystem people
• must scratch the earth and hope for rains in
  order to grow their own food, must gather wood or
  dung to cook it, must build their own huts with
  bamboo or sticks of sorghum dabbed with mud and
  must try to keep out mosquitoes by engulfing them
  with smoke from the cooking hearth. Such people
  depend on the natural environments of their own
  locality to meet most of their material needs
• Gadgil and Guha 1995, 3.

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