Environmental regionalism: moving in from the policy margins

ABSTRACT

In the last 30 years, environmental challenges in the Asia-Pacific have gone from sitting at the margins of political discourse to featuring prominently in academic and policy debates about institutional capacity, economic sustainability and regional futures. Those challenges are extensive: they include loss of biodiversity and species, land degradation and deforestation, water pollution and scarcity, drought, wildlife smuggling, ozone depletion, other forms of atmospheric pollution, and climate change. This article explores regional responses to environmental challenges through a global governance lens. It examines the ways in which vertical and intergovernmental arrangements have been supplemented by institutions and networks that reflect horizontal and transnational approaches. It reveals that this has been an uneven process, with coherence and fragmentation equally represented. In its focus on the two key subregions of Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, it shows how environmental cooperation has been implicated in a crisis of regionalism and caught up in states’ efforts to demonstrate that governance can still be effective in the absence of binding multilateral agreements.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental governance
• regionalism
• ASEAN
• Northeast Asia
• Southeast Asia
• climate change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is beyond the scope of this article to explore barriers to this kind of norm diffusion from the global or regional to the local when policy-makers are faced with or might even be implicated in what McCarthy describes as ‘patterns of elite patrimonialism and crony capitalism’ (2014, p. 772).

2. For a more detailed discussion of this history, see Elliott (2003), Elliott (2011) and Koh and Karim (2017).

3. Koh and Karim (2017) provide an overview of arguments calling for the environment to be a separate, fourth pillar of the ASEAN Community process.

4. The only other legally binding agreement in force is the 2005 Agreement on the Establishment of the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity. A third agreement – the ASEAN Agreement on the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources – has never come into effect.

5. This includes an ASEAN Peatland Management Strategy, a subregional Ministerial Steering Committee on Transboundary Haze Pollution, an ASEAN Sub-Regional Haze Monitoring System, a Technical Working Group on Transboundary Haze Pollution and an ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Transboundary Haze Pollution Control, planning for which is still underway at time of writing.

6. See Sunchindah (2015) for a detailed overview.

7. The five initial participant countries were Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

8. These themes were explored in depth, for example, at the June 2016 ARF Workshop on Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Management.

9. See http://asean.org/regional-forum-on-climate-change-rfcc-2/.

10. While these three accounts of environmentally suboptimal outcomes of regional cooperation – institutional and ideational flaws of soft regionalism, material and resource constraints, and the uneven implementation of flatter and more equitable forms of governance – often run in parallel they are doubtless interrelated.

11. Although the AP-RCEM defines itself as open, inclusive and flexible, and has emphasised the importance of environmental justice and accountability, civil society groups who seek a voice within the mechanism are expected to affiliate with it. This requires that such groups agree to the 2013 Bangkok Civil Society declaration, AP-RCEM's Functional Operations Document and terms of reference and submit a profile to the secretariat.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lorraine Elliott

Lorraine Elliott is a Professor of International Relations and Public Policy Fellow in the Department of International Relations at The Australian National University.