Since the former Norwegian prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, led the World Commission on Sustainable Development, Norway has played an important role in international environmental co-operation. This volume looks at how this one state engaged international regimes in order to pursue its own national goals in the following issue areas: climate change, biodiversity, ozone depletion, air pollution, marine pollution and whaling. In doing so, it offers an innovative new approach to the study of international regime effectiveness and on linkages or interactions between international regimes.

Global warming is the most severe environmental challenge faced by humanity today and the costs of responding effectively will be high. While Russia's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol ensures the treaty's entry into force, lack of capacity, or incentives to renege on their commitments, will impede mitigation efforts in many countries. An important prerequisite for the proper functioning of the Protocol is that its compliance system - which is spelled out by the Marrakesh Accords - proves effective. Implementing the Climate Regime describes and analyses Kyoto's compliance system. Organized into four parts, Part I describes the emergence and design of the compliance system, while Part II analyses various challenges to its effective operation - such as the development of norms, verification and the danger that the use of punitive 'consequences' may also hurt compliant countries. Part III discusses the potential role of external enforcement, with particular emphasis on trade sanctions. Part IV addresses the relationship between Kyoto compliance on one hand, and international governance, oil companies and green NGOs on the other.

Through theoretical discussions and case studies, this volume explores how processes of contestation about knowledge, norms, and governance processes shape efforts to promote sustainability through international environmental governance. The epistemic communities literature of the 1990s highlighted the importance of expert consensus on scientific knowledge for problem definition and solution specification in international environmental agreements. This book addresses a gap in this literature – insufficient attention to the multiple forms of contestation that also inform international environmental governance. These forms include within-discipline contestation that helps forge expert consensus, inter-disciplinary contestation regarding the types of expert knowledge needed for effective response to environmental problems, normative and practical arguments about the proper roles of experts and laypersons, and contestation over how to combine globally developed norms and scientific knowledge with locally prevalent norms and traditional knowledge in ways ensuring effective implementation of environmental policies. This collection advances understanding of the conditions under which contestation facilitates or hinders the development of effective global environmental governance. The contributors examine how attempts to incorporate more than one stream of expert knowledge and to include lay knowledge alongside it have played out in efforts to create and maintain multilateral agreements relating to environmental concerns. It will interest scholars and graduate students of political science, global governance, international environmental politics, and global policy making. Policy analysts should also find it useful.

"Since the former Norwegian prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, led the World Commission on Sustainable Development, Norway has played an important role in international environmental co-operation. This volume looks at how this one state engaged international regimes in order to pursue its own national goals in the following issue areas: climate change, biodiversity, ozone depletion, air pollution, marine pollution and whaling. In doing so, it offers an innovative new approach to the study of international regime effectiveness and on linkages or interactions between international regimes."--Provided by publisher.

Palgrave Advances in International Environmental Politics provides a state of the art review of the major theoretical approaches and substantive debates of the field. The first section reviews the historical development of international environmental politics as well as the theoretical and methodological approaches used in its study. The following chapters each review the trajectory of a key research area within international environmental politics and elaborate on current approaches and debates. Case studies in each chapter illuminate the main theoretical questions that emerge from the review.

The Polar North is known to be home to large gas and oil reserves and its position holds significant trading and military advantages, yet the maritime boundaries of the region remain ill-defined. In the twenty-first century the Arctic is undergoing profound change. As the sea ice melts, a result of accelerating climate change, global governance has become vital. In this, the third of three volumes, the latest research and analysis from the world's leading Arctic research body - the Fridtjof Nansen Institute - is brought together for the first time. Arctic Governance: Norway, Russia and Asia investigates the foreign policy discourses of Arctic governance, specifically as regarding international relations and competing interests between Norway, Russia and various Asian states.

The WSPC Reference on Natural Resources and Environmental Policy in the Era of Global Change provides a comprehensive and prominent reference of various highly authoritative volumes of long-term scientific value, for milestone concepts and theories. The books in the reference set are edited by leading experts in the fields of: Game Theory, International Relations and Global Politics, Computable General Equilibrium (CGE): Economy-Wide Modeling, and Experimental Economics. Each book in the reference set includes chapters that are laid out by recognized, broadly respected researchers, in fields associated with issues related to natural resources and environmental policy in the era of global change. The reference set focuses on the economic and strategic aspects of interactions among various parts of society, all dependent on the availability and utilization of limited natural resources and their impact on the environment. Policy implications are addressed, including current challenges and future perspectives.The combination of the four books provides a unique perspective on the issues that engage the public discourse of researchers and policy-makers at state, regional, and global levels. Each of the books in the reference set and all four books as a whole provide coverage of disciplines and angles through which the reader can obtain an understanding of the state-of-the-art of dealing with natural resources and environmental policy in the era of global change. The books in the reference set complement each other and provide a scientific understanding of our ability to address the issues covered.