International Relations and Environmental Decision Making

Katie Huston for TEI

When it comes to the environment, Peter M. Haas of the Department of Political Science is looking at the big picture. Haas specializes in international relations with a focus on environmental issues, examining the contributions of various political actors such as scientists, international organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the private sector to create effective international governance. “I’m interested in how environmental threats are recognized and what contributes to more effective collective responses to them,” he says.

His passion for environmental issues was inspired by his childhood in California and his desire to see the world. “I grew up in California in the ‘60s and ‘70s, so you couldn’t miss the environment, and I like to travel,” he says. “I realized that all local environments could be degraded by unanticipated events occurring elsewhere. When I was in ninth grade and there was an oil spill, all of the ninth graders got mobilized to go to San Francisco and clean the beaches.”

Haas has worked on a number of environmental issues, including the Mediterranean, stratospheric ozone, climate change, European acid rain, and the North Sea and Baltic Sea. His research has taken him to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the Earth Summit; Nairobi, Kenya to work for the United Nations Environmental Programme; and “all around Europe” more than once.

His newest project focuses on reform of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). The organization was created in 1973 with “remarkably new and imaginative design principles,” Haas says, such as inclusion of non-state actors and a basis in science, and was intended to be “catalytic in nature,” influencing the decision-making of other UN agencies. Today, however, the UNEP is feared to be outdated and largely ineffective, says Haas, who has served as a consultant to the organization.

“The puzzle is why over the last ten years, when there are a host of imaginative and constructive ideas about UNEP reform, have diplomats only pursued those options that appear banal and conservative,” Haas asks. To find the answers, he’s been “deconstructing the policy process” by reviewing secondary literature on the creation of the UNEP and contacting people who were involved in the process. His research of the UN today comes from his own participation in meetings, interviews with diplomats, and analyzing various policy papers issued by governments about the reforms they would like to see.

“If you want to know what the basis for a national position was at a meeting, you can often find that out in the memos and the summaries of internal meetings, or you can find somebody expressing a viewpoint which is at odds with the conventional wisdom that is being presented in the media at the time,” he says. “I found that out in ozone. The story from within was totally different from the story that was being told in the NY Times.”

Haas is also working on what he calls a “tri-continental research effort” with colleagues from Japan and Norway. His team will be conducting comparative case studies, looking at environmental regimes or negotiated agreements to find out which combinations of political actors can facilitate more effective environmental governance. “We’ll compare cases where NGOs, or some other actors, were involved that led to outcomes that were generally regarded as good against cases where the outcomes were less clear,” he says.

Haas identifies five potential decision-making bodies at the international level: governments, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, scientific communities and the private sector. “The question is which combination of these gives you the best sort of arrangements – best for the environment in a way which is time-sensitive and economically responsible,” he says.

For example, Haas cites the 1985 whaling moratorium enacted by the International Whaling Commission, which banned catching of all whales, even though many species were not endangered. “NGOs prevailed over scientists and gave an outcome which is politically contentious and may not be the best outcome from the perspective of the environment,” Haas says. “The current arrangement makes some people from Norway, Iceland and Japan unnecessarily unemployed because they made a living out of catching whales that weren't endangered.”

Listening to scientists, he says, may have yielded a more mutually advantageous situation for both people and the environment. “You would still have people who are making their living off of it, and the species protected.”
In general, he finds that effective environmental organizations tend to succeed in two ways. “They adjust their own missions or traditional way of doing things to take account of new environmental realities,” Haas says. “[And] they provide resources to governments so that they can do a better job.”

Haas says his work is interesting from multiple standpoints. “The quality of our lives and of future generations are at risk – that’s the environmental reason,” he says. “Worrying about the environment is important from a policy perspective; it affects a lot of people’s lives.”

His work is also “analytically interesting” from an international relations perspective. “International environmental politics exemplify so many of the features of the current international system – widespread uncertainty, complexity, interconnections between problems, and multiple non-state participants,” he says. “Governments aren’t the only players in making decisions or in doing things that affect what we consider important.” He says that a greater focus is needed on problems such as toxic chemicals in the environment, water quality in the Third World and the health of ecosystems.

Haas’ expertise has earned him work as a consultant to the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Commission on Global Governance, and the United Nations Environment Programme, although most of his work has been academic in nature. He has also been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, German Marshall Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Institute for the Study of World Politics, and the Gallatin Foundation. He also spent five years working on a multidisciplinary, international team project on “Learning to Manage Transboundary and Global Environmental Risks,” which examined the comparative history and functional analyses of social responses to climate change, ozone depletion and acid rain.

Where does he see environmental governance going? “Some things are getting better, some aren’t,” he says. “I’m modestly optimistic, but that’s because it’s compared to worst-case scenarios. When I was getting interested in this in the 1970s, we all expected things to be much worse today than they are. That makes me hopeful.”