Anthem EnviroExperts

Reviewed by Andrea Beck, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 A call for rescaling transboundary water governance to acknowledge and enhance the power of Indigenous peoples 

By Emma S. Norman  Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities. Routledge, 2015, 220 pp.

Governing Transboundary Waters starts from a fundamental problem in water governance: the recognition that political-administrative and hydrological boundaries do not always overlap. In this sense, the book addresses a familiar question: how are we to govern water resources that span political borders when our institutions and frameworks are bound within fixed jurisdictions and nation-state frameworks? What makes this book stand out in this debate is its commitment to questioning and expanding notions of territoriality and sovereignty. Rather than limiting her analysis to municipal, regional, federal or nation-state jurisdictions, Norman brings a “third”––and often ignored––“sovereign” into the picture. That is, Indigenous peoples. Focusing on the Canada–US borderland, she applies a postcolonial perspective grounded in political ecology to unmask the power dynamics at work in transboundary water governance.

The first part of the book examines the rescaling of transboundary water governance mechanisms in response to demands for more ecological protection and public participation. In the North American context, first and foremost among these mechanisms is the International Joint Commission (IJC), an organization rooted in principles of national sovereignty. Through its International Watersheds Initiative (IWI), the IJC has tried to embrace greater participation by nonstate actors and Indigenous peoples. Despite these efforts, the IJC remains firmly in the hands of nation-states, and consequently, the IWI seems to reinforce, rather than transcend, established borders.

The second part provides a contrasting, and more hopeful, perspective. Based on five “parables of change,” Norman shows how Indigenous peoples along the Canada–US border have engaged in innovative, counterhegemonic strategies to reclaim and enhance environmental protection and water governance in their communities. As the examples of the Coast Salish Gathering or the Great Lakes “water walkers” demonstrate, these initiatives have not only promoted more effective governance, but also contributed to the strengthening of Indigenous self-determination, decolonialization, cultural revitalization and empowerment.

In closing, Norman calls for “creating governance mechanisms commensurate to a scale that makes sense both ecologically and culturally.” She also presents a set of principles that would characterize “a good upstream neighbor.” Compared to the foregoing analysis, the simplicity of these principles is surprising, making them seem somewhat out of place at the end of this theoretically elaborate volume. Overall, however, Norman’s work brings us one big step closer to “refram[ing] the dominant narrative related to transboundary water governance.”

Reviewer: Tarique Niazi, Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities examines how postcolonial theory and critical theory have a bearing on environmental and social realities.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur and Anthony Carrigan (eds.) Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, Routledge, 2015

How environmental and social realities are presented and represented is the question that is critically engaged by the field of environmental humanities. Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities is a testament to the scholarly sophistication that defines this discipline. The editors, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur and Anthony Carrigan, are the leading lights of environmental humanities. They bring critical approaches, especially postcolonial theory and critical theory, to bear upon a range of topics that are of concern to a planet divided between the privileged and the underprivileged. Postcolonial theory bears kinship with subaltern studies, while critical theory is inspired by Marxian thought and the Frankfurt School. Both theories bind texts to context to demonstrate their inextricability and ‘relations of definition’.

Texts matter in shaping human perception of the environment, its defilement and despoliation, ‘natural’ disasters, commodification of nature, the Anthropocene and climate change. As such, the volume’s real strength rests in situating contemporary environmental concerns in colonial (imperial) and postcolonial contexts to understand their historical constitution. The collection deploys a number of innovative methods to address the past, present and future state of ‘global ecologies’. All this enriches the ecocriticism presented in Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities to determine the ways in which the environmental predicament is interpreted and mitigated.

Divided into five sections, the volume argues that a critical study of narrative is vital to human understanding of the environment. The first section focuses on colonial and nationalist framings of ecology while conducting postcolonial readings into ‘particular environments’ (provincializing the environment). The second section is devoted to the study of disasters and resilience in different cultural contexts. How ‘natural disasters’ come to be defined is where postcolonial theory and environmental humanities shine best. The third section centers on political ecology, environmental justice and ‘environmentalism of the poor’ in African, Indian and Latin American contexts. Contributions in the fourth section delve into the ways in which ‘world ecology’ was constructed over time. In particular, it examines how ‘globatarian’ approaches to ecological manipulation caused a drift to neoliberal globalization, and asks how the capitalist world system can be considered in terms of ‘world-ecology’ The last section accounts for human transformation of the environment in the Anthropocene.

The real challenge for environmental humanities is to reconcile its postmodernist, postcolonial, critical knack for deconstructing ‘grand narratives’ with the organic unity of global ecology.

 Global Ecologies is destined to become a classic text in environmental humanities.

Harro van Asselt, The Fragmentation of Global Climate Governance: Consequences and Management of Regime Interactions, Edward Elgar, 2014

One cannot but be overwhelmed by how many global regimes for climate change exist especially as we emerge from the COP21 (2015 Paris Climate Conference) negotiations, and also wonder how they can all function in the same policy domain. Harro van Asselt, in The Fragmentation of Global Climate Governance, draws attention to the complexity arising from the multitude of levels of global governance laws and policies (as regimes). He points out how their evolution, happening mostly in isolation, necessitates further exploration of their fragmentation in order to understand how to manage the consequences and interactions of such regimes for the sake of governing climate change effectively.  He defines fragmentation broadly as “the increased specialization and diversification in international institutions, including the overlap of substantive rules and jurisdictions” (p. 35). This definition guides the two objectives of the book: (1) To provide insight into the consequences of fragmentation of global climate governance and the subsequent interactions between different regimes related to climate change; and (2) To examine strategies for dealing with regime interactions in global climate governance, with emphasis on analysing the advantages and drawbacks of the different ways of managing interactions in terms of effectiveness and feasibility of the management strategies.

The Fragmentation of Global Climate Governance is divided into four parts and ten chapters. However, the impetus of this text is set around the author’s analytical framework that is introduced in chapters 3–5. The remaining chapters demonstrate this framework as a methodological tool for analysis and the lessons learned from its application. The basis of the analytical framework is the need for integration of more legal techniques to enhance the analysis of interactions through what the author terms the ‘legal approach’, and also merging this approach with the much more studied ‘policy approach’ (institutionalist view), which focuses on how the regimes affect each other’s development and performance through understanding regime coordination and cooperation.

Van Asselt argues that the analytic framework expands on the study object – ‘what tends to interact’ in an innovative way. He notes that other scholars have largely set their work along discipline-specific boundaries rather than focusing on tools of analysis. Through binary approaches of law and policy arise new advances in understanding fragmentation, its consequences and how to manage them.

This analytical framework accomplishes the analysis of the three extensive cases found in chapters 6–8. The cases reveal the shortcomings and opportunities in regime interactions. Granted, the in-depth analysis of the cases is a major success of the application of the framework. However, the arrangements of the many typologies, hierarchies and categorizations which form the basis of the author’s analytical framework makes understanding difficult at times. There tends to be meagre explanations in some parts and extensive discussions in other parts, leading to an unevenness in arguments. For example, the discussions under the political approach receive little attention in some cases compared to the legal approach. Additionally, what could have been helpful to the reader, given the extensive concepts and nomenclature introduced, is a schematic representation of all these terms, highlighting how they link and form parts of the analytical framework prior to introducing the three cases. This would have reinforced the concepts and mentally prepared the reader to engage deeply with the cases. Nevertheless, this book is ideal for global environmental governance scholars who wish to delve deep into the subject  to understand the ways in which one can study the interaction of regimes. Lessons learned in analysing climate change as a policy domain are without a doubt transferable to other global environmental governance policy domains, such as transboundary water resources and pollution control.

Reviewed by Sudhirendar Sharma

The Last Drop is a wake-up call to liberate water from the predominant notion that ‘whoever controls water controls society’.

Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes, The Last Drop, Pluto Press, 2016

Focusing on the trade and politics of water, the professor-journalist duo of Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes laments the growing insanity of identifying bottled water as a social drink – consumed by elegant people in elegant bars. It is no surprise that some nine billion bottles of water are sold annually across the world. The massive expansion of the private water industry, including the bottled water industry, is an outcome of the commitment of neoliberalism to the privatization of all public goods and services.

Though outwardly it may seem to be the only way to address the issue of access and quality, the reality however is that big corporations with turnover exceeding US$40 billion annually have contributed literally nothing to the resolution of the water problem. This isn’t surprising when one learns that 34 per cent of water and sewerage privatizations have failed across the world, with as many as 180 cities having re-municipalized their water operations.

Citing actual cases of predatory privatization, from Mexico to India and from Laos to Bolivia, the authors contend that capitalism is anything but blind to ecology. It transforms nature into commodities, homogenizing it into products that can be traded for profit. Calling for a new world water order, the book seeks collective engagement of all small movements in a big picture change in favor of water peace, as opposed to the widely publicized prediction of possible ‘water wars’. Simply put, the struggle over water is not only about water, but also about land and more extensively about democracy and rights.

Examining corporate control over water and the ensuing struggle for water resources worldwide, Gonzalez and Yanes join the activists in calling for action to save water from overt and covert privatization. The Last Drop is a grim reminder and a wake-up call to liberate water from the predominant notion that ‘whoever controls water controls society’. Exposing the complex arguments surrounding water, the book makes a technical and scientific case for pushing back market fundamentalism in favor of equity and social justice.

Reviewed by Kelly Heber Dunning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

An excellent primer for those interested in or teaching on Arctic governance

Arctic Marine Governance: Opportunities for Transatlantic Cooperation, edited by Elizabeth Tedsen and Sandra Cavalieri, R. Andreas Kraemer, Springer, 2013

This book opens with a clear and thorough explanation of European Union and American policies concerning the Arctic. In addition, it provides a supplemental overview of the way these countries approach ocean planning and management in general. Within this discussion, I was interested to see that the authors addressed recent regional policy developments, such as the enactment of regional ocean planning by the Obama administration. Additionally, the authors discuss multilateral institutional arrangements for Arctic management in a way that solidly grounds the sections that follow.

After its opening, the book shifts its attention to the most relevant environmental processes—both natural and man-made—that warrant changes in the way the Arctic is managed. These include the albedo effect, increased CO2 from melting permafrost, and expansion of various industrial activities. Again, the authors provide a clear map of the relevant institutional and governance arrangements, offering an excellent primer for anyone new to the issues of Arctic governance or for those teaching classes on the subject. The first two chapters deliver a succinct overview of the relevance of human and ecological. The third chapter offers a helpful explanation of governance, a nebulous topic. The remainder of the book “zooms in” on important challenges, especially those to be faced by indigenous communities in a changing Arctic. These include ways in which crisis management may be necessary along with resilience thinking and efforts to build adaptive capacity, particularly as these relate to the needs of indigenous groups.

The next section of the book focuses on economic issues, potential impacts of environmental change, and impending shifts in policy or regulation. The chapter on fisheries is excellent and will be appreciated by fisheries management professionals concerned about trans-boundary disputes caused by mobile and valuable stocks. Overall, the book is a thorough and well-edited account of contemporary policy and management issues in the Arctic. It covers environmental as well as socio-economic variables and can be used for teaching purposes as a single text or in sections.