Constitutional Implications of Global Environmental Change

1. Constitutional Implications of Global Environmental Change SHEILA JASANOFF with JIM DRATWA MYANNA LAHSEN

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

3. 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 CMU-HDGC

4. 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 CMU-HDGC

5. 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” CMU-HDGC

6. 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. CMU-HDGC

7. 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) CMU-HDGC

8. 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). CMU-HDGC

9. 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. CMU-HDGC

10. Dissension on Kyoto or Other Precautionary Action • internationally • within the EU • between Aznar’s 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 CMU-HDGC

11. Planet Earth: Image and Imagination CMU-HDGC

12. 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). CMU-HDGC

13. 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 worlds…humans are inconsequential(Sagan 1994, 5-6). CMU-HDGC

14. 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). CMU-HDGC

15. 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). CMU-HDGC

16. “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 don’t want to reach down to the level of survival (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, 40). CMU-HDGC

17. Other Images, Other Ecologies CMU-HDGC

18. Human Place in Nature • India’s “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. CMU-HDGC

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