2004 — A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

International law has become the key arena for protecting the global environment. Since the 1970s, literally hundreds of international treaties, protocols, conventions, and rules under customary law have been enacted to deal with such problems as global warming, biodiversity loss, and toxic pollution. Proponents of the legal approach to environmental protection have already achieved significant successes in such areas as saving endangered species, reducing pollution, and cleaning up whole regions, but skeptics point to ongoing environmental degradation to argue that international law is an ineffective tool for protecting the global environment.

In this book, Joseph DiMento reviews the record of international efforts to use law to make our planet more livable. He looks at how law has been used successfully—often in highly innovative ways—to influence the environmental actions of governments, multinational corporations, and individuals. And he also assesses the failures of international law in order to make policy recommendations that could increase the effectiveness of environmental law. He concludes that a "supranational model" is not the preferred way to influence the actions of sovereign nations and that international environmental law has been and must continue to be a laboratory to test approaches to lawmaking and implementation for the global community.

A searing account of how the international community is trying—and failing—to address the worst effects of climate change and the differential burdens borne by rich and poor countries.

Climate change is increasingly accepted as a global emergency creating irrevocable losses for the planet. Yet, each country experiences these losses differently, and reaching even inadequate political agreements is fraught with contestation. Governing the End untangles the complex relationship between deteriorating environmental conditions, high politics, and everyday diplomatic practices, focusing on the United Nations’ agreement to address “loss and damage” and subsequent battles over implementation.

Lisa Vanhala looks at the differing assumptions and strategic framings that poor and rich countries bring to bear and asks why some norms emerge and diffuse while others fail to do so. Governing the End is based on ethnographic observation of eight years of UN meetings and negotiations and more than one hundred and fifty interviews with diplomats, policymakers, UN secretariat staff, experts, and activists. It explores explicit political contestation, as well as the more clandestine politics that have stymied implementation and substantially reduced the scope of compensation to poor countries. In doing so, Governing the End elucidates the successes and failures of international climate governance, revealing the importance of how ideas are constructed and then institutionally embodied.