Environmental Regime Building In Northeast Asia

The share of global CO2 emissions from the core Northeast Asian (NEA) countries in 2015 was estimated to be as high as 33.63 percent. Representing 28.21, 3.67, and 1.75 percent of total global emissions, China, Japan, and South Korea were ranked the first, fifth, and seventh largest contributors, respectively. Some parts of China, the Republic of Mongolia, the Russian Far East, and Southeast Asia have long been on serious alert due to accelerated deforestation. With their rapid population growth and economic development, the core countries of Northeast Asia are responsible both directly and indirectly for numerous environmental problems. Urgent individual and collective action is required from the region’s governments. Against the backdrop of debate on how to understand Northeast Asia as a "region," Park focuses on the major regional economies of China, Japan, and South Korea, along with Russia, North Korea, and the Republic of Mongolia, due to both their geopolitical proximity and their significance to the region. The author attempts to answer the questions: "How far has regional environmental cooperation progressed in Northeast Asia?"; and "Why are Northeast Asian countries reluctant to cooperate further on urgent transboundary and regional environmental issues?"

Annotation As the twenty-first century commences, the countries of Pacific Asia are grappling with the impact of regional development, industry, and growth on their increasingly acute environmental problems. International Environmental Cooperation: Politics and Diplomacy in Pacific Asia brings together innovative and insightful studies of international environmental politics in this increasingly critical part of the world. The first section of the book examines many of the issues and actors impacting international environmental cooperation, highlighting important themes such as cooperation between developed and developing countries, international justice, and regional environmental security. This section also illustrates key features of specific multilateral environmental agreements and the competing interests of important national bodies, international organizations, multinational corporations, and nongovernmental entities. The second section focuses on environmental diplomacy and regime-building in Pacific Asia, examining issues such as acid rain, nuclear waste, deforestation, and conflict over regional seas. Contributors from Asia, Europe, and North America bring an international perspective to questions of environmental cooperation. International Environmental Cooperation provides policymakers, citizens, scholars and students with essential information for understanding and addressing some of the world's most significant environmental problems.

The past few decades have witnessed the emergence of a vast array of regional arrangements and institutions dealing with all aspects of ocean management. The level of cooperation ranges from minimal dispute avoidance to relatively comprehensive ocean governance at the regional level. As concrete examples, reasonably successful and comprehensive regional regimes have been created for the Baltic, the North, and the Mediterranean Seas and the South Pacific. And attempts at regional regime building are ongoing in Southeast Asia, the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Although there are broad similarities between the semi-enclosed seas of Western Europe and Northeast Asia, no regional maritime regime has yet been initiated in Northeast Asia. The papers in this volume are authored by leading authorities on not only the maritime affairs of their particular region of focus but on maritime policy in general. They describe and explain existing or incipient regional maritime regimes in an unusually broad comparative context, and extract lessons learned that may be applicable elsewhere including Northeast Asia. The case studies are neatly sandwiched between an introduction to concepts and principles on regional co-operation and concluding chapters on lessons learned and their applicability to Northeast Asia. Moreover, the papers raise and address several questions of relevance to policy. For example, what factors are conducive to maritime regime initiation, expansion and positive evolution, and which constrain regime formation and evolution? Why has maritime regime building been successful in Europe and largely unsuccessful in Asia? And which, if any, lessons learned in the European context are applicable in Asia? Given the growing interest in regime formation and effectiveness in general and maritime regimes in particular, this book will be of considerable interest to both analysts and policymakers.

This dissertation examines the microprocesses of regime creation in Northeast Asia regarding transboundary environmental problems. Despite the growing need for international environmental cooperation and policy coordination at the regional and global levels, Northeast Asia has not yet succeeded in reaching any binding regional agreement on any environmental issue, even though it has developed various environmental cooperative mechanisms regarding transboundary pollution. Rather than characterizing regional environmental cooperative mechanisms in Northeast Asia as "non-regime," this study unpacks the varying forms of collective action in terms of the speed of development of cooperative mechanisms and the substantive content of the development undertaken by states in the region. The causal relationships between specific forms of political leadership, knowledge, and socialization and the degrees and forms of regional collective action is explored regarding the transboundary air pollution issues of the region, including acid rain, dust and sandstorms, and various long-range transboundary air pollutants. In addition to comparing the participation of countries in this region in broader Northeast Asian cooperative mechanisms, the study also analyzes the differences between European and East Asian experiences on this topic. An analysis of the three cases indicates that all three independent variables are only partly associated with varying degrees of collective action as measured by formal features and concrete collective action in Northeast Asia. The study's comparison of the varying degrees of collective action in Northeast Asia and Europe and among the three studied Northeast Asian environmental cooperative mechanisms discovers two useful insights. First, the analysis supports the hypothesis on social mechanisms among political leadership, shared knowledge, and socialization, which asserts that the stronger the political leadership and the greater the shared knowledge in the region, the more likely participants in regional cooperation are to engage in the learning process of socialization and thereby create the most formal and concrete collective action. The study finds that strong political leadership is not itself sufficient to lead member countries to engage in the learning process of socialization and that a lack of shared scientific knowledge is positively associated with the adaption process of socialization among participants in the cooperative activities of these three regional mechanisms. Another insight is that the lack of shared knowledge and of the learning mode of socialization helps explain why all three regional cooperative mechanisms have failed to advance to become the legally binding regional environmental regimes rather than the comparatively higher degrees of collective action in terms of formalization and concreteness among regional entities within the UNEP's second category of regional action. This study argues that knowledge and socialization barriers are key determinants of the development of regulatory regional environmental regimes. Without shared scientific knowledge and engagement in the learning process of socialization, even given strong political leadership by a participating country, it is not likely for a region to develop a legally binding regional environmental regime.Therefore, this study concludes that to make the transformation from the least formal and concrete collective action to the most formal and concrete depends on creating shared knowledge and the learning process of socialization.