Chapter 14 Revision Guide

Green IR theory has undergone significant development in the last decade to the point where it is recognized as a significant new stream of IR theory.
Green scholarship has grown apace with increasing global economic and ecological interdependence and the emergence of uniquely global ecological problems: climate change; the thinning of the ozone layer and the erosion of the Earth’s biodiversity, much of which was politicized in the ‘limits-to-growth’ debate of the early 1970s.
Emerging as a distinct political theory not before the late 1980s, green theory emerged in the social sciences and humanities in two phases.
The first phase sought to highlight the ecological irrationality of the ideology of industrialism and its core social institutions such as the market and the state. Its questioning of taken-for-granted ideas about progress are strongly affiliated with both liberalism and orthodox Marxism.
Green political theorists have called into question anthropocentrism or human chauvinism − the idea that humans are the apex of evolution, the centre of value and meaning in the world and the only beings that possess moral worth.
Many green theorists have embraced a new ecology-centred or ‘ecocentric’ philosophy that seeks to respect all life-forms in terms of their own distinctive modes of being, for their own sake, and not merely for their instrumental value to humans.
Critique of instrumental reason is also closely related to critical theorists of the first-generation Frankfurt School.
The second wave of green political theory has become more transnational and cosmopolitan in its orientation through its exploration of the relationship between environmental justice and environmental democracy.
Environmental injustices arise when unaccountable social agents ‘externalize’ the environmental costs of their decisions and practices to innocent third parties in circumstances where the affected parties (or their representatives) have no knowledge of, or input in, the ecological risk-generating decisions and practices.
Environmental injustices also arise when privileged social classes and nations appropriate more than their ‘fair share’ of the environment, and leave behind oversized ‘ecological footprints’ (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996). In this sense, environmental injustices are an instance of ‘slow violence’, while simultaneously exposing preceding structural violence both within and among states.
The basic quest of green theory is both to reduce ecological risks across the board, and to prevent their unfair externalization and displacement, through space and time, onto innocent third parties. Intra- and intergenerational concern is crucial to this kind of thinking.
Green IR theory shares many of the characteristics of the new IR theories emerging out of the so-called ‘third debate’ (sometimes referred to as the ‘fourth debate’, see chapter 1): they are generally critical, problem-oriented, interdisciplinary and above all unapologetic about their explicit normative orientation.
Green IR theory may be usefully subdivided into an IPE wing, which offers an alternative analysis of global ecological problems to that of regime theory, and a normative or ‘green cosmopolitan’ wing that articulates new norms of environmental justice and green democracy at all levels of governance.
Both the political economy and normative wings of green IR theory are located on the critical/constructivist side of theorizing. They have challenged the dominant rationalist approaches of neorealism and neoliberalism on four levels.
First: green critics have directed critical attention to the normative purposes that are served by rationalist approaches by exposing the problematic environmental assumptions and ethical values that are implicit in neorealist and neoliberal analyses. Reconceptualizations of core analytical starting points have emerged here. For example, a more comprehensive framework for understanding security would revolve around human well-being and ecosystem integrity, rather than states.
Second: green IR theorists have added their weight to the critique of rationalist approaches pioneered by critical theorists and constructivists, who have exposed the limitations in the analytical frameworks and explanatory power of ‘positivist’ IR theories. For example, green theorists, generally opposing rationalist regime theory, point out that environmental regimes embody moral norms that cannot be reduced to state interests or capacities.
Third: green IR theorists have directed their critical attention to the social agents and social structures that have systematically blocked the negotiation of more ecologically enlightened regimes. One prominent concern of green IR theorists is that international economic regimes, such as the global trading regime, tend to overshadow and undermine many international environmental regimes.
Finally: green IR theorists have explored the role of non-state forms of ‘deterritorialized’ governance, ranging from the transnational initiatives of environmental NGOs to the private governance practices of industrial and financial corporations, including the insurance industry.
Green IR theory has self-consciously sought to transcend the state-centric framework of traditional IR theory and offer new analytical and normative insights into global environmental change.

Case Study. The problem of human-induced climate change represents one of the most challenging environmental problems confronting humankind. In response to the alarming predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) First Assessment Report in 1990, the international community negotiated the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was signed at the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Under the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, industrialized countries agreed to reduce their aggregate levels of greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by an average of 5.2. In the parties launched a new negotiation track for a Treaty on Long-term Cooperative Action (the LC A treaty). However, these aspirations failed.

Case Study continued. As then, continuous disputes between developing and developed countries are regarded a major obstacle in the advances of environmental policies. The former (most notably China and India) insist that developing countries were under no obligation to accept internationally binding commitments given their significant development need and criticize developed countries for their failure to fulfil leadership obligations under the Convention given their greater historical responsibility, capacity, and per capita carbon footprint.

Despite these challenges, the Paris Agreement of 2015 was signed by the EU and a series of developing countries, most notably the BASIC alliance of Brasil, South Africa, India and China. The agreement adopted a modified voluntary pledge and review system reinforcing the Koyoto Protocol, though disputes over different legitimate emission levels between developing and developed countries remain. Nonetheless, the international climate negotiations have been accompanied by significant developments in climate policy at the regional, national, and subnational levels.

Case study continued. Alternative green arguments must be sought to explain such developments. Neorealists cannot explain why many industrialized countries have agreed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, despite the US’s defection and without extracting any binding commitments from developing countries.

Neoliberals, in focusing their attention on the hard bargaining among states over the distribution of benefits and burdens of adjustment, have tended to side line the larger ideational context that shapes and drives the negotiations.

Case Study continued. Green IR theorists give prominence to the role of justice norms in their analysis. As such the environmental ideal builds on a cosmopolitan ideal (see Ch. 13), that argues that all individuals, irrespective of nationality or social class, should have an equal right to the energy resources, provided the total use of resources and services remains safely within the ecological carrying capacity of the biosphere.

This conceptualization of green theory contributes to IR theorizing in two distinctive ways: first, it offers alternative analyses of the political problem and international negotiating process compared to mainstream rationalist approaches. Second, green IR theories have promoted new normative discourses that have generated alternative policy proposals.

There are however internal disputes within green theory, in terms of the role of the state (to be anti-statist or to explore how states and the state system might become more responsive to: ecological problems; the benefits of enhancing communitarian, place-based identity as opposed to the more abstract idea of global citizenship or cosmopolitan democracy; and the wisdom of conceptualizing ecological problems as security problems.
Nonetheless, the new green discourses of environmental justice, sustainable development, reflexive modernization, and ecological security have not only influenced national and international policy debates.
Taken together, they have recast the roles of both state- economic actors and citizens as environmental stewards rather than territorial overlords, with asymmetrical international obligations based on differing capacities and levels of environmental responsibility.
Green IR theorists have brought into view the ideal of increased state and citizen accountability to communities and environments beyond their own borders and made it thinkable.