Drawing together a distinguished cast of international contributors, this new edition offers a timely collection of essays that analyze key issues, institutions, laws, and policies for the protection of the global environment. In addition to crucial historical context on the development of global environmental organizations and treaties, chapter authors offer both engaging discussions of current and critical global environmental agreements and insight into national and international implementation of sustainable development principles. Returning contributors have thoroughly revised and updated their chapters, while six brand new chapters examine such important topics as regime theory, climate change, hazardous chemical controls, perspectives of the developing world, and the European Union’s and United States’ international environmental policies. A useful chronology of global environmental policy and a list of acronyms further aid students in critical reading, as well as review and study.

Preface
Selected Acronyms in Global Environmental Policy
Global Environmental Policy: A Brief Chronology
Contributors

1. Introduction: Governing the International Environment
Norman J. Vig


I. International Environmental Institutions and Regimes

2. Global Institutions and the Environment: An Evolutionary Perspective
Marvin S. Soroos

3. Environmental Protection in the Twenty-first Century: Sustainable Development and International Law
Philippe Sands and Jacqueline Peel

4. NEW! Global Environmental Policy: Governance through Regimes
David Leonard Downie

5. The Role of Environmental NGOs in International Regimes
John McCormick


II. Global Environmental Policy: Cases and Questions

6. NEW! Global Climate Change Policy: Making Progress or Spinning Wheels?
Michele M. Betsill

7. NEW! Global Policy for Hazardous Chemicals
David Leonard Downie, Johnathan Krueger, and Henrik Selin

8. Economic Integration and Environmental Protection
Daniel C. Esty

9. Compliance with Global Environmental Policy
Michael Faure and Jürgen Lefevere


III. Implementing Global Policy: Cases and Controversies in Sustainable Development

10. NEW! Understanding United States Unilateralism: Domestic Sources of U.S. International Environmental Policy
Elizabeth R. DeSombre

11. The European Union as an Environmental Governance System
Regina S. Axelrod, Norman J. Vig, and Miranda A. Schreurs

12. NEW! The View from the South: Developing Countries in Global Environmental Politics
Adil Najam

13. NEW! Debating the Dam: Is China’s Three Gorges Project Sustainable?
Lawrence R. Sullivan

14. Democracy and Nuclear Power in the Czech Republic
Regina S. Axelrod

Index

Norman J. Vig is Winifred and Atherton Bean Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Emeritus at Carleton College, where he taught political science and environmental studies for 37 years. He has written extensively on environmental policy, science and technology policy, and comparative politics and is coeditor with Regina S. Axelrod and David Leonard Downie of The Global Environment: Institutions, Law and Policy, Second Edition (2004) and of Green Giants? Environmental Policies of the United States and the European Union (2004) with Michael G. Faure.

Regina S. Axelrod is professor of political science and chair of the political science department at Adelphi University. She has published numerous articles and books on environmental and energy policy in the United Sates, the European Union, and Central Europe, including Environment, Energy, Public Policy: Toward a Rational Future and Conflict between Energy and Urban Environment. She has lectured at Charles University, Prague, and the University of Budapest on nuclear power and the transition to democracy. She is an academic associate of the Atlantic Council and past president of the New York Political Science Association.

David Leonard Downie is Director of the Earth Institute Fellows Program at Columbia University. He has written extensively on global environmental politics and international relations, including Northern Lights against POPs: Combating Toxic Threats in the Arctic, co-edited with Terry Fenge. He has taught courses in international environmental politics at Columbia University since 1994 and served as Director of Environmental Policy Studies at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs from 1994- 1999.