ABSTRACT
This chapter, first, discusses in detail various perspectives and accounts on inter-state environmental cooperation within the academic discipline of international relations and political science in general. It focuses on how those various accounts answer the question why countries would advance environmental cooperation in spite of many seemingly insurmountable barriers to maintaining a cooperative mechanism. Participating countries’ motivations for concerted actions to settle environmental problems are diverse, incoherent, and fluctuating, which makes generalization and theorization attempts highly daunting. Based on existing perspectives on the state’s stance on environmental cooperation, the chapter suggests seven theoretical categories under two broadly distinguishable frameworks of motivation, “environment as a secondary means” and “ecological protection as an ultimate goal.” Further to this, the chapter explains how regionalism and regionalization may reinforce the symbiotic effects of the three pillars of regional environmental affairs, “security, development, and environmentalism.” In order to reduce the gap between this general-level theoretical discussion and the particularities of the region, the chapter outlines an analytical framework, a “Regional Ecological Development Model,” consisting of several stages of historical evolution. Such a framework is to help in the understanding of the dynamic features of the region with particular attention to the environmental aspects of development.
