ABSTRACT
At first sight the international system does not seem like a good place to look for either environmental justice or democracy. Formal institutions in this system have always been quite weak, and seemingly no match for the power of sovereign states and multinational corporations. Inasmuch as international organizations and regimes are now being strengthened, it is generally with economic concerns in mind—think, most notably, of the recent establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to preside over the expansion of global free trade. As Vandana Shiva argues in her contribution to this volume (Chapter 04), the WTO in many ways represents the latest phase of an exploitative and hierarchical global order in which the world's poor and their environments are further subordinated to the interests of the world's wealthy, now organized into global capitalism. Certainly there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about the prospects for ecological rationality, justice and democracy in the contemporary international order.
