Introduction

The purpose of this Yearbook, now in its ninth edition, is to enable orientation in the increasingly complex and even treacherous field of international environmental politics. To this end, its five sections are designed with a view to exposing the extent to which goals under international agreements are met and commitments under them are likely to be followed up in practice. That is why the first, analytical, section provides concise articles that assess both the achievements and the limitations of various efforts to manage specific environmental problems. Those assessments are made by independent experts, who are instructed to pinpoint what they perceive as the main obstacles to effective governance in the pertinent areas, and how those obstacles can be overcome. For the same reason, the subsequent descriptive sections offer systematic, detailed, and updated information not only on the scope, rules, and decision-making procedures of the major environmental conventions and organizations, but also on features that are particularly relevant to implementation—such as financial resources, review procedures, reporting and inspection arrangements, and systems for dispute settlement. Similarly, the Country Profiles section provides not only environmental performance indicators, such as energy consumption and emission of various regulated substances, but also data on compliance with reporting requirements under international agreements and contributions to various international environmental funds. Several of the articles in the Current Issues and Key Themes section of this edition address a theme that looms steadily larger on the agenda of scholars and practitioners alike: the interrelations between separate international institutions. Worries about duplication of work and normative fragmentation—in the sense that separate international bodies regulate the same activity differently—have fuelled this interest in regime interplay, as reflected for instance in a 1998 Report of a UN Task Force on Human Settlement and Environment. That report is the point of departure for Steinar Andresen’s sober discussion of the gains that can be expected from improved co-ordination. Regime interplay can also be supportive, however. Lawrence Juda points to the mutually reinforcing relationship between three international instruments that address management of high seas fisheries: the Compliance Agreement and the Code of Conduct under the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement. Drawing attention to relationships between global and regional regimes, Jonathan Krueger notes that the regional-level Bamako Convention has a positive role in supporting national implementation of the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal. Similarly, J0rgen Wettestad shows how the emergence of stricter and more comprehensive European rules to combat air pollution (the Gothenburg Multi-Pollutant Protocol under the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, LRTAP) were facilitated by negotiations on a parallel directive within the European Union (EU). Specifically, the EU’s financing of modelling work within LRTAP was a positive element of interplay.