Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals

March 2010
6 x 9, 240 pp.
$22.00/£16.95 (PAPER)
Short

ISBN-10:
0-262-51390-0
ISBN-13:
978-0-262-51390-6

Forthcoming

Cloth (2010)

Politics, Science, and the Environment

Related Links

Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals
Challenges of Multilevel Management
Henrik Selin

The challenges posed by managing hazardous chemicals cross boundaries, jurisdictions, and constituencies. Since the 1960s, a chemicals regime—a multitude of formally independent but functionally related treaties and programs—has been in continuous development, as states and organizations collaborate at different governance levels to mitigate the health and environmental problems caused by hazardous chemicals. In this book, Henrik Selin analyzes the development, implementation, and future of the chemicals regime, a critical but understudied area of global governance, and proposes that the issues raised have significant implications for effective multilevel governance in many other areas.

Selin focuses his analysis on three themes: coalition building in support of policy change; the diffusion of regime components across policy venues; and the influence of institutional linkages on the design and effectiveness of multilevel governance efforts. He provides in-depth empirical studies of the four multilateral treaties that form the core of the chemicals regime: the Basel Convention (1989), which regulates the transboundary movement and disposal of hazardous wastes; the Rotterdam Convention (1998), which governs the international trade in chemicals; the CLRTAP POPs Protocol (1998), designed to reduce the release and transnational transport of emissions of persistent organic pollutants; and the Stockholm Convention (2001), which targets the production, use, trade, and disposal of persistent organic pollutants.

The interactions of participants and institutions within and across different levels of governance have implications for policy making and management that are not yet fully understood. Selin's analysis of these linkages in the chemicals regime offers valuable theoretical and policy-relevant insights into the growing institutional density in global governance.

Politics, Science, and the Environment series

About the Author

Henrik Selin is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at Boston University. He is the coeditor, with Stacy VanDeveer, of Changing Climates in North American Politics: Institutions, Policymaking, and Multilevel Governance (MIT Press, 2009).

"Selin's analysis is lucid, insightful, and timely. He has done a good job of assembling information on an institutional complex that has received less attention among those interested in environmental governance than a number of other cases. The book offers a nice balance between analytic arguments and empirical applications and, in the process, produces insights that will be of interest to those working on matters of governance in a number of issue areas."
—Oran R. Young, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals provides an illuminating account of the evolution of the global chemicals management regime. Selin's analysis of the agreements that make up this regime provides important insights into the role of coalitions and institutional linkages in the complex and multi-scale governance efforts aimed at improving chemical safety. Highlighting an issue that to date has received less attention that it deserves, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars and practitioners in the field of global environmental governance."
—Jennifer Clapp, CIGI Chair in International Governance and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of Waterloo, coauthor of Paths to a Green World

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