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Phoebe Stephens | Equity Norms in Global Environmental Governance
Despite arguments that the nature of environmental issues poses a
fundamental challenge to sovereignty, reflected through statements such as
“prevailing structures of dominance and the patterns of power [are]
tempered by the fact of ecological interdependence” (M. Williams 48), in
reality norms of state responsibility and rights have proven to be resilient.
Overwhelmingly, proposals for global management have been met with
staunch opposition as they do not comply with the extant social structures of
international governing institutions. (Bernstein 498)
Second, the moral temper argument proposes that equity norms are
shaped by the broader climate of the political environment. Taking a bird’s
eye view of GEG reveals important shifts in geopolitics that altered the way
the environmental debate took place in the 1970s in comparison to the
1990s. The end of the Cold War was unequivocally the most significant
difference between the Stockholm Conference and the Rio Earth Summit
(Najam 435). Whereas Cold War politics underpinned environmental
negotiations in the 1970s and 1980s, by the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio
multipolarity had injected new energy into the North-South debate. Rather
naively, the end of the Cold War was greeted with a sense of euphoria as it
was anticipated that global governing bodies such as the United Nations
would finally be able to properly address international issues (Young 273).
However, the vertical axis characterized by East-West tensions shifted to a
horizontal one and international environmental negotiations soon became
polarized along the North-South divide (Najam 435). The Cold War created
part of the impetus for the CHM principle as countries feared the global
commons would be vulnerable to militarization on the part of the
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