When the Australia Labor Party (led at the time by Kevin Rudd) was elected to federal office in November 2007, almost two years into the period under review, many commentators anticipated a substantial and substantive change in Australia’s foreign environmental policy. The change in rhetoric before and after November 2007 was, indeed, pronounced. These were governments with apparently very different world views: Labor articulating an internationalist and multilateralist model of international relations and global governance, and the Coalition eschewing ‘ideology’ and idealism in favour of what it saw as a hard-headed realism and a willingness to walk away from multilateral opportunities that did not deliver the outcomes they wanted.

The nature of Australia’s economy and ecosystem ensures that Australian governments have taken a continued interest in the negotiations for, and implications of, most of the world’s multilateral environmental agreements. Australia has an energy-intensive economy. Agriculture and extractive industries, both of which have had severe environmental consequences, contribute significantly to export earnings. The country is both highly urbanised (around 85 per cent of the population lives in cities) and the world’s only industrialised ’mega-diverse’ country, custodian of about 10 per cent of the world’s biodiversity. Australia is also one of the few industrialised countries that suffers extensive desertification – over half of the country’s land area is in need of some form of repair. Australia’s exclusive economic zone – 11 million square kilometres of marine waters – is one of the largest in the world. Australia’s environmental role in world affairs includes its domestic responses to environmental treaty obligations and its commitment to sustainable development both at home and abroad.

In conventional institutional terms, Australia’s role in world environmental affairs is the product of its foreign policy on regional and global environmental issues and its domestic implementation of formal treaty obligations and other commitments. Australia’s ecological profile provides good reason for governments of whatever political hue to take a keen interest in international negotiations to manage transboundary and global pollution, protect the world’s species and ecosystems, and advance the cause of sustainable development. Australia has one of the world’s most variable climates and is, with the exception of the Antarctic, the world’s driest continent. As the drought conditions that beset the country in the first half of the period under review demonstrate, the country is susceptible to water stress. Australia is one of the few industrialised countries that suffers from severe desertification, and it is the only developed country among the ten in the world that qualify as mega-diverse in their fauna and flora. As a country ‘girt by sea’, protecting the oceans from pollution and resources therein from over-exploitation is a key policy objective.

The contemporary system of international law and international political practice has come to be characterized by two patterns that now “live side by side.” Together, they provide an apparently settled understanding about the legal and legitimate deployment of force in international relations. The legal and political norms of the Westphalian order proscribe the use of force between states except in self-defense. Since the period immediately following World War II, another pattern – the so-called United Nations (UN) Charter model – has been superimposed on this older model. The collective security provisions of the UN Charter legitimate the use of multilateral force but only in defense of any member state under attack or, under Chapter VII, when the Security Council determines that there is a threat to or breach of international peace and security. Although it is not specifically stated in the UN Charter, such threats have been assumed to arise from military attack. All other “external” uses of military force and forces, therefore, are deemed illegal under both Westphalian and the UN Charter models of international law. A number of international-relations scholars, whose orientation falls within a broadly cosmopolitan framework, argue that military institutions now have a new role in the management of security crises through what has been variously described as “cosmopolitan law enforcement” and the “new military humanism.”