This chapter tracks the emergence and acceleration of global environmental problems since the end of World War II and delineates the field of global environmental politics. It also introduces the proposed new geological epoch called ‘the Anthropocene’ and the concept of planetary boundaries along with the key global environmental discourses of limits to growth/degrowth, sustainable development/green growth, ecological security and environmental justice. The chapter then examines how scholars working in the major theoretical traditions of International Relations – realism, liberalism, Critical Theory, constructivism and English School theory – have approached global environmental challenges. The conclusion reflects on the pivotal roles of the United States and China in tackling global warming.

Introduction

This chapter will delineate the field of global environmental politics, and track the emergence and rapid acceleration of global environmental problems since the end of World War II. It will also introduce the key global environmental discourses of limits to growth, sustainable development, ecological security, environmental justice and the concept of planetary boundaries, together with the proposed new geological epoch called ‘the Anthropocene’. It will then explore how environmental scholars working in the major theoretical traditions of International Relations (IR) – realism, liberalism and critical theory – have approached and responded to a fundamental puzzle of global environmental politics: why is it that, despite a rapid increase in public environmental concern and environmental legislation and environmental treaties at the national and international levels, the most serious and irreversible global environmental problems facing the international community have continued to worsen? Finally, the chapter turns to contemporary challenges, focusing on the shifting role of the United States in tackling the most serious global environmental problem of all: climate change.

The study of global environmental politics has emerged as a problem-oriented and multidisciplinary field of inquiry that seeks to understand: (1) how and why global ecological problems arise and persist; (2) how ecological risks are distributed through space and time; and (3) how the global community (encompassing states and nonstate actors) has responded, or ought to respond. These three basic questions frame the field of inquiry of global environmental politics. They also signal the enormous political challenges facing international and transnational collective efforts to protect the earth's ecosystems and climate in a world of nearly 200 sovereign states with vast disparities in capacity, resource endowments, population, cultures and levels of economic development.

Global environmental politics is a sprawling field of study in terms of both the sheer breadth of the object of study and the variety of disciplinary frames that are relevant to global eco-political problems. While the primary object of study is political responses to global and trans-boundary environmental problems, the distinction between global and trans-boundary, and national and local, environmental problems is hard to maintain. All global ecological problems produce different local effects, and many local and transnational practices contribute to global ecological problems.

Preface

Some members of this team of authors have occasionally collaborated together over the years and decades. Collectively, we all came together for the first time in 2004, as part of a larger group working on a project on ‘Resolving International Crises of Legitimacy’, funded by the British Academy. That project was born of our shared interest in issues of international legitimacy, and how this interacted with ‘power’ in world politics. The specific legacy of that undertaking was a special issue of the journal International Politics, 44 (2/3) 2007. The broader legacy was the immense intellectual stimulus of working together as a group, and when the opportunity arose to resume this collaboration, it was immediately seized. This opportunity was created in 2007 by a funding award from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) that included a collaborative dimension, and we all gratefully acknowledge this generous support. Given that throughout we have been variously based in Australia, Canada, Italy, the UK and the US, the award enabled periodic workshops that brought us together, and without which this book would not have been possible.

The award covered a generic project on the social bases of American power. In part, this represented a carry-over from the previous study: if an institution were to suffer a ‘crisis’ of legitimacy, how might this be resolved? What role should the United States specifically play in bringing about this resolution? These questions appeared to become even more pertinent with the election of the Barack Obama administration. Our initial intention was to approach this under the rubric of ‘hegemony’, as this was already the principal element of the cognate research being undertaken by Ian Clark as part of his individual role in the overall ESRC project. However, in the course of our meetings, it gradually became clear that what was routinely expected of hegemons was that they would bear special responsibilities for contributing to the solution of global problems. Slowly, the main focus on hegemony diminished and was replaced by that on special responsibilities. We wanted to emphasise that our theory of special responsibilities was one specific way of elaborating our general approach to the social constitution of power. This also justified the focus on the US as it offered a useful framework for disaggregating US power in particular.

‘The grading of powers is a matter of theory’, Martin Wight once remarked, whereas the ‘managerial function of the great powers is a matter of practice’. Special responsibilities erode this distinction: they are about the grading of powers, as well as their managerial functions. Accordingly, this chapter traces how special responsibilities came to be developed in both theory and practice. At its heart is to be found the complex interplay between the category deemed to be special, and the nature of the responsibility that is as a result attached to it. Special responsibilities first arose within a traditional and European-centred states system. In that context, it was the seemingly fixed category of the special that attracted attention; subsequently, a more reflexive understanding of responsibility has led to a more fluid understanding of those who are to be considered special, and for what specific purpose. This fluidity has tracked the more complex global system that has evolved in the meantime.

This chapter clearly demonstrates that there was a practice of special responsibilities long before there developed any coherent ‘theory’ to account for it. When a theory began to emerge, it was one that largely emphasised a responsibility attaching to a pre-existing group of states, namely the great powers. That the explanation and justification took this particular form, rather than something else, meant there were a number of significant consequences. Any attempt to make sense of special responsibilities must therefore begin with a brief history of its practice, and how this subsequently came to be engaged in the International Relations (IR) theory literature.

Our first case of nuclear weapons represents one that is predominantly state-centric, and is centred on core issues of international security. If there is one domain that approximates the Waltzian view of great powers taking on special responsibilities, this should be it: material capability and role converge to the point where there is no space left for any social idea of responsibility at all. In fact, as we will show, the nuclear domain has not simply followed this Waltzian dictum.

This chapter examines the nature and functioning of special responsibilities in relation to the development and possession of nuclear weapons, and it centres on an examination of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The reason for focusing on the NPT is that it established a legal categorisation between those that were recognised as nuclear weapon states (NWSs) and those non-nuclear weapon states (NNWSs) that consented, whilst parties to the treaty, to give up the right to acquire nuclear weapons. For our purposes, it is crucial that this categorisation became the focus of expectations (which pre-dated the treaty) regarding the special responsibilities of the nuclear and non-nuclear powers. We show how these special responsibilities have mediated between the principle of sovereign equality, on the one hand, and the stubborn fact of material inequality, on the other. Moreover, and contrary to the Waltzian argument, the chapter demonstrates how these special responsibilities constitute the possibilities of legitimate political action within this domain, supporting our cardinal claim in the book that special responsibilities cannot just be unilaterally asserted by powerful states, but have to be recognised as such by those to whom they are addressed.

The previous chapters have worked through the history and theory of special responsibilities and provided an empirical analysis in three different domains of global governance. It now remains to explore the ethics of special responsibilities. We offer an initial, and tentative, account that we consider both ethically compelling, and also largely consistent with the preceding sociological history. Here our primary task is to elucidate and defend the ethical basis for the assignment of special responsibilities to particular states or other actors. What claims to special responsibilities are justified? Given that one of our core sociological arguments has been that special responsibilities are domain specific, then we might expect that the ethical justification for the allocation of special responsibilities would be similarly so. We certainly show this to be the case when we explore the specific content and application of ethical principles in the domains of nuclear weapons, climate change and global finance. It nonetheless remains an open, and interesting, question whether there are some core or common principles, a recognisable family of arguments, or at least a common moral grammar that would apply to all the cases.

There are two possible methodological routes to exploring this possibility. The first is to develop specific ethical arguments for each of our three case studies, and then see if there are sufficient commonalities to allow development of universal ethical claims. The second is to begin by developing general ethical arguments for the allocation of special responsibilities in world politics, and then applying them to each of the case studies. Both routes would enable an exploration of the extent to which our ethical arguments formed part of the actual allocation, or subsequent contestation, of special responsibilities in the three cases. We opt for the second route because it is more interesting and challenging, and likely to be of broader interest to normative International Relations (IR) theorists.

During his visit to China in November 2009, US President Barack Obama gave a joint press conference along with China’s President Hu Jintao. In his statement, Obama identified three major global problems: nuclear proliferation, climate change and economic recovery from the global financial crisis. Their common feature, he insisted, was that none could be solved by either state acting alone. He therefore welcomed China’s greater role, ‘a role in which a growing economy is joined by growing responsibilities’. This emphasised the seeming proportionality between the material resources enjoyed by a state, and the scale of responsibilities it was required to shoulder. It explicitly brought together one view of international politics, as rooted in material resources, with an importantly different view, as rooted in social responsibilities.

There are four interesting dimensions to this statement. First it specified those key global problems in particular. Second it attempted to address them by an explicit appeal to responsibility. Third it assumed that increased responsibilities flow from greater material resources. Fourth it attempted to (re)allocate these responsibilities to reflect those new material distributions.

As we saw in the preceding chapter, the practice of claiming, ascribing and distributing special responsibilities has been a prominent and persistent feature of world politics for at least the last two centuries. Furthermore, International Relations (IR) scholars of diverse theoretical persuasions talk as though such responsibilities do exist, and fall disproportionately on the shoulders of some states. Yet we struggle to find within IR much in the way of sustained theoretical reflection on the nature, function and significance of special responsibilities in world politics. The nature of responsibility itself has gone largely unexplored, as have the particular characteristics of ‘special’ responsibilities. Very little has been written on the relationship between the definition and distribution of responsibilities and the constitution of international social orders, and discussions of the relationship between responsibilities and political power seldom amount to more than an equation of great capability with great responsibility. More specifically, as the previous chapter explained, the existing literature on special responsibilities in world politics suffers from five principal weaknesses: (1) a conceptual shallowness, apparent in a general failure to probe the nature of responsibility in general and special responsibilities in particular; (2) an unnecessarily narrow conception of agency, in which special responsibilities are the preserve of great powers, but it is consistently denied that a single superpower could have or uphold them; (3) the restriction of special responsibilities to the maintenance of international order, narrowly defined; (4) a monolithic conception of the international system, in which there is one, central distribution of special responsibilities spanning the full range of diverse social domains (security, economic and environmental); and (5) a failure to grapple with the complex ethical issues raised by practices of special responsibilities (addressed in Chapter 6).

The financial crisis of 2007–9 severely shook global confidence in the regulatory approach and capacities of the United States. Is the country which, since the end of the Second World War has been the presumed lynchpin of the global financial order, still capable of exercising special responsibilities in the domain of global finance? Has the US been consistent in exercising special financial responsibilities, or has its faith in the ability of market forces to be self-regulating undermined the exercise of special responsibilities? Since special responsibilities are ‘socially sanctioned’ powers, the answers to these questions depend not only on our assessment of US material power, interests and will to lead, but also on how US authority is viewed by other important actors in the domain of global finance.

In keeping with the overall orientation of this volume, our primary focus in this chapter is on how special responsibilities have been articulated by states and in international institutions. However, we cannot neglect the responsibilities of market players in global finance, especially now that many have grown so large, and the amount of capital they command is so voluminous. The interplay between private firm and market responsibilities on the one hand and political responsibilities on the other, is thus an important theme explored in this chapter. In the political realm, we highlight and analyse the tension between formal articulations of responsibility embedded in institutions such as those negotiated at Bretton Woods, and more informal tacit arrangements which have at times replaced and supplemented the formal agreements. We find a pervasive tension between the institutionalised expression of general responsibilities of all states on the one hand, and informal or tacit articulations and claims of special responsibilities of specific states on the other. This tension can at least partly be understood as an aspect of the gap between formal equality and actual differentiation of capability so often faced in international society, as laid out in the introductory chapter of this volume. The broader normative context of sovereign equality, and concerns of narrow national self-interest, condition and in some cases limit the articulation of special responsibilities, rendering certain forms of special responsibility more tacit than explicit, and others the source of contention and conflict. And yet, the influence of claims of special responsibilities is discernible in shaping developments that cannot be adequately accounted for in terms of material power politics.

The term ‘special responsibility’ is more than a euphemism for US authority or ‘soft power’. The language of responsibility and special responsibility is routinely used in the practice of international relations, often to delimit specific collective action problems and to articulate guidelines for the exercise of legitimate, accountable authority in addressing those problems. The above epigraph from former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s speech to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies was part of an exhortation to the Europeans to bear more of the burden of NATO responsibilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere. Rather than cloaking US power in euphemism, Gates seems instead to be acknowledging US special responsibility, while also asking that the burden of responsibility be shared among capable allies. In doing so he must evoke shared notions of legitimacy – not to cloak US power, but to enlist cooperation in achieving common goals.

This book has attempted systematically to analyse the practice of evoking special responsibility, explicating with theory and evidence how special responsibilities have been allocated and contested in the face of three important global problems: nuclear non-proliferation, climate change and financial regulation. We have also developed a way of reasoning through the ethical issues surrounding special responsibilities, and suggested how such ethical reasoning may be applied in the specific case studies. In this conclusion, we consider special responsibilities as a form of social power, their relationship to international orders, the global role of the US and the consequences of the diffusion of responsibility in world affairs.

Environmental problems arrived relatively late on the agenda of international relations but they are now persistent and ubiquitous, having crept up, as it were, on a rapidly modernising world as the unintended and in many cases unforeseen side-effects of otherwise acceptable practices. These special features of environmental problems make the allocation of responsibility especially difficult and troublesome, and explain why they are often characterised as ‘wicked problems’. In this chapter, we focus on the wickedest of them all – the problem of human-induced climate change – which is destined to remain a permanent item on the international agenda for the foreseeable future.

The debate over who should take responsibility for climate change has become more urgent as the successive reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have become more confident about the seriousness of the problem and the window of opportunity for preventative action diminishes. The development of a low carbon global economy requires a massive transformation of social purpose and social practices at multiple levels of social aggregation. Few would deny that everyone should ‘play a role’ and share in the general responsibility to address such a major collective action challenge. Yet it does not follow that everyone should play the same role or take on the same responsibility, given the vast differences among individuals, households, communities, firms, organisations and states in terms of their historical contribution to the problem, capacities to respond and adapt, levels of income, development needs and vulnerability. The problem of climate change is especially pernicious from an ethical point of view because the impacts cannot be geographically quarantined to ensure that the big greenhouse gas emitters suffer impacts in proportion to their causal responsibility, or that the least culpable and most vulnerable are protected. Indeed, in many (though not all) cases, there is an inverse relationship between causal responsibility and capacity to respond, on the one hand, and vulnerability and under-development, on the other. These features suggest that the collective task of preventing dangerous climate change can be more fairly and effectively fulfilled by differentiating social roles and responsibilities among different social agents. Our task in this chapter is to examine how states have negotiated different roles and responsibilities to address climate change, with a particular emphasis on the roles and responsibilities of the US.