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No description available.

Through the 1990s various environmental management strategies and concepts advocating harmonization of economic and environmental concerns have spread across the world. These strategies and concepts have sought to connect the global levels of governance, national policies, business strategies, local environmental agenda, even including consideration of the lifestyles of each individual in highly industrialized societies. The dominance of the discourse of management and productivity in the environmental debate has resulted in the generation of proposals and reports for the constant reform in environmental performance of each social sector and which has been identified with Ecological Modernization (EM). This thesis argues that environmental politics is essentially transnational in its nature. Facing with difficulty, as it does, a state-centric governmental system as the primary form of collective action, it has been argued that it is necessary for local government, NGOs, academia, sometimes governmental agencies, businesses, and even international organizations to generate new form of political practices to address environmental problematique. Thus, this thesis demonstrates the globalizing dominance of the environmental initiatives known as EM, and argues that a distinctive form of environmental politics has emerged in which transnational actors and transnational authority have taken a leading role in addressing the necessary socioeconomic restructuring and `solving' the conflicts of interpretations embedded in the environmental problematique. In demonstration of this transnational restructuring key EM initiatives are examined, reserving special attention to the case of the Zero Emissions initiative undertaken in industrial and local governmental sectors in Japan. This case poses fundamental questions regarding the transnational dynamics of political influence on the environment in modem industrialized societies. The concept of transnational authority would allow us to approach studies of global environmental governance through a focus on the generation of trust, authenticity, validity, or the credibility of the impact of environmental discourses and practices and how they emerge in environmental politics in modem industrialized societies. The thesis thereby sheds new light on the modes of global governance and sustainability

While the reasons why states create international institutions have attracted sustained academic interested in international relations for more than three decades, the question why states design these institutions in such a variety of ways is only emerging on the academic agenda. This study seeks to contribute to the institutional design debate by transferring the principles of transaction cost economics theory from the context of in- ter-firm to that of inter-state cooperation. Transaction cost economics shares with other functionalist design theories the core assumption that actors adopt the design that best addresses the specific hazards a given problem poses to their cooperative undertaking, whereby they have to balance the merits and drawbacks associated with individual design options. Specifically, states face a dilemma between adopting a mode of governance, which fosters higher levels of compliance (hard law with high levels of obligation, precision and delegation) and one, which allows for flexible adjustments to changing circumstances (soft law). Which type of design is most appropriate, depends on the underlying problem constellation-categorised here based on the three variables asset specificity, behavioural uncertainty, and environmental uncertainty. This study hypothesises that 'harder' governance structures are pertinent when the intensity of asset specificity (the incentives to shirk and the vulnerability to shirking by others) and behavioural uncertainty (the difficulty involved with detecting non-compliance) are high. In contrast, 'softer' institutions are required as the possibility of unforeseen changes in the understanding of the causes, consequences or remedies of a problem increases (environmental uncertainty). Whether form does indeed follow function according to this logic will be tested qualitatively on the basis of four international institutions established between 1988 and 2003. These institutions have in common that they all seek to tackle problems arising at the fuzzy border between crime and war, such as conflict diamonds, the trafficking in narcotic drugs and small arms and light weapons, and money laundering. These institutions differ from each other, however, in terms of their design, spanning the full spectrum from high to low degrees of legalisation.

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The purpose of the thesis is to examine the International Community’s (IC) responses to post-conflict at the turn of the twenty-first century and in a period of transition. The thesis will establish whether there are any standard models for the IC’s engagement in post-conflict and if so whether these models are gradually ‘evolutionary’ or subject to radical change. The thesis will situate the IC’s response within the existing academic models and will encompass a review of these models so as to establish whether recent post-conflict interventions can be adequately defined by them. The thesis will also define a typology of post-conflict so as to establish whether the existing definitions are ‘fit for purpose’. The thesis will make use of a substantial body of empirical evidence which was gathered by the author during a period of fourteen years spent in the Western Balkans. It will in consequence address the issue of ‘observation’ in the research design and conclusion. The thesis will use this corpus of evidence gathered to illuminate the points raised during the thesis and to establish whether the changes in the typology of the IC’s response to post-conflict in the Western Balkans were specific to those particular missions or whether they represented a longer-term change in approach by the IC. As part of this changing approach to post-conflict, the thesis will also examine the role of the European Union (EU) and question the role which the EU, only one amongst many regional and sub-regional organisations, has ascribed to itself in the IC’s management of post-conflict.

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This thesis examines democratic transitions that occur in the context of international administration, where international actors not only provide assistance and guidance regarding domestic development, but also hold temporary executive authority over some or all of the functions of government. It argues that the process of regime change in the context of international administration is systematically different from more conventional settings, where such extensive international intervention is absent. The theoretical framework of the thesis suggests that the most significant impact of international administration derives from the fact that external actors assume roles conventionally held by domestic actors, and thus have available to them extensive mechanisms of influence at the domestic level. International agents can favour some local elites over others, structure the political environment through agenda-setting and veto powers, and ultimately bypass local actors if deemed necessary by drafting and imposing laws and institutions. As a result, the presence of international administrators heavily shapes the final mode of transition, and one of the most significant implications of the external influence is that purely non-democratic regime outcomes are unlikely to emerge. However, the influences of international administration are not always positive, and neither are they constant across contexts. The final impact on the transition process itself will depend in large part on the nature of the domestic political landscape, and in particular the balance of power and ideology among the domestic political parties. When domestic elites are favourable to democracy, international administrations can work with local actors to co-author a new democratic regime through a pacted transition. When dominant local parties are opposed to democratic development, however, the international and domestic interaction may contribute to a more conflicrual and contentious mode of transition entailing elements of international imposition. The nature of the transition mode will, in turn, have implications for post-transition regime consolidation. These findings are based on a structured, focused comparison of three cases, those of Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor. In attempting to isolate the international influence, the case studies utilise the process tracing method to identify the causal mechanisms that connect international actions to democratic political outcomes, and the experiences in each case are compared to facilitate the generation of bounded generalisations about the impact of international administration on the processes of regime change.