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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2004. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-135). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Diss. Linköping : Univ.

Canada’s emissions are nearly 30 per cent above its Kyoto target. Kathryn Harrison is looking to understand why some countries are leading the way and why others are falling short.

Thesis -- Departmental honors in Philosophy. / Bibliography: ℓ. 84-88.

The four ‘Global Commons’ – the Atmosphere, Antarctica, the High Seas (Oceans) and Outer Space – are in international law identified and recognised as falling outside the jurisdiction of any state. Whilst crucial to mankind and the global ecosystem as a whole, the commons are severely impacted by the current anthropogenic climate change. This thesis argues that the global commons have a weak legal protection today. Given the significance of the global commons for the achievement of sustainable development, exploring possibilities to strengthen such protection through international law is crucial to secure the future of our world. The purpose of this thesis is to highlight the issues relating to the current legal protection of the global commons and to address them in the perspective of international law and sustainable development as intersecting conceptual and theoretical frameworks. By applying and analysing the acknowledged New Delhi Declaration of Principles of International Law Relating to Sustainable Development, this thesis will aim to provide insights, and maybe even a fresh point of view, as to how legal instruments could be structured and implemented in the strive for more effective and sustainable protection of the global commons.

Environmental issues increasingly demonstrate local-global linkages in driving forces and effects. Policy responses are initiated at local, national and global levels. The successful management of such cross-level environmental issues involves co-ordinated and co-operative policies and action among stakeholders at several levels of governance. Pesticide use in the South-which is a potential driving force for environmental and health problems-has in this dissertation been analysed in relation to such multilayered governance. The theoretical framework from studies on common property resource (CPR) management is applied, facilitating the cross-level analysis of pesticide use in the South as being a global common. The study looks into problem structuring, risk reduction policies and decisionmaking with respect to pesticide use in the South at the local, national and global levels, with Kenya and Costa Rica as cases for the national and local levels. The degree of common understanding among stakeholders across governance levels on what the problems with pesticide use in the South are and how the problems should be addressed and why, is limited but not entirely absent. Mismatches ininformation flows and knowledge, institutions, and values between governance levels hamper the prospect of establishing multilayered governance. These mismatches can be addressed by giving more attention to the level at which institutions are functional, by involving more stakeholders in the generation of knowledge, and by adopting more inclusive values. One approach to achieve these required changes is to embrace a systems perspective on this issue as a global common, a global environmental concern.

Areas beyond national jurisdiction or the high seas are vital areas for biodiversity and marine resources in our oceans, yet the protection and conservation of this global resource is insufficient due to absence of international agreement concerning the matter. Therefore, the new Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) agreement was recently agreed upon, with the objective of ensuring protection for these resources.This study endeavours to assess the applicability of Ostrom's and Stern'sprinciples, as the theoretical frameworks for sustainable governance of global commons, on the BBNJ agreement. By employing deductive reasoning, this study compares and contrasts the principles proposed by Ostrom and Stern, using them as lenses to examine the agreement. As a case study, this research investigates the utilization of international agreements as integral components of international law for the governance of shared resources. Conducted as a qualitative desk study, the analysis involved scrutinizing the BBNJ agreement to identify keywords and themes associated with eachprinciple. The study’s findings reveal that Ostrom's and Stern's principles exhibit varying degrees of applicability. Despite sharing certain similarities, they embody distinct foundational approaches, with Stern's principles demonstrating better applicability to the governance of global commons. The study suggests that the BBNJ agreement holds the potential to govern the global commons in a sustainable manner.

This thesis provides an analysis of recent attempts to regulate the governance of genetic resources through the initiation of new global commons regimes. These attempts have arisen out of a combination of the growing recognition of genetic resources' value and global nature; a new resurgence in support for the common property paradigm; and, during a period in which the world is becoming increasingly globalised, with many governance competencies moving to the supranational level. They can be viewed as part of a broader effort to proffer the common property approach as a legitimate alternative in the property regime debate: a debate that has increasingly become trapped in the public-private dichotomy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the success of these attempts, and offer suggestions about how future attempts might be more successful. While there are a multitude of books, articles, opinion pieces and media reports produced that concern themselves with property theory, intellectual property theory, the efficacy or morality of applying property regimes to living materials, and the threats and promises of globalisation, all of which influence the notion of a potential global genetic commons, relatively little has been written directly on the idea of applying global common property regimes to genetic resource governance issues. The first part of this thesis constructs a theory of a global genetic commons, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources, while the second part tests this theory in order to analyse the outcomes of the recent attempts, and suggest directions for future research. The thesis finds that the conception of a global genetic commons is indeed a valid one, and that while not all attempts so far have been successful, the common property paradigm does offer valuable insights for the future governance of genetic resources at the global level.

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