The environmental challenges the Arctic region faces in the climate change context have prompted an abundant literature on what is to be done to protect the Arctic environment. The thesis addresses the question of what is international law’s role in promoting Arctic environmental protection, but taking a different perspective than previous research on the issue. It develops a new critical approach to analyze how international law adopted to protect the environment is in fact part of the problem. The theoretical framework bridges Martti Koskenniemi’s critical approach and the interactional account of international law developed by Jutta Brunnée and Stephen Toope. These two approaches provide conceptual and methodological tools to understand the mutual influence of international actors and structures on legal discourse. This framework is applied to four main Arctic environmental challenges in the context of climate change: increased oil and gas activities, increased shipping, adverse effects on indigenous peoples’ environment and culture and biodiversity depletion. For each case study, the thesis provide a three-stage analysis to understand the development of international law to address these issues, the influence of political considerations on such law and the normative potential of each of the different rules, standards, principles and rights to create a sense of legal obligation. This analysis sheds light on when international has enabled practices of legality, where international actors support the rule, right or standard at issue, fell bound by it and follow it in practice. The analysis also reveals the influence of the bias in favour of neoliberal development in legal discourse. This bias has favoured the development, interpretation and application of international law to promote the assertion of sovereignty over natural resources, industry deregulation, the promotion of trade, little consideration for indigenous peoples’ human rights and the consideration of biological resources in economic terms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/65702 |
| Date | 13 August 2014 |
| Creators | Mayrand, Helene |
| Contributors | Brunnée, Jutta |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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