ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 9 No. 12 (December 1999) pp. 568-569.

EQUALITY AMONG UNEQUALS IN INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW: DIFFERENTIAL TREATMENT FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES by Anita Margrethe Halvorssen. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999. 200pp. Cloth $60.00. ISBN 0-8133-3727-5.

Reviewed by Norman J. Vig, Department of Political Science, Carleton College.

This well-written legal treatise focuses on one of the most difficult issues in international environmental diplomacy. Although nation-states have traditionally been regarded as sovereign equals under international law, they are clearly not equal either in their contributions to global environmental problems or in their capacities to undertake international environmental obligations. This is almost always an issue between developed and developing countries in the negotiation of international environmental agreements because the latter states require special considerations and incentives to enable them to enter into and effectively implement environmental
treaties that will ultimately affect all humankind.

The author, a former Norwegian environmental official who teaches international environmental law at the University of Colorado, finds the answer to this dilemma in Principle 7 of the Rio Declaration (signed at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992), which explicitly recognizes that "States have common but differentiated responsibilities" in the conservation and protection of the Earth's ecosystem. This principle complements Principle 21 of the Stockholm
Declaration of 1972, as modified by Principle 2 of the Rio Declaration, which recognizes that all countries have the right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies, provided that their activities do not damage the environment of other states or of the global commons. Both developed and developing countries are now obligated to pursue "sustainable development" policies that will preserve the global environment.

The issue is how poor countries can be induced to cooperate in international agreements to pursue such policies. They naturally give higher priority to economic development and may have little motivation or capacity to protect their environments, especially in view of the fact that heretofore most of global environmental degradation has been caused by the developed countries. A number of recent environmental agreements, notably the Montreal Protocol to protect the atmosphere from ozone-depleting substances, have successfully surmounted this hurdle by providing common but differentiated obligations for developing countries (in this case in the form of a ten-year extension for compliance and multilateral financial and technical assistance to develop alternatives to the offending technologies).

Such "selective incentives" will be needed on a large scale if developing countries are to eventually agree to participate in other critical international environmental regimes, especially the

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Framework Convention on Climate Change. Halvorssen argues that it is far better to require commonality in the core obligations of treaties--with flexibility in the timing and means of achieving them--than to seek the cooperation of developing countries at the level of the lowest common denominator, or to exclude them entirely from binding targets (as developing states currently are under the climate change regime). This kind of flexible, differentiated approach has been used successfully in the European Union without undue sacrifice to environmental standards, and it can be applied more generally.

Halvorssen provides a very clear and useful explanation of the recent development of international environmental law as it applies to this context. She provides a primer on the sources and nature of international law in general (chapter 2) as well as a lucid discussion of the legal meaning of "sustainable development" (chapter 3). From there she proceeds to a discussion of legal arguments for and against use of differentiated (as opposed to uniform) environmental norms as a means of broadening treaty participation (chapter 4), and an analysis of different incentives and disincentives that have been employed in recent international agreements to
accomplish this end (chapter 5). Here she discusses such mechanisms as delayed compliance schedules, special financial assistance, technology transfer, joint implementation, general capacity-building and flexible non-compliance procedures. The book concludes with insightful, up-to-date chapters on the problems of international environmental institutions (the United Nations Environment Programme, Commission for Sustainable Development, World Bank, and the United Nations Development Programme, among others); on special funding mechanisms (including the Global Environment Facility, debt-for-nature swaps, tradable permits and taxes); and on the growing role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in all aspects of international environmental policymaking and implementation.

This brief volume is thus of much broader interest than the title and the focus on Principle 7 suggests. It serves as a masterful introduction to the entire field of contemporary international environmental law while at the same time clarifying the cutting-edge debates going on about how to better employ economic and other incentives to broaden and deepen cooperation between rich and poor countries in this complex field. It is also written in accessible style, despite the usual heavy notation baggage of legal literature. The only fault I can find is with some sloppy proofing of the final text (e.g., there are many misplaced hyphens and the past tense
of the verb "lead" is consistently misspelled), but these are minor imperfections. This is a book that is well worth the price of the hardback for anyone who is serious about strengthening global environmental protection.

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Copyright 1999 by the author.