Environmental Management: Principles and practice

International law and sovereignty issues
Sovereignty affects access to data and monitoring, and can be a major constraint on
environmental management. Countries are usually reluctant to sign any agreement
which affects their sovereign powers. Yet growing transboundary and global

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environmental problems make it important to get co-operation. There are transnational
and multinational corporations sufficiently powerful to threaten and bribe their way
around sovereignty and other controls. Terrorism can have transnational or global
impact, so there should be better international controls and co-operation to counter
it. Unfortunately for many environmental management issues, getting multi-state
agreements is a slow process.
In 1977 the Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment affirmed the
sovereign right of states to exploit their own resources and their responsibility to
ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the
environment beyond the limits of their national jurisdiction (Stockholm Principle
21). This affirmation has had considerable influence on subsequent international
environmental law making (Birnie and Boyle, 1992:90).
International trade agreements, notably the GATT/WTO provisions (see chapter
5), mean that if a country has environmental protection laws, say controlling the
import of pesticide-contaminated produce, timber cut in an environmentally unsound
fashion, or fish caught using nets that kill dolphins, these measures may be
unenforceable because they impair ‘free trade’ (Sinner, 1994). The level playing
field demanded by trade agreements may make it difficult to control importation of
food and commodities produced by means of genetic engineering and growth- or
lactation-enhancing hormones. Conversely, there may be situations where
globalization helps countries adopt and enforce better standards (care must be taken
to ensure that the motive is to improve environmental quality and not an attempt to
make production costs uniform or create a global market for standardized products
that enjoy economies of scale). Globalization of patent rights has generated concern;
MNCs and TNCs seek to recoup research costs and control markets; poor countries
fear bio-piracy with corporations patenting and claiming intellectual rights on genetic
resources and ideas derived from such resources. The patenting and control of sales
of crop seeds (modern varieties) and pharmaceutical products has also caused much
friction.
Protection and extension of sovereignty can lead to wars; testing and storage
of weapons; and territorial claims. These affect the environment and need to be more
firmly addressed by international agreements and law (Shaw, 1993). The pollution
associated with the Gulf War underlines the importance of negotiation. Hostile
environmental modification is covered by the 1977 Environmental Modification
Convention (invoked to hold Iran to reparations for damage to Kuwait), and there
are controls on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Box 3.4 presents some of the treaties and agreements relevant to environmental
management (it is not complete but a selection). A number of trends are apparent
here. There has been a move towards the precautionary principle—since about 1972
countries have been guided to try to prevent pollution accidents and misdemeanours.
Obtaining damages for, or penalizing, transnational pollution has been patchy, e.g.
there were no adjudications over Chernobyl, Amoco Cadiz and many similar disasters.
There has been little progress in establishing ‘environmental rights’ (i.e. rights of
natural objects or organisms), although in some western countries there is a vociferous
animal rights lobby. Various agreements and conventions have reaffirmed and

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