Introduction - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 12

an obscure provision of an 1899 law required all polluters of waterways
needed a permit to discharge their effluent. This interpretation came as
a great surprise to industry and the government. To take another exam-
ple, in 1972, a district court ruled that a few words listed as a vague goal
in the Clean Air Act required that EPA rewrite its regulations to prevent
significant deterioration. In Canada, a court overturned the permit from
the national government on the export of water from Lake Superior.
In Australia, the high court overturned settled law on Aborigine owner-
ship of the land in the Mabo case. Countries that do not trace their legal
system back to England find the courts much less likely to intervene.
he diplomatic agenda is a special case of policy diffusion, and an
important one for the environment. The nations of the world more and
more relied on cooperation, especially through the United Nations. The
pattern of a large international conference to address a problem has become
standard. Specialized UN agencies like the World Health Organization,
the World Meteorological Organization, and UNESCO disseminated
scientific information. In 1972, the United Nations established its envi-
ronmental program.
International conferences have played an important role in spreading
alarms about environmental dangers and in demonstrating solutions.
In June 1972, diplomats, scientists, and experts from 113 nations convened
in Stockholm for the world's first environmental summit, a meeting that
marked the emergence of the movement internationally. This paralleled
the movements within the United States, Europe, and other industrial
countries. Since the Environmental Decade of the 1970s, concerns in
one country have influenced other countries, and the global aspects have
been apparent. The world has now held three additional Earth Summits
in 1992, 2002, and 2012, and international conferences meet every year
on problems like climate change, oceans, biodiversity, and so forth. These
conferences do not always result in success, however. For example, the
1997 conference on climate change in Kyoto seemed to agree on a solution,
but by the 2009 annual conference of the parties in Copenhagen, it is was
obvious that the Kyoto Protocol was dead.
Big conferences are a common method of transferring policies. Some
countries lag behind others in their environmental concerns, thus they
may first become aware of an issue because they are invited to attend a
conference to sign a treaty. For example, the Japanese people and poli-
ticians were not particularly aware of the problem of global warming
until they were asked to host the 1997 conference in Kyoto. Suddenly, the