Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
16
Environmental politics and global shipping
trade: club goods as a solution to common-pool
resource problems
Elizabeth R. DeSombre
Most goods traded internationally - whether measured by value or by weight - are moved
from one place to another on ships (Steinberg, 2001, p. 14). The environmental impacts
of ships are therefore important to consider, as well as the political processes by which
these impacts are in
uenced. These impacts have been dramatic, from major oil spills that
wreaked havoc with coastlines and wildlife to invasive species transported in ballast water
that have destroyed ocean ecosystems.
The international political economy of shipping underpins any e
fl
ff
ort to understand its
environmental e
ects. Changes in technology and globalization made a dramatic increase
in global shipping trade possible, and the international regulatory structure - most promi-
nently the role of '
ff
ag-of-convenience' ship registries within which global shipping now
primarily operates - has in
fl
fl
uenced the level and type of regulation to which ships are
held.
The issue structure of ocean environmental issues is central to understanding the envi-
ronmental politics of global shipping: for the most part, environmental issues pertaining
to the oceans have the characteristics of common-pool resources, since they are both rival
and non-excludable. This issue structure, combined with an international regulatory
system in which states choose which international rules to adopt and a ship registration
system in which ship owners can choose which state in which to register their ships, makes
protecting the ocean environment especially di
cult.
The actual environmental politics of shipping is primarily coordinated through the
International Maritime Organization (IMO), a UN-a
liated organization under whose
auspices most of the international agreements to protect the ocean environment from
shipping have been negotiated. Ultimately, where the rules the IMO oversees have been
most successfully implemented in the context of globalization and
fl
ag-of-convenience
ship registration has been through e
orts to change the structure of the regulatory issue.
Although the environmental issues remain common-pool resources, a regulatory process
that excludes actors from bene
ff
ts they seek if they do not participate in protecting the
resource gives important incentives to ships to uphold international rules. The processes
that have succeeded in restructuring the regulatory issue have often done so through direct
or indirect impacts on trade. In an area as di
fi
orts
to work within the political and physical constraints underlying environmental problems
have made some progress in protecting the resource.
cult to regulate as the open ocean, e
ff
Technology, globalization and international ocean trade
Technological advances - improvements in both shipbuilding technology and the
technology of handling goods to be shipped - have reduced shipping costs over the last
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