The state of the environment

Let us examine the state of the environment. Climate change and biodiversity loss have reached ‘emergency’ status. Species loss is increasing, the oceans are increasingly polluted, the land is highly degraded affecting the livelihoods of some 3.2 billion people, and air and water pollution cause some 9 million people to die prematurely each year, to say nothing about persistent ill-health.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the world to its knees, and yet it has not unleashed the kind of global cooperation needed to solve the problems. The recent global assessments—Global Environment Assessment-6, its technical summary, and the assessment of assessments entitled Making Peace with Nature—have highlighted that (inter)national policy processes lag far behind environmental degradation and that countries and other actors worldwide are not pulling their weight to solve these problems.  

Against this background, this Special Issue on Lessons Learnt from International Environmental Agreements: Celebrating 20 Years of International Environmental Agreements (INEA) focuses on the key lessons learnt (including theoretical and methodological advances) in the more than 600 papers published between 2001 and 2020 and triangulated with references to other papers in other journals. Methodologically, the papers are clustered into different topics and editorial board members and authors who frequently publish in INEA were invited to undertake the review. Authors have then adopted their own method of analyzing the papers. 

Theme by theme

Instead of going paper by paper, the authors have gone theme by theme in which they combine the lessons learnt across the papers. This reflects the reality that these issues are interlinked and demonstrates how different authors have dealt with the same issues but from their own disciplinary and/or epistemological perspectives. What emerges from all the papers is that the theme of ‘international environmental agreements’ requires not only knowledge from different disciplines, different levels of governance and actors, but also different specializations within themes.

For example, unlike the normal distinction between national and international law, public and private law, INEA articles have covered challenges at the comparative national level, and discussed the challenges both public and private law provide for environmental issues, thereby addressing issues of scale and taking a wide spectrum of perspectives. Most papers focus on what we observe as happening in the different regimes; some focus explicitly on lessons learnt. This editorial focuses on the lessons learnt from research on international environmental agreements, before drawing some broader conclusions.

Editorial

Lessons learnt from international environmental agreements for the Stockholm + 50 Conference: celebrating 20 Years of INEA - J. Gupta , C. Vegelin, N. Pouw   

Original papers

• The politics of multilateral environmental agreements lessons from 20 years of INEA - A. Kalfagianni, O.R. Young   
• Lessons learnt from two decades of international environmental agreements: law - P.H. Sand, J. McGee  
• Economic analysis of international environmental agreements: lessons learnt 2000–2020 - N.R.M. Pouw, H.-P. Weikard, R.B. Howarth 
• 20 Years of global climate change governance research: taking stock and moving forward - P. Pattberg, C. Kaiser, O. Widerberg, J. Stripple 
• Reflecting on twenty years of international agreements concerning water governance: insights and key learning - N. Mirumachi, M. Hurlbert 
• Lessons learnt in global biodiversity governance - M. Petersson, P. Stoett  
• Agency dynamics of International Environmental Agreements: actors, contexts, and drivers - S. Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, K. Rietig, M. Scobie  
• Institutional interplay in global environmental governance: lessons learned and future research - J.P. Elsässer · T. Hickmann · S. Jinnah · S. Oberthür · T. Van de Graaf 
• Equity, justice and the SDGs: lessons learnt from two decades of INEA scholarship - J. Gupta · A. Gupta · C. Vegelin