The Formation of Global Governance for Biodiversity

• In Event: 254 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 15. Globalization

Abstract

The authors investigate the factors that drive the formation of global governance for enhancing biodiversity, by originally examining the countries that have ratified the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). They use event history data of 122 countries spanning from 1992 to 2005. Their multivariate analysis has found that local environmentalism, the orientation toward general global governance, and translocal peer pressure especially from regional peers increase the likelihood of a country’s ratifying the CBD. These results reveal both agreements and disagreements with the existing wisdom of the ratification behavior in global environmental politics. By triangulating their findings with the literature, the authors argue that some dynamics in the global environmental politics of biodiversity are unique, compared to other environmental issue areas such as climate change. They suggest future research that is able to compare ratification politics between different issue areas.

Authors

• Jae-Mahn Shim, University of Seoul

• Eunjung Shin, Science and Technology Policy Institute