Jon Marco Church

Jon Marco Church
Center for International Development
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
502 Rubenstein Building
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
Tel: (1) 617-496-0739
Fax: (1) 617-496-8753
Email: jon_marco_church@hks.harvard.edu
Group affiliation: Giorgio Ruffolo Doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science

Jon Marco Church is a Giorgio Ruffolo Doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard's Center for International Development, and doctoral candidate in Political Science at the Université de Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne. His work focuses on linking social science and environmental policymaking for effective implementation of global agreements at the regional level, exploring in particular regional environmental agreements such as the Alpine Convention and the Carpathian Convention. He holds an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, Queens' College, and received the Radici del Brasile award from the Brazilian Embassy in Rome for a monograph on the roots of Brazilian society. His research interests include international organization, environmental policy, and Latin America. Jon Marco is a doctoral member of the Centre de recherches politiques de la Sorbonne, where he is pursuing his PhD under the supervision of Dr. Yves Viltard. He has lectured in international relations at the American University of Paris, and collaborated with the European Academy of Bolzano, consulting for the Italian Ministry of the Environment and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on the Alpine, Carpathian and (future) Balkan Conventions. Recent publications include A Collection on the Carpathian Convention (editor, EURAC, 2008); La crisis del Canal de Beagle (Estudios Internacionales, 2008); Carpathian Convention: One Step Ahead. Three Steps Back? (with Broggiato, Environmental Policy and Law, 2008). He is also the main author of the recent report Alpine Sites and the UNESCO World Heritage. His faculty host at Harvard is Calestous Juma.

Functioning Regional Environmental Agreements: The Case of the Alpine and Carpathian Conventions
This research project focuses on linking social science and environmental policymaking for the functioning, effective implementation of global agreements at the regional level, exploring in particular regional environmental agreements such as the Alpine Convention and the Carpathian Convention. Political scientists have studied in depth the dynamics of the security regime between the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and of trade negotiations between the World Trade Organization and the European Union for decades. Do regional arrangements function in the issue-area of environmental protection as they do in trade or security? Can the analyses produced by political scientists in these contexts be analogously applied or appropriately adapted to regional environmental governance? Climate science shows the urgency of ensuring effective implementation of global agreements such as the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Alpine Convention has just adopted an Action Plan on Climate Change. Are simple regional environmental agreements such as the Alpine and Carpathian conventions functioning as effective implementation mechanisms of complex global agreements? The European Union is certainly acting as such. However, the European Union is an international arrangement among nation-states, including several ecoregions, while the Alpine or Carpathian conventions include only one. Do single ecoregional agreements function any differently than more complex regional processes such as the European Union? How do the Alpine and Carpathian Conventions interact with European institutions? Since the 1970s French political thinkers have defined concepts such as "biopolitics", "ecopolitics", or "ecopower". Some critical geographers have tried to apply them to the Alpine area. Does theoretical environmental uniformity produce practical political integration? This research project will address these topics, including the analysis of the role of science experts in policymaking in the concrete cases of the Alpine and Carpathian conventions.

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