Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks
The Social Learning Group

DeSombre, Elizabeth R. 2002. "A Review of Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks, vols. 1 & 2." American Political Science Review 96 (3): 681-682.

Book Review

Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks, vols. 1 & 2. By The Social Learning Group. Edited by William C. Clark, Nancy Dickson, Jill Jäger, and Josee van Eijndhoven. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Vol. 1: $75.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. Vol. 2: $60.00 cloth, $27.00 paper.

Elizabeth R. DeSombre
Wellesley College

I have a colleague who collects maps of Africa that demonstrate a specific phenomenon: the developed world's unlearning of African geography. Across the centuries, the maps seem to show that mapmakers know less about the geography of the African continent—particularly the internal parts—than previously was the case. Rivers change direction; mountain ranges disappear. This unlearning, my colleague argues, comes from notions about the acceptability of sources of information previously used. These maps show the social nature of “learning,” the idea that while in many cases there may be actual answers (after all, African geography exists), what information you look for, and from whom, determines how you will view the information you get, and ultimately what you will do with it.

Like geography, there may be a “right” answer to some of the world's atmospheric problems, but how these issues are defined, by whom, and when and where, has important impacts on how they are viewed and addressed. The ambitious project underlying these two volumes (with 37 contributing authors and countless research assistants and reviewers) attempts to examine the way countries of the world have evaluated, and responded to, environmental risks. “The Social Learning Group,” as the authors collectively call themselves, do so by examining the responses of nine countries, the European Union, and international environmental organizations to three problems of atmospheric pollution: transboundary acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, and global climate change. The first volume, A Comparative History of Social Responses to Climate Change, Ozone Depletion, and Acid Rain, focuses primarily on country (and institution) case studies. The second volume, A Functional Analysis of Social Responses to Climate Change, Ozone Depletion, and Acid Rain, examines materials from across the countries and issues by what the authors call “risk management functions.” The time frame within which they examine these issues, actors, and functions is chosen to be the 35 years between the International Geophysical Year in 1957 and the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. Their aim is nothing less than a “long-term, large-scale, multinational perspective on global environmental management” (p. 3). In many ways they succeed.

There are multiple ways the authors could have organized the information presented here, and one of the most important aspects of this project may be what is not reported. So much work, for so many years, went into gathering systematic data for this study that the archives, stored at Harvard University, are likely to be invaluable to future generations of dissertation writers. Impelled perhaps by publishing necessity or the attention spans of potential readers, the authors and editors have had to seriously simplify the presentation of materials, and have taken only two passes of what could have been many through the information (by country and by function). By doing so they have demonstrated precisely what their volumes overall argue: How information is presented influences what you can do with it.

The first volume is organized by the responses of the countries examined—Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the USSR, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Canada, and the United States (along with the European Union and general international environmental institutions)—to the three environmental risks explored. This structure has both advantages and disadvantages. The country-by-country presentation becomes quickly repetitive. Precisely because of the learning that takes place across borders, the same information is presented as relevant to the decision processes of multiple countries, and it, along with the relevant acronyms and time lines, is discussed as if from scratch in each chapter. At the same time, the country-specific focus makes it easy to lose sight of the international or cross-border influences that are likely having an impact, since the information is presented from the perspective of the actors within a given country. Moreover, the chapters are structured to cover similar ground in a similar order, with the emphasis on the term similar; those hoping to skim through the chapters to find the information of most interest to them will have to look in slightly different locations in different chapters, and will find that some chapters cover some factors (the role of political structure, for instance) that others do not.

Nevertheless, some important ground is covered in these presentations. One of the most interesting approaches (demonstrating again both slight differences in implementation across chapters and vast quantities of work underlying seemingly simple presentations) involves graphs of the attention given to environmental issues by national media, political decision makers, and scientific researchers. These can be used to explore the attention given within countries to an issue over time, and the relationship between scientific concern and popular attention. This approach is also used across countries (in Chapter 14, which draws conclusions from the preceding country chapters) to show what is often an eventual confluence of attention to a given issue, with climate change showing the greatest degree of simultaneity of awareness among the countries studied. This cross-cutting analysis also demonstrates that no one country of the group was the temporal or behavioral leader on all three issues examined. The comparisons also suggest that while countries may be addressing the same issue conceptually—acid rain, for example—on the international level, they do so by focusing on specifically local aspects of it in their domestic politics—lake acidification in Scandinavia and eastern North America, forest dieback in Germany, the Netherlands, and Hungary. Act globally, frame locally.

Occasionally frustrating in the country presentations is what is hinted at in the data but not covered in the analysis or sufficiently discussed in all cases to independently evaluate. The role of the Netherlands as a small country with an open economy is suggested as being important for its approaches, but there is no systematic way to examine either of those variables. Accidents and governmental structures are mentioned in various chapters as playing a role in what countries do, but again, not explored across cases. One of the most interesting stories that repeatedly crops up is the difficulty encountered by antinuclear environmental organizations when faced with decisions about responding to certain environmental problems (acid rain or climate change) for which nuclear power could be a logical solution. This, as well, does not fit nicely into the set of variables examined in the country analysis. What gets lost most in the analysis tends to be the politics: who gains or loses most from different approaches to addressing the issue, who decides what decisions are made.

The second volume explores different functional aspects of responding to risks; it cuts across cases and countries to look at risk assessment, monitoring, option assessment, goal and strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation. In most of these chapters, the primary findings are presented through stories—of how the “solution” of banning chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) use in aerosol spray cans was implemented first in the United States and then elsewhere, of how an initial focus on sulfur dioxide as the cause of acid rain eventually broadened to include other substances. Important general lessons are drawn as well. Risk assessments focus much more on emissions and concentrations of pollutants than on other aspects, though most chapters aspired to focus on end-to-end assessments. These, as with some other functions, tend to be “sticky”; examining the role of carbon dioxide initially in climate risk assessments influences the likelihood that carbon dioxide will be the only gas considered when evaluating the risks associated with climate change (note that most models discuss the risks associated with a doubling of atmospheric carbon). Risk assessments also tend to progress from simple to more complex over time.

Monitoring often originates for purposes, largely scientific, prior to its being demanded for political processes. Information gathered from this process can have a huge impact on political decisions—witness Germany's conversion to being a supporter of acid rain controls after discovering its own forest dieback, and the international community's willingness to act on ozone depletion after the discovery of the Antarctic ozone “hole.” More monitoring is done on the scientific aspects of the environmental problem than on impacts of it. Option assessment, the process of exploring the possible activities that can be taken as a response to the environmental problem, focuses much more on reducing emissions than on adaptation activities or environmental modification. Formulation of goals and strategies across issues move within the time frame of the issue from capacity building to pollution reduction, and come to focus more on economic-based solutions (such as taxes or tradable emissions permits) in real time, such that issues addressed later are more likely to feature these types of solutions as goals. Implementation follows from the goals set in moving from building capacity to reducing emissions, and also shows an increasing emphasis on the use and strengthening of international institutions. Finally, the authors suggest that evaluation—of the process of addressing the environmental risk—is rarely done except as part of one of the other functions.

The social character of much of the learning is implicit but important. While it is true that rivers either flow one direction or the other and that carbon dioxide either does or does not have an impact on the global climate cycle, the actual “source” of the Nile depends upon how you define what the source of a river is. Likewise, our understanding of the role of global climate change may be about a doubling of carbon dioxide, about sea level rise, or about increased mean global temperature. These characterizations have everything to do with what we decide to look at, and what we define as part of the problem or part of the solution. With these volumes, our understanding of the geography of global atmospheric problems expands considerably.

American Political Science Review (2002), 96:681-682 American Political Science Association
Copyright © 2002 by the American Political Science Association (Reprinted with the permission of the publisher and author.)

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