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Building Environmental Regimes in Northeast Asia: Progress, Limitations, and Policy Options
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Abstract
In Chapter 9, Shin-wha Lee also discusses environmental regime building in Northeast Asia. Transboundary ecological issues should render strong incentives for international environmental cooperation within this region because it can help protect the natural environmental. Such cooperation can also pave the way for establishing regional confidence building as it thaws intransigent barriers of distrust, miscommunication, uncertainty and differing views of issues that can lead to conflict. Consequently, since the late 1980s, there have been strong calls for regimes of cooperative environmental management in Northeast Asia. South Korea, Japan and China have been engaged in bilateral and multilateral dialogues to establish or promote regional ecological cooperation to address their common environmental problems. However, despite the many incentives for cooperation, as the preceding chapter shows, environmental regime building in Northeast Asia has not come easily, and it remains too ineffective. In fact, according to Lee, there is still much skepticism in Northeast Asia about establishing a sustained, cooperative set of institutions for regional environmental protection, in large part due to pre-existing differences over traditional security issues and continuing distrust in the region from colonial periods, World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War. A further hindrance to regional environmental cooperation lies in insufficient evidence of trans-frontier environmental damage. Surprisingly, despite regional awareness of cross-border pollution problems, no state in the Northeast Asian region has officially claimed grave environmental damage from its neighbors.
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According to Lee, at least five factors are required for the establishment of more effective institutional mechanisms for regional environmental cooperation: national leadership, involvement of international organizations, participation of transnational scientific networks, active involvement of nongovernmental organizations, and significant public concern. With these considerations in mind, Lee makes several recommendations. These include raising awareness of environmental problems among publics in the region, enhancing scientific knowledge about cross-border environmental impacts, and undertaking concerted efforts to overcome resistance to environmental cooperation stemming from national concerns about economic growth, economic competition between states, and the very strong sense of sovereignty in the region that makes imposing the standards agreed in the context of environmental regimes difficult. Unfortunately, none of these factors are realized easily in Northeast Asia. However, by identifying these problems, Lee helps frame the thinking and work that is necessary to facilitate greater regional environmental cooperation and regime building.