Peter Dauvergne

Eco-labels and multi-stakeholder certification bodies have risen in prominence astools through which the sustainable production of certain goods can be signaled toconsumers. Consumers have accordingly been framed as key actors upon whomenvironmental custodianship rests, in what has been popularly termed the“individualization of responsibility.” Despite their seeming importance, I argue that ecolabelsmay be no more than a form of global greenwash, which is the practice of makingunsubstantiated claims of environmental sustainability in a concerted effort to preserveor gain market share. I contend that they are instruments of liberal environmentalismwhich aims to unify disparate goals of economic growth and environmental protection.Moreover, I demonstrate that liberal environmentalism is indeed an extension ofneoliberal and capitalist economic ideals that seek unrestricted market expansion,economic growth, and the accumulation of profit.Thus, eco-labels and certifications being a manifestation of a neoliberal economicorder merely encourage continued consumption. Within the liberal environmentalframework, individuals are encouraged to use eco-labels and certifications in making“green” buying decisions. I argue that given their current position in a neoliberaleconomic regime, certifications and eco-labels are ineffective for assuring positive longtermenvironmental change. I rely on the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)as the case study for this inquiry because the RSPO has positioned itself as theorganization and industry standard that certifies sustainable palm oil. I find that theRSPO has failed to substantiate sustainability claims given continued environmentaldecline associated with palm oil production.ivAlthough there is a body of research on greenwash present in certifications andeco-labels, not many have attempted to uproot its source. This research, thus, aims tounderscore the neoliberal underpinnings of certifications and eco-labels. Importantly, Ihope to demonstrate that by relying on these tools as solutions to environmentaldegradation, we fail to address the structural and contradictory institutions thatpromote them, which disempowers consumers through the false narrative that assertsthat individuals’ best avenue for environmental protection is through their shoppinghabits. Ultimately, this failure is dangerous for the environment and society at large.

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This paper builds on the work of critical environmental justice scholars. I argue that the understanding of environmental injustice requires an expansion beyond conceptualizing environmental injustice as toxic pollutants and external environmental harms being inflicted on marginalized and/or racialized peoples by the settler-colonial state and corporations. Built environments include structures that people work, live, and seek protection from harm and must be included as sites of environmental injustice. The state and corporations that operate under the logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, transformed and shape eco-social relations that produce racialized physical, spiritual, and mental health outcomes. Focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic since early 2020, I explore three cases to examine how the built environments interact with the virus to amplify historical and structural inequalities and to demonstrate how virus transmission moves through eco-social relations. I chose these cases as they reflect systemic inequalities that have been present since Canada’s inception. These cases include the hunger strikes led by Indigenous inmates in Saskatchewan prisons, racialized migrant farmworkers in Ontario, and the removal of environmental monitoring requirements by the Alberta Energy Regulator. I trace the major shifts in the environmental justice literature and explore the settler colonialism and racial capitalism literature to support my arguments. I find that the environmental justice literature first viewed the state as an ally rather than a key actor in producing environmental harm through violence. However, viewing injustice as toxic pollutants rather than within built environments remains consistent. Further, settler colonialism and racial capitalism through the dispossession of racialized bodies and land, have significantly restructured eco-social relations, from mutually beneficial connections to one based on hierarchy and exploitation for profit. Moreover, through the construction of civility and differentiated value, property was given to settlers which resulted in them creating built environments that foster healthy lives. Racial capitalism and settler colonialism also created institutionalized/structural racial hierarchies that render racialized people expendable, controllable, and disposable, which has led to exploitation for cheap labour, wagelessness, and mass incarceration. Examining these cases demonstrate how environmental injustice is present within the built environments (living spaces, workspaces, prisons, and reserves).

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Climate metaphors are cognitive devices that leverage our knowledge of a more common issue to make sense of a different, more complex issue. In this thesis, I use Conceptual Metaphor Theory and a climate justice lens to examine why a pandemic-based metaphor for climate change offers a more apt and just way of thinking about climate change as a consequence of fossil fuels over other common climate metaphors. In this analysis, I look at three climate metaphors—climate emergency, slow violence and war—through a high-level climate justice lens of right, fair and appropriate. I find the metaphor of emergency too vague to advance a meaningful understanding of climate change’s sociopolitical challenges and overall nature. The metaphor slow violence problematically distorts aspects of climate violence as a matter of vast timescales, rather than an issue of oppressive sociopolitical systems that mask climate harms inflicted on racialized and marginalized populations. War as a climate metaphor is fundamentally unsound due to extensive adversarial, binary and reductionist narratives that tend to create “Us” vs “Them” narratives and opens opportunities for justifying unjust actions to win a “climate war.” I then use these three climate metaphors to help situate and map out the climate metaphor “climate change is a pandemic”—positioning fossil fuels as the virus of a climate pandemic—to demonstrate how a COVID-19 pandemic model helps to capture and convey the urgency, speed, scale and sociopolitical dynamics of climate change. I suggest more research is needed to further understand how a climate pandemic metaphor influences public perceptions of climate change, how it might shape the types of solutions and policies mobilized for climate action and how this metaphor might help, harm or advance climate understanding according to climate justice principles.

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Over the years, various scholars in environmental politics have argued that individual action to mitigate climate change is marginal at best, and regressive at worst. According to their assessment, the ‘individualization of responsibility’ places the burden of climate change mitigation on individuals. These scholars also argue that the individualization of responsibility hinders the implementation of institutional solutions. These scholars have responded to a broader debate on what the role of the individual is in the fight against the climate crisis. This paper adds another voice to this debate by directly challenging the aforementioned scholars. First, I draw upon philosophical and socio-psychological scholarship to suggest that individual action is meaningful and can actually serve as a catalyst for institutional advancements. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued that people contribute to collective realities through their individual action. Insights from behavioral contagion theory have subsequently shed light on how people affect the state of the collective through their individual actions. Humans rely on cues from others to determine how to act. When one person decides to engage in environmentally friendly behavior, such as eating less meat, it is likely that those around them will begin to engage in the behavior as well. To illustrate how the effects of behavioral contagion theory can be observed in the real world, I then document the rise of vegans, vegetarians, and flexitarians in North America. This section provides empirical evidence for the value of personal action by analyzing how behavior change at the individual level has inspired businesses and governments to take action as well. Next, I propose an alternative theory of social change. The question of responsibility is not an either-or matter; rather, individuals and institutions reinforce each other in the fight against the climate crisis. Individuals signal to institutions through their actions that they are willing to take on costly actions to mitigate climate change. Institutions then take these signals and scale them up in ways that no individual can do alone. Throughout the paper, I argue that while institutional change is important, individual action can be a key component in unleashing institutional change.

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Since the 2019 Climate Action Summit, China has been playing a prominent role in mainstreaming Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) in global environmental governance, promoting the use of ecosystem management to solve environmental and societal challenges. Global environmental norms like NbS shape our understanding of how to respond to environmental issues and guide our actions. This research investigates China’s seeming leadership in adopting and promoting NbS in its domestic actions and bilateral and multilateral programmes. I argue that China’s adoption of the NbS norm is a case of nominal adoption whereby its analogous local norms – Ecological Civilisation and the Two Mountains Theory – continue to guide domestic policy-making and are unaffected by the transnational norm. Relying on a systematic review of Chinese-language primary sources, I found that China’s discourse and actions involving the NbS norm are outward-oriented and aim to incorporate its domestic environmental practices and ideologies into the fragmented NbS norm, where the global recognition of NbS does not translate into consistent local implementation. In doing so, China is shaping global NbS implementation to its advantage and preventing its institutionalisation. It seeks to showcase its domestic environmental successes, while gaining performance legitimacy and reputational benefits to boosts its international image. This research fills the gap in the political science research on NbS and contributes to the global environmental politics literature by examining the role of one of the most biologically diverse countries in the politics of the NbS norm. The nominal adoption model helps to explain the anomalies of China’s NbS norm adoption and promotion; and highlights the evolving strategies of authoritarian environmentalism and the dynamic diffusion and localisation pathways of global environmental norms.

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Ecological problems that encompass the cultural traditions and customs of non-western peoples have been known to expose the western ethnocentricity subtly embedded within western environmental discourse and its core principle of universalist morality. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Chinese cultural practices associated with certain contemporary environmental issues: 1. Live Animal Markets make clear the underlining assumptions/values that western environmental activists hold regarding cultural others, and the protection of the environment itself; 2. Shark Fin Soup reveals the fundamental misunderstandings that environmental actors have regarding the broader Chinese socio-cultural contexts that drive consumption; 3. The Ivory Trade demonstrates false narratives, and the possibility for environmental activists to overcome misunderstandings to forge successful cultural dialogue. All these case studies touch upon the fact that when western environmental actors attempt to address the problem, they often inadvertently perpetuate/reinforce orientalist narratives about Chinese culture within the media, academia and the broader cultural sphere by engaging in heuristic tropes that frame Chinese bodies as: others who improperly transcend the boundary between nature and man in order to satiate their senseless tastes for “exotic” animals to the point that it will destroy “our” pristine ecosystems. This research paper argues that critical hermeneutics has a role to play within global environmental politics to expose these western, ethnocentric tendencies; it also advocates for the adoption of critical hermeneutics as both a method to acknowledge one’s own cultural pre-judgements to help safeguard against, if not outright avoid, the making of these mistakes in the future, as well as a solution to solve the environmental problem while respecting Chinese culture and traditions at the same time.

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After the controversial exit of Japan from the International Whaling Commission in December 2018, many have debated the reason(s) behind this exit. This paper will analyze the discourse surrounding this issue, focusing on the last decade in general, and this recent exit in particular. It will explain the arguments put forward by Japan, which holds a pro-whaling stance, as well as the arguments of the opposing nations with an anti-whaling position. While Japan states that their pro-whaling stance is largely based on national traditions and culture, and they should therefore be able to carry out commercial whaling free of others’ judgment, I argue that the reason behind the withdrawal are the internal political dynamics of the ‘Iron Triangle,’ as well as a push back against what they perceive as imperialism by Western states. The Iron Triangle refers to a triangle of politicians, government bureaucrats, and big businesses drafting and enforcing policy for mutual interests. I will also explain the relationship between the Japanese government and the Japanese population and how it affects, or more precisely, does not affect Japan’s policy making surrounding the whaling issue. The thesis will conclude by summarizing the developments and evaluating what can be done in the future to improve the current situation.

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Environmental and Indigenous activists in Canada and the United States opposing extraction projects such as pipelines are being targeted by states and corporations. The securitization of critical infrastructure in Canada and the United States has enabled the use of security measures against these activists. The post-9/11 security environment facilitated a broad recognition of threats and permitted the use of a range of security measures. In this environment, policies emerged securitizing critical infrastructure, meaning that it was discursively constructed as a valued object under threat thus necessitating the use of exceptional measures to protect it. While public discourse establishes the securitization of critical infrastructure, private documents reveal the intentions and specific targets of these policies. In practice, the Canadian and American governments target environmental and Indigenous activists because they impede extractive critical infrastructure which operate in states’ and corporations’ economic interests. The use of security measures and their focus on environmental and Indigenous activists can be seen during confrontations like those in Standing Rock and Wet’suwet’en. Policies and actions in Canada and the United States have been influenced by their past treatment of environmental and Indigenous activists, government interests in extractivism, and the post-9/11 security environment. These historical, political, and economic factors shape the nature of the security policies, the actors executing the security measures, and which activists are targeted using particular measures. Though this research charts differences between Canada and the United States, it finds that, ultimately, the consequences of critical infrastructure securitization are similar in the two countries. There are global implications for the use of securitization to justify the repression of environmental and Indigenous activists related to environmental politics and the replication of this process in other countries. This research offers further evidence for the intertwined interests of governments and corporations in extraction and the lengths that they are willing to go to advance them. Environmental and Indigenous activists are an important voice in protecting the environment, biodiversity, and self-determination; without them, governments and corporations will have even greater power to pillage and pollute.

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Compared to China’s tough position in 2009, China’s cooperative stance at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference has been celebrated by the international community as a radical shift in China’s climate diplomacy. In contrast, this paper argues that although China has become proactive in its climate diplomacy, its stance on climate mitigation has been consistently conservative. I argue that the change in elites’ perception of sustainable development has driven China to become more cooperative but the national interest still limits its ambition in its international climate commitment. I employ process tracing to reveal that the ideational source of this perception shift is the incorporation of the climate protection norm advocated by domestic political leaders. The disaggregation of China’s climate policy into a domestic and international dimension attempts to challenge the theoretical divide between the rationalist and social constructivist approach to China’s climate policy. The finding of this paper bridges the gap in understanding China’s climate politics, contributes to theory building in climate diplomacy, and advances the debate between the rational choice theory and social constructivism.

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Rights of nature is a discourse which proposes that, like humans, the natural world should be afforded a set of legal rights; rights which, being nominally inviolable, temper our worst excesses. Although not as ubiquitous as the conceptual framework of global capitalism, this idea enjoys salience in select areas, notably Ecuador, Bolivia, and New Zealand. The reason that alternative paradigms like rights of nature are select, however, is because the monolithic conceptual framework that is the contemporary political economy – that is to say, neoliberalism – tends to absorb or neutralizes such challenging ideas. Such instances are in abundance, for example, in the commodification of environmental sentiments such as ‘sustainability.’ I argue that despite this, rights of nature has survived challenges to its existence in the form of indigenous cosmologies and social philosophies of these countries. This thesis seeks to explain why this is so, arguing that common cultural denominators across all account for this salience. These commonalities include indigenous cosmologies and cultures that express a reverence for nature; histories of exogenous colonial exploitation of land and people; strong feminist traditions at the individual level; and robust legal protections of nature at the state level. In the broader context of global environmental politics, these factors are important because they provide an alternative paradigm which is otherwise obfuscated by the monochromatism of the contemporary world order, which equates the commodification of nature and material wealth with success. Unveiling it may allow social, economic, and natural relations to be wholly reconceived.

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The Small Island Developing States (SIDS) leadership highlights the implications of global climate change upon national and international security frameworks. As chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) for four consecutive years, the Maldives aims to tackle the challenges of climate change by implementing climate related national and international strategies, targets and policies. This paper focuses on why the Maldives prioritizes climate leadership as one of its main political goals. I argue that the nation prioritizes climate leadership in order to gain soft power within the international community; to build developmental assistance for the nation; to promote tourism by crafting an international image of a nation committed to eradicating climate change; to reduce the existential social, political and economic threats caused by climate change that would otherwise destabilize the nation and threaten the existing political leadership; and lastly, as a symbol of green leadership in the world. The Maldivian climate leadership strives to become a source of inspiration and a model for other nations to follow suit. The findings of this paper promote a deeper understanding of Maldivian climate politics, the understanding of climate leadership in the Maldives via agenda framing, political networks, rhetoric and state-crafted bargaining in order to safeguard their national sovereignty and re-define the parameters of global climate leadership.

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Much to the horror of our liberal colleagues, it appears that actual rising tides are less than helpful for those without boats. In this paper I critique the newest and greenest iteration of capitalism, appropriately termed green capitalism, and its proponents’ dangerous desire to fashion a manageable economic crisis out of planetary ecological catastrophe. The economic (il)logic and ontological hubris of green capitalism, I argue, spurs only anthropocentric and imaginatively impoverished market-based solutions that fail to comprehend the fundamentally interrelated nature of social, economic, and ecological systems. Champions rather than challengers of unfettered accumulation and production, proponents of the ‘new green economy’ predictably offer neoliberal and depoliticized narratives of corporate social responsibility and green individual consumption as potential solutions. Combined, corporate social responsibility and the individualization of responsibility are driving profoundly anti-democratic and depoliticized approaches to social, economic, and ecological threats. What results, in other words, is the opposite of a social movement — an anti-social movement of pseudo-activity. Pseudo-solutions and pseudo-activities, I argue, must be rejected in order to cultivate necessarily political, democratic, and collective responses to the ongoing social, economic, ecological catastrophe.

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Embedded, but rarely made explicit within liberal environmental rhetoric, is a focus on the individual as the primacy locus of change. Proponents of this atomized conception of responsibility suggest widespread environmental degradation— the product of individual overconsumption and poor decision making— can be addressed through individual lifestyle changes. According to this logic, individuals can ‘do their bit’ for the environment by buying ‘green,’ recycling, consuming less, and ‘living lightly.’ Despite the ostensible neutrality, the individualization of responsibility is in fact a deeply gendered notion. The injunction to make eco-friendly lifestyle changes results in an intensification of household labour and responsibility women undertake disproportionately. While there is a body of environmental sociological literature that recognizes this gendered division of eco-labour, there have been few efforts to critically theorize this gender gap. Contributing to these theoretical efforts, I argue that a gender-blind environmental approach based on ‘the individual’ as a homogenous, apolitical theoretical concept, depoliticizes environmental degradation as a space of political contestation. Without acknowledging the variation amongst individuals, the individualization of responsibility obfuscates the power asymmetry built into structures of the status quo, thereby stifling critique and the possibility of necessary structural change.

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The pressure to adopt domestic environmental policies is growing as a result of increasingly integrated and influential global environmental regulations, conventions, and institutions. The transformative nature of environmental policies, and carbon taxes in particular, present challenges for domestic governments vis-à-vis public opinion, business groups, and interest groups. Given that provinces have different regional contexts and differing existing normative structures, how can governments inspire acceptance of environmental policies with broad and unspecific global normative rhetoric? In the Canadian provincial context, I argue that norms (known as the widely accepted appropriate or desirable patterns of behaviour within a given society) and ideas play a significant enabling role in aiding governments in the introduction stage of environmental policies that would otherwise be hard to accept. Further, given that different domestic contexts cannot simply adopt normative rhetoric at the global level, I argue that governments must utilize normative strategies to bring the policy to be complementary to existing local norms, discourses, and structures. These strategies include grafting, known as introducing a new norm by connecting it with an existing norm in the same issue area, and framing, known as suggesting alternative perceptions of appropriate normative application that better resonate with public understanding. Lastly, while norms are not the only policy perspective that governments must consider, domestic normative processes have the potential to be a dominant consideration due to the impact they have on other factors of the policymaking process. In light of the recent federal announcement to implement a carbon tax in all provinces currently without a carbon pricing system by the end of 2018, I illustrate my argument by showing how two provincial governments, with vastly different industry and contextual backgrounds, both voluntarily introduced carbon taxes prior to the announcement. Their existing normative structures – the already existent polluter-pays principle in British Columbia and normative pressures from the top-down in Alberta – proved to be crucial factors to the introduction of the carbon tax in their respective provinces. These cases serve not only as an interesting comparison, but are also useful examples of the employment of normative strategies to other provinces hoping to follow suit.

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Prior to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, China consistently obstructed multilateral climate change governance, and instead advocated for national regulation and flexibility for developing states. However, at the World Economic Forum in January 2017, President Xi Jinping expressed strong support for the Paris Climate Agreement. This thesis seeks to explain China’s new approach to climate governance. In the first section, I evaluate the design of the Paris Agreement from a rationalist perspective to find that the Agreement compromises environmental outcomes to promote economic growth, trade liberalization, and national sovereignty. Further, I find that this design is consistent with China’s previously climate policy objectives. In the second section of this thesis, I argue that while the agreement is weak on environmental protection, the Paris Agreement represents a forum to signal responsible behavior, and therefore the Paris Agreement has instrumental value for China’s economic and development objectives. Thus, the Paris Agreement has become part of a larger legitimation strategy used by Chinese leadership, to signal China’s benevolent economic rise, particularly to the Global South. This thesis contributes to existing literature to suggest that, in the arena of climate change governance and economic development, China is largely a status quo power. Likewise, this thesis argues that the design of Paris Agreement is largely a continuation of previous agreements and negotiations, rather than a significantly different approach to climate governance.

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International observers might have expected China to respond to US defection on climate change with a similar defection, but it has shown no signs of doing so. Why? This paper argues that Chinese commitment to environmental targets, embodied by the Paris Agreement, is the result of a greening of self-interest: in other words, China has realised its existing domestic and foreign policy goals are best served by a realignment from unrestrained to more sustainable development. The primary drivers of this shift are the pursuit of domestic legitimacy, the economic benefits of industrial efficiency and green technology production, and a desire to improve China’s international reputation. The paper will utilise a range of academic, media and direct political sources to uncover the reality of Chinese foreign policy motivation piece by piece. It will end by reflecting on two logical corollaries of the main question: first, will China simply discard its climate commitments if the incentives it is faced with start to favour untrammelled environmental exploitation again? Discursive chains, norm internalisation and influence over the global normative framework may operate against this outcome. Second, how will Chinese leadership in the international sphere influence the nature of global environmental norms themselves? China’s climate strategy appears to embrace the consumption-led, industrial capitalist conception of environmentalism which already prevails, suggesting this rising giant is likely to further entrench existing norms rather than shift the world towards genuinely sustainable solutions.

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Collaborative consumption(CC)refers to activities surrounding the sharing, swapping, or trading of goods and services within a collaborative consumption community. First, this MA thesis evaluates the factors contributing to the rapid increase of CC initiatives. These factors include technology, personal economics, environmental concerns, and social interaction. Second, the thesis explores the prospects and limits of CC in terms of sustainability. The most promising prospect is that CC seems to generate social capital and initiate a value shift away from ownership. However, institutional forces promoting growth limit this potential. The thesis concludes that CC itself is not enough to achieve sustainability, and therefore, more political solutions are needed. The paper ends with a critical discussion on the future of our growth-based economic model by suggesting that certain forms of CC could represent the roots of a “post-growth” economy.

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This paper provides a first look at the intersection between the natural resource and foreign aid curses. In doing so, it proposes that the economic, political, and developmental effects of foreign aid and natural resources are influenced by similar factors. While to date much of the literature on the aid and resource curses have tended not to engage one another, it is shown that through a political economy model of political survival, important commonalities can be drawn out with respect to the cause and effect of both curses. Accordingly, this paper argues for the necessity of no longer studying the two phenomena in isolation, and instead presents a common theoretical model allowing for a unified approach to understanding the implications of unearned income. A preliminary quantitative analysis is also presented, which suggests at the effects of foreign aid in natural resource-dependent countries. Important implications not only for academic research, but also importantly for policy making, follow from the findings herein.

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Despite efforts to reduce logging rates, deforestation due to illegal timber harvests continues to plague REDD+ countries. This problem occurs in an array of states that exhibit variance regarding quality of governance, commitment to REDD+ projects, as well as history and causes of deforestation. This behavior is best explained as a typical challenge of implementing policy for nations in which the ‘weak’ state is merely one of several actors wielding power in the form of social control. These power dynamics are likely to persist, or change only at a rate that puts successful implementation of REDD+ projects in jeopardy. Extending this framework to the international level demonstrates how the design of international regimes such as REDD+ may work either to exacerbate or to moderate existing conflict among actors with social power, and how contestation at the local level may act to influence the politics of these global regimes.

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Scholars tend to frame environmental problems and climate change as either a separate issue from national security or as loosely embedded in an overarching framework of human security. Since Barry Buzan’s seminal 1991 work, People, States and Fear, which argues that the traditional concept of security is too narrowly defined and is out of touch with reality, scholarship on human security has proliferated. Within the human security literature, environmental issues have received less attention due to their very broad and complex nature, which requires an integrated, horizontal response on the part of both state and non-state actors. This MA thesis seeks to contribute to the small, albeit growing, study of climate change as part of the broader scholarship on human security. Through the case studies of the largest mangrove forest and two major islands in Bangladesh, I argue that Bangladesh’s attempt to securitize climate change has failed on two levels. First, the state has been unable to convince the public at large that rising sea-levels is a long-term threat to national security. Second, the state has failed to incorporate into the securitization process, the communities most vulnerable to sea-level rise. There are at least two important implications of this failure to securitize climate change: it is contributing to shortcomings in short- and long-term adaptation and mitigation strategies, and it is creating new threats to human security. As a result, only minor changes are occurring on the ground to address with impacts of climate change on Bangladeshi’s most vulnerable populations. The inundation of the Sundarbans’s mangrove forest and Sandeep and Kutubdia islands, vividly illustrates the way in which climate change is adversely affecting both the livelihood and security of the people as well as the state of Bangladesh. To respond more effectively to the escalating crisis of climate change, the Bangladeshi government needs to do more to securitize climate change and raise it to the level of a national security threat. By doing so, the state would have a better chance of not only preventing future loss of livelihood, but also manage future security threats brought on by climate change.

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