Global Environmental Governance and Local Resistance: The Global Trade in ivory

Abstract

The increasing importance of environmental issues in global politics has generated new and powerful interest groups keen to manage natural resources in particular ways. The transboundary nature of global environmental change has meant that it has become a key site for global governance. Oceans, forests, wildlife, the atmosphere and so on all cross human constructed national boundaries; good environmental management has largely been defined in terms of supranational conventions, policies and agreements. The environment has clearly become a key area for governance of local resources from the global level because numerous international regimes are deemed to operate for the ‘global good’. However, an examination of these global environmental regimes reveals that they embody multiple and competing interest groups rather than representing a common global view that can be effectively implemented at the local level. In this chapter the case of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) is taken as an example of how global environmental governance operates and what kinds of resistances it generates.