network of research and training centres/programmes
Reforming International Environmental
Governance:
From Institutional Limits to Innovative Reforms
Edited by W. Bradnee Chambers and Jessica F. Green
 |
More than 500 international agreements and institutions now influence the governance of environmental problems ranging from climate change to persistent organic pollutants. The establishment of environmental institutions has been largely ad hoc, diffused and somewhat chaotic because the international community has addressed key environmental challenges as and when they have arisen. The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 underscored the need to reform the current institutional framework for environmental governance, but failed to come up with any substantive recommendations.
This book takes up the question left unanswered at Johannesburg: what international institutional framework would best promote the protection of the global environment? The contributors take a systematic approach to formulating proposals for institutional changes in international environmental governance and examine three potential models: enforcement, centralisation, and co-operation through increased co-ordination and collaboration. They review alternative institutional arrangements to address identified weaknesses, they elaborate upon specific reform proposals generated through recent policy debates, and they evaluate the potential of each proposal to remedy current weaknesses within the international environmental governance system.
Reforming International Environmental Governance provides useful information about the costs and benefits of different models and approaches to reforming international environmental governance and contributes substantive analysis to future debates.
- W. Bradnee Chambers is a Senior Programme Officer at the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies, Yokohama, Japan.
- Jessica F. Green is a researcher in the Sustainable Development Governance Programme at the United Nations University Institute of Advance Studies, Yokohama, Japan.
Regulating Bioprospecting:
Institutions for Drug Research, Access and Benefit-Sharing
Padmashree Gehl Sampath
 |
Bioprospecting, or the search for useful biochemical compounds and genes in nature, has been the focus of international negotiations for more than a decade, yet the debate on the terms for access to genetic resources, traditional knowledge and benefit-sharing is far from settled.
This book examines the optimal property rights structures and institutional mechanisms for regulating bioprospecting for drug research. Focusing on the economics of contracts, it shows that the rights exchanged are complementary at each stage of drug discovery and the development of genetic resources.
Defining and enforcing rights for access to genetic resources and traditional medicinal knowledge should not be attempted in isolation from the realities of drug discovery and development; otherwise the potential of bioprospecting for sustainable development and biodiversity conservation in source countries will not be achieved. This analysis is substantiated by examples of bioprospecting collaborations in several countries and a critique of the institutional and contractual factors that led to their success or failure.
This is one of the first books to address the contractual complexities of bioprospecting for drug research and is thus a key text for policy makers, practitioners and scholars in the areas of law, economics, ethnobotany, anthropology and environmental sciences.
- Padmashree Gehl Sampath is a Researcher at the United Nations University Institute for New Technologies (UNU-INTECH) Maastricht.
STOP SPAM! A Javascript-enabled browser is required to email
© 2005 United Nations University