Book Review: Climate for Change: Non-State Actors and the Global Politics of the Greenhouse. Peter Newell, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2000, 222 pp., ISBN 0 521 63250 1 hardback
Abstract
On the day of writing this review (29 March 2001), President Bush renounced the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, thus exercising what is virtually a de facto veto on the existing text. It the wake of this decision, the Protocol will have to be substantially renegotiated if indeed it is not to be thrown out altogether and the process restarted from square one. Such an action does not challenge the fundamental assumption of this book which is that non-state actors have a powerful role to play in the resolution of international environmental issues such as climate change. On the contrary, it makes it all the more relevant. In Peter Newell's book 'Non-state Actors' refers four groups; scientists (as represented by Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change); the mass media; the fossil fuel lobbies; and the environmental pressure groups. For those who seriously want more insight into how international agreements are negotiated, and how these non-state actors intervene to influence the process and the outcome, this book will be fascinating to read. How the negotiations unfold from this point will depend much upon the non-state actors. This book shows why and how.
- Publication:
-
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
- Pub Date:
- 2001
- DOI:
- 10.1016/S0168-1923(01)00246-5
- Bibcode:
- 2001AgFM..109...75B