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We meet groups who consider themselves theguardians of the common good, and those who try todistinguish ‘good science’ from ‘bad science’, ‘betterscience’ from ‘worse science’. ‘Truths’ come into ques-tion, and Berglund illustrates the circular discourse thatscience presents, as scientists themselves set thestandards for judging environmental sciences. Trustbecomes a fragile and fluid relationship which activistswork hard to nurture, using science both to demon-strate the weakness of modernist development and tovalidate the urgency of their philosophy of activism.

The vivid depiction of public meetings and privateconversations enables us to empathize with the ac-tivists’ dilemmas, and appreciate the struggles they gothrough to make democratic representations. Berglundlays bare the sheer hard work of resisting dominantrelations of governance for activists from differentareas, with different standpoints and methods, andwith a great variety of agendas, from ecologicalprotection to health and safety to wholesale politicalchange. Within this antagonistic political situation,the individuals and groups of activists come alive asreal, rounded and flawed people, whose knowledge ofimpending disaster drives them to act. Many arethemselves scientists and engineers, with privilegedaccess to scientific resources, but they, too, mustestablish their political claims with the aid of techno-science, challenging the notion of ‘expertise’ from bothinside and out.

This is an outstanding work, with a depth ofhumanity and insight that is rare in science studies.Woven throughout this acutely observed ethnographylies a cogent critical analysis of contemporary scien-tific discourses, governance and environmentalisms. Inthe greatest tradition of ethnography, this is a studythat offers us a sharply drawn analysis of particularevents and people, thoroughly contextualized in bothlocal personalities and particularities, and contempo-rary national and global issues of science, society,technology and governance.

Simone AbramDepartment of Town and Regional Planning,

University of Sheffield, UK

FAIR WEATHER? EQUITY CONCERNS IN CLIMATECHANGE. Ferenc L. Toth (editor), London,Earthscan, 1999. ISBN 1-85383-557-9 £16.95(paperback). ISBN 1-85383-558-7 £45.00(hardback). 212 pp.

Virtually every environmental social scientist isaware of the basic stylized facts of global warmingand global environmental change, and knows that

the biophysical-scientific basis of global change re-search consists of huge ‘global circulation models’(GCMs). Most social scientists are also aware thatthere is a small interdisciplinary community of socialscientists (mainly geographers, economists and polit-ical scientists) that works in concert with planetary/biophysical scientists on quantitative prediction andassessment projects. Very few social scientists,though, have a very good feeling for how the socialscientific global change research effort tends to pivotabout the construction of ‘integrated assessmentmodels’ (IAMs), which are aimed at linking socio-economic data to GCMs as inputs and outputs.

While Fair Weather? is not a book on IAMs, itprovides a great deal of information on the centralrole that IAMs play in shaping the social science rolein global change research. IAMs are technocraticinstruments, both for better and for worse. On theone hand, IAMs provide a point of entree for socialscientists to lend their expertise to the developmentand refinement of climate and biospheric changemodels. The highly quantitative character of thesemodels puts the social science community on a closerfooting with the atmospheric chemists and physi-cists. IAMs are potentially of great analytical signifi-cance in demonstrating how the overarchingprocesses of atmospheric warming can have highlyvariable and differentiated local consequences andmeanings. On the other hand, the predominance ofIAMs in social scientific research on climate changeserves to greatly narrow the range of research thatcan be done.

Until the past year or two, as efforts to forgeinternational environmental agreements have en-countered more resistance and disillusion than opti-mism and breakthrough, the conventional wisdom inthe global change research community was that thepursuit of international agreements was the logicalimplication of the transboundary nature of environ-mental problems. A corollary assumption is thatinternational negotiating communities are likely tobe less parochial than national parliaments and min-istries. Yet another corollary was that the potentialseverity of ongoing and future climate changes wassuch that, as the WCED (1987) put it in theirwell-known report, we all share a ‘common future’ interms of biospheric stability. Thus, the natural, aswell as social science, research effort was geared todeveloping predictive tools, including sounderGCMs, as well as more sophisticated IAMs for pre-dicting the consequences of climate change for bothsocieties and the biosphere, and for developing ‘miti-gation’ schemes. These models would, among other

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things, help to generate a better understanding onthe part of national and international policy-makersabout the many ways in which the world’s peopleshave a common environmental future.

It was ultimately to be the case, however, thatperceptions of differing, rather than common, na-tional and group interests in climate change policiesbecame the predominant element in internationalenvironmental politics during the late 1990s. One ofthe major bases of claims of differing interests hasbeen that the climate establishment—including notonly climate scientists and the international epis-temic community of climate negotiation officials, butalso developed country environmental groups andgovernments—had swept ‘equity’ and ‘fairness’ con-cerns under the rug in the rush to forge majorbreakthroughs in climate policy protocols. In partic-ular, developing country governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have maderepeated claims that existing climate agreements (e.g.the 1997 Kyoto Protocol), and, especially, proposedagreements that would establish far more ambitiouspolicy targets, fare poorly on the grounds of equityand fairness. For many of the authors in this volume,though, the crystallizing event in the equity debateover climate change occurred in the aftermath of the1995 publication IPCC Second Assessment Report, inwhich researchers made the statistical assumption formodelling purposes that a life in the developedcountries was worth far more than one in the devel-oping world. Further, differing views about equityand fairness can be illustrated by the fact that theinstitutionalization of the principle of ‘differentiatedobligations’ in several international environmentalagreements (e.g. the Montreal Protocol of 1987 andthe 1997 Kyoto Protocol), which, for many, is anecessary pro-South equity measure, has been demo-nized by the US Congress and much of US capitalfor being tantamount to a unilateral act of economicsurrender on the part of American climate policynegotiators.

Fair Weather? is a response to the equity andfairness questions by a range of social scientists,humanists and climate scientists. This volume is theproduct of a 1998 international workshop organizedby one of the handful of accomplished, well-fundedinterdisciplinary climate change research institutes inthe world, the Potsdam Institute for Climate ImpactResearch. The contributors mainly include econo-mists, international legal scholars, geographers, an-thropologists, philosophers and ethicists, inter-national relations specialists and climate science re-searchers.

Toth’s introductory chapter provides a brief butuseful overview of the issues covered in the 12chapters in the book. He acknowledges that thebasic logic behind IAMs is that of a ‘cost–benefit’paradigm, in which matters of equity tend to bereduced to concerns about ‘procedural’ equity inarriving at international agreements and intergenera-tional equity concerns, which are dealt with breezilyby way of fiddling with discount rates. He notes thatIAMs have real weaknesses when it comes to dealingwith intragenerational equity. But he also notes, atthe close of his chapter, that while procedural as wellas ‘consequentialist’ equity are important matters, ithappens frequently that groups unwilling to face therealities of climate change will raise equity concerns‘as a veil . . . to avoid or delay action’ (p. 8).

The next chapter in the book, by Steve Rayner,Elizabeth Malone, and Michael Thompson, is quite acomprehensive treatment of the equity question inclimate change. Rayner, an anthropologist trained insocial studies of science, has been an interestingfigure in social-scientific climate change research. Hehas been part of the climate change establishmentbut has been, essentially, the only scholar in thatcommunity to have expressed publicly concernsabout climate change technocracy, and the role ofsocial sciences in this regard. Rayner et al. begin theirpiece by noting that the standing of the equityquestion can be gauged by the fact that ‘no one hasasked the question of whether and how efficiencyissues can and should be incorporated into integratedassessment’ (p. 11). They note that while the socialscience disciplines are by their nature characterizedby the coexistence of descriptive and interpretive‘paradigms’, climate change research and IAMs drawonly on the expertise from the descriptive perspec-tive. They proceed to lay out alternative schemas fordealing more directly with equity issues, implying allalong that IAM practitioners cannot solve the equityquestion through more clever or complex modelling.But from my point of view, the most significantcontribution of the chapter is the observation madein the closing section that ‘much of the debate aboutequity in climate change mitigation is an extensionof the broader debate in international developmentand political empowerment’ (p. 37).

Joanne Linnerooth-Bayer’s subsequent chapter ar-rives at many of the same conclusions as the chaptersthat follow hers. In particular, she concludes thatthere is no universally valid set of moral principlesthat can undergird institutional or national commit-ments to climate change policy. Likewise, equityissues are reflections of different social and nationalinterests. To the degree that climate change equity is

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rooted in differences of cultural or moral standpoint,this is more an intranational, rather than geopolitical,phenomenon.

Perhaps the most sobering and provocative paperin Fair Weather? is that by David Victor of the USA’sCouncil on Foreign Relations. He essentially arguesthat while ‘fairer’ agreements could well be easier tonegotiate, there is no evidence that more equitableagreements are any more effective than conventionalones in terms of implementation. If anything, theweight of the evidence is that ‘simple’ agreements—in which all countries have equal obligations—areeasier to implement than more complex ones thatinvolve differentiated obligations. He notes that in-ternational environmental agreements are ‘blunt in-struments’ and are poor vehicles for achieving greaterinternational equity. He also suggests that the vari-ous negotiating positions on international environ-mental agreements are a fairly direct reflection ofnational ‘willingness of pay’, which is itself a productof state officials’ interpretations of the interplay ofdomestic social forces.

Victor’s straight talk will be of little comfort tothose with serious concerns about global environ-ment and international inequality. As the book con-cludes with this chapter, his realist internationalpolitical economy of environmental agreementsseems to be the last word on the equity questionfrom the Potsdam group. As wise and reasoned as hiscounsel might seem, a glance at the events of the lastcentury, and, especially, those of the last month of1999, suggests that a longer range view is necessary.At the beginning of the twentieth century, the inter-national state system and its international regimes,which he assumes is self-evidently the only way thatinternational politics can be conducted, scarcely ex-isted. And if we take the World Trade Organization(WTO) to be the quintessential late twentieth cen-tury expression of economic liberalism in an interna-tional state-systemic framework, the anti-WTOprotest at Seattle in December 1999 is a soberingphenomenon. WTO and the social movements (es-pecially globally oriented environmental NGOs,such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth) thatrose up against it suggest that institutions can and dochange. Thus, if we look beyond the question ofhow IAMs can ‘incorporate’ or provide data inputs inorder to respond to equity concerns in climatechange, we can see that the equity question has verysignificant world-historical and long-term elements.For example, what is the ‘environmental balance’between the anti-environmental tendencies of thecurrent global institutions (national sovereignty todamage the environment, world trade laws that

provide a partial veto of national environmental laws,intensifying global economic competition and capitalmobility that deepen the accumulation imperativeand bring more world resources within the reach ofthe accumulation locomotive) versus the positiveones of making possible agreements that can reformnational tendencies toward destructive environmentalpolicies? Will trade liberalization and the chasms ofinequality and social exclusion it opens up ultimatelyserve to undermine the legitimacy of the interna-tional state system? Will international environmentalcontradictions contribute to the undermining of thelegitimacy of the world system or reinforce it? Theseare examples of broader equity questions that getlittle hearing in this book. In large part it is because,as Rayner et al. suggest in Chapter 2, the ‘descriptive’view (a polite synonym for ‘positivism’) holds suchsway within social science global change circles.

References

WCED (World Commission on Environment andDevelopment). 1987. Our Common Future. OxfordUniversity Press: New York.

Frederick H. ButtelUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

GLOBAL COMPETITION AND EUENVIRONMENTAL POLICY. Jonathan Golub(editor), Routledge, London, 1998. ISBN0-415-15698-X. £47.50 (hardback). 221 pp.

Golub’s volume brings together analyses from a num-ber of policy areas, as follows: (1) ‘Global competi-tion and EU environmental policy: introduction andoverview’, by the editor himself, a lecturer in politics;(2) ‘EU policy for ozone layer protection’, by I.Rowlands, lecturer in international relations and de-velopment; (3) ‘Regulating exports of hazardouschemicals: the EU’s external chemical safety policy’,by M. Pallemaerts, lecturer in international environ-mental policy and law; (4) ‘Improving compliancewith the international law of marine environmentalprotection: the role of the EU’, by A. Nollkaemper,senior research fellow in law; (5) ‘The path to EU’sclimate change policy’, by T. Heller, professor oflaw; (6) ‘EU environmental policy and the GATT/WTO’, by D. Vogel, professor of business and publicpolicy; (7) ‘The world trade dimension of ‘green-ing’ the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy’, by

Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Environ. Policy Plann. 2: 167–175 (2000)