Globalizing Information:Persistent Organic Pollutants from

Regional to Global Arenas

Noelle Eckley6 October 2001

Open Meeting of the Global Environmental Change Research Community, Rio de Janeiro, 6-8 October, 2001

Overview

• Background and context

• Effects and effectiveness of scientific assessments

• Research and assessment of persistent organic pollutants

Research and Lesson-Drawing

• Main question: How can a global assessment process make best use of existing regional assessments?– Balancing efficiency and risk of leaving behind

those who didn’t participate in regional forum– What strategies might assessors employ to

ensure that the right lessons are learned from regional experience?

What properties of assessments make them more influential?

• Credibility… – of technical arguments to relevant communities

• Salience (i.e. relevance)... – to changing needs of specific users, producers

• Legitimacy... – or fairness of the process to stakeholders.

Case Study

• Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) under regional and global assessment and negotiation

• Århus Protocol to LRTAP, June 1998: a significant regional precedent for global POPs negotiations

• UNEP POPs convention: May 2001?

LRTAP Parties

Additional UNEP POPs Participants

Participation in LRTAP and UNEP POPs

Major Results

• Efficiency, Legitimacy, and Salience– Making use of regional assessments can

accelerate global processes – Credibility: not a very significant concern– Legitimacy the biggest concern? Not really…– Rather, worry about salience (relevance).

Measuring LRTAP’s Influence

• Effects, and Effectiveness– Effectiveness of assessment process as

facilitating negotiating progress

• Focus on viewpoint of country parties

• Credibility, Legitimacy, and Salience

Strategies for Legitimacy

• Selection of substances and background assessment: review and approval by a representative international forum

• Criteria Expert Group: de-emphasizing the regional– “…where do I sign…”– Coalescing around “reasonable” values

Strategies for Legitimacy (II)

• “People were very careful not to be seen as advancing the view that merely because it was in LRTAP the case was closed.”

• “[Countries say] “Well, maybe you might want to consider, this is a way of doing it,” and it’ll be the way we did it in LRTAP”

• “As long as you’ve got enough other people questioning [the assessment] process you develop a rigor in there.”

Problems with Salience (Relevance/Utility)

• Regional assessments not useful to non-participants– Lack of common information base– Aspects of interest are left out (e.g. alternatives,

management, destruction)– Multiple frames for the POPs issue

Problems with Salience (II)

• “If everyone comes in and says, ‘Oh, that thing that we developed over there was ideal, let’s just adopt it,’ then you can sometimes make the wrong decision by simply adopting something that really at the end of the day isn’t quite what you want.”

• “There is a lack of knowledge about significance in the south, or in tropical countries. And that is unfortunate in these negotiations because we’re not operating from a common information base.”

Pathways to Salience

• Why was assessment path so smooth if regional assessment was not useful/relevant to all parties?

• Other, parallel assessments addressed different expectations– Sub-regional workshops– National assessments– Regional assessments

Conclusions for Scientific Assessment

• Pay attention to credibility, salience, AND legitimacy

• Several strategies for making use of regional assessment results

• Learning from experience??

Acknowledgments

• Global Environmental Assessment (GEA) Project, Harvard University

• Harvard College Research Program

• Radcliffe Traveling Fellowships

• Prof. William C. Clark, Dr. Jill Jaeger, and the GEA project faculty and fellows