05
Jul
LJIL Symposium Vol 25-2: Fairness in International Environmental Law – A comment by Mickelson
[Karin Mickelson is an Associate Professor in Law at the University of British Columbia]
This post is part of the Leiden Journal of International Law Vol 25-2 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below.
It seems a bit dull to kick off an online commentary with a resounding “I agree”, but that is precisely how I am tempted to respond to Mario Prost and Alejandra Torres Camprubi’s “Against Fairness? International Environmental Law, Disciplinary Bias and Pareto Justice.” When invited to comment, I assumed that Prost and Torres Camprubi’s analysis would either represent a critique of views that I hold dear, thus giving me an opportunity to defend them, or at least overlook some of those views, and thereby provide an opening to express them. Instead, I find that the authors have provided a succinct, persuasive and eloquent analysis of how international environmental law has treated questions of fairness in general, and the concerns of the global South, in particular. Rather than focus on trivial areas of disagreement, I have chosen to highlight one aspect of Prost and Torres Camprubi’s analysis that I found particularly compelling, as well as one area where I feel that they perhaps did not go far enough in raising the alarm. To begin with, I must commend Prost and Torres Camprubi for being willing to talk about the South at all. For it seems that everywhere one turns these days, one is confronted with assertions of the meaninglessness of the North-South dichotomy and the need to move beyond outdated notions of this kind. While this is not at all unfamiliar to those of us who lived through the so-called “end of theThird World”, I still find myself baffled by how widespread this perception is. What is perhaps even more surprising is just how easy it seems to be to dismiss any assertions of Southern solidarity or commonality. There seems to be absolutely no embarrassment about characterizing these assertions as the products of either (a) a lack of awareness of drastically changed global circumstances, (b) a lack of intellectual sophistication, (c) blatant self-interest, or (d) all of the above. Ironically, these dismissals of Southern solidarity seem to coexist quite happily with what Prost and Torres Camprubi characterize as an essentialist construction of the South that denies its plurality and diversity, papering over the differences between and within states. (You would think that it would be impossible to have it both ways, but here’s how it’s done: when it comes to listening to some kind of collective voice or assertion of agency, there is no such thing as the South, but if you want to make sweeping generalizations about lack of environmental awareness, generic “developing countries” fit the bill.)