Green learning, the role of scientists and the environmental movement

This thesis compares and contrasts the role of scientists and the environmental movement in international environmental affairs. The influence of these two critical agents of change is, in large part, due to their role in advancing learning. The role of scientists is highlighted in the epistemic communities approach and the environmental movement in the growing nongovernmental organization (NGO) literature. But the two approaches offer very different propositions with respect to who has to learn to effect policy change. In the first approach, convergence in scientific knowledge as well as the placement of scientists in positions of power facilitates government learning and the prospects for policy change. In the second approach, the environmental movement promotes public education which results in (1) public pressure on governments and intergovernmental bodies to adopt new or better policies, and (2) the transmittal of an ecological sensibility in global civil society, which further enhances environmental protection. In short, the impetus to regime development provided by scientific convergence is emphasized by the former, and broad-based, public education, by the latter. A further objective of the research is to describe the process of broad based societal learning. While many political scientists acknowledge the importance of public education, the question of how broad based societal learning takes place is less well understood. Much can be learned from the public education strategies adopted by relatively successful social movements, such as the early American labour and civil rights movements. A Progressive Societal Learning and Social Change Model is offered which highlights the role of NGO activities, protest music, films, formal and informal education, the media, and so forth. The Model asserts that a range of learning sources need to be employed for vibrant and effective social movements. The two case studies examined (climate change and BC forests) differ with respect to role of scientists and the environmental movement. In the case of climate change, scientists, rather than environmental groups are responsible for climate change getting on the international agenda. But environmental (and other) groups are beginning to play a crucial role in transforming climate change from an agenda item to a political program--a task for which scientists are less adept. I argue that the climate regime is stalled at a declaratory and promotional stage due to weak societal learning. The development of a strong implementation and enforcement regime is dependent upon a much stronger environmental movement and more effective public information campaigns. In contrast, in the Clayoquot Sound and Great Bear Rainforest campaigns in British Columbia, the environmental movement took the lead in promoting societal learning and social change whereas conservation biologists are only beginning to organize and to have an impact. The environmental movement relied on a different mix of 'green learning' sources in the two campaigns, and consequently the type and scope of public education differed in each. In the early phases of the protests, public pressure models, which highlight the influence of public opinion and concern on policy-makers, are useful. However, the global civics politics model (as developed by Paul Wapner) is especially useful in describing and explaining later stages of the forest campaigns. Having achieved insignificant policy changes, environmental groups attempted to build alternative global norms and procedures by turning to public education and market campaigns aimed at actors in the global civil society. Conservation biologists, coming from a relatively new field, have moved from the role of marginal players to occasional advisors to senior policy makers. Recently, conservation biologists have also taken the lead in developing a private, transnational regime--the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative.