Environmental challenges in Southeast Asia: Why is there so little regional cooperation?
81 on Disaster Management and Emergency Response is expected to provide a framework for the development of operational procedures to respond collectively and rapidly to disasters. The Agreement includes provisions for movement of relief assistance, expedited customs and immigration clearance. The Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution has the goal to prevent and monitor transboundary haze pollution resulting from land and/or forest fires. Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam founded the Mekong River Commission for the sustainable management of the River and its resources. The two main goals of economic development and ecological sustainability of the River and its resources are jointly implemented and monitored by the riparian countries. The Commission is a fullfledged international organisation whose creation was mainly initiated by the United Nations. The Agreement on the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources is the oldest environmental agreement in the region. Its goal is to maintain essential ecological processes and life-support systems. Its scope is extremely broad and its provisions are kept very general. No concrete measures have developed out of this agreement. In sum, from the perspective of regime effectiveness only two of the five regimes are eligible for detailed analysis.
Analytical framework Common problems need collective action. The coordination of collective action between states is difficult to realise. Actors’ interests might be negatively correlated causing a collective action dilemma. Collective action dilemma means that by realising one actor’s preference, the realisation of another actor’s preference is impeded. States’ willingness to engage in binding arrangements might not be high. Rational state actors try to free-ride on institutional successes without paying the price for implementation. Authors such as Mancur Olson, Garett Hardin and Elinor Ostrom have analysed the potential of institutions to solve dilemmas of collective action. (Olson 1998 [1965]; Hardin 1968; Ostrom 1990) Regime theory is building on this knowledge and attempts to examine the capacity of institutions to solve these kinds of problems. Research on regime creation asks the questions under what conditions regimes arise, how long the process of creation takes, and whether there are differences among international regimes? (Haas et al. 1993; Young and Osherenko 1993; Rittberger 1995) The main argument of regime theorists is that regimes have an independent impact on the behaviour of actors: “policymakers and other actors in the international arena have some room for manoeuvre, delimited by power structures, national interests, and other non-choice variables, for designing and operating institutions that increase the welfare of their participants”. (Bernauer 1995, 354) This means that the described demand for environmental cooperation is only part of the story. High or low demand does not sufficiently determine the level of regime creation. Instead, the crucial variable to explain the existing level of regime creation is the behaviour of important actors. In Southeast Asia, actors play on two levels, the national and the regional. These two levels and the actors therein will be analysed.
ASIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS VOL. 3 NO. 1