International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - Open Call for Special Issue Proposals
Over the last two decades, policymakers worldwide have hardly been able to contain climate change and biodiversity problems – both have now reached emergency status. The Global Environment Outlook of UNEP recognizes that there is growing evidence that our land, water, oceans, air and biosphere have continued to degrade and our policy responses at global level have been reactive at best. There is much greater need for scientific evidence to underlie the design of international environmental agreements and to address the politics, law and economic issues which underlie these negotiations. Moreover, with the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, it has become important that such environmental agreements are not achieved at the cost of social, economic and other goals. Next year we count 50 years since the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which put the environment as a pressing issue on the global agenda for the first time.
Against this background, International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics (INEA) wants to more proactively research and engage with the challenging environmental issues of our time. We invite researchers to submit a proposal for disciplinary and inter-disciplinary Special Issues that broadly cover the topic of international environmental agreements. We have two criteria for such Special Issues:
- The content of the Special Issue should be focused on a gap in scholarship and should aim at generating relevant science-based scholarly insights; and
- The Special Issue should either result from ongoing collaboration between authors within the context of a large international project involving authors from different disciplines, different genders and different countries, or should aim at producing evidence in time for negotiations on a specific global issue.
International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics is a peer-reviewed, multi-disciplinary journal that focuses on the theoretical, methodological and practical dimensions of cooperative solutions to international environmental problems. The journal explores both formal legal agreements such as multilateral treaties, and less formal cooperative mechanisms such as ministerial declarations and producer-consumer agreements. The journal provides a forum on the role of political, economic, and legal considerations in the negotiation and implementation of effective governance strategies.
Special Issues should aim as far as possible to incorporate the legal, economic and political dimensions of hot issues relevant to international negotiations. These can be with respect to the role of markets in addressing problems; the need to treat environmental issues as global public goods; the nexus between different environmental treaties; the relationship between environmental treaty design and development and/or health; critical reviews of decisions made at international level by governance actors; and the role of science, businesses, civil society actors, and diplomacy in shaping international environmental agreements. We are interested in knowing how effective, equitable, efficient and feasible proposals to solve international environmental problems are. We would like evidence on the conditions under which international environmental agreements can become successful and fair mechanisms to solve global problems.
However, we are open to any suggestion for a special issue and appreciate innovative and forward-looking ideas.
All proposals for a Special Issue should include a justification for the Special Issue including how it fits into INEA, a list of abstracts with proposed authors, proposed reviewers, and a timeline for the production of the Special Issue. Proposed papers must not be longer than 8,000 words. Abstracts need to include the gap in knowledge, research question, method, and expected results.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Agni Kalfagianni and Nicky Pouw
For any editorial queries, please contact Prof. Agni Kalfagianni, Editor-in-Chief (kalfagianni@essb.eur.nl). Click here (this opens in a new tab) for the Submission Guidelines.