Effective responses to global environmental problems require international cooperation, but recent global environmental treaty-making efforts, have no accomplished very much along these lines. In this illuminating study, Lawrence Susskand examines the weaknesses of the existing environmental treaty-making system and the increasingly important role of non-governmental interests in environmental diplomacy.

Solutions to environmental problems require international cooperation, but global environmental treaty-making efforts, including the 1992 U.N.-sponsored Earth Summit in Brazil, have not accomplished much. International cooperation has been hampered by the conflicts between the developed nations of the North and the developing nations of the South; by the fact that science cannot accurately predict when or how environmental threats will materialize; and by the problem that the United Nations treaty-making system was never meant to handle threats to the environment.
Lawrence Susskind looks at the weaknesses of the existing system of environmental treaty-making and the increasing role of non-governmental interests in environmental diplomacy. Environmental Diplomacy argues for “nearly self-enforcing” agreements that ensure compliance without threatening sovereignty and maintains that new institutional arrangements are within reach. Susskind builds on the work of the Program on Negotiation at the Harvard Law School and the International Environmental Negotiation Network to offer guidelines for more effective global agreements that provide for sustainable development.

Review

“The author assumes sustainable development to be the agreed upon goal, the globe to be the available arena, and national representatives to be the primary actors. These assumptions, even though controversial, take this book beyond the scholarly domain and make it appealing to policy makers and national delgeates. Once the assumptions are accepted, Susskind's strategy becomes very powerful.”—Choice
The single best book on the negotiating process for protecting the global environment."—Roger Fisher, Harvard Law School, co-author of Getting to Yes
"This book should be mandatory reading for every policymaker involved with the environment and natural resources at the national and international level and certainly by every environmentalist—from both government or non-government sectors—who is worried about the state of our world and is looking for new avenues."—Dr. Uri Marinov, Former Director-General of Environmental Protection Services, Israel
"Environmental Diplomacy gi

Lawrence E. Susskind is the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at MIT and head of the Public Disputes Program at Harvard Law School. He is Founder of the Consensus Building Institute, author of Dealing with an Angry Public: The Mutual Gains Approach to Resolving Disputes (with
Patrick T. Field) and The Consensus Building Handbook (with Sarah McKearnan and Jennifer Thomas-Larmer), and an experienced mediator.
Jeffrey L. Cruikshank is an experienced editor, the author of numerous of interest to managers, and published novelist. His first book collaboration with co-author S