The Dilemma of Environmental Governance in Northeast Asia: An Analysis of Structures and Processes

　　Abstract: Since the end of the Cold War, major breakthroughs in Northeast Asia have deepened and broadened in both bilateral and multilateral environmental cooperation, but this has failed to result in the improvement of environmental problems. For traditional and many nontraditional security issues including economic, financial, and energy challenges, as long as key states can develop cooperation, generally an effective governance solution will emerge. Environmental governance has become a clear exception to this rule. This article attempts to answer the question “why has environmental cooperation in Northeast Asia failed to result in effective regional environmental governance.” The current literature on international environmental cooperation offers a number of answers to this question, including: low levels of coordination, weak “regional identity” in Northeast Asia, Northeast Asian geopolitics, the need for economic growth and the nature of regional governance. However, all of these fall short in their ability to explain the problem. This article identifies the structure and process of Northeast Asian environmental governance as key variables and constructs a model of effectiveness of environmental cooperation to answer the above question. It then uses the case of poor environmental governance in Northeast Asia to empirically validate the model.  

　　About the Author: Yang Chenxi is a PhD Student at the College of Administration of Jilin University