Book Reviews

Baber, Walter F., and Robert V. Bartlett. 2015. Consensus and Global Environment Governance:
Deliberative Democracy in Nature’s Regime. 剑桥, 嘛: 与新闻界.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Mendenhall
University of Rhode Island
Walter F. Baber and Robert V. Bartlett’s Consensus and Global Environmental
Governance is the ﬁnal book in a three-part series about the development of
Earth system governance. Where the two previous books introduce and describe
the authors’ prescription for juristic democracy in global environmental gover-
南斯, this book confronts powerful objections and forwards speciﬁc advan-
tages of a deliberative democratic approach. The overall vision is to have a
sufﬁcient number of globally representative juries engage in collective will for-
运动, by ruling on the same hypothetical cases and then aggregating those
decisions into a global system of common law. This ﬁnal book focuses on
the concept of consensus: why it is possible and good, and how to achieve it.
Key foils include alternate systems of governance: majoritarianism, technocracy,
and state sovereignty. Baber and Bartlett believe that “rational governance” (p. xiv)
can best be achieved through global-scale democratic deliberation.

For Baber and Bartlett, the fundamental problem with existing global
governance is the “democratic deﬁcit” (p. 十二). The main advantage of a delib-
erative approach is that democracy produces legitimacy, which makes rule sys-
tems politically sustainable and is therefore a key condition for effectiveness.
The book connects iterative and small-scale juristic democracy to the develop-
ment of a global system of common law through the development and aggre-
gation of consensus, or “collective will formation.” Baber and Bartlett draw from
both legal theory and the social sciences; their proposed mechanism for map-
ping and aggregating “considered opinions” combines the method of content
analysis with the practice of “restatement” from the common law tradition.

What happens to the resulting body of constructed legal norms and princi-
ples is not entirely clear. In chapter 3, it is the “raw material for a process of cod-
iﬁcation” (p. 47) through traditional international negotiation. In chapter 8,
juristic democracy supplements administrative discretion with “rule making
via hypotheticals” (p. 148), as an alternative to case-by-case adjudication. 在
chapter 9, it provides a stock of principles upon which international tribunals
can draw, “a substitute for the stare decisis doctrine” (p. 168). The broad utility
of the consensus drawn from citizen juries can thus leave the reader with a
sense of incompleteness; the starting point is described in great detail, 但是
ﬁnish line of rule making and implementation remains obscure.

Global Environmental Politics 17:4, 十一月 2017
© 2017 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

153

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154 (西德:129) Book Reviews

Consensus and Global Environmental Governance is an important resource for
theorists and architects of Earth system governance. It provides a modular and
concrete mechanism for global decision-making that builds legitimacy into the
process via the mechanism of citizen juries. The literature on jury size and jury-
style deliberation is surveyed in great detail, and the ability of juries to make
rational, representative decisions is well defended. But the book would beneﬁt
from acknowledging a key difference between trial and citizen juries: the former
interpret the rules of a pre-existing legal order, whereas the latter develop prin-
ciples and norms to serve as the basis of a new common law. Many of the same
ﬁndings regarding group dynamics and diversity probably apply in either case,
but the problem structure and decision-making tasks are different. Can citizen
juries generate consensus norms that successfully confront complex environ-
mental problems? Baber and Bartlett suggest that any problem can be simpliﬁed
and explained by expert witnesses, just as issues are in court. If juries are to pro-
duce “ecological rationality,” “ecological sustainability,” and “ecological democ-
活泼的,” then they will need to understand ecological systems. But is the opinion
of a forensic scientist or the guidance of a judge really comparable to the expla-
nation of an ecologist, climatologist, or oceanographer? Baber and Bartlett do
not address this issue, because for them effectiveness is more about the prove-
nance of a decision than its speciﬁc content.

A key advantage of juristic democracy is its ability to avoid or neutralize
biases in decision-making. Baber and Bartlett lambast the arguments of “differ-
ence democrats,” or those who assert that deliberation and the requirement of
“public reason” are hostile to diversity. A recurring rejoinder is the argument that
researchers can compose speciﬁc juries—either representative or “enclave”—to
address the risk that decisions will reinforce existing social and economic power
关系. But there are other features of juristic democracy that seem to assume
neutrality, instead of achieving it by design. Cases drafted by “the social scientist
or environmental governance professional” (p. 25) must be “properly struc-
tured” to be “directly analogous” to real-world situations and as concrete as
可能的, while remaining hypothetical. Baber and Bartlett provide no guidance
for evaluating whether a constructed case is valid as a test of the competing
positions, except to say that repeated deliberations with slightly varied cases can
help determine which aspects of a case explain deliberative outcomes. Juries will
be provided with “well-balanced information” that is “grounded in reliable
research and valid inference,” and also “the arguments of actual stakeholders”
(PP 47, 25). But what happens when the arguments of actual stakeholders rely
on unreliable research? And who determines what is “balanced” or who is a “stake-
holder”? These important questions, and who answers them, may impact how
democratic the deliberation of citizen juries really is. Baber and Bartlett offer three
general solutions—transparency, peer review, and “a diverse set of disinterested
deliberators” (p. 137)—but do not apply them to these speciﬁc requirements.

Baber and Bartlett demonstrate that their proposed system of Earth system
governance is desirable. But the book does not establish that global juristic

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Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya

(西德:129) 155

democracy is plausible. The authors suggest that the “inherent democratic legit-
imacy” of their method would “bypass states” and create a new rule-making
system “fully complementary with other governance approaches and strategies”
(p. xv). Environmental problems would be treated as questions of distributive
正义, potentially rebalancing international political advantages. But Baber and
Bartlett do not acknowledge or answer arguments about the durability of great
power politics in this book, and the result is a proposal that appears more ide-
alistic than it really is.

Kashwan, Prakash. 2017. Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social
Justice in India, 坦桑尼亚, 和墨西哥. 牛津: 牛津大学出版社.

Reviewed by Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya
Northwestern University

How can we explain when and why states strengthen, weaken, or maintain the
status quo for peasant land rights? According to Prakash Kashwan, it is not simply
a question of getting the incentives right or improving capacity for imple-
心理状态. 反而, the answer depends on the historical, contextual evolution
of forestland institutions, coupled with the everyday practice of democratic
政治.

In this exceptionally detailed and ambitious study, Kashwan sets out to
explain the divergence of forestland institutions in three cases—India, 墨西哥,
and Tanzania—by crafting a rich historical account of the interactions between
colonial legacies, populist politics, and contemporary global environmental
政治. The core puzzle of the book is that states making seemingly similar
economic-environmental trade-offs when deciding how to govern forestlands
end up with divergent—and often counterintuitive—institutions. Critical of in-
stitutional analyses that exclude politics, where factors such as the effects of po-
litical mobilization and state welfare programs are considered contextual factors
exogenous to institutional analysis, Kashwan adopts a power-centric approach.
The goal is to explain three types of divergences: statutory protection of peasant
land rights, delegation of forestland control, and domestic responses to interna-
tional policies. The framework deployed, the political economy of institutions,
brings two types of representation politics into institutional analysis—the stra-
tegic contingencies that shape elite incentives for representation and the mech-
anisms of political intermediation—to advance an argument that elected
ofﬁcials play a unique role as political intermediaries in addressing forest con-
ﬂict. 像这样, Democracy in the Woods is as much about the politics of represen-
tation as it is about forest politics and their outcomes.

The argument unfolds in three main parts. 第一的, through an extraordinarily
detailed history of the precolonial and colonial forestland regimes in each case,
Kashwan demonstrates how the colonial legacies of territorial control continue to

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156 (西德:129) Book Reviews

shape contemporary forest institutions. Where forests were seen as an important
source of power for nation-states, as in India and Tanzania, forest institutions
have served to weaken the voice of peasants by creating policy-making monop-
olies in government agencies. Where forests were historically seen as a resource to
be used for the production of social goods, 然而, as in Mexico, peasant con-
trol over forestlands has remained strong and has contributed to their enhanced
political voice in forest governance. In the second part of the book, a quasi-
ethnographic approach to land reform politics illustrates how states can capital-
ize on competing visions of land rights to align and reinforce economic and
environmental forest agendas. 例如, instead of responding to peasant
demands for tenure security in India and Tanzania, political elites adopt techno-
cratic approaches to address forest conﬂicts as a means to both enhance their
power and weaken peasant representation. Kashwan then brings these two per-
spectives together through comparative policy analysis to demonstrate how
domestic mechanisms of political intermediation—how interests are aggregated
into or excluded from policy processes—explain how Tanzania and India have
resisted institutional reforms to share REDD+ beneﬁts with forest communities,
to continue to limit these communities’ political voice. In contrast to these two
states’ technocratic approaches to forest governance, which removes democratic
representation from forest policy-making, Kashwan ﬁnds that Mexico’s system of
corporatism has resulted in enhanced political voice for forest communities in
REDD+.

For scholars of global environmental politics, this book not only articu-
lates the importance of comparative work for uncovering historically contingent
variables that shape institutional possibilities, but also situates such research in
the broader global context of international environmental agreements that
propel many developing countries into particular institutional trajectories. 为了
REDD+ proponents, perhaps one of the most signiﬁcant contributions that
Democracy in the Woods makes is the argument that politics—not just institu-
tional design—matters. By showing how technocratic approaches to REDD+
contribute to reduced representation in forest policy-making, Kashwan forces
REDD+ proponents to confront its political power in shaping democratic prac-
tice in forest communities.

While Democracy in the Woods presents a highly detailed and rich account
of the forestland regimes in India, 墨西哥, and Tanzania, at times the analysis is
frustratingly complex. The institutional histories are fragmented throughout the
书, with each chapter accounting for some part of each case, 要求
reader to piece together all of the elements of any one case. This is perhaps a
casualty of a complicated comparative analysis that seeks to capture political
dynamics over time, 地理, and scale. 此外, by vaguely referring
to his explanatory variables as “political and economic” factors, Kashwan risks
readers quickly assessing the book as a study of institutional path dependence
rather than an argument about the importance of democratic practice for insti-
tutional change.

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Jonathan Rosenberg

(西德:129) 157

重要的, particularly for students and scholars interested in methodo-
logical innovation, Kashwan does not fully embrace political ethnography.
Instead he buries his own voice by largely drawing from existing studies, 甚至
in the case of India, where he spent years conducting ﬁeld work. As the inter-
pretive turn in political science continues to gain ground, ethnography offers a
potentially powerful methodology for helping explain complex political phe-
nomena. But care is required when deploying ethnographic work—a place where
this project falls short. This critique does not diminish the quality of research
提出, but rather suggests that the study is more accurately represented as
engaging multiple methods to advance historical and institutional analysis.

These weaknesses should not detract from the study’s important contribu-
系统蒸发散. Although the book’s attention to social justice is, in some ways, tangen-
提尔, the importance of drawing attention to the role of political voice in forest
governance should not be overlooked. The tendency to focus on distributive
justice—for example, via land tenure reform—often comes at the expense of
other dimensions of justice, including procedural and recognitional justice.
Democracy in the Woods challenges readers to question the nature of—and poten-
tial pathways to—justice for forest communities.

Buntaine, Mark T. 2016. Giving Aid Effectively: The Politics of Environmental Performance and
Selectivity at Multilateral Development Banks. 纽约: 牛津大学出版社.

Reviewed by Jonathan Rosenberg
Illinois Institute of Technology

What measures do international organizations take to improve the environ-
mental performance of their aid programs? How do they determine which ones
work and which ones don’t? Mark T. Buntaine makes an important contribution
to solving these puzzles with a sharply focused study of concessionary lending
by multilateral development banks (MDBs). His purpose is both analytical and
规定性的, and his book is thought-provoking in both regards.

Buntaine argues that the environmental effectiveness of MDBs is limited
by what he calls the “approval imperative.” He reminds us that MDBs—as
agents of major donor states—are strongly motivated to quickly approve lend-
ing that they can represent to their principals as environmentally improving,
and measure their success in terms of allocations and disbursals.

His story of MDB environmental performance is not all bad news. MDBs
can learn from negative outcomes by devising new accountability mechanisms
and safeguards, as exempliﬁed by the World Bank’s reaction to US and civil
society pressures following the ill-fated Narmada Dam project in India in the
early 1990s. 仍然, there are problems of agency to overcome, since donor states
exercise little direct control over whether and how such reforms actually affect
critical decisions about project approval and evaluation. To locate, analyze, 和

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158 (西德:129) Book Reviews

address these problems, Buntaine scrutinizes the inner workings of MDB project
allocation decision-making.

For Buntaine, the key to overcoming the approval imperative is greater
“selectivity,” deﬁned as institutional practices that “increased the allocation of
projects with a successful record and decreased the allocation of projects with
an unsuccessful record” (p. 2). Stated this way, selectivity is difﬁcult to oppose,
but the deﬁnition does not indicate how the criteria for success are determined,
测量的, prioritized, and applied to future decisions. Buntaine’s research fo-
cuses on the application to future decisions, to support an argument for what
other ﬁelds might call an “evidence-based approach” to project approval.

MDBs enjoy substantial discretion in selecting and managing projects,
which can be either an asset or a liability to their principals. 所以, Buntaine argues,
greater selectivity can be achieved most efﬁciently by incentivizing MDB staff
to use their discretion to design, approve, and implement lending portfolios
that reﬂect the environmental lessons of past projects. The use of such evidence
may slow the design and approval processes, but it should realize net gains in
efﬁciency by improving compliance with environmental safeguards and dis-
couraging the approval of environmentally damaging projects that would later
need to be modiﬁed or repaired.

Four empirical chapters analyze MDB processes and policies with the
potential to increase selectivity. They track the contributions to agent account-
能力, information ﬂows, and selectivity made by safeguard policies such as
environmental impact assessments; interventions by civil society, 包括
the use of public complaint mechanisms such as the World Bank Inspection
控制板; and they explain why mandated project evaluations are more effective
than strategic planning for increasing selectivity.

Buntaine compares data from four MDBs (the World Bank, Asian Devel-
opment Bank, African Development Bank, and Inter-American Development
Bank). Qualitative data from interviews with MDB ofﬁcials suggest ways that
information on project outcomes currently affects decision-making by MDB per-
sonnel and donor states, and data from large numbers of projects that address
local and global environmental challenges are then used to test those sugges-
系统蒸发散. Each chapter contributes to our understanding of how information on
project outcomes does or could incentivize greater selectivity.

Buntaine also acknowledges the downside of selectivity: the tendency to
reward the successful and marginalize the neediest. His answer is for MDBs
to become more selective within country portfolios. MDBs should not seek to
improve their environmental records by steering more aid to countries that are
better governed and more capable of effective project implementation, but should
use data on outcomes to identify and fund the types of projects most likely to
succeed in a given recipient country. Buntaine’s contention that this would
increase aid efﬁciency is supported by his analysis, although not everyone will
ﬁnd it an equitable approach to the environmental challenges facing the world’s
poorest regions.

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Jonathan Rosenberg

(西德:129) 159

The book is impressive for the data it presents in support of a set of fea-
sible policy recommendations. Its shortcomings stem, 部分地, from simpliﬁed
and inconsistent use of principal-agent theory (P-A) and a somewhat rigid
rational-actor approach. Buntaine uses P-A to describe the delegation of author-
ity from member states to MDBs, but the relationships he describes are more
complex and protean than his simple diagram suggests. 例如, he does
not account for delegation that occurs within donor states or between donor
states and their representatives on MDB boards. Nor does he consider the very
real possibility (dramatized by the 2008 economic crisis and the 2016 US elec-
系统蒸发散) that donor states may quickly alter their commitments and will them-
selves wrestle with competing bureaucratic interests, slack, and shirking within
and among their policy-making establishments.

尽管如此, Buntaine has written a book of great interest and value to
学生, 学者, and practitioners of global environmental governance, foreign
援助, and international organizations. His analysis is a counterweight to the some-
times casual assumption by global environmental governance scholars that insti-
tutional reform and treaty-making signify environment-improving developments
in their own right. 通过这样做, he takes readers closer to the level where devel-
opment projects are actually implemented and environmental performance can
best be evaluated.

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