From Precaution to Profit: Contemporary Challenges to Environmental Protection in the Montreal Protocol (original) (raw)

Since the disastrous 2009 Copenhagen climate talks, global climate governance has roiled in crisis. Michael Grubb, a long-time influential advocate for a binding global climate treaty, has warned that the world could enter its "darkest hour" (Grubb 2011). Other scholars now argue that small clusters of countries should negotiate treaties amongst themselves, and expand their clubs over time (Victor 2011). Some have even suggested a "G-2" solution decided by the United States and China alone. On the left, climate justice and "system change " activists are more likely to reject talk of any carbon-trading settlement altogether, despite the occasional radical defense of a global cap-and-trade scheme (Hahnel 2012). Still, a universal treaty remains on the global agenda. And the Montreal Protocol is the precedent most often cited as a uniquely effective example of global environmental governance, thanks to the steep reductions in ozone depleting substances it has achieved since entering into force in 1989. Yet as Brian J. Gareau shows in From Precaution to Profit: Contemporary Challenges in the Montreal Protocol, this ostensible success story is misunderstood, with important implications for global climate politics. Gareau argues, first, that the role of consensus science in the Protocol's inception has been greatly overstated; second , that the treaty's real successes are largely explained by a pre-neoliberal, precautionary political context that no longer prevails; third, that under neoliberalizing conditions, U.S. intransigence, and a newly challenging technological setting, the Protocol's effectiveness has dwindled; and finally, that global civil society (including public science) so far lacks the tools to compel nation states to do better. Gareau musters impressive ethnographic and historical research, supplemented with careful readings of new radical geography, environmental sociology, Bourdieusian theories of social capital, and Foucauldian literatures on power /knowledge and governmentality. And his presentation is clear and cogent even as it navigates the proverbial alphabet soup and dull bureaucratic procedures of treaty governance. In terms of sweeping global developments, he narrates the extraordinary capacity of California's commercial strawberry industry to enlist the United States government's assistance in hijacking a vital environmental treaty , this despite ''the rather inconsequential role that strawberries play in society" (Gareau 2013, p. 149). Readers of this journal may not be stunned to read about the ability of powerful corporations and the U.S. government to bring global environmental institutions and poorer countries' aspirations to heel (see Park and Roberts 2007). But they will learn much about the concrete mechanisms whereby global inequalities are translated into legal victories for some core countries on the negotiating floor. From Precaution to Profit is divided in two. The first section argues that over the course of the 1990s, global environmental governance neoliberalized, with devastating implications for governments' ability ~ and willingness ~ to resolve the contradiction between markets and environment in the latter's favor. The second explores in ethnographic depth the controversy over methyl bromide (MeBr), a toxic chemical gas used to pre-sterilize tomato and (most importantly) strawberry fields to prevent infestation by pests. MeBr, whose continued use the