Countries around the world recognize the importance of global and regional environmental governance and express their willingness to cooperate and support common goals. However it is increasingly apparent that most current governance regimes have not proven effective. The issue is therefore what steps could be taken to transform global or regional agreements into effective measures for implementation at the national level.

2011 is shaping up as yet another critical year for the climate change regime. Two previous deadlines to complete the design of the post 2012 climate change regime, in Copenhagen in 2009 and in Cancun in 2010, failed to produce a comprehensive agreement. The conference of the parties in Durban, South Africa this December is the third attempt to conclude the design of the future regime.

The next major global environmental conference will occur in June 2012, with the uninspiring name of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio Plus 20. It is aimed at promoting the shift to a green economy. After the first preliminary prepcom meetings (16-18 May 2010 in NY, 7-8 March in NY), the first intersessional (10-11 January 2011 in NY) and the failed UNCSD meeting in May 2011, discussions have been quite impoverished in terms of imagination and passion. The formal agenda while still a bit preliminary, calls for efforts to accelerate the shift to a green economy and institutional reform arrangements. Unfortunately this is a seriously disjointed agenda, as each component appeals to different constituencies, and the combined benefits of the disjointed agenda are modest, at best.

International literature in the 90s used the term “natural resource curse” in order to define the problems created in countries with rich natural resources such as oil. In Brunnschweiler and Bulte, according to current literature, resources are associated with (i) slower economic growth, (ii) violent civil conflict, and (iii) undemocratic regime types. Terry Lynn Karl notes that the exploitation of oil has a profound regional and local impact and the localities where oil is located over time tend to suffer from lower economic growth and lower per capita incomes than the rest of the country, greater dislocations, higher environmental and health hazards and higher levels of conflicts.

An omnipresent issue in disarmament talks is what to do with the material that comes out of dismantled weapons so that such material is not recovered to produce nuclear weapons or does not fall into the hands of terrorists. As long as the substances that make nuclear weapons continue to exist and the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons is available nuclear weapons will be produced. This is and is bound to be an unending nightmare for the foreseeable future. The United States and Russia have declared that each has accumulated about 50 metric tons of weapons plutonium in excess of their military needs.

An article concerned with an international labour instrument, even if dealing with maritime sector, may seem an unusual topic for the MEPIELAN E-BULLETIN with its primary focus on marine environmental and ecosystem concerns. The fact that the instrument in question, the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 (MLC, 2006), is a multilateral maritime convention adopted in 2006 by the tripartite International Labour Conference of the International Labour Organization (ILO), rather than the more familiar International Maritime Organization (IMO), only serves to adds to the mystery about its relevance.