Welcome to the 2012 fall edition of MEPIELAN E-Bulletin.

My gratitude and thanks go to all those who have been instrumental in the continuing success of this Bulletin. According to the latest figures, there have been over 10.500 visits to the Bulletin’s website from 143 countries worldwide.

The vision of the Bulletin to provide a dynamic scholarly forum for inter-disciplinary knowledge and discussion and advocate the need to understand environmental governance, its law and policy aspects, in terms of establishing, protecting and promoting international common interest, is realized through the invaluable engagement of distinguished academic experts and scholars as well as of promising young researchers. This edition features several new articles discussing innovative ideas and hotly debated issues of international law and policy, environment and development. While continuing the unending flow of topical thematic news, this edition also presents a new international case of interest, the Yasuni Park Trust Fund as an innovative global experiment reflecting environmental trust governance contributing to sustainability. Moreover, this edition, serving as a showcase for new knowledge-advancing books, presents a new important book “Global Environmental Governance Reconsidered”, an excellent collection edited by Frank Biermann and Philipp Pattberg, which contains insightful articles providing theoretical underpinnings and perspectives of global environmental governance as perceived and researched in the framework of the well-known Clobal Environmental Governance Project.

A Guest Article written by Philipp Pattberg, Associate Professor of Transnational Governance, Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands, eloquently takes an insightful and well-balanced view on the outcome of the Rio+20 Summit, highlighting the weaknesses reflected in the official summit declaration “The Future We Want” – evidently defeating the widespread expectations for achieving “a transformative shift” in international environmental governance – but also denoting its few positive results. As he rightly concludes, “while we certainly should search for additional approaches to global environmental governance beyond mega-conferences, what is most needed now is a critical reflection on how the summit results can be used to revive global sustainability governance.”

Welcome to the first edition of MEPIELAN E-Bulletin in 2012.

We are gratified to see that the previous editions of 2010 and 2011 of the Bulletin have been so well received by many readers. According to the latest figures, there have been over 7.200 visits to the Bulletin’s website from 139 countries worldwide. My gratitude and thanks go to all those who have been instrumental in the continuing success of this Bulletin.

I am pleased to report that there is a flourishing progress of the Bulletin at all levels. Its vision to be a dynamic forum for inter-disciplinary knowledge and discussion and an advocate, through insightful articles of current importance, of promoting and developing international common interest and its multifarious governance, is zestfully met with the increasing engagement of distinguished academic experts and scholars as well as promising young researchers. This edition features several new articles shedding light on hotly debated issues of international law and policy, environment and development. While continuing the unending flow of thematic news, this edition also presents a new international case of interest and it serves as a showcase for new books which are knowledge-advancing and theoretically-informed.

A Guest Article written by Tullio Scovazzi, Professor of International Law, University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy, offers an authoritative and timely overview of  the nature and extent of Maritime Zones in the Mediterranean, illustrating the contextual peculiarities reflected in the patchwork of the present legal regimes of sui generis zones (fisheries zones, ecological zones) and of the established, or officially declared, exclusive economic zones. As he underlines, this situation is directly related to the more general present picture of the Mediterranean Sea: a semi-enclosed “sea in transition towards a generalized exclusive economic zone regime” where, however, “some high seas areas still exist”.