Study to assess nations’ response to enviromental concerns

A $400,000 National Science Foundation grant to study the globalization of environmental policy has been awarded to Clark Miller, an assistant professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW–Madison, and his colleagues at Harvard University.

Miller and two researchers at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government will examine how the public and private sectors, civil society and scientific communities in the three of the largest federal democracies – the United States, Germany and India – are adapting to new global-policy initiatives.

“A lot of people have been studying globalization as a process that washes out local differences and creates homogenized cultures,” Miller says. “What’s become clear in the last couple of years is – even though people all over the world recognize they are living in a global community – they don’t interpret and respond to that idea in the same way.”

Miller says one focus of the research, which is expected to span three years, will be how the three nations “adjust their analytic frameworks and decision-making processes to the fact that they are no longer able to make policy all by themselves.”

The research team will try to gauge how these nations position themselves with respect to international institutions, such as the World Bank and World Trade Organization, and to global environmental agreements, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

In addition, researchers will attempt to understand how the three nations are interpreting and developing tools to measure and assess emerging global-policy concepts, such as sustainability, vulnerability and precaution.

One research topic, for example, will be how the three countries are responding to proposals by environmental economists to revise gross domestic-product figures to take into account whether industrial production diminishes a nation’s natural resources.