ABSTRACT
International co-operation on environmental issues is both difficult and necessary. A host of international and regional architectures recognized that environmental challenges often transcend political boundaries and as such require multilateral response strategies. The 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD or ‘Rio+20ʹ) provides the latest manifestation of global environmental summitry in search of collective actions, and while its convening shows international co-operative resolve, its shortcomings reveal pervasive impediments to facing transboundary environmental challenges (Ewing 2012a; Brand 2012). Examples abound of the perceived importance of multilateral environmental efforts, from the annual meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to frameworks seeking to protect forests, oceans and biodiversity, to attempts to reconfigure the ways that economic growth is conceived and measured. The fits and starts encountered within these sectors exemplify the challenges of constructing and actuating environmental policies in the international space, with regional efforts proving no exception.
