The Fragmentation of Global Climate Governance: Consequences and Management of Regime Interactions, by Harro van Asselt

摘要

Climate law has long been recognized as a field that implicates the notion of legal diversity and, in particular, legal fragmentation. General international law, international environmental law, and numerous functionally determined issue areas may well intersect with one another, in various shifting patterns, leading to the risk of ambiguity over authority propositions pertaining to the climate regime. In The Fragmentation of Global Climate Governance, Harro van Asselt presents a 'comprehensive study on the consequences of the fragmentation of international climate change law' (p. 6). It is not the first attempt at this topic, but it is a pioneering book-length study. Highlighting an awareness of the interactions of regimes and their management, van Asselt's achievements in surveying these many bodies of law, doctrine and scholarship are numerous. This is a fluent, well-structured and ambitious volume, in which the author displays an extremely impressive familiarity with a wide range of the scholarly literature in both law and international relations. The facility of the prose often contrasts with the academic norm and without a cost to the organization of ideas. Above all, now that the paralysis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has shifted from recurrent to acute to chronic, this very welcome book maps strategies that would minimize the conflicts between different regimes and capture their synergies. What follows gives an outline of the volume, places it in the context of the idea of fragmentation, and presses a number of its arguments and methods.