Sep 29 - Tom Hilde
Towards a Pragmatic Reconstruction of International Institutions

Read the paper here (PDF 65KB)

The process and analysis of international regime-building focus on the back-end compliance side of international institutions. The basic assumption is that state interests -- by which is usually meant economic interests -- and efforts at resolving, for example, global environmental problems are in fundamental conflict. Therefore, enforcing a treaty or regime through an emphasis on compliance mechanisms and rules has become the sine qua non of international institutions. The instruments for doing so are derived from basic, and often problematic, assumptions about individual and state interests and behavior.

The contours of the international sphere are changing, however, through the proliferation of non-governmental entities and new information and communications technologies. Accounts focusing on the development of norms suggest that regime-formation is also norm-formulation, a process through which state interests may be transformed. If state interests are not fixed, a more interesting question is to look not to the conflict between interests and compliance efforts, but to the evolving normative grounds of regimes. This is especially crucial to environmental regimes, given that environmentalists often maintain that environmental well-being will ultimately depend not only on simple, concrete efforts, but also a "change in consciousness."

In this paper I explore some of these possibilities in terms of the logic of regime-building, and also at the narrative level of "situated" individual selves in an era of supposed globalization. Since analysis of state interests is partially based on assumptions about individual interests, looking at the changing contours of the self might provide us with a different conceptual map for developing better tools of institution-building.

Dr. Tom Hilde is a Visiting Assistant Professor, and Visiting Research Scholar in the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. He is also a Fulbright Senior Specialist. He teaches courses in International Environmental Agreements, Moral Dimensions of Public Policy, Environment & Development, and Environmental Ethics. Hilde comes from New York University, where he directed the Environmental Conservation Education Program as well as the Applied Philosophy Group, and taught interdisciplinary graduate seminars in environmental politics and development ethics. He has also taught at Penn State and Texas A&M. Hilde co-edited The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism ; translated Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared ; and has published several articles in political thought, ethics, and aesthetics. His edited volume Pragmatism and Globalization will appear in 2006, and his volume Torture will be published in 2007. He is also writing a book on a pragmatic account of democratic legitimacy and globalization. Hilde's interests also include genetic prospecting as an international biodiversity conservation mechanism in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.