Politics polluting your views

There is a long history of public concern and protest about pollution of the North Sea. Since the 1972 Oslo convention on dumping, there has been a gradual increase in international environmental agreements about the North Sea and consequent reductions in the quantities of contaminants entering it. As a marine ecologist working on the effects of pollutants, I find it intriguing that the issues that take priority at national and international levels are not always those for which the scientific case for concern is greatest.

At the domestic level, why have industrial effluents long been subject to a set of discharge consents designed to produce zero ecological damage to aquatic life while major damage to rivers andestuaries by sewage discharges has been permitted? Internationally, why was a ban on the disposal of sewage sludge atsea agreed by the 1990 London Conference on the North Sea despite the fact that this source contributed just a few per centof total nutrient and metal loadings? The short answer is, of course, "politics," so I eagerly turned to Jon Birger Skjaerseth's book hoping to increase my understanding of this.

Skjaerseth examines the evolution of international institutions over the past 30 years and the way in which international agreements are implemented and influenced by sub-national actors.

At the international stage, he discusses the "hard law" approach of the Oslo and Paris conventions and the "soft law" approach of the International North Sea Conferences. Nationally, he takes the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Norway as case studies, and he assesses the roles played by non-governmental organisations and representatives of the industrial, agricultural and municipal sectors. He discusses the publicly stated ambitions of these countries. Using data on pollutant discharges, he assesses the extent to which their ambitions have been achieved. He then compares the rhetoric and the reality with predictions based on the relative magnitudes of their abatement and damage costs. He also assesses the extent to which different patterns of institutionalisation explain the differences.

The book details the role of domestic institutions in implementation differences between states, but gives rather less coverage on the processes leading to the international agreements themselves. Issues such as disposal at sea of sewage sludge and chemical wastes are dealt with, but there are some surprising omissions. The relevant European Union environmental directives are not all examined in depth, and the directive on control of waste from the titanium dioxide industry is not mentioned. Offshore oil and gas platforms, including the Brent Spar, are also neglected and coverage largely stops at 1995. So my hopes were only partially fulfilled.

Skjaerseth's focus is politics, but a little more scientific detail would have been useful to allow readers to realise the ecological significance of the politicaldecisions. There are also a few editorial issues that detract from the book's usefulness. Some sections of the text are written in the present tense but describe past regulatory regimes and organisations.

The target audience of students and researchers in environmental and international politics and policy-makers will find the book useful. But its scope could have been broader with a little more science, the examination of a more comprehensive set of environmental issues and better editing and indexing.

Alastair Grant is reader in environmental sciences, University of East Anglia.