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Almost Saving Whales: The Ambiguity of Success at the International Whaling Commission

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2012

Ian Hurd
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Extract

The international regulation of whaling has been a tremendous success. It has reduced whale hunting dramatically from its peak in the 1960s and brought almost all species of whales out of danger of extinction. Today, whaling conservation stands as a—or perhaps the—paradigm of a successful international regime. Yet the international organization responsible for this success is itself in such crisis that it may not survive.

Type
Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Spring 2012 , pp. 103 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2012

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References

NOTES

1 Young, Oran, Institutional Dynamics: Emergent Patterns in International Environmental Governance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), p. 124Google Scholar.

2 ICRW Art VIII(1). Government can also allow whale hunting if it is “used exclusively for local consumption by the aborigines.” ICRW Schedule, para. 2. The United States is the main user of this rule, permitting around fifty whales a year to be killed.

3 ICRW Art. V(3).

4 These figures are based on official statistics or permits and do not account for either unauthorized hunting or misrepresentation by the governments.

5 On how negotiations make some goods indivisible, see Goddard, Stacie E., Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

6 See Epstein, Charlotte, The Power of Words in International Relations: The Birth of an Anti-Whaling Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.