Global Public Goods and International Law: Insights from International Forest Protection

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to contribute to this endeavour by identifying the weak-nesses of, and the areas for improvement in, the current global forest regulatory and institu-tional framework, through an analysis conducted using the lens of the concept of global public goods as transposed into, and shaped by, the discipline of international law. To this end, Section 2 starts by providing an overview of the origins of the concept of global public goods in political science and economy. Section 3 brings to the fore the value that the in-ternational legal discipline might add to the global public goods discourse. Section 4 pro-ceeds by explaining forest sustainable management protection as a global public good. Sec-tion 5 assesses the current status of global forest governance from a global public goods analytical perspective. Section 6 finally builds on the earlier findings to draw some con-cluding remarks about the shortcomings of current global forest governance and the possi-ble ways forward. The expected contribution of this analysis is twofold. First, it aims at enriching the on-going debate on global forest governance with insights from an enquiry conducted through a theoretical lens, that of global public goods, which is increasingly discussed by interna-tional legal scholars as a valuable frame to understand pressing global problems, but has never been comprehensively applied to forest loss and degradation . Secondly, and more generally, it seeks to provide for a better understanding of how the concept of global public goods fits within, and might be informed by, the discipline of international law, and partic-ularly of what content the latter is able to give to the former and with what implications