How not to solve a problem like plastics: The ‘wickedness’ of the Global Plastics Treaty

Description

How to solve a problem like plastic pollution, a problem so intractable that it has been identified by the United Nations as part of a triple planetary crisis ‘causing profound suffering’ to life and livelihoods, human and non-human, alongside climate change and biodiversity loss? For the last thirty-five years, the growing challenge of plastic pollution has primarily been tackled – if at all – via the 1989 Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes. By offering clear definitions of ‘hazardous waste’ and specifying parties’ legal obligations to, inter alia, prohibit their import and export, the Basel Convention provides a clear problem-solution matrix or format for intervening to end the problem of plastic pollution.

In a radical departure from this ‘tame’ approach, the draft Global Plastics Treaty, under negotiation since December 2022, offers a much more complex textual form to capture plastic pollution as it is understood today. Rather than approaching plastic pollution as a definable problem with clear origins, causal factors, and solutions, the draft GPT is intentionally open-ended or indeterminate, offering no singular origin to the problem, nor a single definition of it. It also offers no universal and common set of solutions for parties to sign up to. As such, the draft GPT is best understood as a ‘wicked’ treaty in the sense first described by policy scientists such as C. West Churchman in the late 1960s. Drawing on what Annelise Riles calls the ‘technical aesthetics’ of law, and contributing to ongoing debates on the power of international legal form, Dr Richard Clements suggests that the draft GPT marks a new development in the treaty form, whereby the substantive emptiness of the treaty’s content permits states to ‘build-their-own’ treaty by importing their unique definition and approach to plastic pollution. Ultimately, he argues that, contrary to the question posed by the UN, the draft GPT does not seek to solve or even identify the problem of plastic pollution at all, but to foster and manage stakeholder interaction on such questions via the ‘wicked’ form of the treaty itself.

Bio

Dr Richard Clements is an assistant professor in international law, specialising in international law, legal theory, and international organisations with Tilburg University. Richard received his PhD from Cambridge University in 2020, having previously gained an LLM cum laude from Leiden University and an LLB (honours) from Queen's University Belfast. He is a Faculty member at the Institute for Global Law & Policy, Harvard Law School, and currently serves as a co-organiser for the International Law & Politics network at the Law & Society Association. Richard has served as Editor in Chief of the Cambridge International Law Journal and currently serves on the editorial board of the Leiden Journal of International Law. His first monograph, The Justice Factory: Management Practices at the International Criminal Court, was published by Cambridge University Press in spring 2024.

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