GLOCAL February 2014 | Page 42

Environmental justice in world politics can be better understood and implemented through these three dimensions of world politics. In view of the political synergy as well as friction and tension that exist between and within these dimensions, I argue that the transnational mode of environmental justice is better situated to achieve positive and enduring results for local communities and their environments around the world. It can also mitigate the practical difficulties encountered frequently in achieving environmental justice through the international and global dimensions of world politics. 40 The overall effects of these changes can turn out to be positive, negative or even neutral according to the adjustment capacity of states, and also according to the multivariate interactions among different dimensions of globalism. Due to these variations in state capacity and different dimensions of globalism, the norms and practices of state sovereignty are differentially affected. State sovereignty seems to be resilient, although not monolithic or immutable, and it is too early to declare the obsolescence of interstate politics. If this analysis of contemporary world politics holds, then, we can view world politics as constituted by simultaneous interactions within and among its international, transnational, and global dimensions. *The author is editor of GLOCAL. Page globalist side of this debate argued that GEF‘s funding must be restrict with the truly global environmental issues such as ozone depletion, climate change, loss of biodiversity, and pollution of international waters. The glocalists, on the other hand, argued that seemingly local issues such as land degradation problems in developing countries (desertification and deforestation) must also qualify for financial and technical assistance since they were connected to other global problems. With the fundamental restructuring of GEF in 1994, this dispute was resolved with a compromise solution that included land degradation problems as eligible for funding in so far as these cases were related to GEF‘s four focal areas (i.e., ozone depletion, climate change, biodiversity loss and international water pollution). Despite the challenge of globalization and transnational relations, the international sphere is far from being obsolete. Transnational and global forces are definitely altering the international dimension of world politics by challenging, for example, the de facto and de jure aspects of state sovereignty, but their quantitative or qualitative effects on states are not homogenous at all.