Transnational Corporations

The Impact of Transnational Corporations TNC’s and the Environment on Foreign Policy Making.

Environmental change is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century facing humanity as a whole. Practical evidence suggests that this change in climate is due mainly to industrial activities of Transnational Corporations (TNC’s), thus this results in a global challenge that demands collective universal action because TNC’s are the source of economic empowerment and technological innovations. Thus, climate change is a challenge to the broader humanity’s technological and social creativity, ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions and to the ability to act responsively to the threats that will affect the world’s future generation.

As a result, scholars argue that without domestic political processes it is inadequate to explain repeated patterns of behaviour in international relations. Thus, as Kenneth Waltz suggests, to explain how any single nation-state might respond to constrains enforced by the international structures necessitates foreign policy making mechanism to be put in place ( Waltz, 1979). Accordingly, the Stockholm Conference was a defining moment for international relations because it legitimized environmental policy as a universal concern among nations and so created a platform for environmental issues on many national agendas where they had been in the past unrecognized. This entails that the growth of international environmental cooperation during the 1970’s and thereafter is a feature of a larger social transition. It is an expression of a changing view of humanity’s relationship with the earth (Lynton, 1990:

As these problems become more and more persistent, the boundaries of states become increasingly distorted. This implies that, the wasteful use of coal or the inability to treat communicable disease in one state not only devastates that states’ environment and population, but it also has direct and often dramatic consequences for the other states also for instance the spread of avian influenza (H5N1) throughout Asia since 2003, across to Europe and the Middle East, as well as Africa. More so, as the rapid growth in the number of international environmental agreements since the 1970’s indicates, the resolution of these kinds of problems requires extensive cooperation and coordination among states in the formulation and implementation of policies. The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) has a record that lists close to 200 multilateral environmental agreements and amendments to existing agreements, most of which have been established since the Stockholm Conference which was the first universal recognition of environmental awareness in 1972 ( Susskind, 2002; MacNeill, 1990; and Gallagher,1968). Accordingly, scholars argue that it emanates as no surprise that the path of international climate diplomacy has always been a shaky one and this is especially true since the