From Classical Liberalism to Neoliberalism: Explaining the Contradictions in the International Environmental Law Project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides a critique of the development of international environmental law, showing the influence of ideologies of classical liberalism, welfarist liberalism and neoliberalism on key legal texts. Sharing the assumptions of critical approaches to law and applying a methodology in line with ideology critique, this paper is aimed at deconstructing the prevailing Western understanding of the positive evolution of international environmental law towards better environmental protection. First, it describes the classical liberal understanding of nature and concepts to address environmental problems before World War II through the example of fisheries agreements. Second, it moves to the influence of welfarist liberalism on international law following World War II, which gave rise to several environmental instruments, especially marine pollution agreements, and later the Stockholm Declaration. Third, it looks at the conceptual shift under the influence of neoliberalism that occurred in the 1990s in the Rio Declaration as well as in the biological diversity and climate change regimes. As the paper shows, instead of changing the problematic understandings of nature in international law, international environmental law relies on these liberal classical understandings and further exacerbates the instrumentalization of nature with the focus on economic rationality, and favouring cost-benefit analysis, deformalization of law, deregulation and self-regulation by private actors, management by experts, and market mechanisms to address environmental problems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.082 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".