Anthropocene (In)securities: Reflections on Collective Survival 50 Years After the Stockholm Conference. Edited by Eva Lövbrand and Malin Mobjörk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 160p. $85.00 cloth.

mechanisms leading to compliance with the WTO, and international organizations in general. It corrects alternative explanations for compliance centered on exporter lobbying or the EU’s normative exceptionality. However, the book’s findings provoke some questions that are not completely accounted for. First, if trade officials are so concerned about WTO compliance and trade policy measures are always swiftly brought in line with adverse rulings, why do WTO-incompatible trade policies come into existence in the first place? Is this simply the consequence of (vague) WTO rules being misinterpreted by these officials? Do trade officials’ preferences change after a ruling, as the book argues, or are there perhaps different preferences even among (different branches of) trade policy makers, and does a WTO ruling strengthen some over others? Were trade policy makers somehow forced to adopt a policy against their preferences in the first round, and did they eagerly seize on a WTO ruling to bring the policy in line with their actual preferences? What happens within the group of trade policy makers that explains how they move from first-order noncompliance to swift second-order compliance could have been explored more in the book. Second, how to explain the counterintuitive finding that, in each of the cases in which the EU did not change its policies in response to an adverse WTO ruling, it was confronted with a powerful complainant? Here, the book could have profited from integrating insights on not only determinants of compliance with WTO rulings but also determinants of initiations of WTO disputes. Perhaps powerful WTO member states, the United States in particular, use theWTO to raise fundamental disagreements with the EU (e.g., on risk assessment), to which the EU is unlikely to respond. While weaker WTO member states might only challenge EU policies when they think it is very likely that they will win the dispute and that the EU will subsequently change its policies. In other words, variation in compliance is not only determined by how compliance is supplied within the defendant but also how the decision to launch a dispute is made within the complainant.