Global health is a very institutionalized field of governance, with diverse international institutions contributing in various ways to promote and protect human health (or negatively affecting it, depending on whom you ask). Such institutions include global international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO), regional organizations such as the European Union (EU), hybrid institutions comprising public agencies and corporate bodies such as the International Standardization Organization (ISO) and, more recently, public-private partnerships and networks showing a similar structure. This proliferation is not surprising conceptually if we consider that health is an intrinsic and essential dimension of human beings and communities, both from a biomedical point of view as well as from a public health and social perspectives. So many transnational factors, processes and policies have a direct or indirect impact on health that not only existing international organizations have integrated or upgraded health considerations in their agendas, but new ones have been established to address neglected aspects of global health governance.

The exclusion of an individual or entity from the membership of a club or body inevitably raises questions regarding the fairness of the criteria used to take the decision. It is no different when it comes to the exclusion of a state from the membership of an intergovernmental organization (IO) – either through denial of membership or suspension or expulsion from membership. The elementary reason is that membership brings with it certain benefits. These can include political recognition, the possibility of making claims on institutional resources, the opportunity to influence policies of other states in particular areas of international life and signalling and locking-in domestic policies.

Even the most casual observer of international organizations must at times be puzzled. It is puzzling to realize, for instance, that regardless of the public outcry over nasty acts done on the watch of some international organization or another, nothing ever seems to happen: accountability is much-discussed, but rarely materializes. It is somewhat mystifying that for all the discussion of the reform of international organizations and of their policies, and for all that these are often amended, nothing much ever seems to change. Likewise, few international organizations have lawmaking powers properly so-called, and yet international organizations seem to be highly influential. By the same token, international organizations often engage in co-operation with one another without anyone noticing it, and seemingly without having strong authorization to do so. And it must be puzzling to realize that the law tends to treat all international organizations in much the same way, regardless of whether they work for the global common good or are better seen as interest groups for a particular group of states; regardless of whether they serve a global cause or manage a particular industry; and regardless also of the sort of activities they engage in – whether they occupy themselves with questions of peace, security and disarmament or are, effectively, institutions of higher learning set up as international organizations.

Scholarship on international organizations law, like most approaches in international law and international relations (IR), is dominated by state-centric, functionalist and rational choice frameworks. According to these mainstream approaches, states are axiomatically the principal actors in international affairs, which pre-exist and create international organizations to serve their own interests and needs. To realists, international relations are structured by competition, the search for security and the struggle for power among rational, self-interested states. In this view, international organizations are epiphenomenal, reflecting extant power relations and having only a marginal impact on state behaviour.1 To IR scholars and international lawyers of a more liberal-institutionalist orientation, international organizations are designed and created by states to pursue shared goals, solve coordination problems and produce public goods.2

In most international organizations there is a certain level of trust that basic commitments are being met by the member states. Disarmament organizations,1 however, form a special case: they are often seen as subject to the motto ‘trust, but verify’ in ways that do not quite apply to others. This means that within disarmament organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), different legal issues arise when compared to other organizations, rendering them of great theoretical importance in addition to their undoubted social relevance.

The focus of this chapter is on organizational efforts to regulate, supervise, control and possibly eliminate weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

This chapter considers the shifting meanings and capacities of American and British seasonal literature and media in light of anthropogenic climate change. Via two case studies, it compares seasonal work before and after widespread concerns about altered seasonal patterns in the United States and Europe. Beginning with a discussion of the seasonal aspects of Rachel Carson’s writing – most notably her sea trilogy – and its literary contexts, this chapter examines seasonal prose produced prior to the climate crisis. It also reflects on contemporary scholars’ tendency to revisit Carson’s work when ruminating on climate change, suggesting a nostalgia for seasonal reassurance. The chapter then turns to the contemporary production of seasonal media, using the BBC series Springwatch as a second case study. Placing Springwatch within a British tradition of seasonal broadcasting, it analyses the intersection of environmental and cultural seasonality in this series. As a show produced during a period of heightened climate anxiety, Springwatch actively works to generate seasonal data for climate research in the United Kingdom. In this sense, seasonal media unfolding within – and responding to – perceptible season creep can route seasonal sentimentality into the observation of phenological change.

International governance is increasingly characterized by the decline of formal intergovernmental organizations as the preferred sites of rule-making, as the growth rate of intergovernmental organization has declined by 20 per cent since the beginning of the twenty-first century.1 More than a decade after the debates about fragmentation2 and regime-collision in international law,3 it now seems clear that the key question is not that, as a professional experience, international law seems divided in sometimes incoherent specialized regimes, but that international lawyers have a more dense and diverse institutional landscape to deal with.

This chapter deals with the law on the internal matters of international organizations, and more particularly, with the relations between organs of an international organization. Issues include, among others, the power of self-regulation, financial relations between organs of an organization, the creation of subsidiary organs and the applicable legal rules thereto, as well as analysis of various procedures that require the collaboration between different organs of the same organization.1 The chapter will not deal with the legal relations between an international organization and its civil servants. It will equally steer clear of the legal relationships between organizations and their member states, third parties or other international organizations.

This chapter examines contemporary novels that grapple with species extinctions, including our own. The ‘zoo cli-fi’ here includes literature that does not necessarily mourn ‘our’ extinction, and may wean us off the idea that we are central to planetary survival. Zoo cli-fi that follows the broader ‘animal turn’ attributes greater significance to animals as beings-in-themselves and illustrates a powerful ‘point of view’ often missing: animals have their own ‘point of view’ that may or may not include ‘us’. The word extinction is taxonomic, working at the scale of population, and describes a condition of species death rather than the conditions under which death comes about. The distinction is important in a political and ethical sense because, as animal studies scholars have shown, how animal deaths are represented greatly influences how attached or distanced we are from the problem. The word extinction does little to bring home how humans are connected to what can seem a mere ‘biological’ process that occurs somehow outside of a cultural political context. Extinctions are cultural processes, not just biological events that happen offstage; indeed, they may represent a ‘choice’, to quote Margaret Atwood on a recent visit to Australia.

This chapter outlines three methods for reading climate and weather in literary texts while resisting both universalism and anachronism. First, climatological reading focuses on genre, while also drawing on the poststructuralist feminist and antiracist method of making specific absences present. In contrast, meteorological reading harnesses the rhetorical terms metaphor and metonymy to carefully parse the weather’s localised specificities. The concept ‘weathering’ is then introduced to bridge the historical spatial and temporal distinction between climate and weather. Throughout, the chapter demonstrates how to connect readings of power and difference to an analysis of climate and weather. The methods are described by engaging with a range of literary historians, theorists, and ecocritics and illustrated by way of the reading of two famously weatherworn canonical texts, Wuthering Heights and King Lear, and lesser-known pieces by Claudia Rankine and Simone de Beauvoir.

Rather than dwelling on routinely marked distinctions between realist and science fictional modes, this chapter identifies an emergent strand of writing about climate change that it calls ‘critical climate irrealism’. It builds on Michael Löwy’s ‘critical irrealism’ where the irreal – as in the fantastic, oneiric, or surrealistic – erupts within a predominantly realist text. ‘Critical irrealism’ describes fictions that do not follow realism’s ‘accurate representations of life as it really is’ but that are nevertheless critical of social reality. Critical irrealism is a notable feature of what World Literary Studies calls literature emerging from the ‘periphery’: territories that suffer from the violent extraction of labour and resources by the ‘core’ of the capitalist world system. This chapter argues that a comparable, and sometimes intersecting, process can be seen in contemporary fiction that uses the weird, the Gothic, the uncanny, and other modes of irrealism to engage with climate change. But it also suggests that climate change’s non-local effects and distorted temporalities complicate the core/periphery model. In bringing together ‘critical irrealism’ with a sense of ‘climate crisis’, ‘critical climate irrealism’ describes an important new trend, where the irreal negotiates radical environmental upheaval in a manner that realism’s recognisable individual experience cannot.

Science fiction has from its inception been interested in imagining climates and technologically sublime energy infrastructures, and in recent years has been adopted as a mode within many kinds of environmental writing addressing climate change. This chapter explores how the counter-cultural movement of ‘solarpunk’ is concerned with imagining both the technological and societal complexity of energy transition, and the conditions civilisations might face in adapting to living in damaged natural environments. Solarpunk operates across multiple disciplines and art forms, including architecture, art, and literature, and typically sees itself as utopian, decentralised, community-driven, and socially progressive. The chapter identifies some common themes and trends within solarpunk literature – including the predominance of the short-story form, the solastalgic aesthetics of the transformed landscape, and the normalisation of renewable energy technologies – and shows how these features aim to influence readers into climate action.

Behind the newspaper headlines, often an international organization can be discerned. Sometimes the connection remains somewhat hidden. When the USA chides Turkey for procuring weapons from Russia, it suggests that US manufacturers should be privileged because Turkey is a member state of NATO, the US-driven Atlantic security organization. When Poland aims to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, outlawing domestic violence, the Council of Europe expresses concern, if only because the Istanbul Convention was concluded under its auspices. And when it turns out that mailing parcels from certain countries is cheaper than mailing similar parcels domestically, it is not always immediately realized that this may have something to do with postal rates negotiated within the Universal Postal Union.

Within a context of cultural- and land-based Indigenous resurgence, contemporary Indigenous writers, artists, theorists, and activists have made the settler-state and extraction economy of Canada a flashpoint of the global climate emergency. Indigenous peoples often exist on the front lines of climate change, finding their lives and livelihoods threatened by the effects of rising temperatures even as they have been excluded from many of the benefits afforded by carbon-intensive economies. This chapter examines how Indigenous writers place climate change within a long, ongoing history of colonial resource appropriations, ecological loss, and violent suppression of Indigenous bodies and cultures in Canada. The chapter also addresses the diverse ways they respond to its challenges, including: crafting texts and practices of political dissent, solidarity-building, and land reoccupation; grounding present experiences in enduring stories of Indigenous response to environmental and political change; and refashioning genres such as science fiction, horror, or post-apocalyptic imaginaries to explore Indigenous futurisms in a climate-altered world. Above all, Indigenous writers make clear that climate change cannot be extricated from decolonisation and matters of sovereignty. The restoration of Indigenous lands and land-based ways of knowing is the starting point for the pursuit of climate justice.

This introduction sets out the volume’s main contention that any analysis of climate and literature must not only deal with the many ways in which climate has been conceptualised but also frame those conceptualisations as a pre-history to climate emergency. It chronicles first the vexed genealogy of climate and literature, showing how this history proceeds unevenly through expectations around, variously, climate’s agency as a felt presence, its status as data or index, and its betokening of an impossibly complex global system. It thenconsiders the literary and literary-critical fields, arguing for the need to contextualise these both in the here and now of climate crisis and in the longer pre-history of climate concepts. It then introduces the chapters in this volume, which simultaneously look back on this terrain and forward into a fraught world. Ultimately, if the history of climate and literature is one of climate’s various conceptualisations as agency, index, and system, this introduction, like the volume as a whole, argues for the potential of literature to depict systems conversion – not merely the future potential for disastrous global environmental failure but rather the means to reinvent it.