This chapter sets out to identify key conceptual resources available for exploring power in the social construction of global environmental degradation for collective response. The chapter begins with the epistemic community model, which illuminates the role that transnational communities of scientists have in identifying issues like climate change and informing political action. This approach has been important for documenting the origins and establishment of the IPCC in 1988. However, empirical accounts informed by discursive and normative frameworks in other issue areas challenge the centrality of scientists in treaty formation. The studies reviewed identify the emergence of environmental issues as the source of new institutions; however, they also highlight how problem diagnosis has to converge with prevailing political and economic orders. Revisiting the IPCC’s emergence through the idiom of co-production at the end of the chapter, reveals how climate change had to be transformed into a global problem to fit with the existing remit of international organisation.

The introduction explores why there is so much scholarly interest in global environmental negotiations and how the conceptualization and study of these has changed over time. It unpacks how to study global environmental negotiations and related sites as agreement-making defined as the multiple actors, sites, and processes through which environmental agreements are made, and the new sets and arrangements of actors, sites, and processes that are created by any specific agreement, which have the potential to reinforce or reorient the global political order. This approach is offered as a way to organize, spatialize, situate, and connect diverse forms of scholarship into, around, and related to negotiation sites and their products. The introduction provides an overview of the book chapters, which provide the methodological building blocks for conducting this research. As such, the book is relevant for many other nonenvironmental issue areas where collective action is at the core, such as global health, nuclear nonproliferation, security, and trade.

This chapter focuses on the environmental diplomacy surrounding the World Commission on Environment and Development, popularly known as the “Brundtland Commission.” This process popularized the concept of sustainable development. The chapter begins by detailing the substantial changes seen in international environmental conditions through the mid-1980s, brought about largely by the Third World Debt crisis. These shifts created a rapidly deteriorating global environmental context and necessitated significant changes in institutional arrangements. The need for institutional change was a central finding of the important 1987 “Brundtland report,” titled Our Common Future. The Brundtland Commission highlighted a rapid deterioration in the world environment and underlined the need for major institutional change. Some actors sought to realize such change at the United Nations General Assembly in 1987, when the report and its call for action were presented to world leaders. Coordination was hindered, however, by divergent expectations and the absence of a Temporal Focal Point. While states were incentivized to cooperate rapidly to address problems in global environmental governance, the institutional status quo prevailed.

The conclusion summarizes and discusses the principal findings of the book, highlighting the role of temporal coordination dilemmas and Temporal Focal Points in patterns of continuity and change in international institutions. After relating these findings to other theoretical approaches, the chapter discusses the theoretical implications of the analysis contained in this book for the study of change in international institutions. The chapter provides an extended discussion of policy implications, including how international actors can employ the logic of temporal coordination in modernizing global institutions in the current international setting. It concludes with an analysis of the current context in global environmental and sustainable development politics, analyzing progress in combatting global challenges, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It argues that the international community has incentives to realize institutional change and that a Temporal Focal Point could soon emerge.

This chapter introduces the concept of Temporal Focal Points in explaining change in international institutions. In doing so, it elaborates theoretically the arguments contained in the introductory chapter. It models the coordination challenge facing states as a stag hunt game, where international actors can all benefit if they are able to cooperate. In hunting stag – or, engaging in institutional change efforts – actors can move to a Pareto-superior, payoff-dominant equilibrium. The challenge that they face is that if they hunt stag and others do not, they will expend scarce assets and end up significantly worse off. The risk of acting cooperatively when others do not leads actors to persist at inferior, risk-dominant equilibria. This can change suddenly, however, when actors reach a temporal convergence of expectations. The convergence is often facilitated by the arrival of Temporal Focal Points. The heightened probability of successful coordination leads to sharp increases in political and analytical investments. The chapter concludes with a discussion of methodology and case selection.

This chapter focuses on the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the Rio “Earth Summit.” It shows how, despite incentives to address institutional dysfunction and mounting global environmental problems by institutionalizing sustainable development within the United Nations system, divergent expectations persisted until momentum built toward UNCED. The Rio conference, which marked the twentieth anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm conference, emerged as a Temporal Focal Point in United Nations environmental politics. Convergent expectations triggered a significant increase in political and analytical investments in change processes from state and non-state actors, leading to a transformation of the informational and political context. These investments produced significant institutional change, including the creation of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and the institutionalization of the World Bank-operated Global Environment Facility. States also launched the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, a set of Forest Principles, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

This chapter analyzes United Nations environmental politics from 1993 to 2021, focusing heavily on the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), or the “Johannesburg summit,” and the 2012 “Rio+20” United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). The chapter examines the institutional ambiguities created by the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit” and international efforts to address them. It analyzes in detail failed institutional bargaining surrounding WSSD and carries the empirical investigation forward to the Rio+20 summit. The second Rio Earth Summit constituted a Temporal Focal Point in the history of United Nations environment governance and precipitated large-scale institutional change. Among the significant institutional changes emerging from the conference were the transformation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the creation of a High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), and the approval of a process for articulating the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda. The chapter also provides a brief discussion of more recent UN environmental cooperation, focusing on UNEP, the HLPF, and the SDGs, including progress in combatting climate change and the loss of biodiversity.

This chapter introduces a new framework that analyzes the role of timing and temporality in international institutions and world politics. It describes the temporal coordination dilemmas facing international actors. The chapter details the challenges posed by gradually accumulating incentives to alter international institutions and by the large number of actors that must be brought into the picture if institutional change efforts are to succeed. In realizing major change, a large array of moving pieces must be synchronized at one point in time, entailing considerable complexity and transaction costs. Indeed, the political and analytical investments – both international and domestic in nature – involved in recasting institutions are very substantial. Actors’ willingness to incur a sharp increase in transaction costs depends on their expectations that others will engage in a parallel effort. Thus, even as incentives to alter institutions mount, the inertial drift of institutional life persists until actors are able to reach a temporal convergence of expectations. At that time, actors make substantial investments in change processes and alter fundamentally their bargaining behavior.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the state of United Nations environmental cooperation between 1963 and 1972, focusing extensively on the 1972 “Stockholm conference.” It shows how a gradual deterioration of the global environment since the Industrial Revolution produced growing incentives to increase the level of international cooperation in global environmental politics. These incentives lay unrealized for more than a decade, however, until momentum gathered in the lead-up to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. The Stockholm conference, which became a landmark event, produced substantial institutional change, including a Declaration, Action Plan, and ultimately the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The conference, which was originally planned as a largely technical affair, gathered a momentum that was unanticipated by all when it was initially proposed. This momentum is explained by the emergence of a Temporal Focal Point triggered by a series of visible environmental incidents that highlighted long-standing institutional suboptimality. The Stockholm Temporal Focal Point was crystallized by an entrepreneurial conference secretariat led by Maurice Strong.

This chapter examines the post-1972 Stockholm conference phase of institution-building in global environmental governance from 1973 to 1982, with particular attention to the early development of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). UNEP, which was formally launched in December 1972, accumulated a mixed record in fostering global environmental cooperation. After analyzing UNEP’s early years, the chapter provides a detailed treatment of UNEP’s 1982 Governing Council “Session of a Special Character.” The “Nairobi conference,” much neglected in the literature, marked the 10th anniversary of UNEP and served a focal point for analysis of global environmental issues. Despite the efforts of UNEP’s Executive Director, Mostafa Tolba, international conditions had not opened up incentives sufficient to motivate significant institutional change in 1982. Thus, with a few minor adjustments, the institutional status quo prevailed following the Nairobi conference.

The first chapter introduces the main themes and arguments of the book. It discusses the theoretical context in International Relations within which the study of long-term normative change is situated. It introduces the English School as the main theoretical perspective with which the rise of environmental stewardship as a fundamental norm of global international society will be analysed. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of the main argument and an overview of the structure of the analysis.

Chapter 11 summarises the main argument developed in the book, with regard to the rise of global environmental stewardship as a primary institution of global international society, the norm transfer from world society to international society, the globalisation of the environmental norm, ongoing norm contestation and consolidation. It discusses the interplay between the environmental norm and other primary institutions of international society: diplomacy, international law, sovereignty, territoriality, great power management, market and developmentalism. Further, it discusses the use of English School theory to derive predictions about the future development of the international normative structure in response to major ecological threats.

Chapter 2 provides the main theoretical and conceptual framework for the analysis in this book. The first section introduces the conceptual landscape of the English School, especially the concepts of primary institutions, the solidarism versus pluralism debate, and the link between international society and world society.The second section reviews how various English School authors have interpreted the rise of global environmental politics, moving from an initial neglect of environmental issues among the founders of the English School to a more comprehensive engagement with global environmentalism in recent years. Building on this, the third section outlines the analytical framework that will inform the empirical analysis in the remainder of the book.

The emergence of global environmental responsibility as a fundamental norm, or primary institution, in International Relations represents a dramatic expansion of the normative horizon of international society. The successful norm transfer from world society to international society was made possible by a transnational alliance of environmentalists and scientists, as well as representatives of states and international organisations, which acted as norm entrepreneurs to inject environmental ideas into the international agenda. In the end, its successful establishment in international society depended on it being championed by powerful states, which exported domestic environmental norms to the international level. As such, the greening of international relations represents a complex process of political enmeshment between international and world society, but it has done relatively little to slow down global environmental degradation. The norm of global environmental stewardship is still honoured more in the breach than in the observance.