Change in Global Environmental Governance

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Where does change come from in the architecture of global environmental governance? To the extent that a traditional answer to this question exists, it is that states self-consciously make changes in the architecture, to meet specific cooperative goals and in response to new information about the state of the natural environment. This is the classical neoliberal, institutionalist, regime theory answer: States, understood as rational unitary actors, create new institutions to reduce the market imperfections in international cooperation. This answer has informed much good work on global environmental politics over the past two decades, but it is limited by its terms of reference. States are often neither rational nor unitary, and they are not the only actors of relevance to global environmental governance. A more recent counter-narrative to state-based regime theory abjures the state and the formal intergovernmental organizations created by states, looking both to other levels of government and to nongovernmental actors as sources of environmental governance. This approach looks at networks of nonstate actors as the source of voluntary global environmental leadership, built up from the grass roots rather than imposed from the top. This is a useful corrective to an exclusive focus on the state as the unit of analysis, and on conscious design rather