Global Environmental Policies: Between ‘Interstatist’ and ‘Transnational’ Arrangements

Abstract

The political modernisation theory as outlined in chapter 1 will be applied to global environmental policies in this chapter. Therefore it is rather different in nature to the other case studies (chapters 4, 5, 7 and 8). As a global focus will replace the national one, some introductionary comments on policies in the global system will be made in this introduction. These will be followed by a short history of global environmental policies (section 2). Such historical insights are needed in order to be able to diagnose policy change in the last three decades. But to do so, knowledge of current developments in global environmental policies is inevitably needed as well. Therefore sections 3 and 4, next, discuss two issues which arose in the 1980s and for which policies have been designed and implemented in the 1990s: biodiversity and climate change. By dealing with these empirical domains, data and insights will be gathered on the basis of which the political modernisation theory can be applied and, hopefully, enriched. Section 5 deals with the four dimensions of a policy arrangement — policy coalitions, power, rules, and discourses — and ‘inserts’ the empirical data of the earlier sections into this theoretical scheme. Subsequently, the political modernisation thesis — the stability and change of policy arrangements in time — is considered in section 6. In section 7, finally, some conclusions are drawn.