The Business of Global Environmental Governance

The Business of Global Environmental Governance takes a political economy approach to understanding the role of business in global environmental politics. The book's contributors—from a range of disciplines including international political economy, management, and political science—view the evolution of international environmental governance as a dynamic interplay of economic structures, business strategies, and political processes. By providing comparative insights to the responses of business to major international environmental issues, the book illuminates the ways business activity shapes and is shaped by global environmental policies. It moves beyond the usual emphasis on state actors and formal regimes, instead focusing on empirical and theoretical contributions that examine the reciprocal relationship between corporate strategy and international environmental governance.

After developing a theoretical framework for understanding the role of business in environmental governance, the book provides empirical studies of business strategies across a range of cases, from formal regimes to combat climate change and ozone depletion to more informal and private regimes for tropical logging and the ISO 14000 environmental management standards. These case studies demonstrate the key roles of business, markets, and private actors in shaping international environmental institutions and constructing new forms of governance.