The governance of climate change has traditionally been conceived as an issue of international co-operation and considered through the lens of regime analysis. Increasingly, scholars of global governance have highlighted the multiple parallel initiatives involving a range of actors at different levels of governance through which this issue is being addressed. In this paper, we argue that this phenomenon warrants a re-engagement with some of the conceptual cornerstones of international studies. We highlight the conceptual challenges posed by the increasing involvement of non-nation-state actors (NNSAs) in the governance of climate change and explore the potential for drawing from alternative theoretical traditions to address these challenges. Specifically, the paper combines insights from neo-Gramscian and governmentality perspectives as a means of providing the critical space required to generate deeper understanding of: (a) the nature of power in global governance; (b) the relationship between public and private authority; (c) the dynamics between structure and agency; and (d) the rationalities and practices of governance.

Contestations over justice and equity in international environmental regimes present striking evidence of the struggle to create institutions for global environmental governance that are based on widely shared ethical standards of responsibility and accountability. Focusing on two key equity norms—the common heritage of mankind (CHM) and common but differentiated responsibility (CDR)—this paper highlights four factors that affect the influence of moral responsibility norms in global environmental regimes: (i) source and force of articulation; (ii) nature of issue-area; (iii) “moral temper” of the international community; and (iv) “fitness” of norms with the prevailing neoliberal economic idea and structure. Consequent upon the argument that the most important of all these factors is the “fitness” with the extant neoliberal order, the paper questions the assumptions of the burgeoning constructivist scholarship that tends to overemphasize the independent role of intersubjective beliefs in international politics. Further, it is suggested that the abiding “responsibility deficit” in institutions for global environmental governance is due mostly to the successful co-optation of equity norms for neoliberal ends.