Exploring how transnational environmental governance and the operation of global value chains (GVCs) intersect is key in explaining the circumstances under which mandatory disclosure can improve the environmental footprint of business operations. We investigate how the governance dynamics of the tanker shipping value chain (a major emitter of greenhouse gases) limits the effectiveness of the European Union (EU) monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) regulation, which mandates the disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions for ships calling at EU ports. Although MRV seeks to help shipowners and ship managers save fuel and reduce emissions, it does not address the complexity of power relations along the tanker shipping value chain and currently cannot disentangle how different actors influence the design, operational, commercial, and ocean/weather factors that together determine fuel consumption. In particular, the EU MRV neglects to reflect on how oil majors exert their power and impose their commercial priorities on other actors, and thus co-determine fuel use levels. We conclude that, in its current form, the EU MRV is unlikely to lead to significant environmental upgrading in tanker shipping. More generally, we argue that regulators seeking to facilitate environmental upgrading need to expand their focus beyond the unwanted behaviors of producers of goods and providers of services to also address the incentive structures and demands placed on them by global buyers.

This article explores the relations between movement, the environment, and governance through the cases of cruise tourism, plastics in the oceans, and environmental migration. It does so by means of a mobilities perspective, which has its origins in sociology and geography. This perspective shifts the analytical focus toward mobilities and environmental problems to understand their governance, as opposed to starting with governance, as many global environmental governance studies do. We coin the term environmental mobilities to refer to the movements of human and nonhuman entities and the environmental factors and impacts associated with these. Environmental mobilities include movements impacting on the environment, movements shaped by environmental factors, and harmful environmental flows, as we illustrate by means of the three cases. We demonstrate how zooming in on the social, material, temporal, and spatial characteristics of these environmental mobilities can help illuminate governance gaps and emerging governance practices that better match their mobile nature. In particular, a mobilities lens helps to understand and capture environmental issues that move, change form, and fluctuate in their central problematique and whose governance is not (yet) highly or centrally institutionalized.

This article focuses on the emergence of a decentralized institutional complex, interplay management, and the institutional interplay between the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the EU in the issue area of environmental shipping policies. It shows that the synergistic relationship between both institutions has been driven primarily by commitment and compliance mechanisms. By influencing IMO decision-making and improving the implementation and effectiveness of IMO conventions, the EU has become a driving force in international environmental shipping policies, and its new initiatives may even enhance its leadership role within the IMO in the future. Despite the still-existing lack of cognitive leadership by the EU, the synergies between both institutions provide evidence for the EU's leadership capacities in global environmental politics.