The palm oil industry is increasingly certifying its activities as “sustainable,” “responsible,” and “conflict-free.” This trend does not represent a breakthrough toward better governance, this article argues, but primarily reflects a business strategy to channel criticism toward “unsustainable” palm oil, while promoting the value for protecting rain forests of corporate social responsibility, international trade, industrial production, and industry-guided certification. Illegalities and loopholes riddle certification in Indonesia and Malaysia, the two main sources of certified palm oil; at the same time, palm oil imports are rising in markets not demanding certification. Across the tropics, oil palm plantations linked to deforestation and human rights abuses are continuing to expand as companies navigate weak governance rules, and as sales shift across markets and inside global supply chains. Theoretically, this analysis advances the understanding of why and how the power of business is rising over the narratives and institutions of global agricultural governance.

This article situates seafood in the larger intersection between global environmental governance and the food system. Drawing inspiration from the food regimes approach, we trace the historical unfolding of the seafood system and its management between the 1930s and the 2010s. In doing so, we bridge global environmental politics research that has studied either the politics of fisheries management or seafood sustainability governance, and we bring seafood and the fisheries crisis into food regimes scholarship. Our findings reveal that the seafood system has remained firmly dependent on the historical institutions of national seafood production systems and, particularly, on the state-based regulatory regimes that they promulgated in support of national economic and geopolitical interests. As such, seafood systems contribute to a broader, historicized understanding of the hybrid global environmental governance of food systems in which nonstate actors depend heavily upon, and in fact call for the strengthening of, state-based institutions. Our findings reveal that the contemporary private ordering of seafood governance solidifies the centrality of state-based institutions in the struggle for “sustainable” seafood and enables the continued expansionary, volume-driven extractivist logics that produced the fisheries crisis in the first place.

Understanding how, why, and whether the trade-offs and tensions around simultaneous implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals are resolved both sustainably and equitably requires an appreciation of power relations across multiple scales of governance. We explore the politics and political economy of how the nexus around food, energy, and water is being governed through initiatives to promote climate-smart agriculture (CSA) as it moves from the global to the local. We combine an analysis of how these interrelationships are being governed (and ungoverned) by key global institutions with reflection on the consequences of this for developing countries that are being targeted by CSA initiatives. In particular, we look at Kenya as a country heavily dependent on agriculture, but also subject to some of the worst effects of climate change and which has been a focus for a range of bilateral and multilateral donors with their preferred visions of CSA. We draw on strands of literature in global environmental politics, political ecology, and the political economy of development to make sense of the power dynamics that characterize the multiscalar politics of how CSA is translated, domesticated, and operationalized in practice.

This article examines the unexpected outcomes in a puzzling new empirical case—the success of a coalition of small-scale beekeepers, indigenous peasant social movements, and NGOs in thwarting a multinational biotechnology firm’s efforts to commercialize genetically modified (GM) soy in Mexico. Sparked by news of pending EU rules for honey imports “contaminated” with GM pollen grains, beekeepers and their allies leveraged a transnational regulatory focusing event to downscale the forums for contestation of Mexican transgenic policy to subnational levels—where actors vested in regionally valuable honey production became pitted against actors promoting the national commercialization of GM soy across Mexico. The coalition’s success not only depended on an effective political and legal strategy, as might be expected, but hinged crucially on the unique characteristics of the traded commodities themselves—honey and soy. The case reveals the complex socioecological, market, and regulatory dynamics at play in the cultivation of crops and commodities for consumption and sale into local and global markets. Going beyond the actors and interests involved, the case shows how the physical characteristics of commodities act as constraints to the set of possible institutional alternatives to effectively redress policy problems. Regulations contrived with focal commodities in mind, like soy, can have significant spillover effects to more peripheral commodities, like honey, and the interactions and interdependencies shared among commodities in natural and human systems may in fact foster new windows of opportunity for producers to pursue policy change and innovation at multiple levels of governance.

Sustainable diets are an increasingly debated policy concept to address many of the environmental, social, and economic issues in the food system. The role of ultraprocessed foods in sustainable diets has received less attention than meat, dairy, and eggs but is deserving of examination given the high environmental impacts and negative health outcomes resulting from consumption of these foods. Big Food companies that make ultraprocessed foods have focused their attention on sustainable sourcing as a significant sustainability strategy. This article argues that sustainable sourcing as a central strategy for Big Food firms has implications for the achievement of sustainable diets. First, sustainable sourcing lends legitimacy to specific discourses of sustainability that align with a growth imperative. Second, it perpetuates weak and fragmented governance, which can enhance the legitimacy of Big Food when participating in coordination efforts. These dynamics of sustainable sourcing are important for consideration given the legitimacy claims of these companies, which situate them as a key part of the solution in working toward food security and sustainability.

The agricultural input industry has become more concentrated in the wake of recently announced corporate mergers in the sector. This article examines the environmental implications of corporate concentration in the agricultural input sector and outlines the challenges of establishing effective international policy and governance on this issue. The article makes two arguments. First, corporate concentration matters for food system sustainability. Consolidation in the global seed and agro-chemical industries has been deeply entwined with the rise of industrial agriculture, which has been associated with a host of environmental problems including an increase in agro-chemical use and the loss of agricultural biodiversity. Second, although corporate concentration has important sustainability implications, there is little recognition of the potential connection between these issues in international governance measures. The article outlines a number of factors that discourage the development of policy and governance on these issues, including the lack of a clear scientific consensus on how best to promote sustainable agriculture; the weak and fragmented nature of regulatory frameworks and institutions that oversee competition policy and food system sustainability; the power of agribusiness firms to influence policy outcomes; and the complex and distanced nature of the underlying drivers of corporate concentration in the sector.

The global trend toward adopting environmental rights within national constitutions has been largely regarded as a positive development for both human rights and the natural environment. The impact of constitutional environmental rights, however, has yet to be systematically assessed using empirical data. In particular, expanding procedural environmental rights—legal provisions relating to access to information, participation, and justice in environmental matters—provides fertile ground for analyzing how environmental rights directly interface with conditions necessary for a functioning democracy. To understand the extent to which these provisions deliver on their lofty aspirations, we conducted a quantitative analysis to assess the relationship between procedural environmental rights and environmental justice, while also controlling for the extent of democracy within a country. The results suggest that states with procedural environmental rights are more likely than nonadopting states to facilitate attaining environmental justice, especially as it relates to access to information.

How does climate change affect the politics of military bases? The United States alone has hundreds of overseas bases that require continuous coordination with host governments. I argue that climate change can create knock-on environmental problems associated with a base’s infrastructure or waste. Those knock-on problems create a mix of subnational, international, and transnational political contestation that raises the political costs of overseas bases and could even rupture an international relationship. I probe the plausibility of the theoretical framework using new evidence from Greenland. Between 1953 and 1967, the US Army maintained secret bases in Greenland as precursors for a nuclear ballistic missile complex. The bases were eventually abandoned, leaving considerable waste behind. Climate change is now poised to remobilize these pollutants into the surface water, creating a risk for human settlements. The case could be the proverbial canary in the coal mine for future politics surrounding overseas military bases.

Norway, previously an international frontrunner concerning reductions of transboundary air pollution, fell far short of its 2010 target for nitrogen oxides (NO x ) under the 1999 Gothenburg Protocol. In this article I show that leading international compliance theories cannot explain much of this noncompliance. While little evidence supports the management school’s explanations, Norwegian policies are also inconsistent with the enforcement school. Albeit too late to meet the deadline, Norway imposed a NO x tax in 2007. Moreover, the resulting emissions reductions were deeper than in a business-as-usual scenario, despite no international enforcement. That the NO x tax was imposed only after an environmentalist party gained considerable influence over NO x policies in 2005 supports an office-incumbent hypothesis. However, as emissions also declined significantly in many other European countries after 2005, the explanation is likely structural. One possibility is the deadline-pressure hypothesis: As the deadline approached, decision-makers across Northern and Western Europe considered emissions reductions to be more urgent than before.

This article presents an analysis of twenty-six industrialized countries’ support for the carbon-sequestration-based mitigation measures carbon capture and storage (CCS) and reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) during the 2007–2014 period. The article explores whether these proposed solutions to climate change share characteristics that make them feasible for reasons that can be observed in cross-national patterns. Insights from political economy, public policy, and international relations form a “triply engaged” theoretical framework. Relationships are tested using bivariate statistics and multivariate regressions. The analysis reveals that the same states show stronger support for both CCS and REDD+, and mostly for the same reasons. Proponents of such measures are generally petroleum-producing, large, and affluent, and they do not take on more ambitious mitigation targets. This article is the first to suggest that the widely different carbon-sink-based mitigation measures CCS and REDD+ may share similar political functions in similar political contexts.

This article provides theoretical and empirical insights into the effects of transparency on civil society empowerment by analyzing the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in Myanmar. It identifies three processes through which the EITI (dis)empowers civil society: constituting , using , and debating transparency. Whereas most transparency literature focuses on the effects of information disclosure—( using transparency)–the empowering effects of constituting and debating transparency are, for the EITI in Myanmar, much greater. While civil society organizations (CSOs) hardly use the EITI report as it lacks actionable information, the EITI has given CSOs a previously unimaginable role through their involvement in designing and implementing the EITI—i.e., in constituting transparency—and in EITI-related awareness-raising activities and debates, or debating transparency. Though in unequal ways, the processes of constituting and debating transparency empower CSOs to request, collect, and use more actionable information than through the EITI alone. This article argues that transparency initiatives could benefit from focusing attention on not only what information to disclose but also through which processes .

News media outlets are crucial for the dissemination of information on climate change issues, but the nature of the coverage varies across the world, depending on local geopolitical and economic contexts. Despite extensive scholarship on media and climate change, less attention has been paid to comparing how climate change is reported by news media in developed and developing countries. This article undertakes a cross-national study of how elite newspapers in four major greenhouse gas emitting countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India—frame coverage of climate change negotiations. We show that framing is similar by these newspapers in developing countries, but there are clear differences in framing in the developed world, and between the developed and developing countries. While an overwhelming majority of these news stories and the frames they deploy are pegged to the stance of domestic institutions in the developing countries, news frames from developed countries are more varied.

Institutional failure remains an important blind spot in the private governance literature. In this article we argue that a focus on scope conditions alone cannot explain why some programs thrive while others cease to exist. Studying the now-defunct Marine Aquarium Council—a certification program for coral reef protection—we adopt an institutional-process approach to fill this gap. Our main points can be summarized in a two-step argument: First, we argue that the scope conditions of private governance are partly endogenous to these processes. Through making strategic decisions, private governance programs have a certain level of control over their environment, and thus over the scope conditions under which they operate. Second, initial choices often unfold path dependencies over time. By tracing the evolution of the Marine Aquarium Council, we illustrate the program’s “mission creep” and the “vicious cycle” of self-reinforcing activity that culminated in its failure.

This article examines regional environmental governance (REG) through the lens of human geography theory on scale. Drawing on a case study of the Micronesia Challenge, a regional conservation commitment among five Pacific islands, I advance a critical theory of REG as a scaling process and tool of politics through which regions are (re)made and mobilized in support of diverse agendas. Results highlight understudied dimensions of REG, including: motivations for scaling environmental governance to regions; the co-production of regional and global environmental governance; the mutable expression of regionality within REG; and the ways in which REG is leveraged for resource mobilization, global visibility and influence, and conservation. The potential for REG to empower subaltern groups while advancing conservation is promising, and an important area for future research. The overall contribution of this article is a more complex, politicized understanding of REG that complicates a scholarly search for its inherent characteristics.

In 1992 the United Nations identified twenty-four “Annex II” states as being “developed” and holding the greatest responsibility for reducing emissions. Since then, the ambitions of these states toward mitigating climate change have varied significantly. This article is the first to employ fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyze climate policy variation among the Annex II developed states. The presence of a left-wing government is shown to be sufficient for ambitious climate policy, as is having high GDP per capita in conjunction with close links to the EU and few political constraints. The analysis highlights Austria’s surprisingly unambitious climate policy, which is explained, following elite interviews, by the state’s unique social partnership governance model and unusual fuel tourism industry. Overall, fsQCA proves a useful method for examining variables in combination and for case study selection, although limited by the number of variables it can assess.

Despite the relevance of education-specific negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the influential role of the secretariat therein, research in this area is still scarce. We contribute to closing this research gap by exploring how the UNFCCC secretariat becomes involved in and has latent influence on the education-specific debates surrounding global climate conferences and the related information exchange on Twitter. Our analysis extends previous findings by combining theories and methods in novel ways. Specifically, we apply social-network theory and derive data from participant observations and Twitter, which enables us to analyze the role and influence of the UNFCCC treaty secretariat within education-specific negotiations. We find that the secretariat increases its influence by strategically establishing links to actors beyond the negotiating parties and show that it occupies a central and influential position within the education-specific communication networks in UNFCCC negotiations.

We use the New Zealand emissions trading scheme to explore how diffusion and learning from other emissions trading systems can explain the adoption, design, and revision of climate policy. Drawing on secondary documents and interviews with politicians, government officials, business leaders, and independent commentators, we argue for further investigation of how interactions between international and domestic factors shape the design of climate policy, and for deeper probing of structural and shorter-term domestic imperatives, to avoid misreading the extent and nature of international diffusion influences. We particularly stress the importance of distinguishing analytically between diffusion interactions motivated by learning between jurisdictions and scrutiny aimed at avoiding material disadvantages as a result of miscalculations in climate policy design. Finally, we argue for greater attention to the temporal dimensions of climate policy development in explanations of how diffusion and domestic influences may change during policy adoption, design, and revision.

This article investigates the roles of policy diffusion and policy learning in shaping the design of California’s cap-and-trade system. On the surface, it is very similar to other cap-and-trade programs, but in practice many detailed differences reflect active efforts by California policy-makers to avoid flaws that they saw in other systems, such as the EU ETS and the US East Coast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. We assess how California’s cap-and-trade system emerged, the significance of policy diffusion, and the lessons for other trading systems by applying two broad sets of theoretical frames—the role of policy diffusion and the role of organized local political concerns. We find that despite the signature status of the trading system, California mostly relies on much less transparent and more costly direct regulation. We also find that California’s cap-and-trade system has developed mostly in its own, special political context, which hampers the feasibility of cross-border trading.

Countries in the Global South—which are contributing an increasing share of global greenhouse gas emissions—are actively developing carbon market mechanisms, including emissions trading systems and (voluntary) offset mechanisms. This article analyzes past and emerging experiments with carbon market mechanisms in Thailand and Vietnam, in the context of their domestic political economies and the shifting dynamics of the global climate governance regime. Drawing from thirty-three in-depth interviews and document analysis, I show the changing roles of government, the private sector, civil society, and donor and multilateral actors in these countries. Moreover, the article identifies key factors that may play roles in the further—and more synergistic—development of carbon market mechanisms: the generation of domestic demand for carbon credits; building and keeping human capacity and adequate data; creating space for civil society; ensuring coordination within the government and between sectors, notably the energy sector; and establishing further linkages with regional (Asian) and global carbon market mechanisms, such as those in China, Japan, and South Korea. These findings suggest that market-based mechanisms with high social and environmental integrity are one of the options that countries in the Global South have to achieve low-carbon development in the post-Paris climate change regime.

The literature on policy transfer has paid little attention to how policy-makers strategically employ learning from abroad as a resource to advance their domestic policy preferences and successfully implement a policy program. Addressing this research gap, we further develop the concept of “political learning,” distinguishing three dimensions: “learning as an argumentative resource,” “selective learning,” and “learning about policy design.” Empirically, we illustrate the relevance of political learning from abroad for the case of developing an emissions trading system in Australia. In particular, we show how government policy-makers in Australia used political learning from abroad to promote emissions trading in the context of a polarized domestic climate of adversarial ideas and competing interests.