Global Environmental Governance Reconsidered

The notion of global governance is widely studied in academia and increasingly
relevant to politics and policy making. Yet many of its fundamental elements remain unclear in both
theory and practice. This book offers a fresh perspective by analyzing global governance in terms of
three major trends, as exemplified by developments in global sustainability governance: the
emergence of nonstate actors; new mechanisms of transnational cooperation; and increasingly
segmented and overlapping layers of authority. The book, which is the synthesis of a ten-year
"Global Governance Project" carried out by thirteen leading European research
institutions, first examines new nonstate actors, focusing on international bureaucracies, global
corporations, and transnational networks of scientists; then investigates novel mechanisms of global
governance, particularly transnational environmental regimes, public-private partnerships, and
market-based arrangements; and, finally, looks at fragmentation of authority, both vertically among
supranational, international, national, and subnational layers, and horizontally among different
parallel rule-making systems. The implications, potential, and realities of global environmental
governance are defining questions for our generation. This book distills key insights from the past
and outlines the most important research challenges for the future.