ABSTRACT
A number of international regimes have emerged over the last thirty years contributing to the global regulation of pesticides and other chemical pollutants. These developments bear testimony to the work of pressure groups and epistemic communities in highlighting the environmentally polluting effects of hazardous chemicals, which the regimes have helped alleviate. However, unlike the ecocentric restrictions that emerged in North American and Western European domestic pesticide legislation from the 1960s, these regimes were achievable only because they also satisfied anthropocentric values, given greater priority at the global level. It has emerged that human health and economic values are at stake, as well as the conservation of the non-human environment. Crucially, transnational business interests have come to favor worldwide regulation as a means of circumventing variable and sometimes more stringent domestic restrictions on chemical production and trade and so allow an unlikely consensus to emerge and permit the first steps of global governance to be taken.
