ABSTRACT
Students of international relations (IR) with an interest in global environmental politics (GEP) have tended to reach mainly for books on games theory and regimes. As a result, the study of GEP has become the study of intergovernmental negotiations, institution-building and regime effectiveness. This has left the subdiscipline with a rather narrow focus, implying that states are the principal agents of GEP, while the activities of non-state actors are mostly ignored or explained as marginal phenomena. The interest of the state, moreover, is perceived as systemic, as being based merely on positioning in the international system, and case studies, while resting more on theoretical assumptions than actual empirical investigations, have largely evolved around the participation of industrialised countries.
