ABSTRACT
The proliferating ‘global governance’ literature indicates that international order exists in the form of governance rather than government (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992). It has been defined as ‘the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs’ (Commission on Global Governance 1995). Global environmental governance exemplifies this: regimes, often centred on multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), address environmental degradation and management of the commons at local, national, regional and international levels. Regimes are ‘sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations’ (Krasner 1983: 2). Global environmental governance has therefore been defined as ‘the sum of overlapping networks of interstate regimes on environmental issues’ (Paterson et al. 2003: 4). This definition downplays the role of non-state actors and internal power dynamics – a criticism leveled against general global governance scholarship (Barnett and Duvall 2005). Some critical scholars argue that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) remain outside global environmental governance, which they argue is based on hegemonic state and corporate interests (Ford 2003) while others argue that NGOs have been coopted by these hegemonic structures (Goldman 2005). Contra critical approaches, this chapter seeks to demonstrate how international organizations are being reshaped through socialization processes from transnational environmental advocacy networks. As demonstrated below, these processes have succeeded in drawing nonenvironmental international organizations into global environmental governance, by extending environmental issues into the private sector.
