Introduction

Sustainability has become both a goal to be attained and a guiding standard against which to assess the adequacy of international environmental governance. New actors have become involved in international environmental governance and the policy frames organizing their thinking have become more comprehensive. Throughout this transition, the multilateral approach to global environmental governance emphasized identifying consensus scientific knowledge of physical processes and formulating policy guidance based on it. Yet other developments have raised serious questions about the validity of the vision of the place of scientific and other expert knowledge in improved international environmental governance. Environmental governance provides many examples of another dynamic affected by the “lay/expert” relation: increasing realization that implementing policy requires support from a variety of stakeholders. Contestation over what knowledge and whose knowledge is relevant to international environmental governance are unlikely to be eliminated entirely. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.