ABSTRACT
With the increasing scale and complexity of environmental and social problems, there has been a trend of elevating responses to the global level. The call to ‘think global and act local’ means that a global perspective on what is required for sustainability strongly influences actions at national and subnational levels (United Nations [UN] 1992). Global environmental governance is underpinned by a set of normative discourses which hold assumptions on the causes of unsustainability and the corresponding solutions to these challenges (Kates et al 2001; Clark and Dickson 2003; Ostrom 2010). Such normative discourses are important in providing a coherent frame for international strategies in response to large-scale problems such as biodiversity loss, climate change and desertification.
