This article presents a new way of understanding Global Environmental Governance (GEG), historically and functionally. We outline a revised analytical framing, which connects the post-WWII moment of early globalizing conservation with the intensifying attempts to govern the human-earth relationship through an ever-growing assemblage of governable environmental objects and their quantifiable indicators as proxies. Our argument is as follows: (1) GEG has followed a trajectory of dispersal of actors, institutions, conceptual tools and responsibilities from the micro- and local scales to the planetary. We analyze how these trajectories unfold in three essential domains: Earth System science, sovereignty, and neoliberalization. (2) GEG is performative. The governance itself has created the dynamic environmental objects under governance. (3) In this way, GEG has normalized the environment as a policy object.

This chapter analyzes the evolution of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from a specialist organization of climate scientists into an institution at the nexus of science and politics. We explain how the IPCC became the primary scientific authority for policymakers, the public, and climate activists on the existence, severity, consequences of, and, increasingly, possible solutions to anthropogenic climate change. We assess its influence on policymakers and governments, while examining the various tensions, critiques, and contradictions that the organization and its leaders have had to grapple with across its 32-year history, during which it successfully developed a distinct identity as a trusted provider of comprehensive scientific assessments. Our analysis also focuses on the institutional reforms that helped restore legitimacy to IPCC after ‘climategate’ and other controversies.

This article applies a science diplomacy lens to examine Sweden’s 1967–1968 intervention in the United Nations—the so-called “Swedish initiative”—that led to the seminal 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment. The three classic science diplomacy typologies—science in diplomacy, diplomacy for science and science for diplomacy—are employed to structure an analysis of how Swedish diplomats skillfully leveraged science for diplomatic objectives, first for convincing member states of the need to convene a major environmental conference under UN auspices and then to mobilize scientific research internationally—particularly in developing countries—during the Conference preparatory process. The empirical study, based on archival research and the oral histories of key participants, also brings to light how problems of the human environment were conceived of and shaped by Swedish scientists and diplomats during this embryonic moment of global environmental governance. Through analysis of some of the public pronouncements and key documents drafted during the first phase of the Swedish initiative, the article further considers the role of popular science as a style of science communication that is particularly relevant in the realm of environmental diplomacy.

This article provides an historical account and analysis of the repurposing of Ny-Ålesund from Arctic coalmining settlement to Norwegian-administered international research base in Svalbard. Three levels of analysis are employed to explain the settlement’s transformation and its rising geopolitical significance, focusing primarily on the period of rapid internationalisation and expansion of scientific activities starting in the late 1980s. The local level examines Norway’s efforts to maintain effective occupation of greater Kongsfjorden by promoting research, underpinned by the economisation of the area’s near-pristine natural environment as a non-extractive resource for science; the global level applies the concept of telecoupling to consider the role of events and processes at larger spatial scales that facilitated Ny-Ålesund’s transformation; and the “glocal” level explains how the interaction of Norwegian and global actors in the locality of Ny-Ålesund have collectively shaped the community’s institutions over some 30 years. The article also reflects on recent policy changes signalling more assertive Norwegian administration and greater coordination of research in Ny-Ålesund.