The Global Environment

This chapter argues that the regime agenda has had on how global environmental issues are problematized and analyzed. This agenda continues to exert a powerful force on the field of Global Environmental Politics (GEP), as the newly proposed notion of ‘regime complex’ attempts to update and capture the variety of actors and increased complexity that constitutes international environmental issue areas. The success of the regime concept within GEP can partly be attributed to its practical utility, and also to the problem-solving potential it offers to those concerned with improving the global response to environmental degradation. The emergence of discursive approaches in the of GEP shifted scholarly attention to the linguistic practices used to construct international environmental issues as shared political problems. The success of these discursive approaches is demonstrated by their uptake in the field of GEP, with elements of Maarten Hajer’s conceptual apparatus proving particularly popular for studying the social construction of climate change.