7 - Environmental Stewardship between Consolidation and Contestation

Summary

Chapter 7 explores the further strengthening and consolidation of the international environmental norm as well as contestation around it, from the 1990s until the early twenty-first century. In the first section, I explore how global environmental protection has been further embedded in international policy-making and cooperation. This process involved the inclusion of ever more issues in the international environmental agenda; the insertion of green norms into other international policy areas and regimes, most notably those concerned with economic affairs; and a strengthening and broadening of the institutional architecture for global environmental protection. None of these shifts in international practices and norms were uncontroversial or easy to achieve, they were the result of ongoing battles over how to put environmental stewardship into practice. Indeed, the second section of this chapter will discuss in more detail the ongoing normative contestation over global environmentalism. I conclude the chapter with a review of how environmental stewardship fits in with other primary institutions of global international society.