This chapter focuses on the environmental diplomacy surrounding the World Commission on Environment and Development, popularly known as the “Brundtland Commission.” This process popularized the concept of sustainable development. The chapter begins by detailing the substantial changes seen in international environmental conditions through the mid-1980s, brought about largely by the Third World Debt crisis. These shifts created a rapidly deteriorating global environmental context and necessitated significant changes in institutional arrangements. The need for institutional change was a central finding of the important 1987 “Brundtland report,” titled Our Common Future. The Brundtland Commission highlighted a rapid deterioration in the world environment and underlined the need for major institutional change. Some actors sought to realize such change at the United Nations General Assembly in 1987, when the report and its call for action were presented to world leaders. Coordination was hindered, however, by divergent expectations and the absence of a Temporal Focal Point. While states were incentivized to cooperate rapidly to address problems in global environmental governance, the institutional status quo prevailed.

The conclusion summarizes and discusses the principal findings of the book, highlighting the role of temporal coordination dilemmas and Temporal Focal Points in patterns of continuity and change in international institutions. After relating these findings to other theoretical approaches, the chapter discusses the theoretical implications of the analysis contained in this book for the study of change in international institutions. The chapter provides an extended discussion of policy implications, including how international actors can employ the logic of temporal coordination in modernizing global institutions in the current international setting. It concludes with an analysis of the current context in global environmental and sustainable development politics, analyzing progress in combatting global challenges, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It argues that the international community has incentives to realize institutional change and that a Temporal Focal Point could soon emerge.

This chapter focuses on the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the Rio “Earth Summit.” It shows how, despite incentives to address institutional dysfunction and mounting global environmental problems by institutionalizing sustainable development within the United Nations system, divergent expectations persisted until momentum built toward UNCED. The Rio conference, which marked the twentieth anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm conference, emerged as a Temporal Focal Point in United Nations environmental politics. Convergent expectations triggered a significant increase in political and analytical investments in change processes from state and non-state actors, leading to a transformation of the informational and political context. These investments produced significant institutional change, including the creation of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and the institutionalization of the World Bank-operated Global Environment Facility. States also launched the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, a set of Forest Principles, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

This chapter analyzes United Nations environmental politics from 1993 to 2021, focusing heavily on the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), or the “Johannesburg summit,” and the 2012 “Rio+20” United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). The chapter examines the institutional ambiguities created by the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit” and international efforts to address them. It analyzes in detail failed institutional bargaining surrounding WSSD and carries the empirical investigation forward to the Rio+20 summit. The second Rio Earth Summit constituted a Temporal Focal Point in the history of United Nations environment governance and precipitated large-scale institutional change. Among the significant institutional changes emerging from the conference were the transformation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the creation of a High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), and the approval of a process for articulating the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda. The chapter also provides a brief discussion of more recent UN environmental cooperation, focusing on UNEP, the HLPF, and the SDGs, including progress in combatting climate change and the loss of biodiversity.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the state of United Nations environmental cooperation between 1963 and 1972, focusing extensively on the 1972 “Stockholm conference.” It shows how a gradual deterioration of the global environment since the Industrial Revolution produced growing incentives to increase the level of international cooperation in global environmental politics. These incentives lay unrealized for more than a decade, however, until momentum gathered in the lead-up to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. The Stockholm conference, which became a landmark event, produced substantial institutional change, including a Declaration, Action Plan, and ultimately the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The conference, which was originally planned as a largely technical affair, gathered a momentum that was unanticipated by all when it was initially proposed. This momentum is explained by the emergence of a Temporal Focal Point triggered by a series of visible environmental incidents that highlighted long-standing institutional suboptimality. The Stockholm Temporal Focal Point was crystallized by an entrepreneurial conference secretariat led by Maurice Strong.

This chapter examines the post-1972 Stockholm conference phase of institution-building in global environmental governance from 1973 to 1982, with particular attention to the early development of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). UNEP, which was formally launched in December 1972, accumulated a mixed record in fostering global environmental cooperation. After analyzing UNEP’s early years, the chapter provides a detailed treatment of UNEP’s 1982 Governing Council “Session of a Special Character.” The “Nairobi conference,” much neglected in the literature, marked the 10th anniversary of UNEP and served a focal point for analysis of global environmental issues. Despite the efforts of UNEP’s Executive Director, Mostafa Tolba, international conditions had not opened up incentives sufficient to motivate significant institutional change in 1982. Thus, with a few minor adjustments, the institutional status quo prevailed following the Nairobi conference.

Chapter 6 considers self-governance of two important types of commons: water and forests. The mirab, or water manager, is a person who works on behalf of a group of communities to ensure members across villages have access to irrigation water. Forest shuras govern use and access to forests. Mirabs and forest shuras are often effective in governing commons, for reasons our theory predicts, but are vulnerable to outside threats that cannot be collectively countered by the community: irrigation infrastructure has often been destroyed during conflict and is too costly for communities to provide, and the Taliban, commanders, or warlords are often able to extract forest resources by force. Thus, our conclusion is that foreign aid and other government assistance should focus on threats from the outside while leaving daily management of the commons to communities. Our analysis thus extends the insights of Elinor Ostrom, who understood well the possibility of self-governance of property, to self-governance in especially fragile, war-ravaged states such as Afghanistan. In such contexts, war – and organizations that come about during war – can be a great destabilizing force for governance of the commons.