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Great powers routinely face demands to take on special responsibilities to address major concerns in global affairs, and often gain special rights for doing so. These areas include peace and security, global economic management, development, and egregious violations of human rights. Despite the rise in the importance and centrality of global environmental concerns, especially climate change and issues covered by the new Sustainable Development Goals, norms or institutions that demand or recognize great power responsibility are notably absent. This absence is puzzling given expectations in several major strands of International Relations theory, including the English School, realism, liberalism, and constructivism. Drawing on the reasoning behind these expectations, the absence of great power responsibility can be explained by a lack of congruence between systemic and environmental "great powers," weak empirical links between action on the environment and the maintenance of international order, and no link to special rights. Instead, the institutionalized distribution of environmental responsibilities arose out of North–South conflict and has eroded over time, becoming more diffuse and decentered from ideas of state responsibility. These findings suggest a need to rethink the relationship among great powers and special rights and responsibilities regarding the environment, as well as other new issues of systemic importance.

The conditions that led to low expectations for the Rio+20 conference tell us more about the prospects for addressing collective global problems than a focus only on its substantive outcomes. Three conjectures on why expectations were so low are put forward: a lack of vision and modest ambition at the conference's core; unresolved and unconfronted normative contestation that limited progress on potentially transformative ideas such as the green economy; and practices of multilateralism that have not caught up to structural changes in the global system, exacerbated by the inability or unwillingness of key actors to move from entrenched identities. Some surprising institutional outcomes of Rio are also assessed in light of the three conjectures. This form of analysis turns attention to the politics that the outcomes reflect and opportunities and pitfalls going forward.

AbstractTwo attempts at grand compromise have underpinned global order since the end of the Second World War. The first, a compromise between laissez-faire liberalism and domestic interventionism, famously described by John Ruggie as 'embedded liberalism', legitimated and stabilized a multilateral order for 50 years. A second attempt, this time between North and South at the end of the Cold War around a discourse of 'sustainable development', remains uneasy, conflict prone and much less institutionalized. They are compared and contrasted by asking whether they are truly compromises or reflect domination and hegemony, what conditions led to them, and what drivers of change have limited and challenged them. Ultimately, differences in their bases of legitimacy offer lessons for the prospects of building a new grand compromise in the wake of contemporary strains on global governance.

AbstractA growing number of regulations and agencies dealing with the global environment directly affect citizens' lives. In these conditions, a conventional division between international and domestic issues, and between normative and explanatory theory, becomes less tenable, raising corresponding issues of legitimacy, community, and ethics. This chapter assesses liberal environmentalism in terms of a normative theory that considers requirements of authority, epistemic validity, good practices, and practical reason. Despite improvements in terms of efficiency and legitimacy, serious concerns remain concerning the foundations of "good" environmental governance.

Global environmental governance rests on a set of norms best characterized by the label "liberal environmentalism." The 1992 Earth Summit catalyzed the process of institutionalizing these norms, which predicate environmental pro tection on the promotion and maintenance of a liberal economic order. To support this claim, this article identifies the specific norms institutionalized since Rio that undergird international environmental treaties, policies and programs. It also explains why a shift toward liberal environmentalism occurred from earlier, very different, bases of environmental governance. The implications of this shift are then outlined, with examples drawn from responses to climate change, forest protection and use, and biosafety. The article is not an endorsement of liberal environmentalism. Rather, it shows that institutions that have developed in response to global environmental problems support particular kinds of values and goals, with important implications for the constraints and opportunities to combat the world's most serious environmental problems.