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The world environmental regime has influenced government policy and improved environmental conditions around the globe, but its influence on governance is sometimes decoupled from, or loosely connected with, actual practice. This article examines the influence of the environmental regime on foreign aid and proposes that economic incentive, in the form of FDI, is a source of decoupling between aid donors' stated environmental goals and actual aid commitments. Using a three-dimensional panel design (donor × recipient × year), I test allocations of environmental protection and fossil fuel aid in a two-stage process where first the aid recipient is chosen, and then the aid amount. I find that although donor and recipient environmental regime integration are associated with higher likelihood of exchanging environmental aid, other factors (donor/recipient GDP, recipient democracy, etc.) determine the amount of aid. Regime integration does not reduce the likelihood of exchanging fossil fuel aid, but donor regime integration is associated with giving less fossil fuel aid, contingent on the donor's level of FDI in the recipient nation. I conclude that the world environmental regime and the global economy exert contradictory pressures on aid organizations that result in policy–practice decoupling. The world environmental regime, therefore, has only been partially successful in improving foreign aid, and its effect is constrained by donors' economic incentive to ignore environmental norms.

Environmental sociologists highlight the exploitative nature of the global capitalist economy where resource extraction from nations in the periphery tends to disproportionately benefit those of the core. From the Brazilian Amazon to mineral-rich Sub-Saharan Africa, the practice of "unequal ecological exchange" persists. Simultaneously, a "global environmental regime" has coalesced as a prominent feature of the contemporary world system. In the post-World War II era, legitimate nation-states must take steps to protect the natural environment and prevent its degradation even at their own economic expense. Stronger national ties to global institutions, particularly international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) consistently yield more positive environmental outcomes. However, previous work suggests that normative expectations for improved environmental practice will be weak or nonexistent in the periphery. We use the case of palm oil production and its relationship to deforestation to provide a more nuanced analysis of the relationship between material and institutional forces in the periphery. Using unbalanced panels of fifteen palm oil producing countries from 1990 to 2012, we find that stronger national ties to world society via citizen memberships in INGOs result in greater primary forest area among palm oil producers. However, this effect is strongest where production is lowest and weakens as production increases. Even in the cases of Indonesia and Malaysia, where palm oil production is substantially higher than any other producer, ties to global institutions are significantly related to reduced forest loss. These results indicate the variable importance of national embeddedness into global institutions within the periphery of the world system.

AbstractWe review the world society approach to explaining macrohistorical change generally and as it relates to the natural environment specifically. Our review includes work describing the rise of the environmental world society as well as empirical evidence of the consequences of national ties to world society for policy adoption, practices, and individual attitudes at the national level. Additionally, we suggest the application of world society theory to state and substate structures. Throughout the review, we situate the world society literature in relationship to work in the fields of cross‐national comparative and environmental sociology from a variety of other perspectives. We take a forward‐looking approach to our review of theoretical and empirical work in the field and consider the implications for normative change and resistance to prevailing world cultural norms. We conclude with a discussion of the resurgence of nationalism especially as it relates to antienvironmentalism.