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Environmental governance reform—especially in the minerals sector—has featured prominently in Sierra Leone's peacebuilding agenda. While reform has enhanced environmental governance capacity in ways that foster peace, it has also exacerbated conflict over the redistribution of extractive rights. This article examines one such conflict over tantalite in northern Sierra Leone. In the chiefdom of Sella Limba, violence erupted as local landowners and a multinational company utilized institutional hybridity—or the blending of informal–indigenous institutions with liberal reforms—to construct competing claims over mineral rights. The resulting uncertainty over the extractive 'rules of the game' accelerated conflict as stakeholders attempted to (re)negotiate the distributional consequences of institutional change in real time. International and national actors ultimately rejected hybrid institutional arrangements on the grounds that they distorted post-conflict reforms and undermined peace. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork, I retrace the conflict to provide an alternative perspective. I contend that institutional hybridity served as a necessary component of, rather than barrier to, peacebuilding because it 1) opened space for diverse political participation in post-conflict environmental governance and 2) promoted greater political accountability and integration. These outcomes have been theorized as ways in which environmental reform can facilitate post-conflict peace. This argument aims to advance environmental peacebuilding theory by examining the conditions under which environmental governance reform contributes to post-conflict peacebuilding.

This article examines the development of Afghanistan's Environment Law to explore the politics of institutional change in a conflict-affected context. Environment was catapulted to prominence in 2002 when it was included in the agenda for reconstruction under the new transitional government. Subsequent efforts to reconstitute Afghanistan's environmental institutions culminated in the Environment Law written by the United Nations Environment Programme and other international actors, with input from the Government of Afghanistan. The Environment Law was crafted as a model of best practice, intended to modernize Afghanistan's legislative foundation. However, it experienced significant content drift during the ratification process. As a result, the Environment Law produced institutions that differed in important ways from those initially proposed. Capitalizing on changes made during ratification, I analyze how actors across governance scales interact to translate development models from international to domestic policy spaces. I draw on both structure- and agent-oriented explanations to argue that changes to the Environment Law reflect attempts to increase structural complementarity between global and local systems of governance and cross-scalar contests over authority in the post/conflict landscape. The data suggest that interactions between domestic and international domains provided an opportunity to challenge institutional meaning and content. Ultimately, exploring how global models are incorporated within local contexts provides explanatory power for understanding institutional development. This is important in conflict studies, where the expansion of security theory to include issues like environment has provided new opportunities for strategic intervention by international actors in managing global conflict and its aftermath.

As goods and people more rapidly traverse our interconnected world, invasive alien species (IAS) are increasingly frequent, ecologically damaging, economically significant, and culturally concerning. Through examinations of IAS, global environmental politics (GEP) scholars can more deeply engage long-standing and newly emerging research problems within the three areas of global governance, global political economy, and environmental security. First, GEP scholars can use IAS research to further develop insights about the impact of problem structure on global governance. Second, examining IAS dispersal risks and associated costs, as well as intercountry variation in management responses, can generate insights about North–South power dynamics in the global political economy and how distributive conflict is likely to shape future invasion risk. Third, notions of environmental security in GEP scholarship can be challenged and further developed by examining the conceptualization and operationalization of "biosecurity" amid increasingly diverse multispecies assemblages. Greater research attention to IAS in GEP is long overdue, and we intend for this article to open novel pathways for GEP interdisciplinary research on IAS.