Originally focused on seeking policy solutions through international cooperation, transnational administration, and global governance, the study of global environmental policy has become increasingly diverse and fragmented. Complex, crosscutting variables ranging from a wider constellation of non-state actors to diverse critical perspectives, along with a focus on narrower sub-fields and the changing nature of environmental challenges themselves, have left the field in a state of flux. A broader, more process-oriented explanatory framework is needed. Institutionalist, global governance and civil society approaches, as well as middle-range concepts such as policy networks, are insufficient, while critical analyses, although a step in the right direction, are overly deterministic. Transnational neopluralism, which focuses on struggles for power and influence among material interest groups, social movements, and political actors in diverse issue-areas, provides a more robust framework for developing a more insightful research agenda and more constructive policy-making strategies in an increasingly complex and interdependent world.
SHIFTING PARADIGMS IN GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICYThe study of global environmental policy (GEP) has evolved significantly over recent decades. Environmental challenges have grown and debates about environmental policy have moved to a much more prominent place in global politics generally, while the structure of global policy-making is being challenged too. However, analysis of GEP has not kept pace. It has become mired in paradigmatic assumptions that are less effective both in explaining the empirical pathways that policy processes and outcomes have taken and, as a result, in pursuing normative policy goals. Global governance approaches in particular are flawed, while attempts to move away from that paradigm are partial and fragmented. In this article we argue that the underlying structure of constraints and opportunities in the international system, as understood through the prism of transnational neopluralism, continues to stymie attempts at developing effective global policy and transnational administration in the environmental issue-area.Transnational neopluralism focuses not on the more institutional or managerial dimensions of public policy such as global governance, neoinstitutionalism or policy network analysis, but rather on the dynamic interaction -the ongoing conflict, competition, manipulation and jockeying for influence -of specific sets of actors in key policy-making processes. The neopluralist approach not only analyses uneven and shifting power relationships among interest groups and 'value groups' (Key 1953) but also brings in regularized relationships between those groups and state and intergovernmental actors in diverse, structurally differentiated issue-areas. Rather than seeing institutional structure as the main independent variable, neopluralist analysis looks at the political processes that characterize diverse issue-areas and the key actors that interact within th...