Global Environmental Governance and International Environmental Diplomacy

Governance is so commonly used in academic literature and policy papers in the field of international environmental politics and as such has overtaken the words “policy”, “diplomacy” and “cooperation”. This phenomenon has empirical support – environmental policy is one of the most internalized areas of regulation, and states were no longer the sole subject of international rulemaking. The current state of the art in studying global environmental politics is quite paradoxical. Notwithstanding the increased recognition of the importance of non-state, transnational actors and mechanisms to solve global environmental problems, little attention is been paid to the study of the relationship between interstate and non-state forms of interaction. That raises the question of how multilateral environmental diplomacy and global environmental governance are connected with each other in the academic peer-reviewed journals. What kind of international interactions do they study and what links them? To answer these questions, the peer-reviewed articles from SCOPUS and Web of Science databases on multilateral environmental diplomacy and global environmental governance analyzed through a systematic literature review. To understand the nature of the two approaches in studying global environmental politics, I summarize the differences and then identify the links between them. In each of the research areas, sub-directions and the related content were identified, while the typology of the articles allowed to identify the relationships between them. In each of the research areas, sub-directions and the related content were identified, while the typology of the articles helped to highlight the relationships between them. The main finding includes the confirmation that environmental diplomacy and environmental governance studying mostly in isolation from each other. The main finding includes the confirmation that environmental diplomacy and environmental governance studying mostly in isolation especially regarding the interplay between interstate or non-state forms of cooperation as well as assessments of their significance. Two dimensions of the politics – formal negotiations on collective actions and weakly institutionalized public space that involves various stakeholders, movements and initiatives – exists in parallel to each other. At the same time, the study demonstrated the need to develop more responsive notions of international environmental diplomacy, since it is no longer specific only to the study of negotiations and other forms of interstate interaction.