Ideas, Social Structure and the Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism

Abstract

Recent scholarship on international norms neglects the question of why some norms get selected over others to define and regulate appropriate behavior. I introduce a `socio-evolutionary' explanation for the entrance and evolution of norms, which focuses on the interaction of ideas with the social structure they encounter. This explanation best accounts for the most significant shift in environmental governance over the last 30 years, the surprising convergence of environmental and liberal economic norms toward `liberal environmentalism'. The 1992 Earth Summit institutionalized these norms, which predicate environmental protection on the promotion and maintenance of a liberal economic order. Current scholarship on international environmental institutions largely ignores the normative underpinnings of responses to environmental problems owing to its preoccupation with form and function, and thus cannot explain the shift. The proposed explanation also outperforms an `epistemic communities' explanation in its paradigmatic case, challenging the presumed primacy of science in environmental governance. Its advantages are also shown over power, interest and existing ideational approaches to normative development.