Outsourcing Emissions: Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as Ecological Modernisation - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 265

the case of EM measures (Sonnenfeld and Mol 2002) or the specific ways of con-
structing new geographies of environmental conservation (Zimmerer 2006) are
examples of this process.
Secondly, the global environmental governance is marked with the emergence
of transnational institutional arrangements, particularly as a result of the 1980s and
1990s spurt of interest in global environmental problems and the capacity of
global frameworks for solving them. In this context, organizations, groups, and
governments began to think of desirable environmental futures in new ways (But-
tel 2003). These institutional mechanisms are networks with organizational pa-
rameters for dealing with knowledge claims. They also have policies and specific
norms. They function on the basis of legitimacy claims codified through opera-
tional procedures and instruments (Ninan 2009). Simultaneously, these institu-
tional mechanisms co-construct the political space for transnational movements as
response to their activities.
Thirdly, science and expertise play a special role in the emergent global envi-
ronmental governance. Besides having a central role in defining what is counted
as an environmental problem, scientific expertise plays a central role in the gov-
ernance of the networks. It is viewed that any reconstruction of science and poli-
tics in environmental governance must be a multifaceted process wherein both
scientific and social are bound together in interpretations and actions,
“jointly reinforced by the formulation of problems, the tools available, the audiences be-
ing addressed and enlisted to act, the support (financial and otherwise) elicited, and so
on” (Taylor and Buttel 1992, p. 413).
The fourth significant feature of the global environmental governance is the north-
south tensions in the framing of environmental problems and political priorities.
The northern and southern countries differ very much on how and what to per-
ceive as significant knowledge claims and the modalities on how to form institu-
tional mechanisms. These differences of perceptions have often culminated in po-
lemic negotiation between parties 1 .

21.1.3 Emergence of Climate Change Regime

Though there have been scientific warnings since at least the 19th century, when
colonial environmentalists pointed towards the significant implications of climate
variations (Grove 1996) 2 ; the organised international efforts to mitigate global
warming - a process wherein excessive presence of green house gases (GHGs) in
the atmosphere results in a progressive increase in temperature on earth's atmos-
phere with detrimental implications - only started in the late 1970s. The World
Meteorological Organization's (WMO) first World Climate Conference in 1979
expressed its concern over anthropogenic 'regional and even global changes ' of

1

See Johnson 2003; Kulkarni 2003. See also Agarwal and Narain (1999) for elaboration of
this point within the climate change discussions and negotiations.

2

I am grateful to Ingmar Lippert for bringing in Grove's references to climate change.