The structuring of a world environmental regime, 1870-1990

World society is not organized around a single state, and the separate national states took up environmental concerns only very belatedly. During the past century, the spread of a scientific culture and thr creation of an international associational system-most prominently around the United Nations-helped structure a world environmental regime by other means. The development of this world-level regime took a course different from the one that would be predicted by state-based theories. International nongovernmental associations, rooted in expanding scientific discourse, grew earliest, followed by a spate of environmental treaties among governments. Then, after 1945, the United Nations system facilitated a dramatic expansion in the number and scope of intergovernmental environmental organizations. Only late in the process did environmental concerns become structured as major components of national state organizations. We provide qualitative and quantitative descriptions, and report results of longitudinal analyses, elucidating the processes involved. The larger point is that different sectors of world society become structured through more variable processes than are usually considered.