International environmental diplomacy has been met with varying levels of success, depending on the issue area that is being considered and the timeframe in which negotiations take place. International instruments such as treaties, plans, frameworks, and agreements often proceed in an incremental, path-dependent manner, with results being dependent on the positions of entrenched and dominant interests. In plastic waste governance, for example, there was hope that global talks culminating in August 2025 would lead to a treaty limiting plastic production. Unfortunately, this was not the case, as oil-producing countries pushed against production limits and overpromised the capabilities of recycling. However, there are occasional institutional breakthroughs, such as the Paris Climate Agreement, in which countries committed to limiting warming to 1.5 °C in 2015. Researchers in the field of global environmental governance aim to identify these moments of change because a deeper investigation of the causal factors behind them would enable improved policy recommendations and, ultimately, better environmental outcomes.
Between 2022 and 2025, global biodiversity governance has offered some examples of success that suggest a departure from the status quo. These changes include measures to protect marine biodiversity, and measures to share the benefits of commercial profits from biotechnological research or genomic AI development. Other changes — such as financial mechanisms, land use planning and conservation, monitoring, and reporting — support the argument that we have seen a turning point in global biodiversity governance. Theresa Jedd was part of an international team of authors who commented on these recent developments. The commentary, available on the European Politics blog of the London School of Economics and Political Science, is based on a publication in the journal Environmental Politics.
The commentary can be found here:
The research article can be found here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2025.2565867