Introduction

Facing the challenges of global environmental change is more than a political and legal problem – it is also a social one. New institutions of global environmental governance have to be rooted in the emerging‘world society’. However, what are the societal preconditions for the institutionalisation of new patterns of governance that allow for an environmentally effective and socially acceptable way of dealing with global environmental problems? One might argue that the new and sometimes threatening nature of these problems will almost automatically lead the ‘world society’ to develop efficient institutional forms of dealing with them, following a kind of rational logic of problem pressure and interest in survival. Yet it is a well known fact that there is no deduction from problems (ⅰ) to problem perceptions and (ⅱ) to solutions. Especially if complex and far-reaching problems are at stake, as in the case of global environmental change, even the very definition of the nature and the scope of the problem is contested, forcing social science research towards reconstructing the process of their social construction. The same holds for the solutions: what might be regarded as a reasonable (effective, feasible, acceptable …) solution varies according to the different actors involved and their views of nature and society, interests, and institutional and national backgrounds. One might even doubt whether ‘rational’ solutions have a chance against those that merely reflect power structures and actual interests of the parties involved.