Legal scholars rely heavily on vocabularies of ‘actors’, ‘agents’, and ‘experts’ to account for the fact that law does not develop by itself. However, the identities, idiosyncrasies, and individual professional contributions of law's people are rarely illuminated. This article suggests that the relative absence of people in transnational legal scholarship helps to explain some of its gaps. The task of bringing ‘human actors back on stage’ creates some new opportunities for transnational environmental law scholarship. It invites attention to both dominant and excluded voices. It offers a way of bridging the gap between the bureaucratic language of law and its lived reality. It also provides an understanding of why, despite ferocious attempts to roll back the advances of environmental law in some places, many scholars and practitioners find reason to be optimistic about the future of environmental law.

Scholars of environmental law are gaining comfort with looking for law in unusual places. As a result, lists and maps of the environmental content of contractual provisions are emerging. What these lists and maps largely miss, however, is the powerful dynamic of how legal norms move across borders through contract. This article argues that contractual provisions operate as critical platforms for the migration of legal norms, ideas and technologies between project and transactional settings. Three dynamics of how this movement takes place (transfer from contract to contract, migration from contract to legislation, and entrenching private standards through contract) are explored – each revealing how contractual practices reproduce selective visions of what counts as the ‘environment’ worth protecting.

Transnational environmental law is the subject of growing scholarly interest. Yet, much work remains to be done to fill in both the conceptual and empirical contours of this field. One methodological challenge that transnational law poses is the need to look beyond traditional sources of international and national law. This article contributes to efforts to understand transnational law's multilayered architecture by drawing attention to the use of transnational contracts as a mechanism to protect habitats and species. The diverse and proliferating examples of conservation contracts discussed in this article – which include forest carbon agreements, conservation concessions, debt-for-nature swaps, conservation performance payments, and private protected area agreements – reveal an ongoing and intensifying transnational attempt to use private contracts to address some of the most pressing issues of common concern. This article draws on fairness theory in both contract and international environmental law to argue for law's relevance in interpreting conservation's call for contracts.

The gravitational pull of environmental treaties is felt not only by states. Yet international lawyers almost exclusively focus on states to explain treaty compliance, measure treaty implementation, and assess treaty effectiveness. This essay draws attention to a phenomenon that falls outside traditional boundaries of treaty analysis: the efforts of private corporations that aim at complying with environmental treaties. Existing models of treaty implementation are inadequate to explain these direct interactions between corporations and treaties.1 The dominant grammar of treaty “compliance” equally fails to fit.2