We are pleased to announce the launch of a new collective project that builds on a recent workshop held at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies.
This meeting laid the groundwork for a forthcoming edited volume that examines the intersections between domestic environmental debates and the international institutionalization of environmental governance. While the workshop brought together a rich set of national case studies, we are eager to broaden the conversation. In particular, we invite contributions that focus on regions such as Eastern Europe, Central and South America, Africa, and Asia, and especially those that highlight indigenous perspectives and the experiences of underrepresented groups and minorities.
The volume seeks to revisit what we call the Montreal Moment – the slow, uneven convergence of social, scientific, cultural, and political ideas about the global environment that culminated in the Montreal Protocol and reshaped international governance from the 1970s through the 1990s. The Montreal Protocol represented more than a landmark multilateral environmental agreement; it marked a cultural transformation. From the early 1970s onward, a series of international instruments had already been codified to address environmental concerns such as ocean dumping, wetland preservation, and deforestation. This trajectory culminated in Montreal and eventually paved the way for the first UN resolutions on climate change, the Hague Declaration on the Environment, and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. In the process, the notion of a multilateral, participatory, and shared system of environmental governance was translated into the formulation of sustainable development goals and into broader global efforts to confront climate change and global warming. For these reasons, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan famously described the Montreal Protocol as “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date.”
By adopting a genuinely global, transnational, and intermestic perspective, we aim to complement existing historiography and capture the interplay between national priorities and international negotiations, between local discourses and global frameworks. Contributions may explore how different socio-political contexts, cultural traditions, and economic conditions shaped domestic engagements with international environmental governance, and how ideas and practices of the environment – including indigenous knowledge systems – were debated, embraced, or excluded. Together, these studies will shed light on both the rise and the limits of the Montreal Moment, offering new insights into its legacy for environmental politics today.
We particularly encourage contributions that engage with questions such as:
- How did different socio-political perspectives, national cultures, and identities engage with the construction of an international system of environmental stewardship and governance?
- What roles did state and non-state actors play in shaping domestic and international environmental regulations?
- Which ideas and practices of the environment – including systems of traditional or indigenous knowledge – were discussed, debated, silenced, or excluded at national and/or transnational levels?
- How did influential domestic actors, both public and private, affect their country’s or region’s engagement in international environmental governance?
In what ways did structural factors such as economic volatility and industrial development influence domestic positions on international environmental politics?While open in terms of actors, scales, interpretations, and sources, we are especially interested in original, unpublished contributions that trace the trajectory of the Montreal Moment from the 1970s through the 1990s.
We invite proposals of no more than 300-400 words, accompanied by a short biographical note (c. 150 words). Please submit your abstracts by September 30, 2025 to d.fazzi@roosevelt.nl. Authors of selected proposals will be notified by mid-October, with full drafts (8,000–10,000 words including footnotes) due by January 31, 2026. Following peer review and editorial feedback, the volume is scheduled for publication in 2027, in coincidence with the Montreal Protocol’s fortieth aniversary.
We particularly welcome contributions from early-career researchers and scholars based in regions that have been underrepresented in the existing historiography of international environmental governance.
For questions or expressions of interest, please contact the editors at:
Dario Fazzi, d.fazzi@roosevelt.nl
Frank Gerits, f.p.l.gerits@uu.nl
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