Change in global environmental politics: temporal focal points and the reform of international institutions

Manulak’s 2022 book, Change in Global Environmental Politics: Temporal Focal Points and the Reform of International Institutions, comes at an opportune time. Bringing light to the often-neglected temporal dimension of politics, the book reminds of the importance of timing and temporality as key factors in the enactment and explanation of institutional change. Through an attentive study of the history of environmental politics from 1963 to 2022, Manulak shows how Temporal Focal Points (TFPs), defined as discrete, unique, and conspicuous moments in time, facilitate institutional change. As environmental challenges multiply and institutional suboptimality persists, Manulak’s teachings help inform ongoing attempts to generate system-wide transformations.

Ensuing from Manulak’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford, the book’s central argument rests on explaining change through the temporal convergence of expectations, understood as the ‘emergence of intersubjectively shared expectations of coordinated choice in time’ (44). To do so, it reviews temporal periods that encouraged concurrent analytical and political investments and thus opened windows of opportunity to overcome the status quo and reform institutions. Pointing to both exogenous factors that alter background conditions and affect the structure of incentives together with the emergence of TFPs as catalysts for temporal coordination, the author offers original and well-documented accounts of how change occurred in the last decades of United Nations (UN) environmental affairs. Persuasively, Manulak investigates the ‘relationship between gradually accumulating incentives to alter institutions and actors’ capacity to achieve coordination as a means of capitalizing on those incentives’ (26).

The first two chapters of the book serve as theoretical foundations for the analysis. The first introduces the key puzzle posed by patterns of change in UN environmental institutions, the prevailing status quo bias, and the observed institutional suboptimality discernable from global institutions’ ‘inability to respond swiftly to altered global realities’ (2). It also explains temporal coordination dilemmas in international affairs and details the author’s argument on the importance of convergent expectations for institutional reforms. The second chapter presents the concept of TFPs, a novel model of institutional change, and the author’s method for studying coordination over time. The subsequent chapters, namely 3 to 7, offer detailed case study analyses of historical processes in environmental politics from 1963 to 2022. For instance, chapter 3 covers the period culminating with the Stockholm Conference and convincingly providing evidence for Manulak’s perspective on the role of TFPs for ‘allowing all actors to focus on a shared timeline for talks’ (103). As detailed in chapter 6 and 7, the arrival of prominent anniversaries in 1992 and 2012, respectively twenty and forty years after the hallmark Stockholm Conference, also provided a shared timeline for negotiations and enabled change in UN environmental institutions.

The book’s contribution to the field, sustained through a focus on timing and temporality, rests in its original account for explaining change. Adding to rational choice, historical institutionalist, and sociological accounts of institutional change, it proposes a novel ‘temporal coordination model’ emphasizing the role of temporal convergence of expectations (246). Those interested in institutional change, past institutional processes in UN environmental affairs as well as those motivated to engage in the reform of environmental institutions will benefit from reading it. Manulak’s historical investigations and original observations bring valuable insights to resolve institutional suboptimality and invite the reader to pay greater attention to time and temporal factors as crucial to institutional life and change.

The book is relevant for teachers and students of global environmental politics, decision-makers and analysts, and for activists aiming to overcome the status quo to produce profound transformations. It shows that temporal coordination of efforts is key to crafting change. Although the reader would have gained from a broader account of the multiplicity of factors facilitating coordination in international politics, beyond crises, shocks, and the emergence of prominent temporal landmarks, the book underscores key challenges and opportunities for resolving coordination dilemmas in international politics. Ultimately, Manulak’s book offers the tools for understanding, explaining, and creating system-wide and long-lasting change. It provides well-evidenced arguments which call for broader attention to timing in social sciences and serves as an insightful repertoire of lessons for change entrepreneurs; mapping past conditions that have facilitated change and inviting them to prepare and be ready to seize upcoming opportunities. After all, change is, and always will be, a question of timing.