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In this introduction, the editors suggest a framework for the study of globalization and environmental governance, review important contemporary developments in supranational environmental governance, and introduce individual contributions to the special issue. Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton's distinction between hyperglobalist, skeptical, and transformationalist perspectives on dynamics of globalization is useful in the study of the transformations in environmental governance around the world today. Three important innovations are examined: the development of supranational environmental institutions, increased use of market-based regulatory instruments, and the rise of global civil society involvement. Emergent transformations in global environmental governance are not inevitable, and neither are they sufficient for sustainability. Rather, they are constantly threatened by the interests and actions of economic actors and constrained as well by politics, geography, and global inequality. Persistent efforts by interested parties are required to retain salience, maintain momentum, and extend effectiveness of the new forms of environmental governance.

Ecological modernization theory posits that social movements play a central role in the environmental transformation of contemporary society. How they do so has received limited scholarly attention. This article seeks to reduce this thesis to a number of propositions which are then examined in light of the experience of the pulp and paper industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on field research and interviews in Southeast Asia, Australia and the United States, as well as available data, the study finds that social movements were instrumental in the environmental transformation of the pulp industry, with important differences between North and South. It concludes with a call for more nuanced studies of the influence of social movements on different sectors and countries, especially in newly industrializing countries where more tenuous and dependent forms of ecological modernization may be emerging.