As international environmental law grows decentralized, it is increasingly important to understand how norms promoting new environmental law institutions diffuse. This article identifies the actor classes that are promoting a norm supporting the establishment of specialized environmental courts and tribunals. It first surveys existing literature on environmental and institutional norm diffusion for foundational insight. Using document review, expert surveys and elite interviews, the article identifies key actors who have sought to promote environmental court establishment. The findings affirm that environmental courts have been promoted by widely recognized agents of environmental norm diffusion, including intergovernmental organizations, regional organizations and nongovernmental organizations. However, the results also emphasize that global environmental norms reflect active engagement by domestic judges, courts and judicial networks. This finding holds broad theoretical relevance for legal transfer and norm dynamics research in global environmental governance. First, while domestic judges are widely recognized for implementing international environmental legal norms and contributing to the governance of specific environmental regimes, this study demonstrates a case where domestic judges' norm entrepreneurship has actively supported the global diffusion of an emergent institutional norm. Second, while institutional actors including intergovernmental organizations, regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations and judicial networks are known to directly advocate new environmental institutions, this article emphasizes that they also catalyse normative dialogue, intentionally facilitating exchanges among domestic judges and actors. Collectively, these insights support ongoing research examining what values domestic environmental courts may reflect and how domestic judges and courts support environmental norm diffusion, broadly. Finally, the interdisciplinary nature of these findings underscores the benefit and practice-relevance of further integrating norm diffusion scholarship in international environmental law and global environmental politics. | INTRODUCTIONAs global environmental politics and international environmental law principles are increasingly interpreted and implemented in decentralized, domestic and subnational settings, domestic courts and judges offer valuable and often innovative pathways for governing global challenges. 1 Simultaneously, understanding who is advocating 1

The rapid and widespread establishment of domestic environmental courts and tribunals raises important questions regarding their implications for international environmental law and global environmental governance. I use an interdisciplinary, multi-method approach to consider the capacity of domestic environmental courts to identify and apply norms and principles of international environmental law in domestic opinions. I first review existing literature, identifying jurisdiction, judicial discretion, and a court's position in a legal system as key institutional determinants of this capacity. I then develop a typology of domestic environmental courts and tribunals, which suggests that, all else being equal, a court with national geographic jurisdiction that also enjoys attributes of broad subject-matter jurisdiction and discretion may be expected to be best equipped to implement norms and principles of international environmental law. Next, I integrate existing assessments of environmental court presence with original outreach and web research to identify all countries which possess environmental courts, and assess a subset of eight existing national-level institutions. The analysis of this subset highlights the diversity of institutional models that can incorporate theorized best practices. Based on these findings, I draw several theoretical conclusions: specifically (i) the relevance of environmental court research to individual- and institutional-level analysis in transnational and international environmental law, (ii) the need for further legal-institutional analysis in global environmental governance scholarship, and (iii) the opportunity for further interdisciplinary analysis of the role of domestic courts in environmental governance.

As the emergence of nongovernmental conservation efforts generates conflict among various stakeholders, the causal story that each party articulates regarding conservation and the causes of land degradation reflects their unique interests. This study uses existing literature to evaluate causal stories surrounding a contemporary conservation effort: Montana's American Prairie Reserve. Through qualitative review of web-based documents and newspaper articles, it generates a preliminary account of key stakeholders' causal stories. The case study suggests that parties who might be disadvantaged by ascribing responsibility for environmental harms in an adversarial fashion may instead elect to articulate causal stories that are more neutral than existing approaches might forecast. The study concludes by suggesting that further development of causal story literature may enable it to better address contemporary conservation efforts.鉴于非政府形式的自然保护区工作的出现导致了不同利益攸关方之间产生冲突，各方就自然 保护区和土地退化的起因而发表的叙事反应了各自的独特利益。本研究使用现有文献，对围 绕蒙大拿州的美国大草原自然保护区(Montana's American Prairie Reserve)这一当代保护区 工作的因果叙事进行了评价。通过对基于网页的文件和报纸文章进行定性审视，产生了有关 利益攸关方因果叙事的初步记录。案例研究暗示，那些因以一种对立方式对环境危害的责任 进行归因而可能处于劣势的党派，有可能反而选择表达比现有方法所预测的更为中立的因果 叙事。本文结论建议，对因果叙事进行进一步研究，可能会更好地应对当代自然保护区工作。 关键词: 因果叙事, 自然保护区, 环境冲突, 叙事, 政策叙事 A medida que el surgimiento de esfuerzos de conservación no gubernamentales genera conflictos entre varias partes interesadas, la historia causal que cada parte articula sobre la conservación y las causas de la degradación de la tierra refleja sus intereses únicos. Este estudio utiliza literatura existente para evaluar historias causales que rodean un esfuerzo de conservación contemporáneo: la Reserva de Praderas Estadounidense de Montana. A través de la revisión cualitativa de documentos basados en la web y artículos periodísticos, genera una cuenta preliminar de las historias causales de los principales interesados El estudio de caso sugiere que las partes que podrían estar en desventaja al atribuir la responsabilidad de los daños ambientales de una manera adversaria pueden optar por articular historias causales que son más neutrales de lo que podrían predecir los enfoques existentes. El estudio concluye sugiriendo que un mayor desarrollo de la literatura de historias causales puede permitirle abordar mejor los esfuerzos contemporáneos de conservación.

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