Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s stark pronouncement in Davos on the “rupture” of the rules-based order captured the sense of many that long-held international norms hold little sway and the practices of major powers are increasingly unpredictable. Yet, change in global order(s) is nothing new. Our current conceptual frameworks risk overstating contemporary change even as they may have missed more subtle, but still significant, changes in global order and governance over the last several decades.

This talk makes the case for analysing international norms, practices, and their interaction to understand processes of change and continuity in global order. It identifies four scenarios of change, with illustrations from aspects of the global ecological, development, and rules-based order.

Steven Bernstein is Distinguished Professor of Global Environmental and Sustainability Governance, Acting Chair of the Graduate Department of Political Science, and Co-Director of the Environmental Governance Lab, University of Toronto. His research spans the areas of global governance and institutions, global environmental politics, and international political economy. His has published several books, most recently ‘Norms, Practices and Social Change in Global Politics’ (Cambridge University Press), and over 90 scholarly articles and book chapters. His current projects investigate transformative policies and initiatives to achieve decarbonisation, coherence and incoherence in global sustainability governance, and change and transformation in international relations and global environmental politics.

Louise Fawcett is Professor of International Relations and Wilfrid Knapp Fellow and Tutor in Politics, St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, 1995 - present. From 2017-2020 she was Head of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR).

She chairs the International Advisory Board of the UN Centre for Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS) in Belguim; she also serves on the Academic Advisory Board of German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg. In 2020 she was elected to Belgian Royal Academy (Académie Royale de Belgique) as an Associate Member of the Class of Letters and Moral and Political Sciences.

'A rupture, not a transition? Scenarios of change in the global ecological and rules-based order' with Prof Steven Bernstein