Neoliberal civil society? INGOs in the Montreal protocol

Global Environmental Governance has shifted over the years, moving away from government regulation, command-and-control policies, and usage of the precautionary principle.  Nowadays, entrepreneurial solutions, trading instruments and other market-based models are most common in global environmental discourse and policy.  These approaches to global environmentalism can be roughly linked to neo-liberalism.  In the paper, I will illustrate this shift in global environmental governance, and show how it has affected international environmental nongovernmental organizations (IENGOs) operating in the Montreal Protocol. It is argued that IENGOs contribute to the neo-liberalization of ozone governance, in some cases changing tactics to fit the neo-liberal discourse of the treaty.  Consequently, some IENGOs have recently abandoned what appear to be outdated discourses of global environmental health, global security, and social welfare to address neo-liberal concerns of individualism, competition, and transparency in ozone politics.