'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.' Simon Beaudoin, Environmental Politics
1. Introduction: Institutional suboptimality in world politics; 2. It's about time: Explaining change in UN environmental institutions; 3. The Stockholm conference and institutional change; 4. UNEP and the 1982 Nairobi conference; 5. The Brundtland commission and the seeds of change; 6. The Rio conference and institutional change; 7. Post-UNCED UN environment institutions; 8. Conclusion.