We examine how a new discourse shapes the emergence of new global regulatory institutions and, specifically, the roles played by actors and the texts they author during the institution-building process, by investigating a case study of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and its relationship to the new environmental regulatory discourse of ‘precaution’. We show that new discourses do not neatly supplant legacy discourses but, instead, are made to overlap and interact with them through the authorial agency of actors, as a result of which the meanings of both are changed. It is out of this discursive struggle that new institutions emerge.
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