Environmentalism as a global agenda has gained currency particularly in the aftermath of 1970s when some international events on environmental issues took place around the world. The diverse theoretical perspectives have been advanced to understand the rise of environmental agenda at global level and its consequential impact on sovereign states. It has increasingly been claimed by the scholars of neoliberal institutional theory that the environmental problems are such issues that can attract the attention of the whole world and generate cooperation among nation-states for its solution. But how far this assertion is true is the test of time. This article is a benign step in the direction of conducting this test. The neoliberal institutional theory, which is fully supportive of this claim, has been systematically analyzed in this article and its basic assumptions have been juxtaposed with the real-world situation arising out of environmental crisis to point out how state’s behavior/sovereignty gets modified to accommodate burden resulted from global environmental crisis. It has been observed in this article that in order to fully appraise the global environmental agenda, the basic assumptions of neoliberal institutional theory, which have by and large remained successful in explaining the global environmental agenda, need to be refined and strengthened further.
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