What have scholars learned over the past decade about the forces that shape the creation, design, and adaptation of intergovernmental institutions in earth system governance and their influence on state behaviour? Context characteristics – shared, science-based knowledge; the behaviours involved; and the availability of alternative behaviours – can shape institutional creation, design and adaptation. The strategies states, existing institutions and non-state actors deploy, in turn, can promote institutional formation despite challenges or inhibit it despite propitious conditions. Context characteristics also can pose larger or smaller obstacles to institutional effectiveness. Institutions prove more effective when their designs reflect political, economic and social constraints as well as major actors’ power and incentives. They shape material, ideational and normative incentives and opportunities that channel states toward positive behaviours and away from negative ones. New research can build on recent findings by investigating complex interactions at and across the international, transnational, domestic and subnational levels of earth system governance.