Building on comparative analysis, this chapter identifies ten trends that we feel capture key dynamics of global policymaking in the early twenty-first century: the clash of sovereignties, the growing focus on individuals, the universalization of aspirations, the promotion of a holistic narrative, the orchestrating role of international organizations, the pursuit of inclusion, increasing codification, the emphasis on expertise, the resilience of the North–South divide, and Western hegemony. The arrangement of these dynamics, which embody a combination of practices and values, obviously differs across issue areas. Nonetheless, most of these ten trends are observable in pretty much any instance of global policymaking today. The ultimate goal of this comparative exercise is to determine whether there are (1) practices that recur more often than others and (2) worldviews that seem to regularly triumph over others. Among others, we observe that sovereignty remains central to global governance but sometimes in heterodox ways; codification is a much more diverse process than legalization; orchestration is as much about cooperation as it is about competition and collusion; and North–South politics can give way to unexpected alignments.

Scientific advances of the nineteenth and early twentieth century meant climate began to be understood as something to be measured and described technically; yet the supposed objectivity of this scientific discourse became inseparable from the subjectivity of social comment and prejudice. With its interest in putting different discourses in tension, Modernist writing is well suited to challenge these conceptions, and the growing literary recognition of under- or unrepresented communities saw a diversity of cultures being written. While Modernist writers such as Stein and Stevens complicated easy assertions about the social effects of climate, Southern and African-American writers including Faulkner, Hurston and Hughes contested generalized or racially inflected climatic theories. It is the economy rather than environment that places the figures of American Modernist literature in their privileged or precarious positions, which only then determines whether they can exploit or are subject to the climate. Such writing reveals the limitations and failures of technical and economic understandings of the environment, troubling them with personal and bodily experience of weather.