Generative institutions reflect efforts by ‘a community or a collection of groups that join forces….to promote a particular set of activities … [by] structuring the way parties think about problems’ (Young, 1999b: 40-1). Not surprisingly, then, such institutions are common during the early stages of an international environmental problem’s lifecycle when the definition of the problem is still in a state of flux. Indeed, they are most common during the issue emergence stage discussed in the previous chapter (and therefore they receive little further discussion here)
Programmatic institutions tend to appear when states to foster scientific progress on problems that are poorly understood