Abstract: Offers the first comprehensive history of international efforts to protect the ozone layer by abandoning the use of chlorofluorohydrocarbons (CFCs), and underlines that this is the greatest success yet achieved in managing human impacts on the global environment. The arguments advanced to explain how this success was achieved are theoretically novel and of great significance for the management of other global problems, particularly global climate change. An account is provided of ozone-depletion issues from the first attempts to develop international action in the 1970s to the mature functioning of the present international ozone protection regime. Examines the parallel developments of politics and negotiations, scientific understanding and controversy, technological progress, and industry strategy that shaped the issue's development and its effective management. Important new insights are offered into how the interactions among these domains influenced the formation and adaptation of the ozone protection regime. In addressing the initial formation of the regime, the book argues that authoritative scientific assessments were crucial in constraining policy debates, and shaping negotiated agreements. Assessments gave scientific claims an ability to change policy actors’ behaviour that the claims themselves, however well known and verified, lacked. Concerning subsequent adaptation of the regime, the book identifies a series of feedbacks between the periodic revision of chemical controls and the strategic responses of affected industries, which drove rapid application of new approaches to reduce ozone-depicting chemicals. These feedbacks, promoted by the regime's novel technology assessment process, allowed worldwide use of the CFCs to decline further and faster than even the boldest predictions — by nearly 95%t within ten years.

Keywords: CFCs, chemicals, chlorofluorohydrocarbons, environmental management, environmental policy, environmental protection, international agreements, international cooperation, negotiation, ozone depletion, ozone layer, ozone protection regime