This PhD project explores the political influence of four sets of non-governmentalactors upon the international politics of global warming. The forms of influenceattributable to Working Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(the body set up to advise governments on the science of climate change), the massmedia's coverage of global warming, and the political involvement of both the fossilfuel lobbies and environmental groups in the policy debate on climate change, areunderstood via use of literatures on the dimensions of power appropriate tounderstanding the significance of non-state actors. The project stems from a widelyacknowledged absence of a detailed understanding of the role of non-governmentalorganisations in international environmental politics, which extends to the internationalpolitics of global warming.The influence of each group of actors is conceptualised in different ways, so that theforms of power used to describe the various groups are not compared. Rather, the aimof the thesis is to assess what a less state-centred reading of the international politics ofglobal warming, derived from a discussion of the role of the above actors, has to offerexisting explanations. The analysis of these groups of actors sheds light on differentaspects of the way the issue of climate change has been addressed at the internationallevel. The conclusions drawn about the influence of these actors are used to critique thepopular use of Regime accounts in international environmental politics that focus upon the process of institutional bargaining between states, which are argued to provide aninadequate basis for explanation of the global politics of climate change.