The proposed panel focuses on international organizations as political bodies in which new approaches to conceptualizing the environment emerged in the decades following the Second World War. By offering insight into a range of organizations that dealt with a variety of topics, all of which touched upon environmental problems, the panel brings the fields of environmental, international, and global history into productive conversation with each other. Glenda Sluga’s paper takes a number of case studies of the ‘UN Environmental Program’ and ‘UN Economic Commission for the Far East’ to examine how they engaged environmental policy in the context of the dominant developmental paradigm that became the raison d’ètre of the UN across the first three decades of the postwar. The paper by Amalia Ribi Forclaz and Corinna Unger studies discussions about environmental risks associated with chemicalized agriculture that took place in three UN specialized agencies: the International Labour Organization, the World Health Organization, and the Food and Agriculture Organization. Taking into account the political, social and economic contexts in which these UN agencies operated at the time, the paper analyzes the production and mobilization of ecological expertise over three decades, from the 1940s to the 1970s. Richard Schweizer’s paper focuses on Greenpeace’s external communication practice between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, illustrating the non-governmental organization’s anthropocentric policy approach. The analysis reveals how Greenpeace emphasized a direct correlation between environmental protection and human well-being. In this way, the NGO contributed indirectly to increasing civil society demands for environmental human rights as a result of heightened global awareness. With its focus on the emergence of a global environmental consciousness and its emphasis on international organizations’ archives, the panel contributes to ENIUGH’s themes “Global environmental history” and “Expanding the global archive”. Its aim is to overcome the nation-centered narratives that dominate historiography in this field so far, and to contribute to the writing of critical global histories that challenge the notion of a linear postwar development toward global governance.