The climate crisis has a terminal character and the biosphere is deteriorating alarmingly. Climate policies, like any other environmental ones, however, do not originate in a vacuum but are embedded in the context of much broader social, economic, and political goals. Governance is a social phenomenon. Mapping patterns of developmental and global insertion, therefore, are central to understanding why environmental governance among European countries remains limited among Latin American ones. Although the LAC has shown unprecedented irruption of environmental laws in recent years, weak enforcement prevails. Climate change and biodiversity loss show social systems’ limitations to dealing with them, but the old consensus might eventually break down. An eclectic set of social forces and institutional, economic, and political factors push governments for change. For bad or for good, trade and investment agreements have always played a key role in LAC environmental management agenda. The new institutional approach adopted by the European Union might be helpful, a necessary condition but certainly not sufficient to induce Latin America’s economies to move toward a new global insertion model. The chapter adopts a global political economy perspective to evaluate and compare environmental governance in Latin America and the EU.