Abstract
As international climate negotiations under the UNFCCC have adopted the goal to limit the increase in global mean temperature to well below 2° C, a highly differentiated—but largely uncoordinated—global climate governance system has emerged. Although coordinated global collective action for mitigating climate change sufficiently to meet the 2°-C goal is still lacking, a multitude of multilateral, minilateral, transnational, national, subnational, and nonstate actors have emerged. This article offers a critical specification of the attempt by Elinor Ostrom and those influenced by her in the literature to conceptualize this climate governance reality as a polycentric approach. We claim that the concept of polycentricity offers high descriptive value for understanding the horizontal and vertical differentiations of current climate governance, and present systematic analysis of a polycentric approach to deliberately enhance the design of the emerging global climate governance architecture. To systematize the Ostromean literature on polycentric climate governance, we identify and specify four key features for climate mitigation governance and their related mechanisms: an emphasis on self-organization, a recognition of site-specific conditions, the facilitation of experimentation and learning, and the building of trust. After discussing objections to a polycentric approach, we conclude by tentatively evaluating its potential to enhance the effectiveness of climate mitigation, and identify central tasks for the efficient design of a polycentric global climate governance regime.
Highlights
As international climate negotiations under the UNFCCC have adopted the goal to limit the increase in global mean temperature to well below 2° C, a highly differentiated—but largely uncoordinated—global climate governance system has emerged
Current global collective action is insufficient to achieve the goal of limiting global warming to well below 2° C (UNEP 2016)
Classical top-down approaches have emphasized the global character of the climate change problem and identified international multilateralism, seen as cooperative effort between nation-states, as the central and most appropriate forum for climate governance (Hare et al 2010)
Summary
In the 1940s and 1950s, Michael Polanyi analyzed “polycentric tasks” in a number of articles (collected in Polanyi 1998), referring to problems of balancing a large number of elements—ranging from mathematically calculable displacements of multiple connected, interdependent dots in a graphical network, up to the noncalculable manageability of complex social tasks. As part of Ostrom’s insights on self-organization for sustainable resource management at the local level, she argued in the case of global commons management against the prevalent prediction “that only two state-established institutional arrangements—centralized government and private property—could sustain commons over the long run” (Dietz et al 2003, 1907) Instead, she referred to a number of local, national, and regional policies and other individual climate-relevant actions, highlighting the potential to create and exploit cobenefits at multiple scales and levels to incentivize climate mitigation. Jordan et al (2015) critically discuss promising strands of the literature on new, dynamic forms of climate governance, but call for scientific and political efforts to strengthen the understanding and effectiveness of the rather diverse polycentric patterns
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