Global Climate Governance between State and Non-State Actors: Dynamics of Contestation and Re-Legitimation

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Global climate governance is one of the most complex global governance systems that is also ridden with divergent interests of states and non-state actors. Since the 2000s, the authority of UN-led global climate governance has been contested by the states declining their mitigation targets of the Kyoto Protocol and by those that find the international climate negotiations inefficient to ramp up climate action. These divergent views of states resulted in the counter-institutionalization apparent in the proliferation of minilateral forums and hybrid coalitions of climate initiatives oftentimes bringing states and non-state actors together. These non-UNFCCC partnerships have functioned to be strategic actions that put pressure on the global climate governance system to re-legitimate itself. Meanwhile, transnational actors have also contested the same system demanding a deeper cooperation that will keep the temperature goal below 2 degrees. This study argues that with its new mode of governance named hybrid multilateralism, the Paris Agreement was actually an institutional adaptation to the contestations by states and non-state actors in the forms of counter-institutionalization and politicization. It also discusses the problematic sides of the functions that non-state actors are expected to provide in this new governance mode. This paper is composed of four parts: firstly, the theoretical background that feeds into the analysis of empirical data with regard to global climate governance will be presented. Secondly, beginning from the Rio Conference, milestone developments in global climate governance will be examined by taking the contestation by the states into consideration. In the third part, the process of the politicization of climate change in which transnational actors and specifically the climate change movement demanded more decisive climate action will be explicated. In the last part, the existing legitimacy deficits with regard to non-state actors in post-Paris climate governance will be elaborated.