Abstract
Climate‐related security challenges are transnational in character, leading states to increasingly rely on intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)—such as the European Union and the North‐Atlantic Treaty Organization—for policy solutions. While climate security issues do not typically fit comfortably within the mandates of existing IGOs, recent decades have seen increasing efforts by IGOs to link climate change and security. This article reviews existing studies on IGOs’ responses to climate security challenges. It draws together research from several bodies of literature spanning political science, international relations, and environmental social science, identifying an emerging field of research revolving around IGOs and climate security. We observe significant advancement in this young field, with scholars extending and enriching our understanding of how and why IGOs address climate security challenges. Yet we still know little about the conditions under which IGOs respond to climate security challenges and when they do so effectively. This article discusses the main gaps in current work and makes some suggestions about how these gaps may be usefully addressed in future research. A better understanding of the conditions under which IGOs respond (effectively) to climate security challenges would contribute to broader debates on climate security, institutional change, and effectiveness in international relations and environmental social science, and may facilitate crafting effective global solutions to society's most intractable climate security challenges.WIREs Clim Change2018, 9:e496. doi: 10.1002/wcc.496This article is categorized under:Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance
Highlights
Societies worldwide are currently being confronted by a new class of security challenges posed by climate change
Climate change is undermining the security of states and people in ways that are unprecedented in complexity and spatial reach.[1]
There is ongoing academic debate about the causal linkages from climate change to conflict,[2,3,4,5,6] researchers and policy-makers widely agree that climate change has exacerbated existing vulnerabilities in already unstable regions by shaping social, political, and economic circumstances.[7,8,9,10]
Summary
Societies worldwide are currently being confronted by a new class of security challenges posed by climate change. Behavior, and effectiveness of IGOs in addressing climate security challenges has burgeoned in response. In several social science subfields spanning political science, international relations (IR), and environmental social science, the questions of how, why, and how effectively IGOs respond to climate security challenges have started to attract scholarly interest over the past decade. Such questions are becoming increasingly relevant in addressing this new class of global climate security problems. States have delegated more and more political authority to IGOs in recent decades, and IGOs in turn are known to affect state behavior through means such as economic coercion, social shaming, information provision, agenda-setting, and norm socialization (Ref 11)
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