Abstract
As nations agreed on a bottom-up approach to establish the Paris Agreement in 2015, Non-state Actors (NSAs) became increasingly acknowledged as key players in the implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). In a mostly urbanised world, local governments have a major part to play in designing and implementing climate policies that will help overcome carbon lock-in and enable the transition to a sustainable low-carbon future. Transnational municipal networks (TMNs) have a well-documented history of contributing to multilevel climate governance and supporting experiments in local climate action in many countries. In Brazil, urban climate experimentation has increased since 2005 and accelerated after 2015. Based on empirical evidence from a national survey and two Brazilian metropolises, the study demonstrates that TMNs have been drivers of the municipal climate agenda in Brazil, but there is no evidence so far that urban governance experiments have resulted in significant greenhouse gas emission reductions. Furthermore, the collective impact of cities' experimentation on the national climate agenda is yet to be verified. In light of multilevel climate governance and the urban experimentation conceptual framework, we contend that while there is no documented evidence that local climate action has affected Brazil's ability to meet its mitigation goals, cities' paradiplomacy and policy experiments have strengthened a multilevel approach to climate governance and contributed to positive change towards a sustainable transition. Furthermore, a closer look at policies across scales and their interactions will help our understanding of how to improve t'he institutional framework for climate governance in Brazil and secure GHG emission reductions, thus contributing to global goals beyond 2020.
Highlights
To address the most challenging collective action problem in modern era, nations have moved from a top-down binary approach that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol in 1998, to a bottom-up process that culminated in the 2015 Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2015; Brun, 2016, p. 115)
Following negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement, Brazil submitted its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat in September 2015, declaring absolute greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction goals of 37 percent by 2025 and 43 percent by 2030, relative to 2005 levels (Brazil, 2015)
In the words of an environmental official from Belo Horizonte “the citys participation in Transnational municipal networks (TMNs) resulted in positive outcomes [due to climate policies],such as a significant decrease of respiratory disease cases and losses due to flooding.”28 Salvadors municipal environment secretary considers that “participating in transnational networks is fundamental for inspiration and learning about what to do and how to avoid repeating mistakes.”29 We argue that this focus on co-benefits does not affect potential mitigation results, as questioned by some researchers (Bansard et al, 2017)
Summary
To address the most challenging collective action problem in modern era, nations have moved from a top-down binary approach that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol in 1998, to a bottom-up process that culminated in the 2015 Paris Agreement NSAs had participated as observer groups since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) entered into force and became acknowledged key players with a central role in the Paris Agreement implementation. Their actions are reported within the international governance framework through the NAZCA2 platform established in 2014 by the UNFCCC. By June 2018, NSAs including business, civil society organisations and subnational governments had reported over 12,500 climate actions cities alone accounted for over 2500 entries, including from Brazil
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