Abstract
The Paris Agreement of 2015 marks a formal shift in global climate change governance from an international legal regime that distributes state commitments to solve a collective action problem to a catalytic mechanism to promote and facilitate transformative pathways to decarbonization. It does so through a system of nationally determined contributions, monitoring and ratcheting up of commitments, and recognition that the practice of climate governance already involved an array of actors and institutions at multiple scales. In this article, we develop a framework that focuses on the politics of decarbonization to explore policy pathways and mechanisms that can disrupt carbon lock-in through these diverse, decentralized responses. It identifies political mechanisms—normalization, capacity building, and coalition building—that contribute to the scaling and entrenchment of discrete decarbonization initiatives within or across jurisdictions, markets, and practices. The role for subnational (municipal, state/provincial) climate governance experiments in this new context is especially profound. Drawing on such cases, we illustrate the framework, demonstrate its utility, and show how its political analysis can provide insight into the relationship between climate governance experiments and the formal global response as well as the broader challenge of decarbonization.
Highlights
There is no global climate regime, at least in the terms and form commonly understood over the past 25 years—a top-down, centralized, legal global response based on a treaty developed through multilateral negotiations
We develop a framework that focuses on the politics of decarbonization to explore policy pathways and mechanisms that can disrupt carbon lock-in through these diverse, decentralized responses
It acknowledges that much of the actual work of decarbonization required will be undertaken or catalyzed by a wide array of other actors, including subnational and non-state (Hale 2016). As important as this shift in legal form and institutional structure is—variously described in terms like “bottom up” and “regime complex” (Sabel and Victor 2017; Falkner et al 2010; Keohane and Victor 2011; Falkner 2016)—the Paris Agreement embodies at least the beginnings of an even more profound conceptual shift in how we understand the problem of climate change: from a legal regime conceived as a negotiated distribution of commitments to solve a collective action problem to preserve a global commons to a catalytic mechanism to promote and facilitate transformative pathways to decarbonization
Summary
There is no consensus definition of climate governance experiments or experimentation. Experimental governance was a decentralized and bottom-up response to climate change where the global regime was centralized and top down It engaged diverse actors in new arrangements working on a full range of climate-related activities rather than being a state-centric attempt to distribute greenhouse gas emission reductions. The current context where broad decarbonization is the goal, with multiple actors and processes being legitimized and recognized as climate governors, has changed the conversation once again This context raises a key new analytic challenge: to understand how experimental initiatives can catalyze (generate and accelerate) decarbonization pathways
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