Regime Complex For Climate Change Research Articles

European Leadership and European Youth in the Climate Change Regime Complex

Environmental degradation is one of the most significant challenges faced by humanity, yet current global politics struggle to implement collective solutions. Previous research has suggested that the EU has a leadership role in the international climate change regime complex, which refer to a set of overlapping institutions that address different aspects of climate governance. Moreover, within these regime complexes, non-state actors have been found to have an active role. Building on the literature on regime complexes and non-state actors, we study the specific role of European non-state actors in furthering the EU’s agenda in the climate change regime complex. More precisely, we focus on European youth organizations. Indeed, youth have recently embraced the global climate agenda very actively while receiving limited attention from scholars. This article is based on the analysis of a database of youth organizations active in several institutions of the climate change regime complex, interviews with European officials and European youth actors, and documentary analysis. The analysis shows that EU interactions with European youth have been slow, while the need for coordination between the two is clear. On an analytical level, we contribute to the academic debate on how governmental entities such as the EU could shape international regime complexes with the support of non-state actors.

A matter of information – The influence of international bureaucracies in global climate governance networks

International bureaucracies, also called International Public Administrations (IPAs), have been identified as potentially influential actors within the global climate change regime complex. To assess how these organizations exert influence, scholars have predominantly relied on case studies, interviews and descriptive (network) statistics. This article aims to contribute to this literature with a systematic analysis that is not limited to an organization, issue or region, but applies exponential random graph models (ERGMs) to data from an original large-N survey (n = 342) of participants of global climate negotiations. Our findings indicate that IPAs have a considerable potential to influence global climate policy outputs. This potential influence is associated with the information they provide to regime stakeholders.

The Climate Change Regime Complex

Abstract In an era defined by forum shopping, institutional proliferation, and regime complexity, why do global governance arrangements remain relatively stable? This article combines the insights of regime complexity scholarship with historical institutionalism to address this question. It argues that the establishment of international regimes creates winners and losers. States dissatisfied with these arrangements push for institutional change. Regimes nonetheless tend to develop in a path-dependent manner because institutions are resistant to change and the winners under the status quo seek to protect it. Thus, existing governance arrangements exert a centripetal pull, even when states engage in forum shopping and institutional proliferation to generate regime complexity. An examination of path-dependent institutional development in the global climate regime supports the argument.

The Role of An Environmental Goods Agreement in the Quest to Improve the Regime Complex for Climate Change

The environment-trade nexus requires action. Environmentalists have claimed that the interests of the trade community, as represented at the WTO, would trump environmental concerns while trade specialists have claimed that an open trading system is key to meet the environmental challenge facing us. After a decade-long negotiation at the WTO on the reduction of tariffs on environmental goods (EGs) failed to produce an agreement, in 2014 a group of 14 countries entered plurilateral negotiations aiming for an Environmental Goods Agreement (EGA) that would have substantially reduced or eliminated tariffs on a long list of EGs. This also failed. This paper discusses the hurdles faced by these negotiations, the resulting stalemate, and avenues for reviving the negotiations. We argue that conclusion of the EGA negotiations under the current narrow agenda would help build trust to go further but would produce only very modest gains. Extending the agenda to include non-tariff barriers (NTBs) and environmental services remains the acid test for an EGA to address meaningfully the climate-change challenge.

Accountability Challenges in the Transnational Regime Complex for Climate Change

AbstractThis article discusses challenges to accountability in the context of transnational climate governance. It argues that the emergence of a distinct transnational regime complex and the increasingly integrated structure of international and transnational climate governance create new challenges for using established analytical frameworks that rely on accountability regimes for individual actor types. Instead, studying accountability requires a system‐level conceptualization and a revisiting of accountability regimes, taking diversity and networked governance structures into account. Using data from the CONNECT‐project on the transnational regime complex for climate change, the article uses a framework of six elements of an accountability regime to identify three overarching accountability challenges. First, the expanding borders of the transnational regime complex for climate change are starting to shift accountability from the multilateral level (the UNFCCC) to a networked and more intricate structure. Second, transparency, monitoring, and reporting remain an urgent challenge despite a rapidly increasing flow of data and repositories in particular concerning ex‐post impacts. Third, the availability and utility of sanctions are poorly understood in the context of transnational climate governance.

Taking a wider view on climate governance: moving beyond the ‘iceberg,’ the ‘elephant,’ and the ‘forest’

Attention in the literature on global climate politics has recently turned from a focus on intergovernmental negotiations to conceptualizing climate governance ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ the UN regime. However, this literature differs on three key aspects: the underlying research paradigms, what is identified as the heart of the problem, and proposed solutions. One group of scholars calls for an attention shift from the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of climate governance to its much larger ‘hidden parts,’ conceptualized through notions such as the ‘climate change regime complex,’ a ‘fragmented climate governance architecture,’ and ‘transnational climate governance.’ A second set of authors points to the ‘elephant in the room,’ namely underlying power structures and material configurations in the international system that block effective responses to the climate crisis. A third group has argued that instead of looking at the individual ‘trees’ of climate negotiations, research should focus on the ‘forest’ of climate governance, made up of framings, norms, and emerging ‘climate governmentalities.’ The article proposes the concept of a ‘schism of reality’ as a means to overcome this fragmentation of the literature. This notion offers a new way of understanding interactions between the climate regime and its wider environment by focusing on discrepancies and contradictions. It accommodates different theoretical perspectives and provides common ground for future research: on how paradoxes and contradictions are dealt with in climate governance; how they can be overcome; how current developments in climate governance reduce the schism; and where and why aspects of the schism persist. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:318–328. doi: 10.1002/wcc.391This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > International Policy Framework

Non-state governance and climate policy: the fossil fuel divestment movement

This article charts the evolution of the divestment movement, a transnational advocacy network that uses a range of strategies to shame, pressure, facilitate, and encourage investors in general, and large institutional investors in particular, to relinquish their holdings of fossil fuel stocks in favour of climate-friendly alternatives. It describes the movement's central characteristics and the strategies it employs, it maps its basic architecture and the potential role it plays in the broader climate change regime complex, and shows how it represents a novel form of private investor-targeted climate change governance, operating primarily through symbolic political action and as a norm entrepreneur. Given the potential importance of the movement, the model it may provide for other forms of private governance, and the paucity of analysis of its implications for climate change mitigation, this article addresses an important descriptive and analytical gap in the climate policy literature.Policy relevanceThe early success and rapid growth of the divestment movement suggests it may play a significant role within the broader sphere of climate change policy. This article shows how the movement has used the aggregation, packaging, and dissemination of scientific fact and moral argument, and local and international campaigning, direct action, lobbying, and knowledge construction to steer the actions of investors. More broadly it demonstrates how shaming, persuasion, and empowerment can be used as strategies to bring about economic and political change and to catalyse the ‘energy revolution’ that many see as the essence of effective climate change mitigation. In so doing, the article indicates how climate policy can be advanced by novel forms of private governance, and (so its proponents would argue) how more might be achieved by unconventional means and leveraging the private sector than governments have managed by conventional means in some two decades.

Non-State Governance and Climate Policy: The Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement

This article charts the evolution of the divestment movement, a transnational advocacy network that uses a range of strategies to shame, pressure, facilitate, and encourage investors in general, and large institutional investors in particular, to relinquish their holdings of fossil fuel stocks in favour of climate-friendly alternatives. It describes the movement’s central characteristics and the strategies it employs, it maps its basic architecture and the potential role it plays in the broader climate change regime complex, and shows how it represents a novel form of private investor-targeted climate change governance, operating primarily through symbolic political action and as a norm entrepreneur. Given the potential importance of the movement, the model it may provide for other forms of private governance, and the paucity of analysis of its implications for climate change mitigation, this article addresses an important descriptive and analytical gap in the climate policy literature.

Narrowed Constellations in a Supranational Climate Change Regime Complex: The 'Magic Number' is Four

The world needs a supranational-level solution to climate change within very few years. Nonetheless, much existing scholarship almost stubbornly continues to promote solutions that are still too broad to be viable within a realistic timeframe. This article breaks with these theories and posits that effective climate change action can be instigated by a much lower number of nations than what has been promoted thus far, and that this is the only realistic solution in the scientifically proved timeframe in which catastrophic climate change can still be avoided. Such minilateralism among fewer nations is a more realistic solution with greater potential for more targeted and effective results. However, a crucial question remains to be answered in this context: what is the “magic number” at which a supranational governance system is the most likely to be able to develop a solution that not only has some substantive effect, but that can also act as a catalyst for further treaty membership increase and/or replication in other contexts? This article provides the answer: It is three. The United States, China, and the EU, and Brazil or India will be able to move forward the agenda that was reinvigorated in 2012 when negotiations to develop a successor treaty to the now-expired Kyoto Protocol got back on track at the meeting of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (“UNFCCC”). In providing this answer, the article critically examines a few of the world’s most successful treaties. Some of these have unfortunately become largely forgotten about in today’s rush to what seems to be an attempt to reinvent the treaty wheel. They provide important lessons to learn for anyone interested in international environmental law.

Strengthening the Transnational Regime Complex for Climate Change†

AbstractThe inadequacies of the inter-state institutions and negotiating processes central to international climate policy create a pressing need for governance innovation. This article proposes one promising and feasible approach: strengthening the existingtransnationalregime complex for climate change. Leading organizations could strengthen the regime complex by forging stronger links among institutions, increasing coordination and collaboration, supporting weaker institutions and encouraging the entry of new ones where governance gaps exist. An enhanced regime complex would have a multilevel structure, enabling transnational institutions tobypassrecalcitrant national governments by directly engaging sub-state and societal actors at multiple levels of authority and scale. It would also help tomanagerecalcitrant states by mobilizing advocacy, demonstration effects and other pressures on governments. Regime entrepreneurs, using the strategy of orchestration, could deploy a range of incentives and other tools of influence to enrol, support and steer transnational organizations.

Order out of Chaos: Public and Private Rules for Managing Carbon

To date, much of the work on “regime complexes”—loosely connected nonhierarchical institutions—has excluded an important part of the institutional picture: the role of private authority. This paper seeks to remedy this shortcoming by examining privately created standards within the regime complex for climate change and their relationship to public authority. Public rules in the Kyoto Protocol serve as a “coral reef,” attracting private rulemakers whose governance activities come to form part of the regime complex. Using original data, I conduct a network analysis of public and private standards for carbon management. Surprisingly, I find evidence of policy convergence—both around public rules and a subset of privately created rules: there is an emerging order in the complex institutional landscape that governs climate change. The observed convergence arises from private standards' concerns about demonstrating credibility and providing benefits for users. These findings are important for scholars of institutional complexity and climate politics: public rules on carbon accounting have the potential to outlast their current incarnation in the Kyoto Protocol, as perpetuated through private authority.

Constructing a Transnational Climate Change Regime: Bypassing and Managing States

The inadequacies of the inter-state institutions and negotiating processes central to international climate policy create a pressing need for innovative modes of governance. This paper proposes one promising and feasible approach: strengthening the existing transnational regime complex for climate change. Leading organizations could strengthen the regime complex by forging stronger links among institutions, increasing coordination and collaboration, supporting weaker institutions and encouraging the entry of new ones where governance gaps exist. An enhanced regime complex would have a multi-level structure, enabling transnational institutions to directly engage, address and support sub-state and societal actors at multiple levels of authority and scale. In this way the transnational regime complex would bypass recalcitrant national governments. It would also help manage recalcitrant states by focusing advocacy, creating demonstration effects and otherwise mobilizing pressure on governments. Regime entrepreneurs using the strategy of orchestration could deploy a range of incentives and other tools of influence to enroll, support and steer transnational organizations.

Restoring the Climate by Realizing Rights: The Role of the International Human Rights System

In recent years human rights have begun to feature prominently as a tool to address climate change. This article explores how the institutions and tools of the human rights system are being deployed to complement the negotiations within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, close the emissions gap and hold the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C or 1.5 °C above pre‐industrial levels. It offers an explanation of how the interface between rights and climate change has helped to evolve our analysis of socio‐ecological thresholds, created a strong and compelling narrative centered on climate justice, and enhanced political processes to better account for the experience of vulnerable populations. The article shows that the various Special Procedures and Universal Periodic Review of the Human Rights Council are already advancing the cause of urgent and ambitious climate action and suggests ways in which they can become more influential in a wider climate change regime complex.

The Transnational Regime Complex for Climate Change

In climate change, as in other areas, recent years have produced a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of transnational institutions, standards, financing arrangements, and programs. As a result, climate governance has become complex, fragmented, and decentralized, operating without central coordination. Most studies of climate governance focus on inter state institutions. In contrast, I map a different realm of climate change governance: the diverse array of transnational schemes. I analyze this emerging system in terms of two theoretical frameworks developed to describe, explain, and evaluate complex governance arrangements—regime complex theory and polycentric governance theory—revealing fruitful avenues for positive and normative research. I conclude by arguing that the benefits of institutional complexity could be increased, and the costs reduced, through nonhierarchical ‘orchestration’ of climate change governance, in which international organizations or other appropriate authorities support and steer transnational schemes that further global public interests.

The Transnational Regime Complex for Climate Change

In climate change as in other issue areas, recent years have produced a Cambrian explosion of international and transnational institutions, rules, implementation mechanisms, financing arrangements and operational programs. This renders governance highly complex: climate governance is not only fragmented but decentralized, operating with little central coordination. It is more appropriate to view it as a regime than as a unified regime.Most discussions of the climate change regime complex focus on inter-state institutions, especially those that promulgate legally binding rules. A recent example is Robert Keohane & David Victor's important 2011 paper in Perspectives on Politics, Regime Complex for Climate Change. The present paper, in contrast, maps the true regime complex for climate change: the inter-state arrangements Keohane & Victor identify, plus the diverse and expanding array of transnational organizations engaged in climate change governance.The paper then characterizes transnational climate governance in terms of two theoretical frameworks developed specifically to describe, explain and evaluate complex governance arrangements; this reveals potentially fruitful lines of positive and normative analysis. Regime complex theory provides some useful insights, but its core arguments are of limited utility for transnational governance. A looser version of the theory, though, directs attention to the causes and effects of institutional fragmentation and to ways of managing fragmentation. Polycentric governance theory, associated with the work of Elinor Ostrom, also considers the benefits and costs of fragmentation. But it directs particular attention to the scale of individual organizations and to the operations of governance systems at multiple scales, arguing that polycentric, multi-scalar systems can produce collective action more effectively than unified institutions such as the UNFCCC/Kyoto Protocol process. This has important implications for climate governance.

The Regime Complex for Climate Change

There is no integrated regime governing efforts to limit the extent of climate change. Instead, there is a regime complex: a loosely-coupled set of specific regimes. We describe the regime complex for climate change and seek to explain it, using interest-based, functional, and organizational arguments. This institutional form is likely to persist; efforts to build a comprehensive regime are unlikely to succeed, but experiments abound with narrower institutions focused on particular aspects of the climate change problem. Building on this analysis, we argue that a climate change regime complex, if it meets specified criteria, has advantages over any politically feasible comprehensive regime. Adaptability and flexibility are particularly important in a setting—such as climate change policy—in which the most demanding international commitments are interdependent yet governments vary widely in their interest and ability to implement them. Yet in view of the serious political constraints, both domestic and international, there is little reason for optimism that the climate regime complex that is emerging will lead to reductions in emissions rapid enough to meet widely discussed goals, such as stopping global warming at two degrees above pre-industrial levels.

A Climate Coalition of the Willing

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See, for example, Robert Keohane and David Victor, “The Regime Complex for Climate Change,” Discussion Paper 10–33, The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, January 2010, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/19880/regime_complex_for_climate_change.html. Note, however, that their definition of the regime complex excludes private and sub-state actors. 2. See, for example, J. Lawrence Broz and Daniel Maliniak, “Malapportionment, Gasoline Taxes, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,” presented at the Third Annual Conference on The Political Economy of International Organizations, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., January 28–30, 2010, http://dss.ucsd.edu/~jlbroz/pdf_folder/wip/broz_maliniak_PEIO.pdf. 3. Antoaneta Bezlova, “China's Climate Change Plan: The Debate Goes On,” Inter Press Service News Agency, November 6, 2009, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49166. 4. National Development and Reform Commission, “China's National Climate Change Programme,” June 2007, http://www.ccchina.gov.cn/WebSite/CCChina/UpFile/File188.pdf. 5. For further information on Chinese climate-change policy, see the government's online informational portal, http://www.ccchina.gov.cn/en/; also see ChinaFAQs, an informational Web site sponsored by the Washington-based World Resources Institute, http://www.chinafaqs.org/. 6. U.S. Energy Information Administration, “International Energy Statistics,” http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=90&pid=44&aid=8. 7. For an overview of the negotiations of the ozone regime from the perspective of the chief U.S. negotiator, see Richard Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 8. For more information, see the organization's Web site, www.c40cities.org; for a detailed study of “urban climate governance,” see Heike Schroeder and Harriet Bulkeley, “Global Cities and the Governance of Climate Change: What is the Role of Law in Cities?,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 36 (2009): p. 313, http://law2.fordham.edu/publications/articles/400flspub17715.pdf. 9. For more information, see the network's Web site, http://www.incr.com/; for an analysis, see Michael MacLeod, “Private Governance and Climate Change: Institutional Investors and Emerging Investor-Driven Governance Mechanisms,” St. Antony's International Review 5, no. 2 (February 2010): pp. 46–65. 10. For a partial list, see Mathew Hoffmann, “Climate Governance Experiments,” http://matthewhoffmann.wordpress.com/climate-governance-experiments/. 11. Nicholas Lutsey and Daniel Sperling, ‘‘America's Bottom-up Climate Change Mitigation Policy’’, Energy Policy 36, no. 2 (February 2008): pp. 673—685. 12. President Barack Obama, “Executive Order 13514—Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance,” October 8, 2009, http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/pdf/E9-24518.pdf. 13. The countries surveyed were Bangladesh, China, Egypt, France, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Russia, Senegal, Turkey, the United States, and Vietnam; see The World Bank, “Public attitudes toward climate change: findings from a multi-country poll,” December 3, 2009, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDR2010/Resources/Background-report.pdf. 14. U.S. Energy Information Agency, “Greenhouse Gases, Climate Change, and Energy,” http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggccebro/chapter1.html. 15. See, for example, the EPA's Household Emissions Calculator, http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html; the Nature Conservancy's Carbon Footprint Calculator, http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator/?gclid=CNyfr4DB4aQCFctL5QodVihNGg; or Carbon Footprint Ltd, http://www.carbonfootprint.com/. 16. The UN Global Compact's registry can be found at http://www.unglobalcompact.org/ParticipantsAndStakeholders/index.html. 17. David Vogel, Trading Up: Consumer and Environmental Regulation in a Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 18. Paul-Erik Veel, “Carbon Tariffs and the WTO: An Evaluation of Feasible Policies,” Journal of International Economic Law 12, no. 3 (2009): pp. 749–800. Additional informationNotes on contributorsThomas HaleThomas Hale is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and a Visiting Fellow at LSE Global Governance, London School of Economics