Bäckstrand, K., & Lövbrand, E. (2015) - Research Handbook On Climate Governance

RESEARCH HANDBOOK ON CLIMATE
GOVERNANCE
Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

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Research Handbook on Climate
Governance
Edited by
Karin Bäckstrand
Professor, Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, Sweden
Eva Lövbrand
Associate Professor, Department of Thematic Studies: Environmental
Change, Linköping University, Sweden
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand 2015
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otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
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Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.

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A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015945552
This book is available electronically in the

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DOI 10.4337/9781783470600
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01
Contents
List of figures and tablesix

List of contributorsx
Acknowledgementsxv
Climate governance after Copenhagen: research trends and policy practicexvii
Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand
PART I THEORIZING CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
1. Global governance 3
Markus Lederer
2. Realism 14
John Vogler
3. Political economy 25
Peter Newell
4. Science and technology studies 36
Sheila Jasanoff
5. Governmentality 49
Johannes Stripple and Harriet Bulkeley
6. Deliberative democracy 60
Hayley Stevenson
7. Feminism 73
Annica Kronsell
8. Normative theory 84
Edward A. Page
PART II PROCESSES AND SITES OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
9. Climate diplomacy 97
Radoslav S. Dimitrov
10. Geopolitics 109
David Ciplet, J. Timmons Roberts and Mizan Khan
11. Fragmentation 121
Fariborz Zelli and Harro van Asselt
12. Minilateralism 132
Jeffrey McGee
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vi Research handbook on climate governance
13. The North–South divide 142

Joyeeta Gupta
14. Transnationalism 153
Klaus Dingwerth and Jessica F. Green
15. Vulnerability 164
Tim Forsyth
16. Climate skepticism 175
Reiner Grundmann
PART III THE STATE AND CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
17. Climate leadership 191

Charles F. Parker and Christer Karlsson
18. China 202
Phillip Stalley
19. The United States 213
Guri Bang
20. The European Union 224
Claire Dupont and Sebastian Oberthür
21. Brazil 237
Eduardo Viola and Kathryn Hochstetler
PART IV NON-STATE AGENTS AND INSTITUTIONS OF CLIMATE

GOVERNANCE
22. NGOs 251

Michele Betsill
23. Business 262
Chukwumerije Okereke
24. International bureaucracies 273
Bernd Siebenhüner
25. Science 286
Silke Beck
26. Civil society 297
Dana R. Fisher and Anya M. Galli
27. Citizen-consumers 309
Mikael Klintman and Magnus Boström
28. News media 320
Alison Anderson

Contents vii
29. The city 332

Vladimir Janković
PART V MODES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
30. EU emissions trading 345

Jørgen Wettestad
31. Low-carbon economies 356
Heather Lovell
32. Carbon accounting 366
Esther Turnhout, Margaret M. Skutsch and Jessica de Koning
33. Multi-stakeholder governance 377
Hannah Betts and Heike Schroeder
34. Climate policy integration 388
Harro van Asselt, Tim Rayner and Åsa Persson
35. Climate policy instruments 400
Simon Matti
36. Climate engineering 411
Anders Hansson, Steve Rayner and Victoria Wibeck
PART VI NORMATIVE IDEALS OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
37. Regime effectiveness 425

Steinar Andresen
38. Environmental democracy 435
Frank Fischer
39. Transparency 446
Aarti Gupta and Michael Mason
40. Security 458
Angela Oels
41. Adaptation 470
Lisa Dilling
42. Post-humanist imaginaries 480
Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Åsberg and Suzi Hayes
43. Resilience 491
Carolina E. Adler, Paulina Aldunce, Katherine Indvik,
Denís Alegría, Roxana Borquez and Victor Galaz

viii Research handbook on climate governance
PART VII THE FUTURE OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE: THEORY AND

PRACTICE
44. Multilateralism in crisis? 505

Robyn Eckersley
45. Reform options 516
Frank Biermann
46. Re-politicizing climate governance research 526
Ian Bailey and Piers Revell
47. Property and privatization 537
Ronnie D. Lipschutz
48. Innovation investments 547
Björn-Ola Linnér and Steve Rayner
49. Knowledge pluralism 555
Mike Hulme
50. The future 566
Paul G. Harris
Index579

Figures and tables
FIGURES
16.1 Major world newspapers: frequency of ‘climate change’ or ‘global

warming’ (at start of article) and ‘skeptic*/sceptic*’ or ‘denier*/denial*’
(anywhere)177
16.2 The New York Times: frequency of ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’
(at start of article) and ‘skeptic*/sceptic*’ or ‘denier*/denial*’ (anywhere) 178
20.1 GHG emissions in the EU15 and EU28, 1990–2012 227
20.2 Progress towards 2020 renewable energy (RE) and energy efficiency
(EE) targets in the EU 229
35.1 An empirically founded, general model of policy support 407
43.1 Summary of search results, document selection and final inclusion 495
43.2 Number of public policies (pp) on climate change (cc) and resilience,
by year of publication 496
43.3 Number of climate change policies per country, with proportion of
policies with reference to resilience 497
48.1 Decarbonization rate of the EU15: 1980–2011 548
TABLES
13.1 Evolving coalitions from the South 150

17.1 Leadership recognition 2008–2013, general trend for main actors
(percentages)193
20.1 Main pieces of climate-related legislation in the EU since 1990 226
22.1 Examples of NGO-led global climate governance 257
27.1 Types and examples of actor-and structure-oriented climate
mitigation strategies 310
43.1 Definitions of resilience in disaster risk management 493
47.1 Approaches to internalization of greenhouse gas injuries 541
48.1 Estimated contributions to LCET investments of US$45 billion in
research, development, demonstration and deployment (RDD&D)
based on different ways to calculate contributions based on
Gross National Income (GNI) and GDP per capita (GDP/CAP) in
US$ millions (MUSD); selected countries 552
49.1 A simple typology relating notions of human and divine agency 558
ix
Contributors
Carolina E. Adler is a Geographer and Environmental Policy Scientist at ETH Zurich,

Switzerland.
Paulina Aldunce is Assistant Professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences
and Natural Resources and at the Center for Climate and Resilience Research of the
University of Chile.
Denís Alegría is a veterinarian with a MA in Management and Environmental Planning
from the University of Chile.
Alison Anderson is Professor in the School of Government and Director of the Centre for
Culture, Community and Society, Plymouth University, UK, and Adjunct Professor in
the School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Australia.
Steinar Andresen is Research Professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo,
Norway.
Cecilia Åsberg is the Director of the Environmental Humanities Collaboratory and
Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Linköping University, Sweden.
Karin Bäckstrand is Professor in Environmental Social Science at the Department of
Political Science, Stockholm University, Sweden.
Ian Bailey is Professor in Environmental Politics in the School of Geography, Earth and
Environmental Sciences, Plymouth University, UK.
Guri Bang is a Senior Researcher and research director at the Center for International
Climate and Environmental Research—Oslo (CICERO), Norway.
Silke Beck is Senior Scientist at the Department of Environmental Politics at the
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ in Leipzig, Germany.
Michele Betsill is a Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University, USA.
Hannah Betts is an Analyst on issues related to REDD1 and Climate Change at LTS
International Ltd, UK.
Frank Biermann is Professor of Global Sustainability Governance at the Copernicus
Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrech University, the Netherlands.
Roxana Borquez is a Renewable Natural Resources Engineer with a Master in Public
Policy and Management at the Center for Climate and Resilience Research of the
University of Chile.
Magnus Boström is Professor in Sociology at Örebro University, Sweden.
Harriet Bulkeley is a Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University,
UK.
x
Contributors xi
David Ciplet is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of

Colorado—Boulder, USA.
Jessica de Koning is Research Coordinator of the REDD1 network of Wageningen
University, the Netherlands.
Lisa Dilling is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Fellow of the Cooperative
Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado,
Boulder, USA.
Radoslav S. Dimitrov is Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario,
Canada.
Klaus Dingwerth is Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of St. Gallen,
Switzerland.
Claire Dupont is Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute for European Studies and the
Political Science Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.
Robyn Eckersley is a Professor of Political Science in the School of Social and Political
Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Frank Fischer is Distinguished Professor of Politics and Global Affairs, Rutgers
University, USA and Senior Research Associate at the Environmental Policy Research
Centre, Free University of Berlin, Germany.
Dana R. Fisher is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Director of the Program
for Society and the Environment at the University of Maryland, USA.
Tim Forsyth is Professor of Environment and Development at the London School of
Economics and Political Science, UK.
Victor Galaz is Associate Professor in Political Science and Research Theme Leader at
the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden.
Anya M. Galli is Graduate Fellow at the Program for Society and the Environment and
PhD Candidate at the Department of Sociology, the University of Maryland—College
Park, USA.
Jessica F. Green is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at New York University,
USA.
Reiner Grundmann is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of
Nottingham, UK.
Aarti Gupta is Associate Professor in the Environmental Policy Group, Social Science
Department of Wageningen University, the Netherlands.
Joyeeta Gupta is Professor of Environment and Development in the Global South at the
Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research of the University of Amsterdam and
UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Delft, the Netherlands.
Anders Hansson is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Thematic Studies—Technology
and social change at Linköping University, Sweden.

xii Research handbook on climate governance
Paul G. Harris is Chair Professor of Global and Environmental Studies at the Hong Kong
Institute of Education, China.
Suzi Hayes is PhD Candidate in the Department of Creative Arts and English at La
Trobe University, Australia.
Kathryn Hochstetler is CIGI Chair of Governance of the Americas at the Balsillie School
of International Affairs and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo,
Canada.
Mike Hulme is Professor of Climate and Culture in the Department of Geography at
King’s College London, UK.
Katherine Indvik is Research Assistant at the Center for Climate and Resilience Research
of the University of Chile.
Vladimir Janković is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology
and Medicine, the University of Manchester, UK.
Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard
University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, USA.
Christer Karlsson is Associate Professor of Political Science and Lecturer at the
Department of Government, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Mizan Khan is Professor of Environmental Science and Management at North South
University, Bangladesh.
Mikael Klintman is Professor in Sociology at Lund University, Sweden.
Annica Kronsell is Professor at the Department of Political Science at Lund University,
Sweden.
Markus Lederer is Professor for Political Science with a focus on International Relations
and International Governance at the University of Münster, Germany.
Björn-Ola Linnér is Professor at the Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research and at
Department of Thematic Studies – Environmental Change, Linköping University, Sweden.
Ronnie D. Lipschutz is Professor and Chair of Politics, and Provost of College Eight, at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA.
Eva Lövbrand is Associate Professor at the Department of Thematic Studies:
Environmental Change and affiliated with the Centre for Climate Science and Policy
Research, Linköping University, Sweden.
Heather Lovell is Reader in Environment and Society in the School of GeoSciences at the
University of Edinburgh, UK.
Michael Mason is Associate Professor in Environmental Geography at the Department of
Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
Simon Matti is Associate Professor of Political Science at Luleå University of
Technology, Sweden.

Contributors xiii
Jeffrey McGee is Senior Lecturer in Climate Change, Marine and Antarctic Law at
the Faculty of Law and Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, the University of
Tasmania, Australia.
Astrida Neimanis is Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney,
Australia.
Peter Newell is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK.
Sebastian Oberthür is Professor for Environment and Sustainable Development at the
Institute or European Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.
Angela Oels is Visiting Professor at the Department of Political Science and at the Lund
University Centre on Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), Sweden.
Chukwumerije Okereke is Associate Professor in Environment and Development at
the Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading,
UK.
Edward A. Page is Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and International
Studies, Warwick University, UK.
Charles F. Parker is Associate Professor of Political Science and Lecturer at the
Department of Government, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Åsa Persson is Senior Research Fellow and Leader of the Transforming Governance
Research Theme at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Sweden.
Steve Rayner is James Martin Professor of Science and Civilization and Director of the
Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) at Oxford University, UK.
Tim Rayner is Senior Research Associate at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change
Research, the University of East Anglia, UK.
Piers Revell is Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Government
at Plymouth University, UK.
J. Timmons Roberts is Ittleson Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at
Brown University, USA.
Heike Schroeder is Senior Lecturer in Climate Change and International Development at
the School of International Development, University of East Anglia, UK.
Bernd Siebenhüner is Professor of Ecological Economics at Carl von Ossietzky University
of Oldenburg, Germany.
Margaret M. Skutsch is Senior Researcher at CIGA-UNAM in Mexico and associated
with the University of Twente, the Netherlands.
Phillip Stalley is Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at DePaul
University in Chicago, USA.
Hayley Stevenson is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of
Sheffield, UK.

xiv Research handbook on climate governance
Johannes Stripple is Associate Professor at the Political Science, Lund University, Sweden.
Esther Turnhout is Associate Professor at the Forest and Nature Policy Group of
Wagningen University, the Netherlands.
Harro van Asselt is Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute in Oxford,
UK.
Eduardo Viola is Professor of International Relations at the University of Brasilia and
Senior Researcher at the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development,
Brazil.
John Vogler is Professorial Research Fellow in International Relations at Keele University,
UK.
Jørgen Wettestad is Research Professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo, Norway.
Victoria Wibeck is Associate Professor at the Department of Thematic Studies—
Environmental Change and affiliated with the Centre for Climate Science and Policy
Research, Linköping University, Sweden.
Fariborz Zelli is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Lund
University, Sweden.

Acknowledgements
This Handbook is the result of thought-provoking ideas, hard work and dedication
by many people. The idea of a Research Handbook on Climate Governance was first
proposed by senior editor Alex O’Connell at Edward Elgar in spring 2013. We would
like to thank Alex for setting this process in motion, as well as the publishing team at
Edward Elgar for their speedy, professional and patient response and assistance in the
production of the book. Second, we want to express our gratitude to all the authors of
this Handbook for their collegial spirit, and tremendous efforts and patience in revising
their chapters. The constructive input from the authors has significantly strengthened the
theoretical and empirical coherence of this book and helped us to advance the frontiers
of the scholarly field of climate governance. To edit a book of this length is a daunting
task and editorial assistance is therefore a crucial part of the process. We are indebted to
our research assistant Maria Jernnäs who had made our lives easier through her effective
and dedicated work in pulling together the manuscript. We would also like to express
our gratitude to Jonathan Kuyper, who patiently and swiftly copy-edited many of the
chapters, with excellent editorial and substantive comments.
In May 2014 we organized a Jubilee Symposium in the city of Norrköping entitled
Climate Governance in the Post-Copenhagen Era: New Directions in Scholarship and
Practice to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Centre for Climate Science and
Policy Research at Linköping University, Sweden. During the Jubilee Symposium,
draft versions of many Handbook chapters were presented and themes covered in
the book where debated in lively and inspiring discussions. The symposium proved
to be excellent space for an intellectual exchange among contributing authors and
other researchers, and helped pushing the theoretical and empirical boundaries of the
Handbook as well as strengthening input on drafts. We would like thank all panelists
and speakers during these two days for helping us to reflect upon the future of climate
governance scholarship and policy practice. We want to extend a special thanks to
Ingrid Leo and Annika Arvidson for excellent administrative support in conjunction
with the Jubilee Symposium, and to CSPR colleagues, especially Björn-Ola Linnér,
Julie Wilk and Mattias Hjerpe, for their intellectual and practical encouragement,
and not least to all the students who assisted during two intense symposium days.
We also gratefully acknowledge the generous support for this event provided by the
Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Research Council Formas, the Wenner-gren
Foundation, the Linköping University Faculty of Arts, the Linköping University’s
Climate Compensation Fund, the Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research and
the Department of Thematic Studies.
In April 2015 the final Handbook manuscript was presented at the Environmental
Policy, Politics and Learning (EPPLE) seminar at the Department of Political Science
at Stockholm University. Many thanks to all seminar participants for their construc-
tive and helpful comments. We take full responsibility for any errors and omissions
remaining in the book. Finally, we are grateful for the support, joyful interventions
xv
xvi Research handbook on climate governance
and help from colleagues and friends, and not the least from our families whose love
and support made this volume possible. This book is dedicated to our respective chil-
dren Lisen and Olle, for whom the challenges of climate governance stretch beyond
academic interest.
Stockholm, Sweden, April 2015

Climate governance after Copenhagen: research trends
and policy practice
INTRODUCTION
Climate change is unprecedented with respect to scale, severity and complexity. Like no
other environmental problem it unsettles contemporary society and calls into question
the ways in which we collectively have come to organize and conduct social and political
life in the twenty-first century. The elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere are intimately linked to the rise of industrial capitalism and are today fueled
by globalized patterns of production, consumption and trade. While the causes and
effects of human-induced climate change are local and directly tied to everyday urban
and rural life, the biogeochemical drivers of a changing climate are global and stretched
out over long time periods. Given these complicated spatial and temporal dynamics,
climate change has proven inherently difficult to govern. As the collective action problem
par excellence, climate change has since the late 1980s spurred a plethora of state-led,
private and hybrid governance activities across multiple jurisdictional, administrative
and political levels. Although these activities currently are intensifying in scale and scope,
we are regularly told that the political response to climate change remains inadequate.
In October 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that
global greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, global mean temperatures are on
the rise, glacial ice caps are melting and weather extremes are more frequent (IPCC 2014).
Instead of limiting global mean warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels—a goal that
today is endorsed by most political leaders—we may very well be heading towards a 4° or
even 6°C world (IPCC 2014).
In this Handbook we have brought together contributions from more than 50 of the
world’s leading scholars of climate governance to take stock of the political response
to climate change. We do so in a time when society is increasingly ‘climate-challenged’
(Dryzek et al. 2013) and diplomatic efforts to craft a forceful global response are
intensifying. While none of the authors included in this Handbook question the severity
or magnitude of the climate problem, they disagree on how to make political sense of
this problem and how to devise effective and just solutions. Mirroring the heterogeneous
and evolving practice of climate governance, this volume mobilizes a wide range of disci-
plinary and theoretical resources to discuss how the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change
(Rittel and Webber 1973) is best governed. These diverse scholarly approaches range
from grand theorizing to close empirical studies of micro-political practices, and span the
ideational and the material, the historical and the contemporary, the n ormative, empiri-
cal and the critical. No single volume can of course represent a synthesis of a rich and
heterogeneous field in the making. The scholarship on climate governance has expanded
dramatically in recent years and now engages with numerous theoretical traditions and
xvii
xviii Research handbook on climate governance
approaches. In order to offer a taste of this diversity, we have asked the authors in this
Handbook to provide snapshots of recent debates in the literature, to present their argu-
ments and to provoke debate. These scholarly interventions are organized in seven sub-
sections that reflect the multitude of political sites, processes, agents, practices and ideals
that currently preoccupy academics in this field. We believe that the resulting collection
of chapters represents the state-of-the-art and most recent thinking in the rich and
expanding scholarship on climate politics and governance.
To set the stage for the contributions that follow, this introductory chapter starts by
assessing the practice of climate governance following the 2009 United Nations (UN)
climate conference in Copenhagen. We use this infamous UN summit as the reference
point for our joint reflections and as the stepping stone for the new era of climate politics
that is currently unfolding. When the final pieces of this volume are coming together, the
outcomes of the next UN climate summit in Paris in December 2015 are still unknown.
While the intellectual resources mobilized in the Handbook do not allow us to predict the
precise outcomes of this high level meeting, the trajectory of climate governance post-
Copenhagen gives us good reason to expect a decentralized loose framework agreement far
from the universal targets and timetables approach of its predecessor—the Kyoto Protocol.
CLIMATE GOVERNANCE IN THE POST-COPENHAGEN ERA
The 2009 UN climate conference in Copenhagen is often represented as a turning point

not only for international climate diplomacy, but also for the scholarship on climate poli-
tics and governance. Acting as the culmination of two years of intense negotiations, this
15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was expected to form the basis for a comprehensive and
legally binding treaty after the expiry of the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period by
the end of December 2012. However, to that end the Copenhagen conference fell short.
Early drafts including global emission cuts of 50–80 percent by 2050 were abandoned
during the last days of the meeting and COP 15 instead ended up ‘taking note’ of a
three-page non-binding political agreement—the Copenhagen Accord—which was ham-
mered out by a group of 28 heads of state in the last 24 hours of extended negotiations
(Bodansky 2010; Dimitrov 2010, this volume).
Many scholars of international relations (IR) have interpreted this ‘Copenhagen
failure’ as a legitimacy crisis for multilateralism in general and as a crisis in confidence
for UN climate diplomacy in particular (Bäckstrand 2011; Hoffmann 2011; Victor 2011).
The Copenhagen Accord signifies the rise of a new fragmented global climate order where
a system of voluntary carbon reduction pledges submitted by states has replaced binding
targets and timetables negotiated under the UN framework. Hence, the top-down univer-
sal approach to global climate governance—modeled on the Kyoto Protocol—has after
the Copenhagen summit given way for a fragmented and decentralized global climate
policy architecture (Aldy and Stavins 2010, Zelli and van Asselt this volume). In this new
political landscape, climate governance appears more hybrid, complex and dispersed. As
demonstrated by the collection of chapters in this Handbook, post-Copenhagen climate
politics has turned into virtual laboratory for novel ‘governance experiments’ (Hoffmann
2011) emerging in the absence of, or in parallel to, traditional state regulation.

Climate governance after Copenhagen xix
As political leaders now are preparing for the 2015 UN climate conference in Paris
where a new global climate treaty for the post-2020 era is expected to be signed, the
primacy of intergovernmental regulation is challenged along with the conceptual frame-
works used to understand climate politics. The time when the state was the privileged unit
of analysis and only locus of climate politics has passed and given way to new sites of
power, authority and governance that cut across national boundaries and conventional
divisions between public and private domains (Stripple and Bulkeley 2014). The scholar-
ship on climate governance has played a central role in this recasting of climate change as
a political problem. By drawing attention to the dense and multidirectional interactions
between state and non-state sectors, work in this field has dislodged political authority
from the sovereign state and invited us to consider the changing form and institutionali-
zation of climate politics (Bulkeley and Newell 2010; Bernauer 2013; Dryzek et al. 2011).
In this Handbook we cast a broad net to capture the multiple, and sometimes conflicting,
empirical, normative and critical engagements with this reordered world. We begin our
overview by turning to the various theoretical perspectives they draw upon.
THEORIZING CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
Needless to say, there is no unified theory or methodology of climate governance. The

academic study of climate politics and governance borrows widely from multiple disci-
plines including political science, law, economics, sociology and geography. While this
heterogeneous scholarship cannot easily be captured or contained, this Handbook sug-
gests that the terminology it draws upon owes much to trends in IR theory. In the latter,
global governance emerged as a new research agenda in the 1990s and offered a power-
ful way to think through the character of global life at the end of the twentieth century
(Latham 1999). The idea that the political world is undergoing profound change is at the
heart of the global governance scholarship (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992; Rosenau 2009).
Following the end of the Cold War, the globalization of economies, the advent of social
movements and the growth of intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations,
literature in this field has described a world where governance no longer is confined to
governments and political rule is more multilayered, polycentric and networked.
The conceptual language of global governance was adopted by scholars of international
climate politics in the new millennium and emerges as a response to realist arguments
that national self-interests and entrenched norms of sovereignty are inevitable drivers
of dangerous climate change. For realists, the climate threat epitomizes Garret Hardin’s
(1968) parable of the tragedy of the commons, where greenhouse gas emissions by almost
200 states have resulted in an over-usage of the atmospheric commons. Climate change
thus represents the ultimate global collective action problem associated with strong asym-
metries of costs and benefits for climate action, free-riding and differentiated climate
impacts spread across developing and developed states (Andresen this volume; Barett
2005). Whereas realists have used the disjuncture between individual state interests and
those of the common good to explain the impossibility of effective international climate
cooperation (Vogler this volume), liberal institutionalist scholars are more optimistic
about the diplomatic efforts to formulate a global response to climate change. Entrenched
state interests and political gridlock remain important themes in this parallel scholarship

xx Research handbook on climate governance
(Victor 2011). However, work in this field has also demonstrated how international insti-
tutions, norms and transnational activist networks can facilitate flows of information,
build trust, identify points of agreement and hereby forge international climate policy
coordination (Siebenhüner, Dimitrov, Betsill this volume). The international climate
regime, organized around the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol, represents the ultimate
example of such structured patterns of cooperation and was for a long time the focal
point for political analyses of climate change.
With the adoption of the global governance terminology, the theorization of interna-
tional climate cooperation has become less state-centric and also extended beyond the
international climate regime (Okereke et al. 2009; Bulkeley and Newell 2010). Biermann
(2006) offers two broad categories of meaning for the global governance concept that
are helpful to illustrate directions in the climate governance scholarship. Empirically, the
concept speaks to important political transformations of our times. It describes a world
that no longer is defined by nation-states, but increasingly made up by dense and multi-
directional forms of cooperation between public and private sectors. In this emerging
global governance system, climate politics is no longer a strictly intergovernmental affair
(if it ever was). Climate governance has been rescaled to include a variety of actors and
is characterized by complex layers of rule-making and implementation that cut across
subnational, national, international and transnational levels (Biermann 2006). Many
chapters included in this Handbook use this empirical or phenomenological notion of the
term ‘governance’ to make sense of the changing forms of political rule that characterize
the post Copenhagen era. By drawing attention to the increasing involvement of private
and civil society actors in climate rule-making and implementation, work in this field has
opened the study of climate politics to disciplinary fields beyond IR theory and hereby
brought new analytical resources to bear on the challenges of collective climate action.
In parallel to this empirical interest in the multiple and dispersed processes of climate
governance, Biermann (2006) reminds us that global governance also has a strong nor-
mative connotation. Wedded in a language of collective problem-solving and partnering,
the governance concept has been advanced as a political program for the cooperative
establishment, promotion and restoration of order in an increasingly disaggregated,
pluralized and interdependent world (Rosenau 2009). In the field of climate politics, this
normative project typically involves calls for state orchestration of a complex and frag-
mented climate regime (Zelli and van Asselt this volume), the creation of more legitimate
forms of UN climate diplomacy (Eckersley, Stevenson this volume), the development of
new financial mechanisms for climate adaptation and low carbon development strategies
(Linnér and Rayner this volume) and more transparent forms of international climate
expertise (Beck this volume). Whereas most authors in this Handbook demonstrate a
normative commitment to forceful collective climate action, the volume also includes
many chapters that engage with climate governance in critical terms. Whether grounded
in neo- Gramscian, Foucauldian or Habermasian critique, these critical approaches
seek to reintroduce neglected dimensions of power, politics and justice to the study of
climate governance. Of central concern are the political drivers and effects of the emerg-
ing climate governance order. Some chapters in this Handbook draw attention to the
macro-political dynamics of capitalism, neo-colonialism and patriarchy to examine who
wins and who loses in an increasingly decentralized, privatized and liberalized climate
policy architecture (Newell, Kronsell, Ciplet et al., Gupta, Lipschutz this volume).

Climate governance after Copenhagen xxi
Other chapters critically interrogate the micro-political processes of knowledge-making

(Jasanoff, Forsyth, Hulme this volume), environmental monitoring (Lovell, Turnhout et
al. this volume) or individual self-regulation (e.g. Stripple and Bulkeley this volume) at
work in the everyday governance of climate change.
In the first part of the Handbook, we present a number of theoretical inroads to this
rich and evolving scholarship. The chapters span different disciplinary traditions and
demonstrate the diverse ways in which climate governance currently is theorized as a
matter for the political and social sciences. In the following we map some of the empirical,
normative and critical claims emerging from this scholarship. We do so by following the
subsections of this Handbook.
PROCESSES AND SITES OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
A central focus for many chapters in this Handbook is the complex and unruly nature of
contemporary climate governance. Processes of rule-making, standard-setting and imple-
mentation that previously were in the hands of governments are today contracted out to
corporate, civil society and local government actors in ways that make collective climate
action seem more heterogeneous and dispersed. One of the values of the governance per-
spective is its capacity to provide a framework for understanding these changing forms of
political rule (Stoker 1998). By advancing concepts such as ‘regime complexes’ (Keohane
and Victor 2011), ‘institutional fragmentation’ (Zelli and van Asselt this volume), ‘climate
anarchy’ (Dyer 2014) and ‘orchestration’ (Abbott 2012), work in this field is now provid-
ing a language and common frame of reference through which a complex institutional
landscape can be studied and explained. The second part of this Handbook includes
chapters that draw upon this language to map and critically interrogate the climate
governance order that has evolved after the Copenhagen conference in 2009.
Many of these contributions focus on the structural dynamics that drive and define
UN climate diplomacy. Gupta (this volume) refers to entrenched colonial patterns to
explain the multilateral crisis that erupted in the Bella Conference Centre in Copenhagen
in December 2009. The US rejection of the Kyoto Protocol eight years earlier intensi-
fied the disparity between the world’s rich and the poor countries and created a deep
mistrust that could not be bridged despite intense rounds of negotiations. Given the
persistent North–South asymmetries in historic greenhouse gas emissions and in levels
of climate vulnerability (Forsyth this volume), efforts to forge a new global climate treaty
were doomed to fail. In contrast, Ciplet et al. (this volume) suggest that the Copenhagen
summit marked a geopolitical shift where ‘major economies’ and ‘major emitters’ emerged
as key sites of climate governance. A new climate (dis)order defined by the rise of China,
the fragmentation of G77 and the decline of European Union (EU) leadership was
consolidated. In this altered ‘powerscape’, new political coalitions have emerged and the
firm distinction between developed and developing countries inherited from the Berlin
Mandate is less pronounced. A handful of developing countries have now surpassed the
North in greenhouse gas emissions and are thus increasingly part of the climate problem
and its solution (Ciplet et al. this volume). In parallel to this development, the familiar
top-down approach to UN climate diplomacy organized around binding and absolute
emissions reduction targets has given way to a political order that invites states to make

xxii Research handbook on climate governance
unilateral and voluntary mitigation commitments. The Intended Nationally Determined

Contributions (INDCs) adopted by the 194 parties at the UN Lima Climate Conference
in 2014 reflect this bottom-up process of voluntary national pledging that will form the
basis of the Paris climate agreement.
McGee (this volume) interprets this post-Copenhagen shift towards voluntary and
non-binding climate policy schemes as an effect of the normative dominance of liberal
environmentalism. Following Bernstein’s (2001) seminal work on the topic, McGee
describes liberal environmentalism as a set of norms that predicate international envi-
ronmental protection on the promotion and maintenance of a liberal economic order. In
a world dominated by liberal environmentalism, global responses to climate change will
prioritize the creation and expansion minilateral carbon clubs over mandatory restric-
tions on fossil fuels by large emitters. McGee invites scholars to pay closer critical atten-
tion to the subtle ways in which an increasingly decentralized climate regime undermines
effective and just collective climate action. Dimitrov (this volume), by contrast, paints
the normative development in brighter colors. Even though the Copenhagen Accord
was a weak outcome and opened the door for a bottom-up approach to international
climate policy, he argues that UN climate diplomacy has been successful in changing
state interests in greener directions. By illustrating the multiple economic benefits of
emission reductions, including financial savings, increased economic competitiveness and
job creation, UN climate diplomacy has fostered the development of domestic climate
activities even in the absence of a formal treaty.
In a similar vein, Dingwerth and Green (this volume) outline how the gridlocked mul-
tilateral process has spurred a Cambrian explosion in transnational climate governance
activities including regional and national carbon markets, corporate carbon disclosure
initiatives and transnational city networks. They describe the world of transnational
climate governance as a complex political sphere where groups of actors—business, cities,
non-governmental organizations (NGOs)— pursue their individual goals with little if any
central coordination. This à la carte approach to climate regulation has indeed turned
post-Copenhagen climate politics messier, more diffuse, dynamic and experimental
(Hoffmann 2011). However, transnational climate governance is not about the disap-
pearance of rules and order. What appears striking is instead the increasing scope and
breadth of carbon management activities across all sectors of society. Although there are
examples of continued domestic resistance against ambitious climate mitigation schemes,
particularly in the US where climate skepticism is on the rise (Grundmann this volume),
the chapters in this section invite us to consider the changing forms of political rule in
the post-Copenhagen era. Climate change is not governed less, but differently through
complex and hybrid patchworks of regulatory activity that entangle state and non-state
sectors in intriguing advanced-liberal ways.
STATE AND NON-STATE AGENTS OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
The changing role of the nation-state is a core theme in scholarly assessments of climate
governance after Copenhagen. While work in this field was quick to declare the demise of
UN mega-multilateralism and to turn attention to novel forms of climate action emerg-
ing beyond the international climate regime (Hoffmann 2011; Andonova et al. 2009;

Climate governance after Copenhagen xxiii
Bulkeley et al. 2014; Okereke et al. 2009), the state has continued to loom large in this
literature. Few chapters included in this Handbook speak of a state in decline or retreat.
With the emergence of a more complex climate regime, we have instead seen a new wave
of scholarship aiming to revisit the role of the state in climate governance (Bäckstrand
and Kronsell 2015; Duit 2014). The third part of this Handbook includes a collection of
chapters that seek to understand developments within four of the world’s greenhouse
giants—China, the USA, the EU and Brazil (Parker and Karlsson, Stalley, Bang, Viola
and Hochstetler, Dupont and Oberthür this volume). A central feature in all these chap-
ters is the close links between states’ domestic dynamics and their bargaining strategies
in the UNFCCC process, consistent with scholarship on the domestic sources of interna-
tional agreements (Bang et al. 2015; deSombre 2010). Rather than representing the state
as a unitary actor divorced from wider societal forces, these chapters illustrate how the
state’s interests and policy priorities develop and change in close interplay with domestic
institutions, actors and policy processes.
The fourth part of this Handbook links these dynamic forms of climate statehood to
the manifold climate activities and initiatives among non-state actors and networks. An
important finding from these chapters is that private and voluntary sectors increasingly
are involved in agenda-setting, rule-making and implementation. Betsill (this volume)
makes a useful distinction between three overlapping roles played by NGOs in post-
Copenhagen climate governance that speak to several non-state actor groups examined
in this section. First, Betsill finds that many NGOs remain activists and seek to mobilize
social change beyond the state. By engaging in disruptive protests, blockades, walkouts,
meeting boycotts and direct actions, civic groups such as 350.org and Climate Justice
Now! seek to raise public concern about climate change and to challenge the slow pace
of government action (Fisher and Galli this volume). In parallel to these outsider tactics,
Betsill suggests that NGOs frequently take on the role as diplomats in conjunction with
UN climate meetings. By exchanging information, making formal statements on specific
proposals and providing policy advice, non-state agents work directly with government
representatives to craft climate policy (see, for instance, Beck this volume). Finally, Betsill
suggests that non-state actors have become governors in their own right in the post-
Copenhagen era. As global governors, NGOs, business groups and city networks partner
with the state in the quest for solutions to climate change.
In some cases, these new forms of non-state led governance arise in an attempt to fill
the regulatory and implementation deficits in UN climate diplomacy (Bulkeley et al.
2014). More often, however, non-state climate initiatives seem to evolve in tandem with
government regulation. Okereke (this volume), for instance, illustrates how corporate
carbon reporting schemes came about in direct response to the adoption of the Kyoto
Protocol in December 1997, which sent a clear signal to industry that governments will
act to limit climate change in their respective jurisdictions. Klintman and Boström (this
volume), in turn, examine how voluntary carbon labeling and boycotting campaigns have
aligned individual consumption patterns with public climate goals. Whereas many cor-
porate and civic actors have engaged with climate change without reliance on the formal
resources of government, the rise of non-state climate action does not seem to denote
the hollowing out of the nation-state. On the contrary, the chapters in this section point
to intricate and complex forms of public–private collaboration. In the post-Copenhagen
era, the nation-state and the state system seem to be enmeshed in cross-cutting webs of

xxiv Research handbook on climate governance
governance that blur familiar boundaries and responsibilities between public and private
sectors.
MODES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
The fifth part of this Handbook pays close attention to the practical ways by which
climate governance is accomplished in the post-Copenhagen era. This collection of
chapters engages with a diversity of modes and technologies including emission trading,
low carbon economies, climate policy integration and multi-stakeholder governance.
These ‘climate policy experiments’ (Hoffmann 2011) reflect the exponential growth of
market-based, civil society and public–private tools of climate governance at various
jurisdictional levels from the local to the global (Bulkeley and Newell 2010). Mirroring
a larger trend in environmental politics, climate governance post-Copenhagen seems to
be defined by a shift from ‘hard’, hierarchical steering to ‘soft’, non-hierarchical and col-
laborative modes of governance. Framed as ‘new’ modes of governance, this mix of state,
civil society and market-led instruments are claimed to hold the promise of increasing
deliberation and participation as well as environmental performance and effectiveness
(Bäckstrand et al. 2010).
The Kyoto Protocol’s flexibility mechanisms typify the turn to market-based climate
governance. When the Kyoto Protocol entered into legal force in 2005, and the interna-
tional trade in carbon credits became a political reality, the EU launched its Emissions
Trading System (EU ETS). Wettestad (this volume) traces the evolution of this grand
policy experiment. While framed as a ‘revolution in EU climate governance,’ the effective-
ness of the EU ETS has been severely challenged in the post-Copenhagen era. Due to
the volatile carbon market price following the financial crisis in 2008 and the subsequent
failure of the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, the EU ETS has not been able to foster
the low carbon transition required to match the EU’s climate mitigation targets. In the
absence of stringent climate policy goals, or when policy experiments fail to meet them,
post-Copenhagen politics is defined by long-term and qualitative goals such as ‘low carbon
economies’ and ‘low carbon development transitions.’ Lovell (this volume) examines the
sites and spaces where these low carbon ideals are forged, particularly by focusing on the
discourses and technologies that they draw upon. One technology that has been central to
the idea of ‘the low carbon economy’ is carbon accounting. Turnhout et al. (this volume)
specifically address the carbon accounting practices developed under the UNFCCC
Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism.
They find that the standardized carbon accounting schemes of REDD1 follow a ‘meas-
urementality logic’ that brings tropical forest carbon into market circulation, but risks
alienating and disenfranchising local actors including forest dependent people.
Betts and Schroeder (this volume) examine to what extent the introduction of multi-
stakeholder practices in REDD1 may help to render tropical forests governable in more
democratic ways. Through their Indonesian case study, they demonstrate how a dense
network of state, non-state and hybrid actors is involved in REDD1 implementation
across various political and jurisdictional levels. Although the Indonesian state remains
the most powerful actor within this multi-actor governance system, Betts and Schroeder
find that participatory ideals of stakeholder governance have gained effect also in this

Climate governance after Copenhagen xxv
post-colonial, post-authoritarian state. This is an interesting finding, given that most of

climate policy experiments addressed in this Handbook are found in industrialized coun-
tries and against the background of stable liberal democracies and market economies.
Moreover, the Indonesian case study reminds us that participatory forms of climate gov-
ernance often operate in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ with background conditions of state
intervention, public authority, steering, control and sanctions (Bäckstrand et al. 2010;
Börzel and Risse 2005).
Another theme in this part of the Handbook is how to govern a complex and ‘wicked
problem’ that cuts across almost all sectors of society. Van Asselt et al. (this volume)
examine governance through climate policy integration (CPI). Following the legacy of
environmental policy integration (EPI), introduced by the EU in the wake of the UN
Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992, CPI is a policy instru-
ment that epitomizes the eco-modern promise of maximized synergies between climate
policy objectives and other sectoral and economic policies. Interestingly, however, the
authors find that the no-regrets rationale and technical procedures of CPI (checklists,
strategy documents, strategic environmental assessments) tends to obscure the funda-
mental tradeoffs that still remain between long-term climate mitigation objectives and
many other political goals (including climate adaptation). Van Asselt et al. conclude
that these tradeoffs will need to be addressed head-on to avoid the ultimate ‘democratic’
tradeoff. After all, the effectiveness of climate policy instruments does not hinge on
technical and political-administrative factors alone. As outlined by Matti (this volume),
public support and acceptance are central for compliance and long-term policy stability.
In Matti’s chapter, the social and cultural mechanisms behind public support for climate
policy instruments are outlined and discussed. An important message stemming from
this overview is that we need to pay closer attention to contextual factors (e.g., political
culture, values, attitudes) in order to explain cross-national variations in climate policy
experimentation.
Public support is also a key issue in debates over climate engineering. Opposite to the
soft and decentralized modes of climate governance discussed in most chapters in this
Handbook, climate engineering has in recent years surfaced as a technocratic response
to the Copenhagen failure and as a last resort in the face of dangerous climate change.
Hansson et al. (this volume) outline the various ways in which the climate can be engi-
neered (from proposals to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to efforts to
reflect the sun’s light and heat back into space) and discuss the technical feasibility, envi-
ronmental risks, cost estimates, moral implications and governance challenges of these
options. The chapter effectively demonstrates that climate engineering remains a highly
unreliable political alternative for the years to come. Currently we do not only lack the
understanding and ability to control the negative side-effects. Most ethical and govern-
ance issues also remain unresolved.
NORMATIVE IDEALS OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
The literature on climate governance post-Copenhagen frequently blends empirical analy

ses of the contemporary climate governance order with policy prescriptions for the post-
2020 era. The sixth part of this Handbook includes a collection of chapters that explicitly

xxvi Research handbook on climate governance
address a number of political ideals mobilized in the climate governance scholarship.

The effectiveness and democratic legitimacy of an increasingly complex climate regime
are two reoccurring themes in this normative debate. Andresen (this volume) devotes his
chapter to the weak performance of UN climate diplomacy. While he sees the wicked or
malign problem structure of climate change as the root cause of the lingering UN climate
negotiations, Andresen notes that institutional design matters for regime effectiveness.
In a time when developing country economies jointly produce some 85 percent of total
global carbon emissions, the Kyoto template has grown obsolete. A new framework
treaty in Paris blending bottom-up national pledging and top-down review may provide
the necessary institutional design to involve developing countries in climate mitigation
efforts. However, Andresen concludes that unless public demand for strong climate poli-
cies increases considerably, any new agreement, irrespective of approach, will eventually
prove insufficient to solve the complex problem of climate change.
Gupta and Mason (this volume), by contrast, problematize the standards of perfor-
mance used to assess the effectiveness of the wider regime complex for climate change.
The monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) schemes used in the UNFCCC
context, and the range of voluntary carbon disclosure initiatives developed by corporate
and civic actors, do indeed help to make transparent who is doing what, how and to what
end in a decentralized and messy climate policy architecture. Such rendering of climate
action transparent is a necessary step in holding actors to account for their (in-)actions.
However, Gupta and Mason also illustrate how the growing embrace of voluntary trans-
parency as a default governance option is actively promoted by powerful actors, such as
corporations and policy elites, in order to create and facilitate markets that allow major
emitters to avoid more stringent or costly action pathways. By drawing attention to the
political disagreements about whose actions should be made transparent, by whom and
to what end, they invite us to critically reflect upon the standards of performance used in
the post-Copenhagen era.
Weak mitigation performance brings questions of climate adaptation, vulnerability,
security and resilience to the fore. While these concepts remain at the margins of the
climate governance scholarship, they have proliferated and matured in parallel lit-
eratures such as geography and development studies during the past decades. Dilling
(this volume) outlines how the climate adaptation literature has focused on identifying
decision-making processes that are capable of responding to a deeply uncertain, highly
changeable and contested policy field. Flexibility, robustness, adaptive capacity and risk
tolerance emerge as reoccurring political ideals in this scholarship and are frequently
expected to help societies to build resilience to dangerous climate change. While the
resilience terminology now is moving rapidly into climate policy research and practice, it
has been criticized for its ambiguity and lack of attention to issues of power and human
agency (Adler et al. this volume). Inattention to power relations does not, of course,
mean that concepts such as climate resilience are politically neutral. Oels (this volume)
interprets the discourse of resilience as an expression of an advanced liberal form of
climate governance. It is a discourse that tells those under threat of dangerous climate
change to accept pending climate risks as inevitable and to prepare themselves for the
coming disasters. By constructing climate change as uncertain and catastrophic, funda-
mental questions about our social relations with nature get lost and technocratic forms
of governing are legitimized.

Climate governance after Copenhagen xxvii
Against this backdrop, Fischer and Neimanis et al. (this volume) offer important
analyses of the future of democracy and environmental ethics under the challenging
conditions of the climate crisis. Giddens’ proposal (2009) to leave climate politics in the
hand of experts, and Lovelock’s suggestion to ‘put democracy on hold’ (quoted in
Hickman 2010), demonstrate that eco- authoritarian thought may indeed resurface
in face of pending climate catastrophe. Fischer does, however, see glimmers of hope in
the global ecovillage movement. Anchored in a tradition of participatory democracy,
local e nvironmentalism, decentralization and bioregionalism, the ecovillage movement
invites us to consider how ordinary citizens mobilize to reduce their carbon footprints,
strengthen sustainable lifestyles, and promote self-sufficiency and consensual decision-
making (Litfin 2013). Whereas Fischer suggests that these participatory modes of
ecological democracy may offer a grounded response to the technocratic tendencies in
contemporary climate governance, Neimanis et al. (this volume) propose that new ways
of living with climate change also may provoke a rethinking of the presumed distance
between our human embodied selves and meteorological phenomena. By recognizing
that humans are always of the world and its ‘nature,’ Neimanis et al. suggest that we can
foster a climate politics of location and justice whereby specific histories of subjects and
communities are taken as primary, rather than incidental.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
The final part of this Handbook takes a forward-looking perspective on climate govern-
ance practice and invites us to reflect upon directions in the scholarship. It is not sur-
prising to find that the future of the UN climate regime remains a central concern for
many authors in this section. The scholarship on climate governance after Copenhagen
has, on the one hand, asked us to broaden our conception of climate politics and to
pay close attention to novel forms and topographies of regulation emerging beyond the
international climate regime. On the other hand, the chapters included in this Handbook
effectively illustrate how climate governance post-Copenhagen has developed in dense
interplay between governments, markets and civil society. Much of the low-carbon
experimentation found at national, regional, local and transnational levels—be it through
markets, corporate carbon disclosure or individual footprinting—would simply not have
taken off without intergovernmental agenda-setting, norm diffusion and legitimation.
Against this backdrop, Eckersley (this volume) challenges the notion that UN climate
multilateralism is facing a crisis of legitimacy. Despite the disappointing outcomes in
Copenhagen, she finds that the negotiating states so far have managed to avert crisis by
lowering expectations, avoiding principled commitments and introducing greater flex-
ibility in texts and decisions. Although these developments may not be sufficient to avoid
a real-world climate crisis, they have kept parties at the negotiation table and hereby
spurred activities in the wider regime complex for climate change.
To some authors in this Handbook, this dynamic interplay between multilateral and
transnational climate action is not enough to counter the urgency of dangerous climate
change. Biermann (this volume), for instance, explores avenues for more forceful collective
climate action through strengthened involvement of civil society in climate institutions;
the establishment of a World Environment Organization; the introduction of qualified

xxviii Research handbook on climate governance
majority voting in climate negotiations; and the buildup of effective systems of global
adaptation governance. Linnér and Rayner (this volume), by contrast, warn scholars and
practitioners to uphold the dream of a coordinated global response to climate change.
Instead of perpetuating the erroneous assumption of the Kyoto Protocol—that one day
a cap on emissions will be effectively implemented and trigger a carbon price sufficient
to spur transformations to the low carbon society—they envision a climate regime that
incentivizes investments in low-carbon energy innovation. This alternative approach
to climate regulation would stimulate policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions as
a beneficial side effect of energy efficiency and investments in renewables, and hereby
put society on a low carbon development trajectory. Would such a step away from the
cap-and-trade model of the Kyoto Protocol imply a break with the norms of liberal envi-
ronmentalism that seem to define the post-Copenhagen era? Lipschutz (this volume) sug-
gests not. Efforts to involve businesses and individuals in the monitoring of their carbon
footprints, whether through cap-and-trade schemes or energy investment initiatives, are
premised on the belief that, eventually, authoritative allocations of private property in the
atmosphere will be made and distributed by individual states, who will guarantee them.
Under the rubric of ‘climate governance,’ Lipschutz predicts that the atmosphere will
continue to be privatized and people’s actions and behaviors governed through private
data.
How then, should the scholarship on climate governance develop to foster analytical
space where the ongoing privatization, marketization and liberalization of climate gov-
ernance can be critically interrogated and debated? To Bailey and Revell (this volume),
reinvigorating politics is the way forward. They find that the scholarship on climate
governance for too long has avoided the adversarial political processes that shape the
dynamics and outcomes of climate policy in particular places. One important driver of
this trend, they argue, is the pressure on academics to maintain dialogue with decision-
makers to be policy-relevant. The willingness to offer tacit policy recommendations has
led many scholars in this field to explore reformist rather than radical transformations in
climate governance. This development highlights the importance of critical governance
approaches that seek to challenge and deconstruct the assumed building blocks of the
current regime complex for climate change (see, for instance, Stripple and Bulkeley 2014).
However, Bailey’s and Revell’s critique also concerns the critical governance scholarship.
Given the academic tendency to prioritize theoretical rather than empirically oriented
research, they find an overemphasis on grand theorizing and conceptual advancement
at the expense of empirical assessments of the political realities facing public and private
actors in the everyday governance of climate change.
This critique speaks to Hulme’s call (this volume) for knowledge pluralism in the
continued governance of climate change. In contrast to the widespread assumption that
consensual knowledge on climate change can build political consensus on how to foster
collective action in a complex and interconnected world, Hulme argues for the political
benefits of plural epistemologies and political philosophies. ‘Climate governance is not
about creating the right forms of knowledge. It is thinking first about what forms of gov-
ernance and democracy are desirable and needed’ (Hulme this volume). This Handbook
demonstrates the important role that the scholarship on climate governance can play
in this political process. As effectively outlined by Page (this volume), there are no ‘tidy
solutions’ that can inform the politics of climate mitigation and adaptation. Policymakers

Climate governance after Copenhagen xxix
should therefore not expect political theorists to solve the problems of climate govern-
ance for them. More important are scholarly efforts to create a conceptual space where
current political arrangements can be debated and alternatives explored. Against this
backdrop, the recent expansion and pluralization of the climate governance scholarship
emerges as an opportunity. Epistemological, theoretical and empirical diversity is a good
way to ensure continued experimentation with multiple political ideals, concepts and gov-
ernance arrangements. It is our belief that this Handbook makes a valuable contribution
to that end. The broad analytical repertoire mobilized in this volume invites us to care-
fully think through how climate change has been construed as an object of scholarly and
political concern in the post-Copenhagen era, and to playfully investigate how the range
of political possibilities can be extended in the years to come.
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PART I
THEORIZING CLIMATE
GOVERNANCE

1. Global governance
Markus Lederer
INTRODUCTION
Climate change is a critical issue for global governance as the challenges are mounting
up to pose a highly significant problem (Levin et al. 2012; Bernauer 2013) and climate
change politics has become a lynchpin for overall international cooperation (Andresen
2013, pp. 314ff.). Could global governance be a solution to all these problems? The term
‘global governance’ on the one hand implies the normative notion that global problems
should be dealt with at the global level. On the other hand it refers to ‘the entirety of regu-
lations put forward with reference to solving specific denationalized problems or provid-
ing transnational common goods’ (Zürn 2013, p. 408). The notion of global governance
thus goes beyond ‘international’, as neither the latter’s state-centrism nor its hierarchical
connotation is accepted as an a priori description of world politics. Global governance
never has evolved into a theory (Zürn 2013, p. 401), but there has been a highly fruitful
exchange between the literature on global governance in general and the one on climate
change in particular (for a good overview of the genealogy of the term and how it has
been used in the academic debate about environmental issues, see Stripple and Stephan
2013, pp. 148ff.).
More and more scholars, as well as practitioners, argue that the global level is overrated
in its problem-solving capacity and that both normatively and analytically we should
move beyond global governance. For example, recent literature in the broader field of
international relations states that global governance faces a ‘gridlock’ (Hale et al. 2013),
that that we live in a ‘no one’s world’, where the twenty-first century ‘will belong to no
one’ (Kupchan 2012, p. 3) and that it is a ‘G-Zero World’ (Bremmer 2012). Should we
therefore give up on the notion of global governance of climate change, both as a norma-
tive project as well as an analytical undertaking? This chapter will try to flesh out possible
answers to this question by moving forward in three steps. First, the chapter briefly
describes how the literature on global governance of climate change evolved and why
its overly optimistic outlook can no longer be upheld. Second, the chapter will provide
an overview of current perspectives, differentiating between those who see the effective
and legitimate global governance of climate change as a ‘glass half full’, those who are
agnostic about it and, finally, those who argue that the glass is almost empty. Third, the
conclusion will provide possible scenarios of where the real world of global governance
of climate change might move to and what follows for academic debate.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
The literature regarding liberal institutionalism, multilateralism and regime theory

dominated the early discussions about the global governance of environmental issues in
3
4 Research handbook on climate governance
general (for overviews, see Morin and Orsini 2013; Chasek et al. 2014) and climate change
in particular (for a good overview, see Hoffmann 2013, pp. 7ff.). In the 1980s and 1990s,
scholars were primarily focused on identifying the conditions under which international
institution-building, in the form of regimes (defined as ‘sets of implicit or explicit prin-
ciples, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations
converge in a given area of international relations’, in Krasner 1983, p. 2) can happen.
Participants in this debate referred to the former literature that had analysed formal
organizations in world politics across all policy fields, but they now also tried to get a
hold on the informal institution building that did not teleologically end up in a formal
organization (Martin and Simmons 2013). The independent variables that were used to
explain the formation or development of regimes were demand within a given issue area,
the level of transaction costs, and hegemony or ideological convergence (Hasenclever
et al. 1997). Later on, the literature focused on the effectiveness of environmental regimes
and stated that compliance, and even problem-solving, could be judged to have been
high (Breitmeier et al. 2011). Overall, the regime approach of the 1980s and 1990s was
thus characterized by a strong state-centrism, a positivist epistemology and a rather
positive evaluation of the prospects of finding an institutional solution to environmental
problems.
For these early authors on global governance and climate change, the setup of the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, and
subsequently of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, proved an endorsement of their perspec-
tives. The international climate change regime proved to be very effective in setting
technical standards and, to some extent, in developing procedures for negotiations. For a
while, it did not seem unrealistic that, within the UNFCCC process, a global deal could
be found, as it provided various advantages, such as the promise of, inter alia, binding
commitments and strong signals to the private sector (Falkner et al. 2010, p. 255). The
ozone regime particularly served as a very successful example (Parson 1993) and most
observers hoped that a similar achievement would be possible also in the area of climate
change. It was thus no surprise that most public, political and scientific attention has
been given to the multilateral UN process that centred on Kyoto (e.g., Grubb et al. 1999).
As is well known, the climate change regime, however, has failed ever since to deliver
on substance, as global greenhouse gas emissions have increased 2.2 per cent per year
from 2000 to 2010 (IPCC 2014, p. 6). Andresen thus characterizes the regime as having
‘few achievements, but many challenges’ (2014, p. 21, see also Andresen this volume). The
Kyoto Protocol itself was halfway successful as at least most of those countries that rati-
fied it have delivered on their reduction pledges (Tol 2013). However, the United States
did not become a member of the Kyoto Protocol, neither did major emerging countries
have any reduction targets. Bringing the US and particularly China on board in a mean-
ingful way failed in the now iconic setting where US President Obama discussed with
the BASIC group (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) the so-called Copenhagen
Accord at the Conference of the Parties (COP) 15 in 2009 that, at best, showed that the
multilateral process has not (yet) completely broken down (Dimitrov 2010). Nevertheless,
the Copenhagen climate summit proved to be a turning point, not only for climate
change politics but also for regime literature, as a consensus emerged that international
negotiations would not initiate a strong regime. The 2010 Cancún and the 2011 Durban
Agreements were much better at delivering on technical issues, as well as in bringing

Global governance 5
negotiations to a new time track where, by 2015 (COP 21 in Paris), a new legally binding
agreement should be negotiated that should enter into force by 2020, all of which has to
happen with unanimity. Reduction commitments will have to be found through a (most
likely) voluntary pledge and review mechanism and ought to take into account the 2°C
target upon which the international community has agreed. All this is very unlikely to
be effective, in the sense that it will mitigate greenhouse gases in a substantial way. The
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP 2012) has reviewed all pledges and
identifies a severe ‘emission gap’. It thus seems appropriate to argue that global climate
change governance is facing a severe gridlock (Victor 2011; Hale et al. 2013, ch. 4).
However, how can we make sense of the current situation from an academic perspective?
WHERE ARE WE NOW?
Today we have a significant variety of perspectives that describe ‘global governance

architectures’ (for an overview, see also Biermann et al. 2009). In an ideal typical fashion,
three perspectives can be detected that currently dominate the discussion. These partially
overlap and some authors could easily be categorized into more than one group but,
as a first heuristic device, the following separation is hopefully helpful. There are those
who see the glass of global governance and climate change as half full and thus argue
that the global level, in particular the UN negotiations around the UNFCCC, should
and could play a pivotal role. Second, there are those who are agnostic about the pos-
sibilities of global governance, arguing that under specific conditions, some progress can
be maintained but that it is not evident that progress will occur. To a large extent this is
where neo-institutional regime theorists can be situated today. Finally, there are those
who claim that we have to move beyond the idea of global governance, at least in the
issue area of climate change, as the structural impediments are simply too strong for the
global level to work effectively. Authors in this field are also those who, in general, have
most trust in other fora, be that clubs, states or the subnational or individual level. The
following will primarily focus on the first two perspectives, as various chapters through-
out the Handbook deal with the third one.
THE GLASS IS HALF FULL
There is a group of scholars who have not given up the idea of global governance evolv-
ing into a mechanism for effective and legitimate problem-solving for climate change and
they also argue that the UN system is the most likely place where solutions can be initiated
(e.g., Hare et al. 2010). As one example, Falkner et al. (2010, pp. 258ff.) have argued for a
‘building block approach’ that is incremental but under the umbrella of the UNFCCC; it
could be built on various national and subnational pillars, as well as including treatments
that cover specific sectors, such as technology, deforestation or adaptation. The possibil-
ity of free-riding in such an approach cannot be excluded but, nevertheless, international
cooperation and global governance would be key and the UNFCCC would be the central
institution. Others are less optimistic about the UN process but argue that cooperation
per se is still possible at the global level. Particularly, Messner et al. (2013) have recently

pointed out that the prospects for international cooperation do not look as bad if one
takes the more significant lessons from natural sciences, particularly from evolutionary
biology, where it has been shown that basic mechanisms such as reciprocity, trust, com-
munication and enforcement work much better than we usually assume.
Also, those who focus on norm entrepreneurship either at the individual or at the
institutional level argue that global governance can work. Individuals can initiate norm
cascades at the international level and these norms gain salience under specific condi-
tions within domestic arenas (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). Similarly, international
donor activities, particularly the money they provide, might evolve as a game-changer in
the climate change policy of some states (Fuhr 2010). Regarding institutions, the role of
bureaucracies has gained attention (Biermann and Siebenhüner 2009; Siebenhüner this
volume) and, in particular, the UNFCCC secretariat has been rather successful in coor-
dinating the highly complex negotiations, as it provides important input for weaker state
delegations (Depledge 2005, ch. 6; Busch 2009).
Contrary to the first generation of regime scholars, these authors argue that we either
have to understand the internal dynamics of global institutions (and not just assume that
their existence will lower transaction costs, etc.) or that the domestic political context has
to be taken into account. Global multilevel governance thus includes regional, national
and local states as well as non-state actors that all exercise authority (for an overview, see
Zürn 2012). Also, the state is still perceived to be a major site of authority but without
falling back into methodological nationalism that claims that this is necessarily so from
an ontological or normative standpoint. Global multilevel governance of climate change
is thus no longer perceived as a linear process.
IT IS TOO COMPLEX TO SAY WHETHER THE GLASS IS HALF

FULL OR HALF EMPTY . . .
The largest group of international relations scholars would currently appear to

be in limbo. On the one hand, they argue that there is simply no denying that the
global level has not fulfilled its promises and that some of the literature that was
previously discussed might be too idealistic. On the other hand, the mainstream states
that the global level cannot be completely discarded, for normative as well as for ana-
lytical reasons. It is thus no surprise that we have various terms on offer that all try
to make sense of the current situation; not relying on linear versions of regime theory
but not giving up on it completely, either. These include: fragmentation, institutional
interplay, regime complex, polyarchy and orchestration, and each will be now briefly
introduced.
Starting with the term ‘fragmentation’ seems to be reasonable because all of the later
approaches agree that the global governance of climate change is not only highly complex
but also strongly segmented and partially fragmented, vertically as well as horizontally
(Biermann et al. 2009; Zelli 2011; Zelli and van Asselt this volume). Whereas fragmenta-
tion in popular discourse is often only employed pejoratively, academic debate is more
nuanced and argues that within a fragmented institutional landscape, positive effects such
as fostering institutional competition and innovation can also occur (Cohen and Sabel
1997). However, regulatory uncertainty, high transaction costs and a race to the bottom,

Global governance 7
as well as the creation of hollow institutions are potential drawbacks that are particularly
visible in the field of climate change (Hale et al. 2013, pp. 46, 211ff.).
To avoid some of the negative connotations of the term ‘fragmentation’, many authors
now speak of ‘institutional interplay’. The term nicely captures the fact that the climate
change regime is becoming much more hybrid, with many more state and non-state insti-
tutions involved beyond the UNFCCC (Moncel and van Asselt 2012). This literature
builds on the notion of regime interplay as introduced by Oberthür and Gehring (2006;
see also Stokke and Oberthür 2011). Climate change is seen as a prime example where we
witness a ‘multi-institutional nature of this area of governance’ (Oberthür and Gehring
2011, p. 28). The literature can be divided into those that either focus on the interplay
with other environmental sectors such as biological diversity, desertification and the
ozone regime, or those sectors that analyse the interaction with non-environmental
sectors such as trade, aviation and health (see Oberthür and Gehring 2011, pp. 28–29 for
more details). One of the big questions that remains is whether interplay can somehow
be managed and for some, the UNFCCC is still seen as an important catalyser, agenda-
setter and facilitator for bringing about legitimate governance (Moncel and van Asselt
2012, p. 163). Similarly, Dimitrov (2010, 2013, p. 350) points out that the international
level and the global negotiations indirectly initiate similar national responses towards a
low-carbon framework, even though there is no common legal agreement. It is evident
that these approaches have some overlaps with the building block approach discussed
within the first ‘glass half full’ camp.
Another, and currently very prominent, group of approaches is more pessimistic and
argues that a single international regime cannot be established; instead we shall see the
evolution of a ‘regime complex’ for climate change (Van de Graaf and De Ville 2013).
Raustiala and Victor (2004) introduced the term for describing the institutional inter-
play in the field of plant genetic resources (for a good overview of the literature, see
Orsini et al. 2013) and Keohane and Victor (2010, pp. 2, 14) adopted the term for climate
change, characterizing regime complex as a ‘loosely coupled collection of independent
regulatory elements’. For Keohane and Victor, the regime complex for climate change
evolved because of the high problem and interest diversity inherent to climate change.
Although it might foster gridlock, could be dominated by veto points and could lead to a
race to the bottom, the authors argue that a regime complex is better than an integrated
but highly dysfunctional regime. A regime complex might thus be more flexible across
issues and more adaptable over time (Keohane and Victor 2010, pp. 18ff.). What can,
however, be criticized vis-à-vis this approach is that, besides its strong reliance on states, it
can only ex post explain in a rather functionalist perspective why we witness the evolution
of such a regime complex in a specific issue area.
Very similar to the notion of a regime complex, but giving up on state-centrism, is the
polycentric approach to climate change governance, or ‘polyarchy’ (Ostrom 2010, 2014;
Cole 2011). The polycentric governance approach is characterized by a multitude of
actors (state and non-state) that provide common goods at various levels and in various
combinations. It builds on the earlier work of Ostrom’s (1990) notion of ‘governing
the commons’. In the field of climate change governance, we are said to have a weak,
polycentric approach that includes the UNFCCC process, national and subnational
approaches, as well as non-state initiatives. The big question is, however, whether the lack
of any effective oversight system and the sheer scale of the climate change regime make it

incompatible with managing the commons approach that defined exactly these two issues
as important design principles.
Another approach that resonates most with the general discussion of international
relations scholars, who are also in other policy fields, is ‘orchestration’ (Abbott and
Snidal 2009; Abbott 2012). Hale and Roger (2014, pp. 60–61) define the concept as a
‘process whereby states or intergovernmental organizations initiate, guide, broaden, and
strengthen transnational governance’. They show that this is, by now, a highly relevant
process, as about one-third of identified transnational governance initiatives in the issue
area of climate change involved orchestration of one form or another. Similarly to
polyarchy, the approach thus recognizes the strong role of non-state actors but stresses
much more the necessity of coordination that has to be undertaken by governments or
international organizations. Orchestration thus combines hierarchical and vertical ele-
ments of governance. The advantage of such a perspective is that the dichotomy between
state/non-state actors is, to some extent, overcome and the hybridization of global gov-
ernance arrangements is much better captured.
These conceptual innovations of the mainstream of global climate change governance
research allow a much more nuanced picture of the current situation than the overly sim-
plistic and too optimistic version of regime theory. However, this comes at a price. Firstly,
good concepts are not yet theory. Thus, Zelli and van Asselt (2013) argue for a more
theoretical approach that takes up power-based, interest-based or cognitive approaches
from regime theory, allowing more insights into the causes and effects of the evolving
global governance landscape. Second, there are those who claim that the conceptual
innovations are blind to what is really going on and that the heyday of global governance
is over, no matter how you frame or theorize it.
THE GLASS IS HALF EMPTY, AT BEST
The final group of authors has abandoned almost all hope that the global level, at least in
the form of UN conferences, will deliver any substantial progress and thus stresses that,
if anything at all, only bottom-up approaches are promising avenues for climate change
governance (e.g., Hoffmann 2013). In this group, we can differentiate between those who
argue for state-based, bottom-up politics and those who claim that both the global level
and the state has lost much of its appeal, and that thus non-state activities should be the
way to go.
After the experiences of the perceived failure of the conference of the parties in
Copenhagen in 2009, policymakers and some scholars have stated that we should rethink
the role of individual state action. Their point of departure is unilateral domestic action,
as some individual countries have made significant pledges in how to reduce emissions
or at least to slow their growth; for example, Brazil or China. The evolving pledge and
review mechanism does not, of course, solve the free-riding problem and there will always
be states that will make much lower commitments than they should under a system that
takes the 2°C objective seriously. Nevertheless, it is a second-best option compared to a
world where neither unilateral nor global commitments are being made (Rayner 2010;
Victor 2011).
Building on these individual state actions, some have speculated that small clubs of

Global governance 9
countries or coalitions of the willing could evolve, which provide the collective good
of climate stabilization without waiting for the international caravan to join in (McGee
2011; Eckersley 2012). The question most debated within this stream is whether clubs
should replace the UNFCCC process (Victor 2011) or whether they would provide
transformational input that would then be uploaded to the global level (Weischer et al.
2012). Prominent examples of existing clubs are the Asian Pacific Partnership and
the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate Change; both were initiated by
President George W. Bush in the hope of bypassing the international UNFCCC process
(for details, see Keohane and Victor 2010). Both clubs are, however, currently rather
toothless. Nevertheless, the notion of clubs should not yet be abandoned, as some have
argued that, from a game-theoretical perspective, informal cooperation by a few key
countries could lead to a tipping point at the international level, inducing other states to
join (Heal and Kunreuther 2011). The most convincing example given is that of China
and the European Union (EU) together initiating a new boom in green energy, particu-
larly solar, and thus creating a momentum from which a more efficient international
equilibrium between all states could be reached. Another club is the group of BASIC
countries that is gaining more and more power within the negotiations, as well as within
the policy field overall, and is thus setting a new standard for the group of developing
countries (Never 2012; Lederer 2013a).
Similarly, state-oriented scholars argue that single states unilaterally take up a front-
runner position in a climate-related field that is then potentially replicated by a larger
number of countries. In particular, the German energy transition has been identified as a
potentially leading example (Lederer 2013b). This relates the global governance literature
back to the notion of leadership that can be exercised by powerful states such as the US
(Falkner 2005; Bang this volume) or organizations such as the EU (Gupta and Grubb
2000; Oberthür and Roche Kelly 2008). Weaker states or coalitions can become influen-
tial leaders, ‘borrowing external power’ (Betzold 2010). Overall, today’s climate change
leaders are, however, much more in need of followers and there are strong doubts that
individual actions will lead to a global collective effort.
Finally, a more radical group of scholars argues that, academically as well as regarding
policy, we should completely abandon the notion of global governance and move beyond
regimes in order to conceptualize the politics of climate change. Some criticize the strong
state bias of the regime literature and thus argue for a stronger focus on the transnational
level (Biermann 2010; Hale et al. 2013, p. 268; Hoffmann 2013; Dingwerth and Green
this volume), whereas others are critical of the term regime itself (Conca 2006). Stripple
and Stephan (2013, p. 159) nicely speak of an ‘emerging climate order’ and thus maybe
provide the most neutral and, at the same time, most comprehensive term to capture
current developments that are no longer relying on states to govern globally.
CONCLUSION: WHERE MIGHT WE END UP?
This chapter has argued that the notion of the global governance of climate change has
lost much of its appeal and that currently we are, at best, developing good concepts for
the evolving institutional complexity that surrounds us. But what are the possible sce-
narios for the future and how should academia react to these?

The first scenario seems to be the most unlikely and might be labelled ‘global govern-
ance against all odds’. In this scenario, a coherent intergovernmental regulatory regime
emerges out of the current regime complex and the regime is able to initiate collective
action on climate change. In other words, COP 21 in Paris in 2015 (or whenever it offi-
cially ends) becomes a stunning success. This is not what most people would expect but
then again most observers were also quite surprised when, in the autumn of 2013, the
Doha Round of international trade negotiations came to a rather far-reaching agreement.
The latter was, however, shortly afterwards put into question by the Indian government,
showing that no global success is possible without also the approval of the emerging
economies. The second scenario (labelled ‘transnational actors save the world’), which is
almost as unrealistic as the first one, also predicts successful action but much more from
a bottom-up or transnational level where climate change experiments (Hoffmann 2011)
are initiated and are then successfully scaled up.
The third, and most likely, scenario is the continuation of the status quo, which can
best be characterized as ‘muddling through’. Initiatives from the local, the regional and
the national level contribute to governing the global, but coordination is low and results in
even more fragmentation and complexity. Nevertheless, some emissions are avoided and
some learning takes place. Unfortunately, a fourth scenario (labelled ‘climate change gov-
ernance as the living dead’) cannot be ruled out, predicting that the system implodes and
becomes even more dysfunctional than it already is (Geden 2012). For some, the current
status of carbon markets is already perceived as having contributed more bad than good
and is thus an example of such ‘ungovernance’. We are thus witnessing ‘Carbon Market
zombies stumble on’ (Reyes 2012, p. 28). In this last scenario, if the COP in Paris in 2015
does not deliver any substantial agreement and the voluntary pledges do not add up to
a substantial slowdown of global emissions, multilateral international negotiations and
thus the core of global governance are indeed the ‘living dead’ at best.
What then follows for the academic treatment of climate change and global govern-
ance? A first recommendation would be to take the notion of global multilevel governance
even more seriously (Zürn 2012). Too much of the literature on global governance still
perceives the global level to be normatively superior and/or independent from domestic
politics but, as the literature regarding comparative environmental economics has shown,
domestic politics plays a major role in whether governance structures are established
and how successful they are (see, e.g., contributions in Steinberg and Van Deveer 2012).
The literature regarding global governance is still not global and thus does not take the
Global South seriously enough. There have been various excellent treatments of the role
of the South in climate change politics (e.g., Roberts and Parks 2007; Gupta this volume)
but, so far, these have either lamented the unfair treatment the South gets overall, or that
the rise of new powers will complicate issues. Perhaps more attention should be paid to
potentially positive developments that the South can bring towards low-carbon develop-
ment overall (see contributions in Held et al. 2013).
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2. Realism
John Vogler
INTRODUCTION
Realism has maintained its dominant position, not only in the international relations
(IR) scholarship, but in providing the – largely unacknowledged – assumptions about
interest and power that underlie everyday political commentary. The study of global
environmental politics represents something of an exception. Here, there has been mutual
neglect – even antipathy. For classical realists, environmental issues were the province of
‘low’ functional politics, of little or no relevance to the serious business of statecraft and
the pursuit of national interests. Morgenthau (1967) regarded the natural environment as
either a fixed context for international politics or as one constituent of national power.
Students of environmental politics have emphasized the role of an emergent global civil
society as a critical element of the ‘greening’ of the world system (Falkner 2012). Often
the state forms part of the problem rather than the solution. By contrast, the state is
indispensable to the realist paradigm. It, and its presumed interests, define the subject of
IR in a tradition that approached its ultimate simplification in the neo-realism of Waltz
(1979).1 Structural realism, lacking the subtleties of its classical predecessor, inhabits a
zero-sum world of power politics in which the institutional and cognitive variables that,
in liberal accounts, are productive of global environmental governance (itself a term that
would provoke derision among many realists) are absent. Furthermore, the kind of stra-
tegic cast of mind usually associated with realism would be actively counterproductive
to the negotiated solution of environmental problems. As Deudney (1990) observed, at
a time when the linking of environment and security policy was being widely discussed,
that if the Pentagon had been put in charge of the stratospheric ozone negotiations, they
would still have been stockpiling chlorofluorocarbons to use as bargaining chips!
This chapter examines the possibility that the emergence of climate change as an
issue including, even transcending, other areas of environmental policy has changed this
situation. There are several good reasons to think that under these circumstances realism
cannot – indeed has not – neglected the climate issue. First, there is the matter of changes
to that central realist nostrum, the national interest. Then, there is the associated observa-
tion that climate change has increasingly become a matter of ‘high politics’. This reflects
popular concerns, but also the interconnection between the sources of anthropogenic
climate change and control and use of energy resources – long the object of strategic
competition. Finally, there is an evident relationship between ‘normal’ realist preoc-
cupations with inter-state and inter-communal conflict and war and the consequences
of climatic alteration. This has become a staple of discussion in military establishments
and foreign offices, although there has been little in the way of substantive findings or
reorientation of ideas about security. The related question, for this chapter, is whether the
other side of the mutual neglect between students of environmental politics and realism
still makes sense in the era of climate change. Here two potential contributions of realist
14
Realism 15
thought to the study of climate governance are considered. The first involves the motives
of those who represent state governments in climate negotiations and realist analyses of
the struggle for prestige and recognition. The second considers power structural, hegem-
onic and even ‘concert’ explanations of state behaviour in international climate politics
that derive from the realist tradition.
THE NATIONAL INTEREST, HIGH POLITICS AND

ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY
In realist thought, the national interest, usually defined as the defence of national ter-
ritory but also involving the protection and promotion of economic assets, will deter-
mine state foreign policy objectives. These will be what Arnold Wolfers (1962) defined
as ‘possession’ rather than ‘milieu’ goals. The latter, as the name suggests, involve the
general improvement of the international context through the non-exclusive provision of
universal benefits and public goods. Environmental agreements typically pursue milieu
goals though the avoidance or reduction of harm. In realist accounts, they are of second-
ary or even tertiary importance when considered alongside national welfare and security
possession goals. Mitigating and adapting to climate change must be the ultimate ‘milieu’
goal, but the significant point for realist analysis is that climate issues also impinge upon
core possession goals. This is evidently the case for members of the Alliance of Small
Island States (AOSIS) whose territorial survival is at stake. Such cases of perceived
immediate national vulnerability are relatively rare. Much more typical is a propensity
to frame climate policy in relation to the economic costs of international attempts to
mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Saudi Arabia, for example, has sought consistently to
block measures that might restrict the use of fossil fuels and compromise the future of
its economy. In climate negotiations the economic interests dominating national policies
are only too clear, whether in the US requirement that its developing world competitors
should undertake mitigation commitments, Canadian rejection of a second phase of
the Kyoto Protocol or Russian defence of its allocation of tradable ‘hot air’ under the
same agreement. China also vigorously protects its assumed right to the ‘carbon space’
on which continued economic development is seen to depend. This constitutes a high
priority for regime survival in the face of the pressure to raise the living standards of
China’s vast impoverished rural population. An interest-based analysis of international
politics is, of course, also at the heart of liberal approaches, but the distinctive feature of
realist analysis is its insistence upon the zero-sum character of international negotiations.
Gains will always be relative to those of competitors, denying the possibility of integra-
tive solutions that can realize absolute gains for all parties, which liberals advocate as a
cornerstone of effective global environmental governance.
Climate change differs from other environmental issues because mitigation has been
defined very much in terms of carbon dioxide emissions arising from energy use. This has
meant that attempts at international climate governance are inevitably entangled with the
politics of energy security and control over scarce hydrocarbon resources and controver-
sial nuclear facilities. For realists, the national interest status of the competition for scarce
energy supplies needs little elaboration. Climate policy is, however, usually regarded as a
cost and a potential threat that may bear upon core state energy needs. We are only at the

beginning of serious consideration of how national, energy and climate security policy
might dovetail together (Froggatt and Levi 2009; Vogler 2013).
Most day-to-day international environmental negotiation – on hazardous waste, biodi-
versity or a multitude of other subjects – is generally considered ‘low politics’. This would
include much climate diplomacy in the subsidiary bodies and in the various working
groups at the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) to the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The issues are often highly technical
and discussed by specialized national civil servants. However, the ‘high level segment’
that is scheduled for the end of COPs sometimes achieves significant political visibil-
ity and, often, exaggerated declarations of ‘breakthrough’ and ‘deadlock’. Attendance
by presidents and prime ministers of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and
Development (UNCED), the 1997 Kyoto COP, various G8 meetings and above all
the 2009 Copenhagen COP, have consciously attempted to give ‘high politics’ status
to the climate issue. In 2014, the UN secretary general sought to inject some urgency
into the negotiations for a post-2020 climate agreement by summoning heads of govern-
ment to a ‘summit’ meeting in New York. Commitments were made in the context of
large public demonstrations in the expectation that this would put climate back upon
a crowded and pressing international agenda (Jacobs 2014). Realists tend to maintain a
rather old fashioned definition of ‘high politics’ in terms of the subject matter of classical
statecraft, peace, war and national survival. They would, doubtless, find attempts to raise
the status of climate negotiations not entirely convincing.
It is environmental security, in the face of the consequences of climate change, that has
provoked the most significant involvement of the realist academy alongside military and
political establishments. There is little need to comment upon the vast literature in this
area that has been produced since the end of the Cold War (Barnett 2001; H omer-Dixon
1999; Deudney and Matthews 1999). Originally it was stimulated by a mistaken sense that
the military would be underemployed in the era of the peace dividend and that armed
forces could be usefully reconfigured to cope with environmental problems. Sometimes,
this provided a useful cover for more normal activities. By the late 1990s, North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) was undertaking research into the conflict scenarios that
could be driven by climate change impacts (Lietzmann and Vest 1999). It took some time
for climate change to gain full acceptance as a threat that would rival the conventional
Western security triptych of ‘terrorism, failed states and weapons of mass destruction’.
In 2007, the UK sponsored a climate change debate at the UN Security Council that,
although without concrete result, at least indicated a shift in the international discourse
(Detraz and Betsill 2010), and the German government repeated the exercise in 2011.
Thus climate change has begun to be appropriated into mainstream realist and geo-
political analysis, but in a way that does not challenge fundamental assumptions by
questioning the nature of security. Instead, climate impacts are added to a list of ‘threat
multipliers’ that potentially change the geostrategic context – loss of Arctic ice cover
providing a well-used example (European Council 2008). There is even some discussion
of strategic opportunities (Schwarz and Randall 2003). National territorial integrity, the
control of sea lanes and potential acquisition of territory and resources and the resultant
conflicts are the focus of analyses that would have been, in essence, familiar to Mahan,
Mackinder or Spykman.2

Realism 17
RECOGNITION AND PRESTIGE
This concern with the related issues of energy security and conflict has not been matched
by a realist interest in climate governance. Yet, it is argued here, that there are aspects of
realist analysis that may have direct relevance. Classical realists always recognized that
honour and prestige (or spirit) sit alongside the acquisition of power and material wealth
as motivators of state policy (Lebow 2008). Twentieth-century writers on power politics
also grasped the central relationship between power and prestige (Wight 1978, p. 97;
Morgenthau 1967, p. 69). Prestige can be seen as a ‘positional good’ and one that has a
relative rather than an absolute character. Furthermore, in classical realism at least, it
relates to prevailing ideas of justice that will influence the ‘standing’ of an actor (Lebow
2010, pp. 64–66). This may be especially important in climate politics where questions
of equity and ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ have such a central role. The
significance of prestige and recognition in IR, something that has always been appar-
ent to diplomats and policy practitioners, has begun to attract more scholarly attention
(Lindemann 2010). However, there is little or no specific research on this dimension of
climate politics.
Diplomacy has always been marked by status competition and the climate regime is no
exception, particularly when it ascends to ‘high politics’. We have a rare insight into the
day-to-day diplomatic discussion of symbolic issues in Wikileaked US embassy cables
from the early part of 2010, following the Copenhagen COP. Diplomats note the high
national importance of a presidential visit, regret the European Union’s (EU) policy
of ‘one-upmanship’ and realize the importance of ‘symbolic’ issues (Carrington 2010).
The appointment of a state as host and president of a COP confers national prestige.
There can also be a certain proprietorial pride in the naming of agreements: the Kyoto
Protocol, Bali Programme of Action, the Copenhagen Accord, Durban Platform or
Doha Gateway. The role of the national presidency of a COP is regarded as an important
opportunity to demonstrate concern, diplomatic competence and leadership, and can
make a real difference to the conduct of negotiations.
In negotiations, officials will understand that their own careers may be harmed by
poor performance defined in terms of loss of reputation, and they will very likely have
internalized ideas about the proper position and respect to be granted to representatives
of their government. The same will apply, in a much more public and high-profile way,
to ministers and will be related to the level of public perception of the significance of
climate issues. Whether external climate action can be used to bolster domestic legitimacy
will depend upon the level of public interest/apathy or even outright hostility. The situa-
tion in European countries, where there has been general support for EU action (Adelle
and Withana 2010), is very different from that within a number of Anglo-Saxon polities,
where climate scepticism has been a notable feature of public political discourse.
The politics of prestige and recognition also play a part in identity formation. In the
study of IR, this point has been emphasized in constructivist scholarship. It may be of
particular importance for new states or those that have emerged from a long period of
dependence and subjugation. The assertion or perhaps reassertion of major power status
by China and India over recent decades is clearly evident and constitutes an important
‘political’ component of national positions on climate change. Japan in the 1990s benefit-
ted from the symbolic importance of hosting the negotiations at Kyoto. Japanese climate

activism can be interpreted as a means by which it could assert a major power status,
denied by post-1945 military restrictions, but consistent with its technological prowess
and position as one the largest of the global economies (Kanie 2011, pp. 120–125). There
is a similarity with the experience of the EU, a mainly civilian entity with very limited
access to the normal attributes of a major power. As a union of 28 countries, it is not
logically possible for it to have ‘national interest’ as such, but it has formed an identity
in world politics as an actor within its legal competences. The EU’s leadership in climate
politics, which has been generally acknowledged (Wurzel and Connelly 2011; Parker
and Karlsson this volume) has played a significant role in identity formation in contra-
distinction to the relative weakness of its common foreign and security policy. It devel-
oped its identity through forthright opposition to the George W. Bush administration
after 2001, leading the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and introducing the world’s
first international emissions trading system (Vogler and Bretherton 2006; Wettestad this
volume). Disappointed and even humiliated by the outcome at Copenhagen in 2009, the
EU reinstated itself at the centre of climate diplomacy, engineering the Durban Platform
for a 2015 agreement. Continued activism on issues such as the inclusion of air and
maritime emissions in the EU Emissions Trading System and on the additional taxa-
tion of fuels derived from tar sands have embroiled it in disputes with allies and trading
partners and are an indication of the seriousness of its intentions. A rather different form
of symbolic politics was evident in way in which the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance
(ALBA) used the dénouement at Copenhagen to assert their sovereignty and resistance
to great power dominance.
THE INTERNATIONAL POWER STRUCTURE
The conception of international politics as an endless struggle in which the powerful

prevail lies at the heart of realism. Military strength, by which the great powers were con-
ventionally defined, is paramount, and the United States remains without a close rival in
this respect. However, the possession of vast military capability does not appear to have
any direct relevance to the exercise of power within the climate and, indeed, many other
international regimes. More than three decades ago Keohane and Nye (1977) argued per-
suasively that in a world of ‘complex interdependence’ – in contrast to the old conceptual
world of realism – strategic preponderance was unlikely to be ‘fungible’ across a range of
issue areas. Instead power resources would most likely be more ‘issue specific’. Without
going this far, most realists would probably accept that economic strength is relevant both
to future military balances and the specifics of commercial, environmental and other
issue areas. Thus, the exercise of power will necessarily relate to the economic structure
of the world system, although there will not be a simple correlation between economic
strength and the determination of outcomes.
The structure of the global economy has shifted rapidly over the lifetime of the climate
convention and this ought to provide indicators of a changing power structure relevant
to climate change issues closely related to the scale of national economies, responsibility
for emissions and potential to provide development aid. From 1988 to 2013, Chinese
gross domestic product (GDP) in terms of current US dollars rose from $310 billion to
a 2011 figure of $7,379 billion with similar, but less striking, increases in the size of the

Realism 19
other BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) economies (World Bank 2013).
Assertions of structural change tend to be based on the rate of growth rather than the
absolute size of the BASIC economies. Although China approximately doubled its share
of world GDP between 2000 and 2010, it still has a smaller GDP than the US and the EU,
but the gap is narrowing. Overall, the United States continues to be pre-eminent in eco-
nomic as well as military terms, a position that has been bolstered by its newfound energy
independence based upon the exploitation of fracking technology (Hastings Dunn and
McClelland 2013; Bang this volume).
Insofar as there has been a distinctive realist contribution to the study of international
cooperation, it has been the theory of ‘hegemonic stability’. This posits that cooperation
to sustain international regimes cannot be achieved on the basis of the self-interested
behaviour of the participants, which will tend under anarchic conditions to set them
at odds with each other. On the other hand, rules can be made and enforced and order
maintained if one state is sufficiently dominant to ‘hold all the others in awe’. Thus,
hegemonic leadership is required from a dominant power. Such an actor would have
access to crucial raw materials, control over major sources of capital and would enjoy
comparative advantage in goods of high added value. Crucially ‘it would be stronger on
these dimensions, taken as a whole, than any other country’ (Keohane 1984, pp. 33–34).
There was little likelihood that the USA would be in the vanguard of formulating the
international response to climate change, for it had already abandoned its previous leader-
ship of multilateral international endeavours for a narrower pursuit of domestically defined
national interests (Falkner 2005; Bang this volume). Although North–South tensions were
a constant, adherence to the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ (CBDR) principle
of the convention meant that the critical negotiations were held among annex I countries.
They usually pitted the Umbrella Group of developed countries – of which the US was
a leading member – against the EU. Here the undoubted structural power of the US
was deployed to thwart regime development. US administrations maintained c onsistent
positions, usually in opposition to binding targets and timetables and special treatment for
developing world competitors under CBDR. On key occasions, such as the formulation
of the Berlin Mandate in 1995 and the 2007 Bali Plan of Action, delegations pleaded with
a reluctant US not to block progress. Thus, far from hegemonic leadership, the US has
typically headed a negative ‘veto coalition’ of structurally powerful developed economies.
It may be argued that the theory of hegemonic stability does not actually require that a
dominant power act to lead or cajole others into cooperating over regime formation, rather
it suggests that without its support, an effective regime cannot exist.
This leaves the problem of accounting for the cooperation that did occur, in the setting
up of the convention and, most significantly, in the ratification and implementation of
the Kyoto Protocol in the face of strong US opposition. In realist terms, the EU seems
a most unlikely hegemon. US abdication of its once central role in global environmental
diplomacy certainly provided the opportunity for the exercise of EU leadership and, as
previously noted, there were some important benefits for the EU in being seen to stand
against its transatlantic partner. Also, partly because of the fortuitous use of 1990 as a
baseline date for emissions reduction commitments, the EU was able for a long period to
avoid internal restraints upon its bid for international climate leadership (Vogler 2011).
EU leadership during this period did have some structural basis. At the beginning of the
Kyoto process, the EU collectively was second only to the US as an emitter of greenhouse

gases. The ending of the Cold War also gave assistance to the EU’s climate diplomacy
insofar as it was able to ‘associate’ a whole range of accession states and dependent
neighbours with its climate policy positions. Actually the incorporation of the ten acces-
sion states of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean in 2004 probably marks the zenith
of the EU’s influence as an actor. Although it remained an economy on a par only with
the US, it appeared that growth trends signalled inevitable relative decline and by 2009 its
carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions represented only 11 per cent of the global total. Above all,
the financial collapse of 2007–2008 and the ensuing existential crisis of the Eurozone did
serious damage to the self-confidence of the EU and its external reputation. After 2008,
it was commonplace to regard the EU itself as a problem for the global economy. Great
internal legislative effort had been expended on the 20/20/20 climate and energy package,
eventually approved by the co-decision process at the end of 2008.3 The structural determi-
nants of what was widely seen as EU ‘failure’ at the 2009 Copenhagen COP seemed clear.
In fact the EU had never been in a position to dominate other parties to the convention
not located within its immediate sphere of influence, and had generally led by example,
making significant concessions and providing inducements (notably to Russia) in order to
ensure the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. For all the public ‘one-upmanship’ directed
at the United States during the Kyoto Process, there was always a clear understanding in
Brussels that the US would have to be drawn into any future agreement and great efforts
were expended at the 2007 Bali COP and elsewhere to ensure that this happened.
An older realist idea of a directing ‘concert’ of powers may appear more appropriate
to the climate regime than hegemonic leadership (Brenton 2013). This Metternichean
notion refers to the loose assembly of a few self-defined great powers that met to
ensure the stability of a restored order in Europe following the defeat of Napoleon in
1815. At the time it was a novel development for as Claude (1970, p. 23) wrote: ‘Before
the nineteenth century, the rulers of Europe were so preoccupied with their Sovereign
Dignity that they were virtually unable to do anything more at international conferences
than argue about questions of precedence and prestige.’ In what was, then, a multipolar
European international structure the ‘concert’ was to convene at various points over the
century (Claude 1970, p. 21). Under contemporary conditions with the ending of bipolar-
ity and the subsequent erosion of US dominance, a concert of great powers or ‘hegemony
of the powerful’ might have a renewed relevance. In key economic institutions there was a
concert of the G7, which, after the ending of the Cold War, with the addition of Russia,
became the G8. After 2000, the rise of ‘emerging economies’ brought about important
changes at the World Trade Organization (WTO), where India and China challenged the
dominance of the US and EU and in 2008 the rise to prominence of the G20 grouping.
At the 2009 Copenhagen COP, it appeared that a new concert, partly defined by the
fact that it comprised (with the exception of the EU) the largest emitters of CO2, had
seized control of the climate agenda. The BASIC countries directly engaged with the US
in the writing of the Copenhagen Accord. The fact that the final deal on the Accord was
struck between President Obama and the BASIC heads of government dramatized the
change that had occurred. A near universal consensus saw this as the expression of a new
power constellation that translated underlying structural trends into what amounted to
new great power deal over the future of the climate regime. In the most extreme view, it
was an example of the rise of the ‘G2’, in which the old hegemon came to an arrangement
with the Chinese contender. The EU, previously a leader, was seen to have been effectively

Realism 21
side-lined. In EU circles there was widespread dismay, President van Rompuy describing
the events at Copenhagen as a ‘disaster’ (Carrington 2010). Yet elsewhere Copenhagen
was represented as positive and realistic turn after the prolonged deadlock over Kyoto
borne of a more open and cooperative relationship between the major players and better
aligned with the power-structural realities of the world system (Grubb 2010).
The brutality of this display of great power pre-eminence represented a dramatic
break with the old climate regime that had been relatively immune from the effects of
structural change witnessed elsewhere in the international system. Contrary to experi-
ence elsewhere with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/WTO or even
the Stratospheric Ozone regime, the climate regime had from the outset near universal
membership. This universality and lack of a great power concert may explain some of
the weakness of the regime. Hurrell and Sengupta (2012) argue that the power relation-
ships within the regime had run in the opposite direction from that which might have
been predicted on the basis of underlying economic trends. The developing countries,
led by China and India, were able to exercise most influence over the negotiations in the
early years, in the formation of the convention and at Kyoto. They were assisted in doing
this by the setting of the negotiation under the auspices of the General Assembly and
as part of the universalist heritage of the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human
Environment. This allowed effective coalition politics based on the G77 and garnered the
support of Northern non-governmental organizations concerned with issues of climate
justice. The status of climate change as a specialized environmental issue and the appar-
ent weakness of many Southern economies in the late 1980s also helped (Hurrell and
Sengupta 2012, pp. 468–469). Up until 2009, BASIC members had been able to partici-
pate in various international regimes without having to exercise leadership or provide an
alternative ‘governance template’ (Kahler 2013, p. 715). Now the structural situation of
the BASIC countries has begun to induce them into a fuller engagement with the future
shape of climate agreement that might be negotiable with the US and its developed world
allies. Terhalle and Depledge (2013) have also pointed out that what was at stake here
was the redefinition of the international order. Witness, for example, the comments of a
Chinese delegate who ‘noted candidly that the politics of the negotiations in Copenhagen
were “much more important” to China than the climate change regime itself’ (Terhalle
and Depledge 2013, p. 581, emphasis added).
A weakness of ‘concert’ interpretations is partly – as Brenton (2013) admits – that
AOSIS has played ‘surprisingly important’ role over the life of the regime for ‘a group
which in geopolitical terms are the weakest in the negotiations’, while the Argentines and
Dutch have also had a significance beyond what might be expected. Furthermore, since
the ‘high politics’ of Copenhagen, broadly resented by many of the parties who had a
justifiable sense of exclusion, the regime has appeared to revert to its previous state. The
EU, despite its apparent loss of structural power, was able to reassert its leadership by
negotiating the deal between the Umbrella Group, the BASICs and the rest of the G77
that allowed the agreement of the 2011 Durban Platform. It was able to mobilize other
resources, including its willingness to exert diplomatic effort, through the Cartagena
Dialogue process. This, in typical EU fashion, sought to find common ground between
developed and developing countries within a conversation that embraced members of all
the climate coalitions, including the BASIC countries and ALBA.

CONCLUSIONS
Realist commentators have had to come to terms with the security implications of
climate change, but it is an open question as to whether they had anything useful to
add to our understanding of the politics of global climate governance. In general terms,
realism reminds us of the importance of power and the pursuit of prestige as a counter-
weight to liberal emphasis on the rational solution of collective problems. The hegem-
onic stability thesis, the primary realist contribution to debates about regime formation,
is clearly inapplicable to the development of the climate convention except perhaps in
a negative version! There appears to be much more mileage in a ‘concert’ perspective in
which, as evidenced at Copenhagen, the great powers come together to compose and
then impose an agreement in accordance with their mutual interests. For a long period,
such a ‘concert’ did not exist and at Copenhagen and afterwards such a departure
caused significant resentment among other excluded parties, in the universalist setting of
climate negotiations, that threatened to block further progress. Trust in the fairness and
transparency of the COP was only partly re-established at Cancún in 2010 and Durban
in 2011.
Realist insights into the role of prestige are potentially fruitful. It is evident that the
conduct of climate diplomacy has a number of political functions that are only loosely
related to the formal agenda. Recognition at international and domestic levels is impor-
tant for the parties and may also be part of a wider contest over the nature of interna-
tional order. The search for recognition and leadership status is also quite difficult to
disentangle from the material national interests that form the basis of liberal analyses of
negotiations. Elevated status may, as realist commentators have frequently pointed out
(Wight 1978, pp. 97–98), provide a source and means of influence that does not require
the employment of brute material power. An apparent loss of status and influence has
often been evident in complaints, often from smaller countries, about a ‘lack of transpar-
ency’ in negotiations and those chairing meetings have to be alert and sensitive to issues
of exclusion and wounded national pride.
Awareness of the status dimensions of international climate change politics has some
relevance to the construction of the climate regime. This is not simply a matter of avoid-
ing unnecessary exclusion of parties and various other diplomatic slights. Keohane
(2010) has argued that status-seeking behaviour can be utilized to promote agreements.
According to this analysis of the ‘economy of esteem’, there is an ‘intangible hand’ at
work that might be usefully recognized in the design of institutions. Keohane’s sug-
gestions involve establishing a ‘high standard of praiseworthy performance’ on climate
change and then ‘evaluating actions by countries and firms according to that standard’.
The ‘essential mechanism’ would then be ‘the institution of a number of prominent
awards and prizes’ (Keohane 2010, pp. 20–21). From a realist perspective, such status
indicators and esteem competitions already exist in abundance in climate politics. The
problem is to harness them to a constructive purpose in regime-building. There may,
indeed, be a deep contradiction here, between such an approach and the structural pre-
requisites of agreement involving the exclusion of most UNFCCC parties.

Realism 23
NOTES
1. For a recent attempt to develop a neo-classical realist approach to climate issues see Purdon (2014).
2. As Stevis (2006, p. 20) notes, geopolitics was the predecessor of the contemporary environmental conflict
and security research agenda.
3. This was, alongside pledges of climate funding, designed to provide the foundation of the EU negotiating
position for a post-2012 agreement. It was designed to deliver a 20 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020,
which if matched by other developed countries would be translated into a 30 per cent reduction. In the
event the economic downturn in the Eurozone meant that a decline in economic activity would make 20 per
cent a less than ambitious target while submerging popular concern with environmental issues beneath the
pressing requirements of rebuilding the European economy.
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3. Political economy
Peter Newell
INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICAL ECONOMIES OF CLIMATE

CHANGE GOVERNANCE
This chapter provides insights from a range of (global) political economy approaches into
how and why responses to the issue of climate change to date have taken the form they
have, what forms of (collective) action might be possible in a globalized capitalist politi-
cal economy, as well as providing a lens for analysing the distributional dimensions of
who wins, who loses and how from prevailing responses to climate change. It does this by
exploring in turn the constitution of climate change as a policy issue, its governance and
the social and environmental consequences of prevailing modes of governance. The argu-
ment is that any account of governance, including climate governance, has to provide
convincing answers to questions about who governs and why (who assumes power and
authority over decision-making in key arenas and on what basis? And, by implication,
who is excluded from the loci of decision-making) and what is to be governed (and what is
not) (who frames which issues, sectors, actors are to be subject to governance and those
which are not?), how they govern (which tools and strategies are privileged and why?) and,
critically, on whose behalf (who benefits from prevailing arrangements and how?). It is
argued here that perspectives from critical political economy are particularly well-placed
to provide answers to their questions because they help to understand the wider (social)
relations of power within which particular governance arrangements emerge and which
strongly shape their effectiveness (Newell 2008).
At the outset it is worth noting that there is no one coherent political economy per-
spective on climate change governance, but rather a multitude of them. There are many
political economies of climate change in theory and in practice. Across political science
and international relations there is a substantial body of work that invokes the label
‘political economy’ to describe its approach to explaining climate change governance.
Within liberal political economy, the focus is on states and markets and which combina-
tions are likely to be most effective at addressing climate change: whether we need more
state, more market or some third way as Giddens (2009) proposes in his book on the poli-
tics of climate change. Other work explores which combinations of public and private
actors may be capable of providing the public good of transnational climate governance
(Bäckstrand 2008; Bulkeley et al. 2012), or uncovers the (domestic) political economy of
rent-seeking and interest group politics (Lockwood 2013).
Set apart from this, there is a wide variety of critical traditions drawing on combi-
nations of historical materialism drawn from Gramsci, Marx, Poulantzas, Regulation
theory (Paterson 1996; Newell and Paterson 1998, 2010; Koch 2011; Parr 2012; Levy and
Newell 2002) and cultural political economy (Descheneau and Paterson 2011). While
what has been characterized here as liberal political economy is more oriented towards
the development of problem-solving theory in Cox’s terms (Cox 1987), the latter critical
25
approaches assume the economy and the way it is organized by existing alignments of
states, social forces and international institutions play a central part in causing climate
change and, therefore, pay greater attention to understanding where power lies in the
current global political economy in order to try and transcend it.
I argue that, taken together, the latter accounts – derived from different traditions
within historical materialism – provide immense value in understanding the constitu-
tion, governance and consequences of prevailing modes of climate governance. This is
so because they bring to the fore critical questions of causation and control over the key
processes of production and consumption that generate climate change, rather than take
as their starting point the moment at which an international institution initiates action on
an issue that neglects the prior political and material relations that account for the pro-
duction of environmental harm (Saurin 1996). This has important implications for who
participates in climate policy and on what terms, as well as for the often intimate rela-
tionship between regulators and the regulated. But I would also propose that some such
accounts can be fruitfully combined with more liberal and conventional theorizations
of climate governance, as well as some constructivist traditions. There remains a role
for regime theorizing in accounting for the granularity of negotiation dynamics and the
role of actors such as epistemic communities (Haas 1990) and ‘entrepreneurial leaders’,
for example, without losing sight of the bounded scope for decision-making by state-
managers that critical political economy accounts would emphasize, as neo-Gramscian
readings of regimes have illustrated (Gale 1998). Likewise, cultural political economy
accounts usefully highlight the ways in which norms, values, habits and desires permeate
climate politics and render some forms of action possible and legitimate and others less
viable (Descheneau and Paterson 2011), while work on governmentality helpfully sheds
light on how particular objects and subjects of regulation get constructed (Oels 2005;
Stripple and Bulkeley this volume).
In the sections that follow, I draw on some of the theoretical resources mentioned
above to first shed light on the constitution of climate change as a political issue; second,
to explore its governance; and finally to understand scope for change in prevailing
arrangements through a focus on the consequences of existing modes of climate govern-
ance before concluding with some reflections on the benefits and limitations of historical
materialist readings of climate governance.
CONSTITUTION
Climate change has come to be framed as a classic collective action problem requir-
ing international cooperation of the sort that has been forthcoming in the form of
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and
the Kyoto Protocol and that is the focus of much of regime theorizing (Young 2010;
Rowlands 1995). Conventional framings also identify it as resulting from a ‘market
failure’ – the world’s largest according to Nicolas Stern (2006) – resulting in the need
to price carbon properly, and requiring a new green, low carbon industrial revolution.
For critics, on the other hand, anthropogenic climate change is symptomatic of the
failings, injustices and inequalities of ‘fossil-fuel civilization’ (Parr 2012; Koch 2011)
and provides further evidence of the second contradiction of capitalism whereby

Political economy 27
c apitalism destroys its own means of (re)production through depletion of soil, water
and energy (O’Connor 1998).
Indeed, there is a long history of competing attempts to construct the problem of
climate change and hence the solutions to it in particular ways: as resulting from an
investment gap (UNCTAD 2010), poor pricing (Stern 2006) or lack of technology
(Lomberg 2013), solutions that privilege market-based solutions and the role of capital
and become a further justification for a new round of accumulation. A great deal of
political work goes into accommodating the threat posed by climate change to the work-
ings of the global economy and the need to ensure that responses to it align with capitalist
imperatives. We see this in current debates about ‘green growth’ and persistent attempts
to manage and dilute the critique of industrialism and capitalism implied by worsening
ecological conditions (Brand 2012) and to reconcile it with the idea that the ecological
modernization of the global economy is both possible and underway (Mol 2003). The
fact that reform of the basic operating principles and institutions of the global economy
are off-limits is explained by the ideological commitment to market-based mechanisms
to address a range of environmental problems including climate change (McAfee 1999).
These promote the idea that we can trade our way out of trouble, while faith is placed in
technologies that can leave rampant production and consumption untouched, observed
in the growing support for large scale techno-fixes such as geoengineering. The underly-
ing assumption appears to be that capitalism cannot change, so the climate will have to.
Meanwhile, framings around the idea that addressing climate change requires de-
growth, reduced consumption and the localization of the globalized economy (Trainer
1996) are clearly marginalized from elite discussions about transitions within capitalism.
Yet many of the mainstream discussions of institutions, markets and technology fail to
acknowledge – let alone address – the power relations at work that shape which responses
are possible and acceptable in prevailing political and economic conditions. This neglect
is significant because with climate change we are potentially faced with the need for
change in a political order rather than just a technology and series of discrete social prac-
tices. In part this is because the generation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is closely bound
up with what is conventionally defined as growth and with the production of energy that
sustains that growth (Sorrell 2010).
For political economists, therefore, more so than other issues, climate change is high
politics because responses to it potentially threaten some of the most powerful states and
corporations in the world. This affords immense structural power to providers of energy
able to fuel the growth strategies of state elites and present their fractional interests as
consistent with those of capital in general (Newell and Paterson 1998). What a critical
political economy account affords then is account of causation and dependency: who
produces, who regulates and the relationship between the two. In this sense there is a
relationship between the productive base of the global economy, the institutions set up to
manage it and deal with its contradictions, and the ideas and discourses that legitimate
the system around ‘green growth’, ‘climate compatible development’ and the like.
The prevailing context of globalization also constitutes the terrain upon which climate
governance evolves, shaping the menu of policy options and the autonomy of states to
respond to climate change in particular ways. Hence the era of neoliberal globalization
with its attendant intensification and spread of production and trade, and simultaneous
efforts to reduce the scope of states to resist it, is critical to understanding both the huge

increases in emissions of greenhouse gases that create the problem to be governed and
the reconfigured political landscape in which responses are sought. First, in terms of
the vast increase in greenhouse gas emissions, energy use has grown 16-fold during the
twentieth century and half of all emissions of carbon released into the atmosphere from
the burning of fossil fuels have occurred since the mid-1970s, the period of accelerated
globalization (Peet et al. 2011, p. 22).
Second, politically, globalization emerges both as constraint in the form of disciplinary
neoliberalism that shapes the context within which states have to operate and as an expla-
nation of the restricted terrain upon which debate about responses to climate change
takes place. The constraints derive from the heightened structural power of capital (Gill
and Law 1989) whose enhanced mobility in conditions of globalization lends credibility
to threats of capital flight and relocation of investments in the face of interventions
threatening to their interests, such as proposals for carbon taxes and efforts to secure
the exclusion of sectors exposed to competition in decisions about which firms will be
included in the European Union’s (EU) emissions trading scheme. This helps to explain
why issues of carbon leakage permeate all discussions of action on climate change: the
idea that regulating carbon emissions in one part of the world means polluters relocate
to areas not subject to constraints. It also helps to account for the limits upon state
autonomy in a globalized economy to intervene or reform sectors such as energy that are
responsible for the bulk of GHG emissions in the wake of energy sector liberalization
and power sector reforms pushed by institutions like the World Bank (Tellam 2000). An
emphasis on the way in which climate governance reflects and embodies a particular way
of organizing the global political economy helps to account for the struggle to maintain
policy discussions on the terrain of market and techno-fixes compatible with new rounds
of accumulation and business as usual (Wanner 2015).
But an emphasis on globalization also suggests potential opportunities for change.
This is because of the space opened up by the finance-led regime of accumulation
(Aglietta 2000; Koch 2011), which has created a potential fissure between the interests of
finance and productive (fossil-fuel based) capital. Powerful actors in this current phase of
neoliberalism – global finance – have shown an interest in de-carbonization and a sensi-
tization to the risks of climate change. New forms of climate governance have developed
over recent years focused on reporting, disclosure and the sensitization of businesses to
the risks associated with continued investments in fossil fuels. These are part of the trend
towards the pluralisation and transnationalization of climate governance (Dingwerth and
Green this volume). It includes pressure to disclose from the US Securities and Exchange
Commission, for example, forcing companies to disclose information about GHG emis-
sions alongside their financial reporting or from the UK regulations, which require all
UK quoted companies to report on their GHG emissions as part of their annual direc-
tors’ reports. Likewise, the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) that works with 655 institu-
tional investors holding US$78 trillion in assets to help reveal the risk in their investment
portfolios. Michael Jacobs (2012) refers to the ‘stranded assets’ that many investors may
be left with if states get serious about climate change and force companies to leave the
‘oil in the soil’ and the ‘coal in the hole’ if ambitions to keep warming below 2 or 3°C
are to be achieved. By some calculations, between 60 and 80 per cent of coal, oil and gas
reserves of publicly listed companies are ‘un-burnable’ if the world is to have a chance
of not exceeding global warming of 2°C. Disclosure strategies such as these provide one

means of repositioning investments currently viewed as assets rather as liabilities. In the

words of Carbon Tracker, which is advancing this approach, ‘the two worlds of capital
markets and climate change policy are colliding’ because major institutional investors are
starting to think about these issues such that ‘there will be increasing pressure from stake-
holders for explanations about how capital is being allocated’ (Carbon Tracker 2013). As
well as constituting important strategies of climate governance in their own right, moves
away from fossil fuels by powerful financial actors may also enable state managers to be
bolder in their mitigation efforts without fear of being disciplined.
Another way in which the power of finance capital becomes critical to an account of
climate governance is via interest in the commodification of carbon such that a category
of financiers is created with a material interest in more stringent controls upon GHGs,
which generates demand for the purchase of carbon credits. This has been an important
and critical development in fragmenting industry opposition to action on climate change
by showing that the fossil fuel industries do not always speak for the interests of capital
in general in their resistance to tougher action on climate change (Newell and Paterson
2010). Interest in carbon markets has brought into loose alliance large investors (such
as Merrill Lynch or J.P. Morgan), multilateral and regional development banks (but
especially the World Bank), richer governments keen to pursue options to reduce GHGs
in ways which require less domestic effort on their part, and many conservative non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) with good connections and deep pockets (such as
the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Conservation International)
that see, for example, carbon sequestration as a new revenue stream for their conservation
efforts (see Okereke this volume).
These latter examples suggest the value of political economy approaches that help
to identify opportunities to recast coalitions of interest and move action on climate
change forward based on a reading of the balance of forces that prevails at a particular
conjuncture; albeit in a more incremental and reformist manner that more radical critics
would reject. They draw attention to the relationship between the context and terrain
upon which climate change governance gets constructed and rendered manageable
within existing structures and the modes of organizing the economy that literally produce
climate change. Recognition of the fact that climate change is produced by the same
global political economy that provides the ideological, institutional and material context
in which responses to it have to be forged, takes us to the heart of the contradictions and
opportunities that we observe in global attempts to manage climate change. Historical
materialist accounts then hone their attention on the intimate relationship between the
constitution and governance of the international political economy, and the ‘nature’ of
contemporary patterns of global climate governance to which we now turn.
GOVERNANCE
How climate change came to be constituted in a particular way as evidence of market

failure, a neglect of particular technologies and as a result of a lack of inter-state coop-
eration in many ways put in place the institutional pathway and ideological frameworks
through which it would be governed.
First, given the framing of the issue in policy and academic circles as a collective action

problem, inspired by liberal economic assumptions about the need to deter free-riding
among rational utility-maximizing agents and provide tools for building trust and ensur-
ing compliance in an anarchic world, international law became the appropriate focus of
governance analysis. The early literature sought to explain the inter-state politics that had
produced the compromises and deals reflected in the wording of the UNFCCC (Mintzer
1992; Yamin and Depledge 2004). Explaining the creation and implementation of inter-
national law was the primary goal. Indeed much of the policy and academic attention to
climate governance still centres on the regime that revolves around the key agreements
in this area: the UNFCCC, Kyoto Protocol and its attempted successors (Falkner et al.
2010).
Historical materialist accounts, on the other hand, take a more critical view of the
law and the social relations it reflects and protects. Many scholars draw on insights from
Poulantzas about the state and law (cf. Brand and Görg 2008). In this reading, legal rules
cannot be divorced from the material conditions in which they are produced and seek to
preserve since they form ‘a crucial constituent of property relations and privatized class
power . . . advancing a globalizing neoliberal agenda under the guise of naturalized repre-
sentations of property, market and capital’ (Rupert and Smith 2002, p. 10). Underpinning
this is often a Marxist view of the state as ‘the managing committee for the affairs of the
bourgeoisie’ (Marx and Engels [1848] 1998), or in more Poulantzian terms, a crystalliza-
tion of a particular balance of class forces (Martin 2008), but either way seeking to (re)
produce the conditions for capital accumulation through a mix of law and coercion. An
historical materialist perspective then would be more critical of the idea that the state is a
neutral actor with respect to environmental degradation, including climate change. States
have a lot invested in maintaining fossil-fuel regimes that enrich state-owned enterprises,
are profitable for private companies that can be taxed, which employ large numbers of
people (who also pay tax) and that lubricate modern industry and most infrastructure.
This is to say nothing of the revolving door that often operates between states and the
capital they are meant to be regulating, especially around areas of common strategic
interest such as energy.
Excessive attention to the surface level diplomatic games played among state elites
in the climate negotiations as they play the blame game, passing the buck between one
another and displacing responsibility onto those least powerful to resist it, also tends to
overlook the ways in which climate governance reflects the shifting geometries of power
in the global political economy (Desai 2013). At a geopolitical level, this manifests itself
in the growing economic power and related exponential increase in carbon emissions that
has accompanied spectacular growth patterns in China, India and Brazil in particular
(Ciplet et al. this volume). The Copenhagen summit in 2009 in which China, India, Brazil
and South Africa were considered above the EU by the US, as the central players with
whom targets and measures had to be discussed, was highly emblematic of the shifting
geopolitics of climate change. The enhanced power of these countries has served to raise
the profile of the intimate connections between the global economy and responses to
climate change around issues such as trade, aid and technology, which are enrolled as
bargaining chips in the design of grand strategies for tackling climate change.
Second, the emergence of climate change as an issue of prominence from the late 1980s
during the height of neoliberalism was significant for casting its resolution in a particular
light and predetermining the range of actors that would be charged with responding to

the issue. What became notable as negotiations towards the Kyoto Protocol progressed
was the level of resistance on the part of the US in particular, as the world’s number one
emitter of GHGs at the time, to any agreement that did not include rapidly industrial-
izing developing countries. China, India and Brazil were seen by the US as competitors
and probable destinations for mobile industries wanting to escape emissions controls in
the Global North, made possible in a more open and globalized economy. Emphasis was
increasingly also placed on the need for flexible mechanisms that would allow developed
states to reduce their emissions in the cheapest way possible in order to relieve the burden
on domestic capital.
For political economists, the power of industrial lobbies in resisting regulatory action
and the steady march towards more marketized approaches were defining features of
this era as climate politics became ‘increasingly conducted by, through and for markets’
(Newell and Paterson 2010, p. 77). This can be traced through the creation of emissions
trading schemes in the EU, UK and Denmark, and the Renewable Energy Certificate
trading schemes that now operate in a number of countries (see Wettestad this volume).
It is also manifested in the rise of private governance and voluntary regulation, public–
private partnerships and a plurality of transnational climate governance arrangements
(Hoffmann 2011; Bulkeley et al. 2012; Pattberg and Stripple 2008; Dingwerth and Green
this volume).
It became clear during the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol that if action were to
be taken at all, and particularly by those economies contributing most to the problem,
markets offered the most politically palatable solution as part of a suite of measures to
bring down the costs associated with reducing emissions and to increase flexibility about
where emissions’ reductions take place. Market-based solutions aligned closely with pre-
vailing ideologies hostile to regulation and committed to the primacy of ‘efficiency’ and
the preferences of powerful fractions of capital in leading economies for trading schemes
over taxes or regulation once it became clear that outright opposition to action was no
longer tenable. The incorporation of market mechanisms became the quid pro quo for
the involvement of the US in particular in the negotiations on a Kyoto Protocol.
Despite having insisted on and then secured the inclusion of market mechanisms, the
US then refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. In the stalemate that followed, a discernible
trend became evident towards the diversification and proliferation of forms of climate
governance no longer gravitating around the inter-state regime with the UNFCCC at its
centre. The growth of transnational climate change governance led by cities, businesses
and NGOs can be explained by a range of drivers. These include the will to act in spite
of, or because of, the lack of progress in the climate talks (the governance vacuum), pres-
sures to formulate responses coming from civil society, consumers and other businesses
(civil regulation and peer pressure) and the desire to secure first mover advantages in the
market (Bulkeley et al. 2012; Hoffmann 2011). What has resulted from this diversification
and decentring of the UNFCCC as the epicentre of all transnational climate governance
is what has been labelled a ‘regime complex’ (Keohane and Victor 2010) with all its atten-
dant pluralism and fragmentation (Zelli 2011; Zelli and van Asselt this volume).
Where critical political economy perspectives might add value to this work is in provid-
ing an account of ‘whose rules rule?’ and of which institutions seem to dominate in this
complex and an explanation of why. They would also draw attention to the ability of
political elites to accommodate pressures to subject carbon to constraints, while resisting

demands for policies that would more profoundly upset the existing order, reflected in
the persistence of the un-governance (neglect) of core areas of economic activity in the
world’s most powerful states around energy and trade, for example, the effect of which
is to reduce the overall impact and effectiveness of concerted efforts to reduce carbon
emissions. The implications of increases in carbon associated with new rounds of trade
liberalization are off limits in terms of policy debate, while the World Bank’s ongoing
support to fossil fuel infrastructures directly undermines any emissions savings produced
by its own climate programmes (WRI 2008). The forms of power that operate to accom-
modate the threat that far-reaching action on climate change poses to the existing organi-
zation of the global political economy result in a disconnect between regulation of capital,
which remains weak and fragmented, and regulation for capital, which establishes rules of
the game and property rights necessary for new waves of accumulation.
CONSEQUENCES
So what are the implications of the way in which climate change has come to be consti-
tuted as a policy problem, and the forms of governance that have been constructed and
how can we account for these theoretically?
In so far as political economy analysis focused on social relations and social forces is
often conducted at a more global or macro scale, we still need to understand the social
and environmental consequences of prevailing practices of climate governance, including
the ways in which they reconfigure the livelihoods of many of the world’s poorest people
that bear virtually no responsibility for climate but who find their forests, waste, water
and energy of interest to global investors in carbon markets because of their (cheaper)
mitigation potential. Here, a rich and diverse literature on political ecology (Robbins
2004; Peet et al. 2011) is helpful in rendering visible the consequences of power in global
climate politics as it manifests itself in different sites around the world by drawing atten-
tion to how issues of access, property rights and livelihoods are affected by and enrolled
in global circuits of (carbon) capital. This contributes to an understanding of who wins
and who loses from particular climate governance arrangements.
Such approaches have been used to show, for example, how the creation of carbon
markets through the UN Clean Development Mechanism impacts upon questions of
access, property and justice in communities in the Global South that host carbon offset
projects. Social relations shape the extent to which expected environmental gains are
possible, as well as who gets to capture the economic benefits projects may bring, and
who is excluded from them (Newell and Bumpus 2012). David Harvey’s (2010) work on
spatial and temporal fixes might also be used to explain the ways in which capital is able
to displace responsibility for climate change and circumvent calls for regulation (which
represent limits to capital) by paying others to reduce pollution: the basis of carbon
trading. This reverses the logic of polluter pays by allowing principal polluters to pay
others to reduce pollution on their behalf. The effect of relying on cost and efficiency
(rather than equity) as the primary organizing principles of policy, however, is often
to intensify social and environmental injustice through displacement and dispossession
(Bachram 2004; Böhm and Dabhi 2009). It also helps to explain phenomena such as
‘ecologically uneven exchange’ whereby the responsibility for pollution, as well as the

pollution itself, is redistributed globally such that: ‘Emissions are increasing sharply in
developing countries as wealthy countries “offshore” the energy and resource intensive
stages of production’ (Roberts and Parks 2007, p. 169).
As well as highlighting the inequities and injustices that result from existing configura-
tions of power in global climate politics, historical materialist accounts foreground an
interest in transformation. A political economy analysis forces us to engage with issues of
strategy: the coalitions and the social forces that will be required to reorganize the global
economy along low carbon lines and the constraints that any such endeavour is likely
to encounter. For example, it enables us to identify and mobilize the ‘coalitions of the
willing and winning’ that will have to be assembled; the actors and interests that have an
interest in and are capable of system change, that could benefit from rewiring the global
economy along low carbon lines. These are the environmental sectors that benefit from
climate policy – a $4 trillion industry that is sustaining a large number of jobs and growth
(Jacobs 2012). It also includes the importance of constructing broad-based coalitions
with labour and social movements to ensure that the transition to a low carbon economy
is a socially just one (Swilling and Annecke 2012; Newell and Mulvaney 2013). A reading
of power is indispensable to working out what it will take to shift the balance of power
further in favour of such coalitions. At the moment the winners are politically weak,
fragmented, not mobilized or unborn (in the case of future generations). For example,
the renewable energy lobby is growing in strength, but weak compared with the fossil
lobby and nuclear lobby with which it is also in competition.
In sum, what critical political economy can add to the debates about climate govern-
ance is an understanding of how broader economic structures of trade, production and
finance impact upon (1) the generation of climate change and distribution of its effects
and (2) the willingness and ability of powerful state and corporate actors to regulate
it. The account provided here, drawing as it does principally upon different strands of
historical materialism, relates the global political economic environment from which
the problem of climate change derives to the nature and effectiveness of responses con-
structed within that environment. There is a posited link, in other words, between which
actors are principally responsible for generating most harm and which benefit most from
the wealth it generates, and those charged with delivering collective societal responses to
the threat of climate change: between causation and effectiveness. This provides a fuller
account of different dimensions of power and how they structure the nature of climate
governance and its effectiveness and the prospects of its transformation.
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4. Science and technology studies
Sheila Jasanoff
In the late twentieth century, science acquired unprecedented power to guide human
affairs; yet this was also a period when knowledge became its own chief adversary. Our
capacity for generating scientific knowledge about complex phenomena exploded, but so
did our capacity to understand the limits of scientific knowledge. Climate science and its
role in climate governance reflect these countervailing forces. Scientists played a defining
role in placing climate change on the global policy agenda, particularly through the work
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their findings, however,
encountered and generated uncertainty on many levels. Climate science makes predic-
tions across vast spaces and timescales but constantly bumps up against local signals that
appear to confound global claims. Significantly, too, climate science rose in prominence
at a time when research on knowledge-making practices and their social and political
implications—a branch of the new field of science and technology studies (STS)—was
also growing in sophistication and significance. As an emergent knowledge domain and
a topic of high political salience, climate science quickly attracted the attention of STS
scholars, with results that illuminate but also complicate the challenges of consensus-
building and rational governance.
Climate change universalizes the future of humanity (Jasanoff 2010). Never in the
history of our species has a single story about the fate of the planet been told with
so much conviction and expert authority; nor has any such story commanded atten-
tion from so many people positioned to understand and act upon its message. Climate
science, in these respects, fulfills the promise of the Enlightenment, bringing the light of
scientific knowledge to a global populace mature enough to comprehend it and govern
itself accordingly. In successive reports following its creation in 1988, the IPCC strength-
ened the claim that climate change today is anthropogenic in origin, caused by human
activities that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These reports also predict
increasingly dire consequences for human and ecological survival. According to the Fifth
Synthesis Report (IPCC 2014), unequivocal warming of the global climate is already
producing impacts on human and natural systems, and these are likely to be ‘severe, per-
vasive and irreversible’ unless emissions are curbed and reduced.
Climate science, however, is also a post-modern phenomenon that arrived in a world
attuned to ambiguity and multiple interpretive standpoints. The very word ‘science’
serves today as an umbrella for many different methods of looking at the world. Further,
science increasingly serves as a tool for problem-solving in virtually all areas of human
activity, prominently including environmental protection. Climate science responds in
part to troubling signals from nature, such as the famous rise in atmospheric carbon
dioxide (CO2) concentrations recorded at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa observatory, but it also
corresponds well to changes in scientific production that some have described as ‘Mode 2’
(Gibbons et al. 1994). Such science is characterized by its interdisciplinarity, distributed
production, strong links to policy and openness to public questioning. Moreover, climate
36
Science and technology studies 37
science processes massive amounts of data, integrates hugely disparate variables, uses
meta-approaches that go beyond conventional disciplinary methods, and bridges long-
standing conceptual divisions between the social and natural sciences (Jasanoff and
Wynne 1998; Rayner and Malone 1998). In all these respects climate science is ‘post-
normal’ (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1992), that is, marked by high degrees of uncertainty
while high-stake decisions depend on its predictions being correct and reliable.
Climate science has served STS researchers as both a site and an instrument of
theoretical investigation (for example, see Beck, Grundmann this volume). This chapter
reviews the resulting body of scholarship and traces its implications for governance. One
broad stream of STS research focuses on explicating how climate-relevant knowledge is
constructed, contested and achieves or fails to achieve credibility. This line of work is
grounded in STS’s longstanding preoccupation with the construction of facts and the
settlement of scientific controversies (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Latour 1987). Another
stream examines the debates on climate change in order to refine STS understandings
of the relations between knowledge-making and other social and political phenomena,
particularly in an era of globalization. That strand of work is more closely attuned to
scholarship in the STS framework of coproduction exploring the joint creation of natural
and social orders (Jasanoff 2004). This chapter groups pertinent contributions from both
STS literatures under four themes, one pair related to controversy studies and the other
pair to coproduction: (1) making climate a topic for science; (2) uncertainty and igno-
rance; (3) relations between scientific knowledge and politics; and (4) climate science as a
vehicle for world-making. Overall, this chapter argues that intellectual exchanges between
those who produce facts about climate change and those who study the making of those
facts has not been as mutually supportive as it might have been. That mismatch partially
explains the lag between humanity’s knowledge of climate change and political leaders’
willingness to do more about it.
MAKING THE CLIMATE
Scientific facts do not acquire the status of public knowledge in and of themselves,
whether they are esoteric like those of high-energy physics or relatively familiar like
those of public health and infectious diseases. Facts are products of painstaking social
activity, based on negotiated understandings within communities of scientists about the
right ways to observe nature, to represent those observations, and to make persuasive
sense of what has been observed (Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Latour 1987). Until closure
is achieved on a claim or set of claims—until they are, in effect, black-boxed—science
remains in a zone of ‘interpretive flexibility’ where observations are subject to multiple
competing readings and consensus remains tantalizingly out of reach (Bijker et al. 1987;
Latour 1987).
Individual observations, moreover, do not add up to science. To review, assess, and
validate claims, one needs what the German physician and microbiologist Ludwik Fleck
(1979) called a ‘thought collective’. Such a like-minded community not only authorizes
members’ claims and findings but also attests to the rest of the world that its ways of
looking at things must be taken seriously (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). A central feature
of all significant scientific work, therefore, is the determination of who belongs within

the relevant expert collective and hence is entitled to speak for it, as well as who does not
belong and hence lacks such authority. That partitioning process is known as boundary
work (Gieryn 1999). In public decision-making, expert advisory committees representing
varieties of stakeholders and disciplines carry out the boundary work differentiating reli-
able from unreliable knowledge (Jasanoff 1990). Bodies whose work involves assessing
science for policy purposes have accordingly been described as ‘boundary organizations’
(Guston 2001).
In everyday or ‘normal’ science (Kuhn 1962), boundary work is relatively unproblematic:
the paradigm within which a group of scientists works defines who belongs inside and
who does not. Sophisticated instruments, for example, demand skills that must be
acquired through training. Someone unfamiliar with X-ray crystallography cannot work
a machine that bombards crystals with X-rays or correctly read the diffraction patterns
produced by that technique. Someone unfamiliar with the basic principles of molecular
biology cannot extract DNA from a crime scene sample and produce images that estab-
lish a match with an actual human suspect. Climate science, however, is not paradigm-
driven or ‘normal’ in the sense of being grounded in one underlying theory or a specific
set of instruments and techniques. Nor was it historically the product of a single commu-
nity of scientists. It is a composite of many different forms of observing and recording,
each with its distinctive criteria of what constitutes good or bad work. Hence, much of
the boundary drawing between legitimate and illegitimate climate science has occurred
through the very processes of producing integrated climate assessments, above all within
the IPCC, which functions as a global ‘thought collective’ for climate science. This is also
why, as the historian Spencer Weart (2008) observes, global warming could be ‘discov-
ered’ in several different times and places before the world community generally agreed
that it was happening.
Both historical and contemporary studies shed light on the emergence of ‘climate’ as
a focus of scientific contestation and ultimately consensus. Historians have noted the
lengthy process by which observations of local-level changes became linked to new theo-
retical insights and, eventually, to more systematic studies of patterned climatic and eco-
logical behaviors. It took nearly a century to get from the Swedish physical chemist Svante
Arrhenius’ pioneering 1895 claim about the heating effects of carbon dioxide on the
Earth’s atmosphere to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientist
James Hansen’s 1988 testimony to the US Senate that the ‘greenhouse effect’, caused by
human activity, was occurring with 99 percent certainty. During that time, findings from
many different research fields and institutions had to coalesce into a recognizable new field
called climate science or climatology. New measurement and modeling techniques also
came on line, from the historical study of ice cores and tree rings to computer modeling
of atmospheric and oceanic circulation under diverse assumptions about global warming.
To be sure, today’s climate science did not spring from nowhere. It rests on older local
and regional traditions and infrastructures for studying the weather and other natural
phenomena. In effect, our knowledge about the climate today rests on structural sup-
ports that look like any large technical system (Edwards 2010). National weather services,
for example, began standardizing and consolidating their data collection and forecast-
ing methods by the late nineteenth century, eventually working under the aegis of the
International (later World) Meteorological Organization (IMO/WMO). Regionally,
in the same period, the Bergen school of weather forecasting, working under Vilhelm

Bjerknes, laid foundations for modern atmospheric science through its investigations of
polar events (Friedman 1989). Advances in instrumentation enabled observers to enlarge
the scales at which environmental problems were understood, eventually shifting upward
to a planetary frame. Satellites, computers and other aggregating technologies were at
the forefront of generating global perspectives, although they were not necessarily most
adept at providing early warnings of change. Thus, the British Antarctic Survey’s moni-
toring station at Halley Bay was the first to detect and publish large local drops in strato-
spheric ozone (Farman et al. 1985). By contrast, NASA’s satellites were programmed to
provide more comprehensive global coverage but were less sensitive to local and regional
variations, and they initially did not detect the localized ozone losses (Zehr 1994).
Airborne technologies affected scientific thinking not only through data collection but
by physically positioning scientists and engineers to see Earth from above. Buckminster
Fuller, the pioneering US inventor and engineer, coined the term ‘Spaceship Earth’ to
emphasize the planet’s isolation and vulnerability as a self-contained system reliant
entirely on its own resources (Anker 2007). The Apollo voyages to the moon sent back
images of the Earth that further underlined the need to think of the human environment
holistically, yet on a global scale (Miller and Edwards 2001; Edwards 2010). The World
Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) predicted in Our Common
Future that historians might eventually conclude ‘this vision had a greater impact on
thought than did the Copernican revolution of the 16th century’ (WCED 1987, p. 308).
If seeing the climate as a unitary, global-scale phenomenon was the result of pro-
tracted, friction-laden processes, then so too were decisions about how to represent for
others what climate scientists had found. One bitter and prolonged controversy con-
cerned the ‘hockey stick graph’ (Mann et al. 1999), a data representation showing a sharp
increase in global mean temperatures in the past hundred years (the blade) as compared
with a relatively flat average for the preceding thousand (the shaft). Easily understand-
able to both media and lay observers, that image became one of the most contested
artifacts ever produced by climate science. Arguments about the graph’s validity engaged
not only the scientific community but also the mainstream press, the digital media and
leading political actors. These exchanges vividly illustrated the interpretive flexibility of
non-paradigmatic science and the near impossibility of forging closure on claims when
underlying interests and values remain unbridged.
The hockey stick graph gained iconic status as alarming evidence of anthropogenic
climate change. Almost as quickly, however, the conservative George C. Marshall
Institute and prominent industry-funded scientists swung into action, attacking Mann et
al.’s methods of aggregating and representing data. The hockey stick, they argued, imper-
missibly flattened noisy data supporting a far less clear warming trend than claimed by
the graph’s creators. Not all the criticism, moreover, came from interest-tainted scien-
tists or marginal journals (von Storch et al. 2004). In response to fierce criticism, the
IPCC and its supporters were forced to seek external validation, such as a review by the
National Research Council at the request of the US Congress. Those efforts confirmed
the basic observation of a significantly elevated temperature record in the last century,
but it also led to changes in the IPCC’s representation of the aggregate model data. The
Fourth Assessment Report displayed a range of millennial reconstructions instead of
highlighting Mann et al.’s graph, as the Third Report had done at considerable cost to
the IPCC’s credibility.

Interpretive flexibility continued to surface around many aspects of climate prediction.

One such issue was the observation that, since 1998, global mean surface temperatures
had not risen at rates consistent with the warming potential of the increasing amounts of
greenhouse gases discharged into the environment. What caused this slowdown or hiatus
(Tollefson 2014)? Skeptics charged that scientists had mistaken extreme short-term vari-
ability as a signal of much worse to come, whereas IPCC scientists countered that reliably
predicted long-term trends could not be undone by short-term fluctuations. The debate
revealed a deep normative gulf between those within and those outside the climate science
collective. For the scientists inside, professionally committed to their field, the slowdown
in temperature rise was an anomaly to be investigated using the same techniques of data
collection, simulation and recalibration (i.e., their ‘normal science’) that had revealed the
phenomenon in the first place. Commitment worked the opposite way for skeptics, who
took the hiatus as evidence of a non-problem, warranting rejection of the entire body of
knowledge generated in support of the global warming claim.
UNCERTAINTY AND IGNORANCE
With all that science has learned about climate change, the zone of what is not known
has also grown in scope and political salience. STS research on the methods by which
science seeks to bound the areas of non-knowledge is particularly relevant to issues of
governance. When scientific claims are politically contested, a favored way to forestall
burdensome action is to suggest that we do not know enough and need more research.
Therefore, science’s power to compel action frequently depends on scientists’ success in
rendering uncertainties irrelevant, invisible, or manageable. Put differently, black-boxing
knowledge claims is equivalent to reducing or erasing the uncertainties around them. By
the same token, opponents of a consensus position can destabilize it by getting experts
to present counter- narratives and manufacture doubt (Oreskes and Conway 2010;
Grundmann this volume).
STS studies have documented a number of methods by which science manages and
contains uncertainty. One powerful technique is to express results in numerical form.
The precision of numbers conveys an aura of definiteness, belying the inevitable choices
and judgments involved in translating complex phenomena into mathematical terms.
Numbers can provide more information in some respects than ordinary language, ena-
bling comparison with a baseline or between discrete events. To say that an earthquake is
severe tells us less than to say that an earthquake, such as the one that hit Fukushima in
2011, measures 6.6 Mw on the moment magnitude scale that seismologists use to measure
earthquake strength. Lay people may not understand how such a number was calculated
but they can easily understand relative degrees of severity when expressed on a numerical
scale. Numbers, in short, are deemed trustworthy in ways that naked human judgment is
not, even when the judgment is that of experts (Porter 1995).
Numbers can also function as ‘anchoring devices’ that offer apparent certainty in the
face of shifting knowledge. One such device, the measure of ‘equilibrium climate sensitiv-
ity’, or average temperature rise from concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases,
offers an instructive example. Van der Sluijs et al. (1998) showed that the estimate of
1.5–4.5°C increase in warming for a doubling of CO2 remained constant over a roughly

20-year period, until the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, even though the underlying
ideas and measurement techniques changed significantly. Moreover, participants in the
IPCC process acknowledged that this was not an ordinary probability distribution, with
a most likely peak and less likely tails. Indeed, as one participant observed, climate mod-
elers were unable to offer probability limits as their colleagues would have liked, with the
result that, ‘The range is nothing to do with probability—it is not a normal distribution
or a skewed distribution. Who knows what it is?’ (Jasanoff and Wynne 1998, p. 70). Only
with the Fourth Assessment Report did the IPCC introduce a slight modification in its
estimate of climate sensitivity, raising the lower limit of the likely range to 2°C.
Models are ubiquitous in environmental policy—as instruments for simplifying
complex systems, exploring causal hypotheses and simulating future events. As such,
they played a crucial role in representing climate change and managing the uncertainties
associated with climate predictions. Most significant are the General Circulation Models
(GCMs), computer programs that enable the aggregation of vast amounts of data about
the Earth’s atmosphere and simulation of responses under different assumptions about
the dynamics of the system. Much has been written about the imperfect relationship
between models and the realities they purport to mimic, perhaps most dramatically
summed up in the philosopher Nancy Cartwright’s provocative remark that models are
‘a work of fiction’ (Cartwright 1983). Nonetheless, as STS scholars have argued, models
offer assurance in a variety of ways that are highly relevant to crafting policy.
On the plus side, models allow for constant refinement, or validation (Oreskes et al.
1994), to improve their consistency through comparison with actual observations about
the world. In this respect, models operate as a theater of action in which scientists can
closely approximate the real-world phenomena whose decoding is essential for human
wellbeing and survival. On the less benign side, models may engender a false confidence
that all of what needs to be known is contained within the inner workings of the model
itself. Models operate in this sense almost as promises: that truth can be approximated
ever more certainly simply by learning more about the parameters of the model (Jasanoff
and Wynne 1998). Even when modelers themselves are keenly aware of uncertainties in
their models, humility tends to be washed out in representations to outsiders, such as
politicians who have a stake in using scientific knowledge for action (Lahsen 2005). This
observation led the sociologist of science Donald Mackenzie (1990, p. 372) to propose
a ‘certainty trough’, in which those at a middle distance from the origins of models are
more certain about their conclusions than those closest in to the technical complexities of
modeling and those least knowledgeable and thus alienated from the centers of expertise.
As part of the knowledge infrastructure for policy, climate models moreover are not
merely technical but socio-technical systems (Edwards 2010). STS scholars have stressed
the social element because it helps to explain the dilemmas that climate predictions raise
for policy. Modelers, to begin, are not merely credentialed experts, garbed in priestly
authority, but people with strong beliefs and commitments of their own. The human
dimension of climate modeling forcefully emerged into public view during ‘climategate’,
the controversy resulting from the 2009 disclosure of hacked emails from the Climatic
Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (Beck this volume). Climate
modelers’ intimate doubts were publicly aired, as in a statement by Phil Jones, then CRU
director: ‘The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if
I said the world had cooled from 1998.’ Jones legitimately downplayed his concern by

questioning the statistical significance of a few years of cooling data (Ridley 2014), but
the disclosures proved politically corrosive.
KNOWLEDGE AND POLITICS
In the modern world, knowledge is doubly political: as a resource in political battles as

well as a site for performing politics (Baert and Rubio 2011; Jasanoff 2004). Given its
significance for policies of worldwide dimensions, climate science was bound to attract
both kinds of political attention, and so it did. Much of the attention focused on the
IPCC, whose Working Group I had given a political voice to climatology. STS research
sheds light on the sources and limits of the IPCC’s epistemic authority; that research
also raises questions about STS’s own role in shaping how science influences politics
and policy.
In STS terms, the IPCC sees itself as a ‘boundary organization’ (Guston 2001) whose
task is to ‘provide rigorous and balanced scientific information to decision makers’.1 Yet,
from the IPCC’s inception, the scientific assessment of climate change has never been
distant from the epicenters of climate politics. As a joint creation of the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO),
the IPCC was born a hybrid. Its establishment reflects in part the advances in climate
science and assessment that a number of largely Northern scientific communities wished
to carry forward with governmental support. At the same time, the IPCC enhanced the
United Nations’ status as a transnational voice for global environment and develop-
ment policies. Assessment and policy were tightly coupled in the founding documents
describing the IPCC’s raison d’être and mission. Thus, while stressing the need for better
knowledge, the WMO resolution supporting the IPCC’s creation also noted a ‘growing
international concern about the possible socio-economic consequences’ of increasing
greenhouse gas concentrations.2 The General Assembly, too, picked up the theme of
‘potentially severe economic and social consequences’ in its 1988 resolution endorsing
the IPCC.
STS research has established that scientific advisory committees are forced to make
policy judgments even when their formal charge is to assess science (Jasanoff 1990;
Lentsch and Weingart 2011). Under these conditions, seeking legitimacy in science alone
may prove counterproductive. Some have argued that advisory organizations may serve
policymakers better by blurring boundaries between science and politics than by insist-
ing on a rigid separation (Guston 2001). Others see it as more important to clarify the
adviser’s role as an ‘honest broker’ of available knowledge (Pielke 2007). These analyses
invite scientific advisory committees to be more aware, indeed self-aware, with respect to
the complex relationship between facts, values and expert judgment in policy-relevant
science. Nevertheless, the IPCC sought from the start to base its authority primarily on
scientific rigor, claiming that ‘[t]he work of the organization is [. . .] policy-relevant and
yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive’3 (see Beck this volume).
Over time, the IPCC changed its procedures, broadened its reviewer base, sought
both technically and politically accountable experts, and ensured more participation by
developing countries (Agrawala 1998). This evolution illustrates the phenomenon of
coproduction (Jasanoff 2004), whereby a new state of knowledge (global climate change)

was certified as authoritative along with the social order (norms of global inclusion)
needed to sustain that new way of seeing the world. Yet, when the IPCC comes under
challenge, as in the controversies over hacked email and errors such as assessing the rate
of Himalayan glacier melting, the organization’s tendency has been to retreat into tra-
ditional modes of scientific authorization: tighter conflict of interest guidelines, better
means of expressing uncertainty, stricter peer review and renewed calls for transparency
(InterAcademy Council 2010).
Testimony before the InterAcademy Council convened to review the IPCC process
illustrates the imperfect uptake of STS scholarship and its inconsistent application to
climate assessment. Hans von Storch, a respected German meteorologist and occasional
critic of the IPCC, quoted Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, arguing that climate
science has entered a post-normal state: ‘When facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes
high and decisions urgent, science is not done for reasons for curiosity but is asked for as
support for preconceived value-based agendas’ (emphasis in von Storch presentation).4
He concluded, however, that this bending of science toward politics must be countered
through a separation of scientific and political functions within the IPCC and a stricter
demarcation between ‘scientifically constructed’ and ‘culturally constructed’ knowledge.
That recommendation perpetuates the presumption of a given-in-advance boundary
between science and culture, contrary to basic STS observations that such boundaries
are the results, not the precursors, of collective fact-making (Gieryn 1999; Jasanoff 1990).
It also misses Funtowicz and Ravetz’s (1992) key recommendation that post-normal
science demands ‘extended peer review’, enlarging the community of critics to include
interested and affected parties—a prescription long enshrined in US administrative law
(Jasanoff 1990).
The InterAcademy Council’s analysis of the right way to fit science and politics reso-
nates well with a strand of research that attributes the IPCC’s credibility problems to
the corruption of science by political interests. In the United States, in particular, docu-
mented ties between the fossil fuel industry and dissident scientists on a range of environ-
mental issues has led some to conclude that scientific consensus would carry the day were
it not for the willful corruption of knowledge by politics (Oreskes and Conway 2010).
Here, the distorting influence is money, not ‘culture’ as in von Storch’s analysis, but the
conclusion is similar: what the IPCC needs to do in order to regain authority is to weed
out corruption, whether inside its own house or outside the assessment process, in society.
That analysis may be comforting for the IPCC, but it dangerously simplifies a more
symbiotic relationship between the production of policy-relevant knowledge and its
public uptake and acceptance. STS research emphasizes that the persuasiveness of scien-
tific knowledge depends not only on the circumstances of its production but also on the
context of its uptake and spread in society (Shapin 1995; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). This
is especially true of science that serves policy and hence is more than usually subject to
the deconstructive forces of public scrutiny (Jasanoff 1990, 2012). To achieve credibility,
then, climate science—like any other policy-oriented science—needs to pay attention
to the cultural circumstances that aid or impede public acceptance of its claims. These
conditions include diverse ‘civic epistemologies’—or public ways of knowing (Jasanoff
2005)—that vary even across modern Western liberal democracies. These interdependen-
cies between the context and content of scientific production help explain why an event
such as the disclosure of CRU’s hacked emails led to more consternation and policy

s kepticism in some countries than others, affirming different national narratives about
climate change, the IPCC, and the need for collective action (Jasanoff 2011).
CLIMATE SCIENCE AND WORLD-MAKING
The IPCC emerged in the late twentieth century as an agent of political as well as epis-
temic globalization, an actor that imagined and represented the Earth as a unitary con-
struct needing integrated governance rather than as a space of competing sovereignties
ruled by agreements among nation-states (Miller and Edwards 2001). In part, as seen
above, this relocation of the locus of envisioning and power was achieved through the
infrastructural moves that created climate and climate science in the first place (Edwards
2010). Space-based technologies played their part. As the WCED (1987, p. 308) stated
in Our Common Future: ‘From space, we see a small and fragile ball dominated not by
human activity and edifice but by a pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery, and soils.’ This
declaration represented the planet not only as a unified whole but also as a composite
of interacting physical and biological ‘systems’ whose functions and futures could, in
theory, be modeled without deference to ‘human activity’. Science, in short, was hence-
forth to be the primary tool for knowing the Earth; political consequences would follow
from what science discovered and dictated. That presumption was built into the IPCC’s
organizational structure: Working Group I, the chief focus of attention to date, would
assess the science; Working Groups II and III would follow with their impact studies and
mitigation options.
Any radical displacement of the standpoint for knowing a major social problem,
however, entails a corresponding displacement of politics—by reshaping the discourses,
institutions, and identities associated with the shifts in knowledge (Jasanoff 2004). STS
scholarship, broadly conceived, provides several different angles on the political implica-
tions of the epistemic move embraced in Our Common Future. As early as the 1970s,
when technologies of Earth system modeling were first taking off (Meadows et al. 1972),
thoughtful critics noted their ideological dimensions. Models, as STS analysts have
repeatedly observed, cannot in their nature be policy-neutral (Jasanoff and Wynne 1998).
Specifically, seeing Earth whole and in systemic terms implied both the capacity and will
to engage in such grand panoptic exercises (Ashley 1983).
The emergence of climate change as a universal, impersonal and apolitical imaginary
also carries profound ethical significance. Seen as a collective phenomenon, aggregated
at the global level, climate change reduces the possibility of attributing responsibility to
agents at lesser scales, such as specific nations or forms of consumption. Yet, resistance
to that leveling of responsibility has plagued climate negotiations from Kyoto in 1997
to Lima in 2014. Developing countries continue to contest the (in their view) spurious
egalitarianism that sets lower per capita emissions from populous poor nations on a
par with higher per capita emissions from nations with smaller populations but more
profligate consumption habits. Bruno Latour (1993) has argued that the separation of
nature from culture, in this case the dissociation of atmospheric carbon from the activi-
ties that produce it, is a constitutional move of modernity, and it needs to be undone
with greater respect for the actual hybridity of nature-culture networks (Neimanis et al.
this volume). But the idea floated by Indian environmentalists Anil Agarwal and Sunita

Narain (1991) to do just that, to classify, price and tax carbon differentially in accordance
with its human purposes—subsistence versus luxury—never gained traction in climate
negotiations.
More subtly, climate science tends to undermine people’s age-old attempts to make
sense of their circumstances in local terms, based on close-to-home understandings of
space, time, community, and rightful governance (Jasanoff 2010). To be sure, climate
change urges all people on the planet to think globally (Edwards 2010). Yet, one must
ask what forms of agency and autonomy can be taken away from people in the name of
science, and which philosophical foundations (e.g., utilitarian or deontological) to adopt
in answering those questions. What, for example, are the ethical and political implications
of requiring people to shoulder burdens now for the sake of as yet unborn future gen-
erations when their families are suffering from hunger and need for shelter or fuel? Such
questions loom even larger when mature scientific disciplines cannot decide how to relate
present needs to future demands. That dilemma gained the spotlight in a debate among
prominent environmental economists over the right discount rate for estimating the
long-term impacts of climate change (Jasanoff 2010). The American economist William
Nordhaus dismissed as too ‘prescriptive’, and hence presumably not scientific enough,
the assumptions in the influential Stern Review on the economics of climate change com-
missioned by the UK government (Stern 2006).
A comparable debate has opened up around geoengineering. The difficulty of obtain-
ing political agreement in climate negotiations has led some to argue that technological
means must be found to counter extreme warming (Keith 2013). Two major types of
geoengineering are most frequently discussed: solar radiation management and carbon
dioxide capture, followed by storage (see Hansson et al. this volume). Both carry risks,
and both raise large and as yet unresolved questions of ethics and governance. Going
beyond the usual barrage of factual claims and counterclaims, scholars trained in STS
ways of thinking have called attention to the world-making assumptions latent in propos-
als to engineer the Earth (Hulme 2014; Stilgoe 2015). In this debate, one may find hopeful
signs of an integration of STS insights into discussions of how to move forward in the
face of intractable uncertainty and ignorance.
CONCLUSIONS
The evolution of climate science and its increasingly significant role in climate govern-
ance reads in many ways like a playbook for STS: it illustrates almost every phenomenon
that decades of STS research have identified as key characteristics of modern scientific
production and use. First, it took more than a century of work to build the edifice known
today as climate science; even now that edifice consists of a series of more or less tightly
connected sub-structures occupied by communities living to some degree under rules and
conditions that do not apply to the entire thought collective. Second, as with all attempts
to shift paradigms, the emergence of climate change (displacing the slightly older con-
struct of global warming) was deeply contested, generating epistemic uncertainties and
fractures that still remain unhealed. Models played a crucial role in both the recognition
of a global phenomenon and prediction of its consequences, but the results display the
strengths and weaknesses of modeling as an instrument for making sense of the world.

Third, the production of climate science cannot be teased apart from the dynamics of
climate politics, a point that the IPCC and its defenders seem not to have fully accepted
but that is influencing debates on geoengineering. Fourth, and most significant for
governance, predicting climate change is but one face of a process of coproduction that
has remade people’s normative expectations about how to live in a world in which climate
is a major driver of change.
The most surprising feature of climate change from an STS perspective concerns
what is called reflexivity: the capacity of a society or its members to reflect and act upon
knowledge of their role as agents in a larger whole. STS has many stories to tell about
climate science. The fossil fuel industry’s efforts to manufacture debate, even on issues the
great majority of climate scientists consider closed, is one but it is not the only one. That
account of industry-fueled deconstruction does not do justice to the legitimate doubts
and uncertainties that surround climate impact predictions, nor to the culturally hetero-
geneous ways in which societies come to grips with polarizing interest group politics. In
elevating the corruption story above others, climate science risks ghettoizing itself as a
community unwilling to accept deeper criticism of its methods of consensus-building.
In reverse, the tale of science for hire, uncomplicated by other strands of STS research,
tends to shore up tendencies within STS to be seduced into intervening in policy debates
instead of maintaining critical distance as a source of reflective insight and clarification.
Decades ago, the renowned German sociologist Ulrich Beck ([1986] 1992) called for
contemporary societies to engage in a process of reflexive modernization to take respon-
sibility for the risks and uncertainties created through the global spread of advanced
technologies and the dissolution of traditional institutions of governance. Climate
change, more than nuclear power and other preoccupations of the 1980s, raises most of
the dilemmas that Beck articulated in his conception of the ‘risk society’. STS studies
offer illuminating perspectives on the nature and consequences of knowledge and non-
knowledge of the risks of climate change, stressing the need for joint resolution of meta-
physical and ethical concerns. A crying question for climate governance is whether ruling
institutions will absorb and act on STS analyses of the contingency of knowledge and
its normative implications—or whether answers placing an undue abundance of faith in
science and technology to solve the climate problem will preclude our taking full ethical
responsibility for our common future.
NOTES
1. Quoted from IPCC home page.

2. WMO Resolution on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1988).
3. IPCC home page.
4. Hans von Storch, presentation to IAC Review Committee, Montreal, June 15, 2010, http://reviewipcc.
interacademycouncil.net (accessed June 19, 2015).
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5. Governmentality
Johannes Stripple and Harriet Bulkeley
INTRODUCTION
In the academic community, governing climate change was by the late 1990s understood
primarily as a question of how to achieve cooperation and coordination among states on
a global scale under conditions of fragmentation and conflict (Hurrell and Kingsbury
1992, p. 1). Scholarship revolved around the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol.
Negotiators and academics wrestled with questions such as what kind of measures were
needed to make states comply with the protocol? How could market mechanisms be
designed in order to make the treaty effective and efficient? At the same time, for anyone
visiting the climate negotiations it was obvious that there was a wealth of other activities,
initiatives and policy proposals being discussed and promoted. These could be about the
support of low carbon technologies (Lovell this volume), about new ways of organizing
mobility and transport in large cities (Janković this volume) or recommendations for
eating food with less carbon content.
On the one hand, such activities and initiatives can feel distant from the governing that
states were embarking upon but, on the other hand, it was governing conducted by rec-
ognized authorities. What made these forms of governing different? Are forms of power
different just because they are deployed by different agents, or do forms of power antici-
pate forms of agency? Early scholarship on climate governance sought to uncover the
ways in which the insurance industry was seeking to govern the climate ‘beyond the state,’
and argued that global climate governance could be conceived as comprising ‘all pur-
poseful mechanisms and measures aimed at steering social systems towards preventing,
mitigating, or adapting to the risks posed by climate change’ (Jagers and Stripple 2003,
p. 385). Other work focused on the role of cities in governing climate change. Bulkeley
and Betsill (2003) argued for the need to examine the ways in which climate governance
was taking place through a range of processes and sites that could not be captured by
traditional accounts of climate governance as an international problem. This work was
part of a growing momentum within the social science community during the first decade
of the twenty-first century to figure climate governance differently: to question where, by
whom and on what grounds the climate was being governed, and to what ends (Demeritt
2001; Newell 2000; Rowlands 2000). Despite being inspired by the diversity of sites of
climate governance, work in this field—our own included—tended to be characterized
by accounts that saw climate governance in more or less homogenous terms. Climate
governance was considered as a relatively stable set of processes unfolding in predictable
ways whatever the context.
Since the idea of climate being governed ‘beyond the state’ gained traction, it is now
commonplace to point to its diversity, multiplicity and complexity (Pattberg and Stripple
2008; Bulkeley et al. 2012). It is this diversity of empirical sites that leads to projects
such as this one, the creation of a Handbook, and to dedicated journals, conferences and
49
fields of academic research. Yet the sense is still somehow that what climate governance
is can be readily identified, circumscribed and contained. That the different perspectives
and empirical realms bought into view provide us with different windows into the same
object. Do we lose precision when we too readily conceive of different realms as instances
of climate governance? And, are we at risk of not capturing ‘climate governance’ as a
particular form of power and authority with its own history and context? Rather unfor-
tunately and problematically, in international relations the concept of global governance
has come to be understood both as a new empirical phenomenon and a theoretical term
for analyzing it (Stephan and Stripple 2013).
As a way of thinking through such questions, the concept of governmentality provides
a different starting point. Originally advanced by Foucault in the late 1970s, govern-
mentality has since been adopted and adapted by a range of scholars. Conceived both
as a particular modality of power with particular contemporary significance, and as a
perspective or analytical tool through which to view power in general, governmentality
has offered scholars in the climate change community a means through which not only
to develop a more critical understanding of the processes at work in governing climate
change but also a means through which to connect the spaces of climate politics to fun-
damental concerns with the state and international political order (Lipschutz, Oels this
volume).
Governmentality neither offers us a substantive theory about the forces that shape
climate policy and politics, nor does it assume a particular ontology of what constitutes
climate policy. Instead, governmentality provides an analytical toolbox that can advance
new perspectives on the processes of governing; grasp and highlight the existence of
changing discursive productions of a warming world and their effects in mitigating or
adapting to that world (Walters 2012). How did, for example, tropical rainforests, carbon
markets and climate refugees become domains amenable to governmental intervention?
What are the rationalities and subjectivities by which a carbon-constrained world is
ordered, categorized and represented (Turnhout et al. this volume)? What does it imply
to govern climate change under a condition of emergency? In addressing these and other
questions, the climate research community has just begun to deploy a Foucauldian ana-
lytics of government (Lövbrand and Stripple 2014a; Stripple and Bulkeley 2014a). This
body of work does not yet constitute or consolidate a distinct analytical field, but it has
nevertheless provided a significant contribution to the debate on how we might under-
stand and rethink climate governance. In the remainder of this chapter, we first introduce
governmentality studies, before highlighting three contributions that work in this field of
inquiry is making to our understanding of climate governance.
MAKING CLIMATE CHANGE GOVERNMENTAL
In 1970 Foucault took up his chair in ‘The history of systems of thought’ at the Collège
de France, where he was to begin teaching the following year. Teaching as a professor
at this prestigious French institution follows particular rules. Professors have to present
new research and the courses and the seminars are completely open, no enrolment or
qualification is required. The huge audience is made up of students, teachers, research-
ers and other interested parties. It is thus a space where it is possible to present material

Governmentality 51
that is still in the making; ideas and perspectives that need to be refined, tested and
thought through. For a long time, only fragments of the courses were published, but
recently Foucault’s lectures from the late 1970s and early 1980s have been made available
(through combining Foucault’s lecture notes and tape recordings and their translation
into English) for a larger audience. The provisional nature of the lecture notes have re-
energized scholars to engage with governmentality not as a closed system of thought to
be applied, but as something more provisional; a perspective on power that has to find
new expressions within new circumstances of governing (Walters 2012).
In the fourth and fifth lectures of the series delivered in 1978, Foucault first launched
the neologism governmentality to describe a particular mode of power (deployed in the
eighteenth century), but later in the course the word no longer only designates govern-
mental practices constitutive of a particular regime of power, but the way in which power
operates through the conduct of people’s conduct (Senellart 2007, p. 388). In the fifth
lecture (on February 8, 1978) Foucault uses simple illustrations from historical diction-
aries to show that what it means to govern has changed dramatically over the centuries.
Governing acquired a very particular political meaning in the sixteenth century (as power
exercised by the state on the unity of the territory), but before that, to govern would
inherit a considerable number of different meanings. It could mean ‘movement in space,
material subsistence, diet, the care given to an individual and the health one can assure
him, and the exercise of command, of a constant zealous, active and always benevolent
prescriptive activity’ (Foucault 2007, p. 122). As indicated by the semantic linking of the
words governing and mentality, broadly speaking governmentality deals with how particu-
lar mentalities—ways of thinking and acting—are invested in the process of governing.
While recovering an older usage of government, governmentalities were understood ‘in
the broad sense of techniques and procedures for directing human behavior. Government
of children, government of souls and consciences, government of a household, of a state,
or of oneself’ (Foucault 1997, p. 82). So government for Foucault was, in the general
sense, about ‘the conduct of conduct’ a ‘form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect
the conduct of some person or persons’ (Gordon 1991, p. 2).
Despite Foucault’s rather fragmented treatment of governmentality, this work, coupled
with other parts of his thinking, has led to the emergence of a vibrant field across dis-
ciplines such as sociology, geography, anthropology, history, political science, gender
studies and science and technology studies concerned with understanding how govern-
ing is conducted. Reflecting on the past 20 years of governmentality studies, Walters
(2012, p. 2) conceives of governmentality as a ‘cluster of concepts that can be used to
enhance the think-ability and criticize-ability of past and present forms of governance.’ It
is a field of inquiry that problematizes the collective and often taken for granted systems
of thought that make governing strategies appear natural and given at certain times in
history (Dean 1999, p. 16). Governance, according to Walters, should hence not be under-
stood as a set of institutions of ideologies, but a practical activity that can be ‘historicized
and specified at the level of the rationalities, programmes, techniques and subjectivities
which underpin it and give it form and effect’ (Walters 2012, p. 3).
Hence, it is doubtful to what extent it is meaningful to speak of ‘climate governance’ in
general, but, rather, what is required are modes of inquiry through which to contextual-
ize and examine its particular articulations, rationalities and programs. As a conceptual
approach, governmentality is highly capable of registering even subtle shifts in these

programs and techniques and, according to Walters (2012, p. 3), it is this sensitivity to
the ‘intricacies of contemporary governance and the nuances of political change’ that
explains its very wide take-up across social science and the humanities. Here, we identify
three main interrelated ‘studies of climate governmentalities’ that have begun to contrib-
ute to the ways in which climate governance can be understood, focused on: (1) the climate
imagined as a historical and political object that is possible to govern; (2) advanced liberal
climate government; (3) subjectivity and the personal conduct of carbon.1
IMAGINING CLIMATE CHANGE
There are multiple ways in which the atmosphere, the climate and greenhouse gas emis-
sions can be imagined. This is why we ‘disagree about climate change’ (Hulme 2009) and
why we need to think about ‘who speaks for the climate’ (Boykoff 2011). The climate is
at once abstract and intimate, understood in divergent ways across time and space. At
various points in history, the atmosphere, the climate and flows and stocks of carbon have
been produced differently as social and political objects. From the conceptual viewpoint
of governmentality, the climate must be represented, depicted and ordered before it can be
governed. In 1976, Reid Bryson, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin, testified before
the United States Congress saying ‘the climatic world is one even if politically we are not’
(Weart 2005). This idea, the climate imagined as a global system, has since then become a
mainstay in the climate discourse (Jasanoff this volume). Over the years, Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) endorsement of a systemic view of the climate has been
very important (Beck this volume). According to Miller (2004, p. 51): ‘Only when the
Earth’s climate was re-imagined as a global system, bringing views of the atmosphere in
line with assumptions about the jurisdiction of international institutions, did claims about
climate change begin to engage with debates about international politics.’ Edwards (2010,
p. 8) considers contemporary climate science a ‘vast machine’ or a socio-technical system
that collects data, models physical processes, tests theories, and thereby generates a widely
shared understanding of the global carbon cycle. This ‘knowledge infrastructure’ not only
offers specifics about the past and future of Earth’s climate, but also enables the imagining
of the planetary climate as something observable, measurable and governable (Edwards
2010, p. 8). Lövbrand et al. (2009) trace the scientific practices that have produced the
Earth system, including the climate system, as a thinkable analytical category back to the
International Geophysical Year in 1957, identifying ‘the Anthropocene’ as a central, but
ambiguous, system of thought (Neimanis et al. this volume).
While the global imagining has been pervasive, there are many more ways in which
the climate has come to be politically, socially and culturally constituted (Hulme this
volume). But in order to understand how that happens, we need to turn to ‘devices’ under
the radar of many political scientists. Devices such as ‘forest carbon inventories,’ ‘carbon
trajectories,’ ‘carbon footprints,’ ‘carbon accounting schemes’ or ‘vulnerability maps’ all
help to constitute particular ways of knowing and acting upon the climate (e.g., Lövbrand
and Stripple 2011). The climate, the atmosphere, carbon stocks and emission trajectories
emerge and become constituted as political spaces, artifacts brought into being and
gaining meaning through representational practices and technologies (Baldwin 2003;
Whitehead 2009). The devices help to establish these spaces and objects for intervention,

Governmentality 53
such as the carbon sink or the carbon offset. Deforestation, for example, became pos-
sible to govern (as carbon) through advances in carbon cycle science and remote sensing
technologies that enable new ways of seeing and representing stocks and flows of carbon
stored in the soil and the canopy (Lövbrand and Stripple 2006; Boyd 2010; Stephan 2012;
Turnhout et al. this volume). At the heart of these different imaginings are often various
forms of calculative practices. Lövbrand and Stripple (2011) conceptualize this as a form
of ‘carbon accounting’; a rationality of government primarily concerned with the ways
carbon can be measured, quantified, demarcated and statistically aggregated (see also
Turnhout et al. this volume). Lövbrand and Stripple outline three different regimes of
carbon accounting—the national carbon sink, the carbon credit and the personal carbon
budget—to illustrate how stocks and flows of carbon are constructed as administra-
tive domains amenable to certain forms of political and economic rationality, such as
government regulation, market exchanges and self-governance by responsible individual
subjects. A slightly different approach is provided by Gabrys (2009). Through using con-
cepts and analogies from waste and material studies, she traces the metabolism of carbon
and how it flows through the air, ocean, land and bodies. The carbon sink becomes a
‘potent figure for thinking through the assemblages of nature, culture and technology’
(Gabrys 2009, p. 678). This, in turn, can give rise to new natural–cultural relations and
imaginings.
One pervasive and recurrent imagining of a climate changed world is that of catas-
trophe and disaster. The idea of climate change as a threat to humanity as such was set
out already at the First World Climate Conference in 1979. At the conference, organized
by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), scientists called on the world’s gov-
ernments ‘to foresee and prevent potential man-made changes in climate that might be
adverse to the well-being of humanity’ (WMO 1979). There are many different technolo-
gies of government that are deployed to make the future made present. Energy scenarios,
climate modeling and ‘low carbon road-maps’ produced by industry or public policy
organizations all shape the ability to act on the future. Looking across different domains
of life (terrorism, trans-species epidemics and climate change), Anderson (2010) notes
the commonalities around how these domains have been enacted as threats and how the
future is now problematized as being indeterminate and uncertain, and thus has to be met
with an extraordinary proliferation of anticipatory action. Duffield argues that this con-
dition turns climate change into an ‘environmental terror,’ an environment that, operat-
ing through uncertainty and surprise, has itself become terroristic (Duffield 2011, p. 763).
Oels (2013, this volume) describes how climate change is rendered governable by modes
of risk management and contingency. She argues that ‘the governmental rationale since
2007 has been to prepare for and manage the “inevitable” primary and secondary impacts
of unmitigated climate change’ (2013, p. 17). Methmann and Rothe (2012) show how the
technologies of climate risk management rely on apocalyptic imaginaries that increasingly
proliferate in discourses around mitigation, adaptation and the security implications of
climate change. The work that we have brought forward above as one stream within a
larger studies of climate governmentalities all elaborate on the close relationship between
knowledge and power, between ways of thinking and ways of acting. Political scientists,
who all too well know about what a certain imagining of the future (such as Hobbes’
Leviathan) can do to the political possibilities of today, should know better than leaving
this out in the analysis of climate governance. How we imagine climate change, and

how we come to imagine—from ‘climate modeling’ to ‘climate fiction’—are important

questions to ask, and important sites to investigate. While scholars have started to name
and identify some of the different rationalities of government at play, such as accounting,
indeterminacy and fear, more work is needed to better grasp the processes through which
climate change is rendered imaginable and governable (see Neimanis et al. this volume).
ADVANCED LIBERAL CLIMATE GOVERNMENT

A second important stream of work within the larger ‘studies of climate governmentali-
ties’ revolves around a particular set of constitutive processes of governing the climate,
namely those loosely characterized as technologies of advanced liberal government; for
example, markets, participatory forms of steering, public–private partnerships, product
standards, city networks and stakeholder dialogues (Dean 1999, pp. 150–159; Lipschutz
this volume; Rose 1999). Lövbrand and Stripple (2014a) describe how climate govern-
mentality studies started to emerge in dialogue with the literature on global climate
governance. The increased participation of non-state actors, public policy networks,
supranational jurisdiction, partnerships and cooperation across the public–private
divide that characterize how climate change is governed in the early twenty-first century
was regarded as mirroring the Foucauldian insistence on heterogeneous and dispersed
governing practices—a micro-physics of power that unfolded in seemingly disparate
places. It also spoke to the Anglo-Foucauldian school of governmentality that emerged
in the 1980s and 1990s and the concern with rethinking liberal forms of government
and statehood (e.g., Miller and Rose 1990; Barry et al. 1996). Scholars working in this
vein have been able to problematize the public and the private, the state versus non-state
dichotomy that has preoccupied studies of global governance in recent years, and instead
asked how the state is articulated into the practices of climate government and how the
private emerges as a terrain for intervention (Bulkeley and Schroeder 2012; Lövbrand
and Stripple 2011, 2012).
One of the key examples here has been the emergence of carbon markets as a key form
of carbon governance. The government of carbon markets reflects many of the features
governmentality scholars identify as key to ‘advanced liberal government’ where govern-
ing is not primarily about governing in a totalizing fashion, but about self-regulation
and governing at a distance through technologies such as standards and accounting
practices. Oels (2005) and Methmann (2013) both identify an ‘advanced liberal’ govern-
ment of the climate. There is an emerging literature on the carbon economy which finds
inspiration in post-structural approaches, including Actor–Network Theory, that have
started to diagnose how carbon markets become established as governable domains (see
Lovell this volume). MacKenzie (2009), with the elegant phrase ‘making things the same,’
focuses on the commensuration process (the ways in which we can compare the climate
impact of disparate activities, such as warming our homes, long-distance flying, eating
meat, lighting cities or producing cement). Paterson and Stripple (2012) draw attention
to carbon as a ‘virtuous commodity,’ the close affinity between virtuality and virtue—the
technological and the ethical—in the government of carbon markets. Overall, studies of
advanced liberal climate government illustrate how the climate domain is imbued with a
certain ‘politics of truth,’ forms of knowledge, styles of thought and certain solutions.

Governmentality 55
The concept of governmentality does not aim to uncover any ‘hidden meaning’ or ‘deep
structure’ (Lemke 2011, p. 82) of these truths, nor does it tell us if its ‘good’ or ‘bad,’
but it helps us to grasp how certain forms of expertise and moral economies come to be
dominant and seen as evident.
THE CONDUCT OF CARBON CONDUCT
A third stream of climate governmentality studies draw on Foucault’s definition of the

term government as meaning ‘the conduct of conduct,’ a form of activity aiming to
shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons (Gordon 1991, p. 2). This
was a central aspect of Foucault’s later lectures and book preparations. The now pub-
lished series of lectures from 1982–1983 is entitled The Government of Self and Others
(Gros 2010). Inspired by this conceptualization of government, there is now an emerg-
ing literature that explores subjectifications around life in a warming and increasingly
carbon constrained world (Rutland and Aylett 2008; De Goede and Randalls 2009;
Paterson and Stripple 2010; Rice 2010). The explosion of projects designed to enable
individuals to ‘do their bit’ in line with government and industry objectives to limit
climate change can be regarded as one means through which such ‘self-government’ is
enacted. Paterson and Stripple (2010) outline and compare five different contemporary
practices that aim at calculating, measuring and accounting for emissions of green-
house gases at the level of the individual (footprinting, offsetting, dieting, rationing and
trading with Carbon Rationing Action Groups or through a system of Personal Carbon
Allowances). What can be seen in these practices is an emergent government of carbon
that entails the ‘conduct of carbon conduct.’ This ‘carbon governmentality’ molds
and mobilizes individual subjects to govern their own emissions in various ways—as
counters, displacers, dieters, communitarians or citizens. Paterson and Stripple (2010)
call this governmental rationality ‘My Space’—individuals as agents managing their own
carbon practice in relation to an articulated global public goal of minimizing climate
change.
The research community has just begun to explore processes of subjectification around
carbon, or ‘how the status of hydrocarbons or standing biomass as resources for the
carbon economy hinges on people orienting themselves towards them in particular ways’
(Bridge 2010, p. 8). Most work has been on the subjectivities of end-users of carbon,
those who consume fossil energy and produce emissions. Here, the urban has come to
figure as a specific site of experimenting, where policies travel and become embedded
(Bulkeley et al. 2015). In Seattle, Rice (2010) finds a process of subjectification in the
local government’s work to reduce emissions. Local governments engage individuals
by appealing to ‘the good carbon citizen.’ Carbon accounting practices enable ‘carbon
territories,’ which Rice (2010, p. 930) defines as the ‘active creation and quantification
of bounded and ordered spaces of carbon-producing activities and simultaneous repro-
duction of local government jurisdictional capacities.’ Along a similar line, Rutland and
Aylett argue that these territorial practices articulate the responsible, carbon-calculating
individual. When individuals internalize the carbon metrics of the state, and ‘base
their actions on these metrics, they become part of a network of self-regulating actors’
(Rutland and Aylett 2008, p. 631). De Goede and Randalls (2009, p. 871) run through

ifferent examples of how subjects are constituted through contemporary climate change
d
policies; from the ‘neurotic citizen,’ who is promised the impossible—absolute security
from climate change—to ‘conscious consumers’ knowledgeable of the carbon content of
each purchase. Finally, Dowling (2010) cautions about reading too much of a neoliberal
(read calculating, self-focused, rational) subject into these developments, instead suggest-
ing that research should avoid thinking in terms of a close unitary alignment between
governmental processes and the identifications of individuals. People are argumenta-
tive subjects and research must thus accommodate ambiguity and alternative subject
positions.
Overall, as we as researchers start to engage with fundamental questions about
how to ‘decarbonize societies,’ we need to move beyond analysis of the institutions
that have specifically addressed climate change to engage with the manifold ways in
which carbon is (un)intentionally governed. Carbon is a fundamental element of the
socio-technical systems through which economies are organized and political societies
and everyday practices are constituted (Mitchell 2011). In order to grapple with this,
we need concepts and approaches, such as governmentality, that does not treat the
mundane and the material as non-political or not worthy of political interest (Lemke
2011, p. 85, 2015).
CONCLUSIONS
When approached from the horizon of Foucauldian analytics of government, climate

governance is a practical activity that can be ‘historicized and specified at the level of
the rationalities, programs, techniques and subjectivities which underpin it and give it
form and effect’ (Walters 2012, p. 3). We should thus refrain from trying to establish
something like ‘climate governance’ as a too abstract and general category that appears,
operates and takes effect in a homogeneous way. To advance governmentality as a mode
of inquiry instead entails a close examination of particular articulations (e.g., climate
campaigns), rationalities (e.g., low carbon lifestyles) and programs (e.g., carbon

accounting schemes) by which subjectivities are molded and mobilized at certain times
in history. The concept of climate governance has been useful to draw attention to not
just formal policies and measures but a wide range of initiatives (e.g., workplace cham-
pion schemes, collective purchasing, meatless Monday campaigns) that govern indi-
vidual or collective behavior by bringing ‘together a sufficient marriage of power and
legitimacy to establish, operationalize, apply, enforce, interpret, or vitiate’ (Conca 2005,
p. 190) rationalities and practices intended to respond to climate change. But while the
concept of climate governance has had a tendency to assume order, agency and purpose,
the concept of governmentality is helpful if we are to specify and register how govern-
ing is accomplished in practical and material terms. We need to pay close attention to
the many initiatives devised to ‘conduct carbon conduct’ across territorially defined
jurisdictions, systems and arenas. These initiatives may govern by advancing new

frames and arguments, but also through practical and mundane techniques that serve
to rearrange socio-material orders, such as redesigning refrigeration in supermarkets,
smart energy meters in the household or lessons in fuel-efficient car driving. Envisioned
in this way, studies in climate governmentality become an inquiry not simply into the

Governmentality 57
design of policy, regulations and codes of conduct, but a close engagement with how
these are taken up, worked through and reconfigured in the day-to-day practice and
culture of everyday life.
NOTE
1. The three categories were first outlined in Stripple and Bulkeley (2014b), but are here substantially revised,
amended and refocused.
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and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–23.
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Mankind, Geneva: World Meteorological Organization.

6. Deliberative democracy
Hayley Stevenson
INTRODUCTION
Questions of fairness and legitimacy are central to studies of climate governance. Failure
to successfully confront the threat of climate change will widely but unevenly impact
people’s lives across the world. Similarly, policies to mitigate and adapt to climate change
can either generate winners and losers, or disproportionately benefit some social groups
over others. Political theorists and political entrepreneurs have sought to address these
challenges within the parameters of deliberative theory and practice. Formal delibera-
tion involves communication that is non-coercive, connects particular interests to more
general principles, induces reflection among participants and encourages speakers to
express themselves in terms that others can understand. This is believed to offer a more
promising process than bargaining or technocracy for effectively and fairly resolving
problems of climate change. Existing settings for debate and decision-making can be eval-
uated in terms of how closely they approach this normative ideal of deliberation. More
broadly, however, we can evaluate governance in terms of its deliberative capacity, that
is, how well it advances deliberative qualities such as representation, participation, reflex-
ivity and accountability. Deliberative-inspired scholars have approached the study of
global climate governance from both of these perspectives: the formal/micro perspective
and the macro/systemic perspective.
This chapter begins by locating the deliberative tradition of democracy within broader
democratic theory (see Fischer this volume), and then discussing the relationship between
deliberative democracy and the environment. The subsequent section explores the range
of deliberative experiments in climate governance that have been implemented at local,
regional and transnational scales. Such experiments are often organized and led by aca-
demic researchers, and as a result they have generated important theoretical and empirical
insights into whether and how deliberative democracy can improve societies’ responses to
climate change. Next, the chapter provides a survey of existing studies into the broader
deliberative capacity of climate governance. The final section offers some reflections on
the potential future contributions of deliberative democracy to climate governance.
DEMOCRATIC THEORY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Theorists of democracy have traditionally seen voting and interest aggregation as the
essence of democracy. In the late twentieth century, many theorists were instead per-
suaded that the democratic ideal of ‘rule of the people’ should instead be sought in
deliberation. Democratic theory thus took a ‘deliberative turn’ (Dryzek 2000, p. 1).
Deliberation can be defined as ‘debate and discussion aimed at producing reasonable,
well-informed opinions in which participants are willing to revise preferences in light of
60
Deliberative democracy 61
discussion, new information, and claims made by fellow participants’ (Chambers 2003,
p. 309). Some deliberative democratic theorists favour less structured understandings of
deliberation and permit such talk as rhetoric, storytelling and testimony (Dryzek 2000,
p. 1). What is important is that communication is based on the exchange of reasoned
positions, is non-coercive, connects private interests and particular preferences to general
principles and is expressed in terms that all can understand. This shifts the focus from
the aggregation of preferences (as privileged by liberal and constitutional theories of
democracy) to the potential transformation of preferences through public reason-giving
(Elster 1998, p. 1). Aggregative theories of democracy take preferences as a given and
offer processes for combining and selecting among them to make decisions fairly and
efficiently. Deliberative democracy, by contrast, requires that preferences be justified
and assumes that people may change their mind in the process of publicly exchanging
reasons for their preferences. Even when agreement is not possible, deliberation is more
conducive to mutual respect and increases the likelihood of future agreement (Gutmann
and Thompson 2009, pp. 13–20).1 Deliberative democracy does not necessarily do away
with aggregative mechanisms such as voting (sometimes they may be needed to make a
decision), it simply makes deliberation a priority before any vote is taken.
The tradition of deliberative democracy offers a rich theoretical resource for scholars
concerned about gaps in the legitimacy of climate governance. For some, this may be
surprising. Mitigating and adapting to climate change requires urgent, ambitious and
authoritative action. Democracy and deliberation, by contrast, often proceed slowly
with no guarantees of consensus or sufficiently ambitious outcomes. Indeed, concerns
about the compatibility of ecological sustainability and deliberative democracy have been
voiced for many years (see Eckersley 1992 for an early account). Back in 1992, Goodin
warned that ‘[t]o advocate democracy is to advocate procedures, to advocate environmen-
talism is to advocate substantive outcomes: what guarantee can we have that the former
procedures will yield the latter sorts of outcomes?’ (Goodin 1992, p. 168). Some scholars
have heeded such warnings to such extreme lengths as to advocate for authoritarianism
in environmental governance. James Lovelock, for example, has suggested that ‘[e]ven the
best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on
hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a
war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while’ (quoted in Hickman 2010).
Advocates of deliberative democracy point to numerous reasons for rejecting Lovelock’s
suggestion (Stevenson and Dryzek 2014, p. 5). Scientific evidence suggests that we are
already locked into some degree of climatic change and will be dealing with the conse-
quences for decades to come. As a result, any temporary suspension of democracy to
allow the climate problem to be resolved is simply not feasible. Moreover, decisions about
mitigating and adapting to climate change are increasingly taken at the international
level, where implementing authoritarian rule is beyond the realms of possibility. Even if
this were feasible, it would be undesirable; the environmental policies of existing authori-
tarian experiences are hardly worthy of emulation. The suggestion that democracy ought
to be put on hold invites us to assume that a cadre of ecologically enlightened rulers are
waiting in the wings, ready and willing to implement unpopular and ambitious action on
climate change. This certainly doesn’t characterize contemporary political leadership, so
it is quite difficult to imagine where such rulers may come from. In any case, this chapter
documents evidence suggesting that citizens in developed and developing countries alike

are disposed to more ambitious climate action than that favored by their nations’ policy-
makers and political leaders.
It turns out that there are many good reasons to be cautiously optimistic that delib-
erative democracy will yield more ‘ecologically rational’ outcomes than other forms of
democracy or decision-making (see, for example, Dryzek 1987; Smith 2003; Baber and
Bartlett 2005). The ‘green promise’ of deliberation lies in the expectations that it will be
inclusive of different perspectives (including environmentalist ones), that interests will
be argued in terms that are generalizable to all participants and thereby induce speakers
to consider the interests of others; and that new and creative outcomes will be sought
that meet the interests of all.2 A healthy environment is ‘the generalizable interest par
excellence’ (Dryzek 1987, p. 204, emphasis in original) so sustainability arguments stand
greater chance of being accepted through deliberation than more strategic forms of
discussion (such as bargaining) that privilege self-interests.
Theorists of deliberative democracy have established a distinction between micro-
deliberation and macro- deliberation (see Hendriks 2006; Parkinson 2006; Goodin
2008). Micro-deliberation refers to the organized discussion within ‘mini-publics’ that
can approach the normative ideal outlined above. This occurs in legislatures, assemblies,
roundtables, public forums, deliberative polls, citizens’ juries and consensus conferences.
Its democratic potential lies in the aim to be representative, and to transmit decisions and
ideas from the forum to political institutions. The claim to being representative gener-
ally implies a concern with capturing the diversity of social attributes and perspectives
(Goodin 2008, p. 13). Macro-deliberation, by contrast, refers to the wider and informal
debate that takes place among citizens, bloggers, activists, journalists and politicians in
the public sphere. This promises greater potential for inclusivity. Its democratic potential
lies in the possibility of promoting reflexivity and shifting the ‘balance of discourses’ that
coordinate policies (Stevenson and Dryzek 2014).
This micro/macro distinction can be observed in scholarship on deliberative democ-
racy and climate change governance. At the micro-level, scholars have been involved in
organizing and evaluating citizens’ forums on climate change mitigation and adaptation.
At the macro-level, scholars have analysed and evaluated public debate about climate
change, and have assessed the broader systems of climate governance in terms of delib-
erative democratic qualities (legitimacy, inclusiveness, representation). The following two
sections examine each of these bodies of literature.
EXPERIMENTS IN MICRO-DELIBERATION
Citizens’ forums on climate change have been convened at local, national and inter-
national scales. Some of these have been organized by scholars with an interest in
advancing our understanding of deliberation in practice, others have been organized by
governments, public authorities or social entrepreneurs. Key examples include the 2007
Climate Change Citizens’ Summit convened by the UK government in London, in which
a representative sample of 150 people participated; the Alberta Climate Dialogue, a five-
year project involving thousands of citizens in a series of deliberative events; the 2009
Europolis Deliberative Opinion Poll involving citizens from 27 countries; and the World
Wide Views project that organized 100-member citizens forums on climate policy in

38 countries on the same day. This section explores the experience and findings of several
such experiments in micro-deliberation on climate change.
Empirical support for the theorized virtues of deliberation has emerged from experi-
ments in micro-deliberation, which are generally referred to as ‘mini-publics’. There is
evidence to suggest that through deliberation individuals do build shared understandings
on values and preferences relating to contested issues, and are able to hone in on common
interests and coherently articulate moral sentiments (see Niemeyer 2004). However, it
must be acknowledged that empirically minded scholars have been compelled to chal-
lenge some of the traditional assumptions of what counts as authentic deliberation
(e.g., Dryzek and Niemeyer 2006; Niemeyer 2011; Ward et al. 2003). This is necessary and
justified because deliberative democracy is a political project; the criteria therefore need
to be within the realms of aspiration.
The expectation that deliberation result in absolute consensus (maintained by some
deliberative theorists) has been challenged by Niemeyer and Dryzek (2007). They argue
that this ought to be replaced with an aspiration for ‘meta-consensus’, ‘in which inter-
subjective deliberation produces a situation involving common agreement on important
issue dimensions and legitimate possible outcomes, without necessarily agreeing on
the exact outcome’ (Niemeyer 2011, pp. 105–106). Movement towards such common
agreement about responding to climate change was observed in a deliberative forum
carried out in the Australian Capital Territory in 2009. Organized by political scientists,
Simon Niemeyer and Kersty Hobson, the event brought together 35 citizens in the
Australian Capital Region. The aim was for them to deliberate on options for respond-
ing to climate change based on a range of scenarios up to 2050 and 2100. Niemeyer
and his colleagues wished to determine how perspectives, or discourses, on climate
mitigation and adaptation would alter under conditions of deliberation versus the mere
provision of information. To this end, face-to-face interviews were carried out with 103
randomly selected citizens, and a Q methodology-based tool3 of ‘Opinion Mapping’ was
employed to capture their initial pre-deliberative positions. Four discourses emerged
from this mapping: A. Self- assured scepticism (disbelief in human- induced climate
change); B. Governance imperative (recognizing climate change as a problem and
stressing regulatory government action over market forces); C. Assured pragmatism
(technological optimism leading to indifference about the need to take action); and D.
Alarmed defeatism (pessimism about society’s capacity to overcome the climate change
catastrophe). Deliberative forum participants were then selected with the aim of achiev-
ing a discursively representative sample (rather than primarily gender or age diversity).
The participants spent three days talking and listening to one another, as well learning
more about the issues at stake through interactive expert presentations. The experiment
produced important findings concerning, on the one hand, the transformative potential
of deliberation and, on the other hand, the relationship between deliberation and adap-
tive capacity. The researchers concluded that ‘deliberation does change individual posi-
tions regarding climate change: that is, there is less skepticism, more desire for action,
and a greater willingness to act. It also alters the nature of the collective debate, as more
people move closer together in terms of their position within the discourses’ (Hobson
and Niemeyer 2011, p. 966). The discursive terrain post-deliberation was quite different
to the pre-deliberative one, but it was partly characterized by a greater convergence on the
discourse of Governance imperative. Deliberation could also be seen to enhance adaptive

capacity through learning: numerous participants claimed to have learnt a lot and devel-
oped more coherent positions in the process of engaging with different perspectives. Yet,
other ‘problematic elements’ were also observed in the rising levels of mistrust of public
officials and political systems, as well as a strong focus on what other people ought to be
doing rather than personal involvement or leadership. In a context like Australia, where
climate policy is extremely weak, this mood – while perhaps understandable – is bad news
for progress on climate change mitigation (Hobson and Niemeyer 2011, p. 967).
Deliberative experiments on the issue of climate change adaptation have also been
carried out in the United Kingdom. Tompkins and colleagues developed a ‘scenario-based
stakeholder engagement’ method that allowed coastal communities to deliberate on the
trade-offs associated with long-term planning, as well as the appropriate governance
models for designing and implementing such plans (Tompkins et al. 2008). Trade-offs in
adaptation principally concern risks and costs; including, how to value low-probability
but potentially catastrophic impacts; how to value non-market goods and services; how
(or whether) to determine discount rates; and how to promote participation in decision-
making. Their a ‘scenario-based stakeholder engagement’ method involved ‘identifying
stakeholders; impact scoping; deliberative development of evaluation criteria and future
scenarios; opening deliberative spaces to explore preferences; and identifying a range of
priorities’ (Tompkins et al. 2008, p. 1582). Deliberative workshops were held in the south-
east coastal community of Christchurch Bay (with 18 participants), and in Scotland’s
Orkney Islands (with 13 participants). With the aim of measuring changes in the citizens’
preferences, citizens were asked to rank and score a set of concerns relating to coastal
adaptation to climate change. In the case of the Christchurch Bay workshop, strong
preferences for risk minimization were expressed even more strongly after deliberation.
In Orkney, by contrast, participants converged overwhelmingly on the prioritization
of local participation in decision-making over concerns for risk or cost minimization
(Tompkins et al. 2008, pp. 1587–1589). Deliberation had an evident impact on strength-
ening individual positions and developing clear common positions.
The Danish-led World Wide Views (WWViews) on Global Warming represents the
most ambitious effort to scale up local and national mini-publics to an international
scale. On 26 September 2009 (in the lead-up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit that
was expected to deliver a new global treaty) deliberative forums were held in 38 countries
involving some 4,000 participants. The forums gave people the opportunity to consider
and make recommendations on the same issues of mitigation, adaptation, finance and
technology that were on the United Nations (UN) negotiating agenda for Copenhagen.
The forum design incorporated the provision of information by video (ensuring all
participants in all countries received the same information); moderated discussion in
groups of five to eight; anonymous voting on several questions; the drafting of policy
recommendations; and anonymous voting to prioritize all recommendations (Bedsted
et al. 2012). In almost all countries, participants recommended much stronger mitigation
action than their governments were (or are) willing to take. This included more ambi-
tious cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in Annex I (industrialized) countries; reduction
targets for high-emitting emerging economies; and emission limitations in low-income
developing countries (Danish Board of Technology 2009). The principle of ‘common but
differentiated responsibility’ was evidently accepted but with the added expectation that
all countries take more ambitious action. The view that a global agreement on climate

was required urgently and immediately was overwhelmingly accepted across all regions of
the world (ranging from 84 per cent agreement in Asia to 99 per cent agreement in South
America) (Danish Board of Technology 2009, p. 12). While WWViews was a political
initiative rather than a research-based one, academics were closely involved in several
country forums and have reflected on the experience in light of deliberative democratic
theory (Riedy and Herriman 2011; Blue forthcoming). Reflecting on the Australian
experience, Riedy and Herriman observed a skewed representation, which is understood
as typical of ‘mini-publics’. Unlike the experiments described above, representation in
WWViews was sought along demographic lines rather than discursive lines. Yet, even
with careful sampling it is difficult to overcome the bias towards disproportionate accept-
ance from highly educated, high income, political active, older, white and male invitees
(Riedy and Herriman 2011, p. 13; see also Dryzek 2011; Halvorsen 2006).
Riedy and Herriman also noted that the potential impact of the exercise was weakened
by insufficient understanding of the decision-making settings they aimed to influence.
In particular, they lamented the decision to hold forums just two months before the
Copenhagen summit, by which time most countries’ negotiating positions were settled
(Riedy and Herriman 2011, p. 8). Despite efforts to engage directly with politicians and
policymakers about the event’s outcomes, none could be persuaded to accept the results
or make a statement on how they would respond (Riedy and Herriman 2011, p. 9). More
generally, they acknowledged that ‘there is no evidence that WWViews had any influence
on negotiating positions at COP-15’ (Riedy and Herriman 2011, p. 22). They conclude
that ‘sustained pressure over a longer period’ is more likely than one-off mini-publics to
influence decision-making (Riedy and Herriman 2011, p. 23).
The question of how mini-publics can have greater political and social impact is one
that deliberative theories have grappled with for some time (e.g., Goodin and Dryzek
2006; Smith 2009). Examining the link between the micro and the macro, Goodin and
Dryzek (2006, pp. 220–221) argue: ‘When it comes to the macro-political impact of
micro-political innovations, mini-publics . . . rarely themselves determine public policy
. . . Generally they can have real political impact only by working on, and through,
the broader public sphere, ordinary institutions of representative democracy, and
administrative policy making.’
MACRO-DELIBERATION: MEASURING THE DELIBERATIVE

CAPACITY OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
At the macro-level, scholars have analysed and evaluated public debate about climate
change, and have assessed the broader systems of climate governance in terms of delibera-
tive democratic qualities (inclusiveness, representation and accountability). Much of this
scholarship can be seen as consistent with the ‘systems’ turn in deliberative democratic
theory (Parkinson and Mansbridge 2013). Thinking about democratization in delibera-
tive system terms shifts focus and expectations away from any single forum or institution
and instead looks at how democratic qualities can be advanced in multiple locations and
practices – none of which alone will satisfy all normative ideals, but in combination may
advance deliberative democratic qualities. The precise elements of a deliberative system
have been conceptualized in slightly different ways, most of which are tied to models of

liberal democracies (e.g., Mansbridge 1999; Hendriks 2006). Dryzek’s conceptualiza-

tion (2009, pp. 1385–1386) has broader applicability and is therefore useful for thinking
about governance at multiple scales from the local to the global. His scheme comprises
six elements: public space (in which citizens, bloggers, activists, journalists, etc. exchange
perspectives about a particular issue); empowered space (where collective and authorita-
tive decisions are made, including legislatures, courts, councils and committees); trans-
mission (means by which ideas and influence travel from public to empowered space);
accountability (mechanisms through which empowered space answers to public space);
meta-deliberation (a capacity for reflecting on the system as a whole and c orrecting any
shortcomings), and decisiveness (ensuring the other elements are consequential) (Dryzek
2009; Stevenson and Dryzek 2014). Identifying such spaces in climate governance (or any
other issue area) is the first step of deliberative systems analysis. It is also important to
evaluate them: a well-functioning system would feature authentic deliberation in public
space, empowered space, transmission and accountability; be inclusive in public and
empowered spaces; and be decisive (Dryzek 2009, p. 1387).
Stevenson and Dryzek (2014) have used such a framework for mapping, evaluating
and prescribing reforms for global climate governance. Their findings are mixed: the
system is found to have some favourable aspects but many serious deliberative deficien-
cies. Public space, for example, is found to be inclusive of multiple discourses but lacking
authentic deliberation. Four categories of climate discourses are discerned in the public
space of global climate governance: mainstream sustainability (positing the possibil-
ity of a positive relationship between climate mitigation and economic development);
expansive sustainability (stressing social justice and basic needs); limits (stressing finite
planetary boundaries); and green radicalism (highlighting how climate change emerges
from unjust political and economic structures). Debate within public space is diffuse
and cannot be expected to conform to the deliberative ideal aspired to in mini-publics.
Instead, authentic deliberation in this context would be dialogue promoting greater
reflexive capacity. Here problems can be observed in the public space of global climate
governance. Despite a diversity of climate discourses, particular discourses are found
to flourish in discrete settings (‘deliberative enclaves’) with little engagement occurring
across discourses. Deliberative democracy has a place for enclaves, but only as spaces
for developing coherent arguments prior to engaging with others. Enclaves are especially
important for marginalized or disadvantaged groups (Fraser 1992; Mansbridge 1999;
Karpowitz et al. 2009). But enclaves can also stifle reflexive capacity: if arguments are
only articulated among like-minded others then their proponents are not exposed to
critique and outsiders are not exposed to competing ideas that may inspire them to revise
their own positions. Reflexive capacity is further diminished by the tendency for enclaves
to produce ‘ideological amplification’ and ‘group polarization’ (Sunstein 2003, 2007).
This refers to the tendency for individuals to reinforce their commitment to existing con-
victions when they are supported by the majority. Regardless of the plurality of perspec-
tives privately held, groups will become more polarized in the direction of the majority
of publicized perspectives. Correcting this deficit in the deliberative system for climate
governance could be quite straightforward: the solution lies in creating opportunities
for engagement across discourses. So, organizers of particular forums could deliberately
include dissident voices from their own majority, or special inter-discursive forums could
be convened – either in physical or virtual spaces.

The empowered space of global climate governance comprises the multilateral

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as well as a
great many governance networks. Evaluating the inclusivity and deliberative authenticity
of each and every unit of authority would be a gargantuan task. Stevenson and Dryzek
instead analysed cases representing the different configurations of authority (multilateral,
and public, private and hybrid partnerships). On the question of inclusivity a common
theme of ‘discursive domination’ emerges. Discourses present in public space do not tend
to be fully represented in empowered space. Mainstream sustainability is the most pre-
dominantly articulated discourse in the UNFCCC and governance networks. Expansive
sustainability occasionally finds a presence in the UNFCCC due to the G77 group of
developing countries’ emphasis on evening out inequalities across states. Limits and Green
radicalism barely register a presence, except for brief encounters with outside activists
and occasional statements from left-leaning Latin American delegations. Negotiations
are not organized according to deliberative principles and strategic bargaining tends
to be much more common than anything resembling authentic deliberation. Yet, some
deliberative principles can be observed (at least indirectly)4 in UNFCCC negotiations.
Ideally, deliberative negotiations would feature truthfulness, respect, justification of
positions taken, common-interest appeals in the content of justification, non-coercive
persuasion and efforts to find proposals that satisfy different concerns. Perceptions of
untruthlessness often emerge in the UNFCCC as a result of mistrust, which in turn is
bred by broken promises (such as on finance and technology) and suspected unspoken
motives (such as abolishing the Kyoto Protocol). Respect, however, is much more com-
monplace: personally disrespectful behaviour in the UNFCCC is rare and negotiators
generally do not extend disdain for parties’ positions to those articulating the positions.
Diplomats are very good at justifying positions and building a case, but the delibera-
tive virtue of this tends to be lost in the UNFCCC negotiations because listening and
reflection are absent. Moreover, the reasons provided for positions are often perceived as
incomplete or covers for genuine reasons. Agreement through persuasion lies at the heart
of deliberative democracy, yet the UNFCCC fall far short of this. Negotiators have only
limited scope for revising positions in the process of negotiation, and generally will only
be persuaded to do so on relatively minor matters. This often results in the agreement
of ‘constructive ambiguities’ (flexible language accommodating diverging interests and
interpretations), rather than the development of common understandings or positions.
Others have also analysed various components of the UNFCCC and climate govern-
ance at large (Gupta and Mason this volume) in terms of deliberative democratic quali-
ties. Naghmeh Nasiritousi and colleagues (2012) examined the potential for the side event
programme that runs alongside UNFCCC meetings to reduce the deliberative democratic
deficit of global climate governance. The side events potentially provide an opportunity to
enhance deliberative capacity by providing an unconstrained space for state-and non-state
actors to share ideas and knowledge. These potentially fill a ‘transmission’ function between
public and empowered space, because some 30 per cent of participants are governmental
representatives and negotiators (Hjerpe and Linnér 2010, p. 173). However, Nasiritousi
et al.’s research suggests that this potential is diminished by incomplete representation
of discourses. Based on participant questionnaires and content analysis of side-event
abstracts at the Conference of the Parties (COP) 17 in Durban (2011), they find that most
non-state actors in these settings do not necessarily articulate more diverse p erspectives

than already represented by states in negotiations. What they observe is a domination of

mainstream discourses emphasizing technological change, governmental regulation and
market mechanisms, with little space occupied by those emphasizing lifestyle changes as a
solution to climate change. For Nasiritousi and her colleagues, more equal representation
of discourses is necessary for further democratization of global climate governance.
Johannes Stripple (2010) interprets the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM) as an example of the ‘deliberative turn’ in environmental politics.
This is perhaps not an obvious case: the CDM is a market mechanism and deliberation
has never been a central concern. Yet, Stripple (2010, p. 68) argues that the deliberative
qualities of the CDM (‘participation of non-state actors, state-society communication
and broadened knowledge’) may become ‘one of its most important legacies’. While
not designed with any deliberative ideal in mind, certain deliberative qualities can be
discerned. There is an expectation that CDM project proposals will have been through a
process of consultation with local stakeholders. But Stripple (2010, p. 74) points out that
the quality of this engagement is undermined by barriers to participation: ‘[b]arriers are
power asymmetries between partners, and lack of competing and alternative voices of
citizens and marginalized actors’. There is, however, evidence to suggest that the CDM
has contributed to raising awareness about climate change in the countries in which it has
operated (Fuhr and Lederer 2009).
The CDM has also been scrutinized by Eva Lövbrand and colleagues (2009) in terms
of its legitimacy. They conceptualize legitimacy in terms of normative input criteria
(transparency, accountability and participation) and an effectiveness-based output cri-
terion (goal attainment). They argue that these two sides of the legitimacy coin do not
comfortably coexist. Rather, enhancing deliberative input increases transaction costs and
impedes goal attainment. Stevenson and Dryzek (2014, p. 118) observe that, in practice,
this trade-off is resolved in climate partnerships in favour of output rather than input.
The privileged position of market agency in partnerships such as the CDM squeezes out
opportunities for public deliberation, which is considered costly and counterproductive
to the goal of maximizing investment in climate change mitigation. Similar findings about
the deliberative democratic deficit of climate governance networks emerge from Karin
Bäckstrand’s meta-assessments of transnational public–private partnerships (PPPs) for
climate change and sustainable development (Bäckstrand 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012). Her
analysis casts doubt on the dominant framing of PPPs as a new mode of governance that
can reduce the legitimacy deficits (both input and output) of global climate and sustain-
ability governance. In terms of output legitimacy, Bäckstrand (2010, pp. 91, 97–100)
shows that it is impossible to assess the environmental effectiveness of many PPPs –
simply because their design eschews quantitative goals and monitoring. Weaknesses in
input legitimacy are equally apparent. The partnerships emerging from the Johannesburg
World Summit on Sustainable Development were characterized by a considerable over-
representation of wealthier states, professional non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
and market actors. This severely restricts their ability to advance principles of par-
ticipation and representation (Bäckstrand 2010, pp. 91–93). The CDM has suffered from
similar skewed representation: just three countries (China, Brazil and India) captured the
majority of project. Even in these countries, the quality of stakeholder participation has
been low: public participation opportunities are highly formalized, opaque and expert-
oriented, and require an advanced level of understanding, awareness, and internet access

to be utilized (Bäckstrand 2010, p. 93). Ultimately Bäckstrand (2010, p. 94) concludes

that existing climate and sustainability PPPs ‘mirror rather than transform existing pat-
terns of power, inclusion and exclusion between North and South, public and private
authority and professional NGOs and local grass-roots movements’. Even for those
actors that do have the capacity to participate, the actual opportunities for deliberation
are minimal; many partnerships are oriented to rule implementation and any deliberative
processes they do entail tend to be ‘cosmetic and symbolic and . . . added on or serve to
legitimize decisions already made’ (Bäckstrand 2010, p. 96).
CONCLUSION
In theory there are good reasons to assume that deliberative democratic processes
would enhance the legitimacy of climate governance, as well as its effectiveness.
Deliberation privileges inclusivity over exclusivity, and generalizable interests over
particular self-interests. Deliberators are expected to consider the interests of others,
as well as argue their own position in terms that others can understand. This provides
a context in which arguments of sustainability are more likely to prevail than they
would in other forms of debate or bargaining. Given that existing climate governance
over the past two decades has failed to effectively confront problems associated with
climate change, scholars and practitioners ought to be considering creative possibilities
of reforming governance. Deliberative possibilities should therefore certainly be part
of this consideration. To what extent can we already glimpse deliberative potential in
climate governance? This chapter has revealed a mixed picture. Experiments in micro-
deliberation have produced interesting and largely encouraging findings for the poten-
tial for deliberation to enhance social responses to climate change. Citizens engaged in
deliberation have been shown to have a significantly higher level of ambition than most
political leaders have displayed. Micro-deliberation has also generated less scepticism,
greater desire for action and willingness to act, and a greater willingness to pay for
mitigation. Importantly, deliberation also has enabled people to better understand and
accept some aspects of alternative discourses held by other people. This is important
for moving towards more shared understandings of the nature of the climate change
problem and the best way to respond to it.
The deliberative quality of actual climate governance is rather less positive than
micro-deliberative experiments. Discursive domination by mainstream climate discourses
is a problem in UNFCCC negotiations and side events. Deliberative qualities such
as respect are commonplace in negotiations and positions are generally well justified
(that is, reasons are provided – if not always in their entirety). But deliberative qualities
such as listening, reflection and a capacity to revise one’s position are mostly lacking
in the UNFCCC negotiations. In networked climate governance, deliberative capacity
is severely constrained by power asymmetries and an over-representation of relatively
privileged actors at the expense of participation by the most vulnerable and marginalized.
Overall, input and output legitimacy prove rather weak in climate governance networks.
Of course, we must keep in mind that deliberative democracy is not a political project
that can be implemented once and for all at any level of political order: whether at the
municipal, nation-state or global level of governance. Instead, deliberative theories

provide frameworks for critically evaluating existing governance, and for thinking about
possibilities for reform that would enhance deliberative democratization (Dryzek 2009).
Some degree of climate change is already inevitable. It is therefore too late for delibera-
tion (or anything else) to prevent climate change. But deliberative processes still hold
the possibility of producing more ambitious mitigation action to minimize the extent
of climate change, as well as to help society confront many of the challenges that will
continue to arise as societies and leaders determine how to mitigate and adapt to this
problem.
NOTES
1. For a fuller comparison of aggregative theories of democracy and deliberative democracy, see Gutmann
and Thompson (2009, ch. 1).
2. A more complete account of the environmental promise of deliberative democracy is provided in Stevenson
and Dryzek (2014, ch. 2).
3. See Watts and Stenner 2012. Q methodology is a factor analysis tool for investigating how individuals’
points of view together form a wider and coherent discourse concerning a particular issue.
4. The closed nature of negotiations makes direct observation difficult; hence assessments generally must rely
on the accounts of negotiators and UNFCCC staff.
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7. Feminism
Annica Kronsell
INTRODUCTION
Scholars, policymakers and civil society groups have come to realize that gender matters
in the governance of climate issues. Research shows that there are significant differences
in how women and men are exposed to and impacted by climate change. These findings
have influenced the climate governance agenda with calls to consider gender aspects in
the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change (Hemmati and Röhr 2009; Nordic
Council 2009). Gender is a concept derived from feminist theory. While there are many
feminist perspectives, one commonality is their view of gender as related to power. From
a feminist vantage point, climate governance is part of a gendered power order. This
order is expressed materially in terms of differences in livelihoods, work roles and access
to resources, which, in turn, are based on gender norms and societal practices. However,
in this chapter I will argue that this is not the way gender is perceived in much of the
scholarship on gender and climate change, and certainly not in climate governance prac-
tice whether in Scandinavia, the European Union (EU) or the United Nations (UN).
In the scholarship discussed further in this chapter, the attention is mainly on women;
for example, by demonstrating sex differences in the impacts of climate change and by
highlighting the vulnerability of women in the South, or emphasizing their specific role in
mitigating climate change. This is unfortunate, as climate governance would benefit from
theorizing gender power relations. The aim of this chapter is therefore to clarify how an
attention to power is relevant for the study of gender and climate governance.
The chapter begins with a brief outline of how gender is understood and studied
through feminist perspectives. The category ‘woman’ is fundamental to women’s studies
and feminist research and key in the research surveyed in this chapter. This is illus-
trated through a discussion of the scholarship on gender and climate change and
through a survey of studies and data on climate governance practice in the UN, EU and
Scandinavia. I will argue that it is imperative to apply critical feminist perspectives to
shed light on the power relations and power structures of climate governance and the
chapter provides examples of how this can be done.
FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES AND THE GENDER POWER ORDER
Feminist perspectives are highly useful to understand the relevance of sex and gender.
The concept of ‘sex’ refers to men or women and is often used as a variable in statistics
and pertinent when counting bodies, for example, in decision-making institutions. If
we are interested in UN climate governance, it is relevant to ask to what extent women
are represented in UN climate conferences, in the supporting bodies of the UN climate
convention and whether they have leadership positions. The presence of women in
73
ecision-making can be an important indication of the democratic quality of governance

d
and add to its legitimacy.
Feminist scholars explore how sex difference is related to power through the concept
gender. Gender refers to the social and cultural practices, the relations, organization and
institutions around presumed biological differences between men and women (Connell
2002, p. 9). Gender is not static but in the making as individuals do gender through
everyday activities (West and Zimmerman 1987; Butler 1990). Individuals perform

gender in relation to others and to organizations and institutions; for example, as fathers,
energy consumers or policymakers. The gender order has a base in individual identities,
shaped through the historic relations between men and women. The gender order is the
structural component that assigns difference to behaviors, traits and societal functions
(Acker 2006), that is, what is considered masculine or feminine. Thus, gender permeates
social and political life and is expressed materially and normatively. Gender intersects
with and is related to other expressions of power such as class, ethnicity and age (Lykke
2010). As such a pervasive organizational principle, the gender order can be expected to
influence also institutions of climate governance.
Feminist theory in the academic scholarship has its base in women’s and feminist
social movements. There are many feminist perspectives, formed in connection to
various debates within the feminist community and they differ regarding their view on
gender, epistemology and even ontology (Lykke 2010). In this chapter I allow myself a
simplification and advance the term ‘critical feminist perspectives’ to denote all scholarly
accounts1 that engage in a critical inquiry of the material and normative dimensions of
the gender power order with the ultimate objective not only to question but change the
dominating gender order. While empirical studies on the conditions of, and the role of,
women in climate change and in climate policymaking are pivotal to feminist research,
the claim here is that critical feminist perspectives take us further in studying how climate
governance is gendered. The chapter moves on to illustrate this through a critical feminist
analysis of scholarship and practice in climate governance.
WOMEN AS VULNERABLE VICTIMS AND VIRTUOUS

HEROINES IN CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
A major part of studies on gender and climate change concern the local level and cast
women as vulnerable victims (cf. Resurrección 2013). Geraldine Terry’s edited book
Climate Change and Gender Justice (2009) was one of the first to establish how gender
matters in climate issues. It comes from the gender and development community and
takes its starting point from statements by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) on how rural women in developing countries are among the groups most
vulnerable to climate change. While Terry’s discussion is nuanced and multifaceted, her
attention is on women as victims in places such as Bangladesh, India and Tanzania (Terry
2009). A similar representation is found in Irene Dankelman’s edited volume Gender and
Climate Change (2010), written as an introduction to the field with multiple examples of
local practices, mainly in the South.
Similar elaborations on women as vulnerable victims, mainly in the South, are found
in studies on climate adaptation (Bendlin 2014, p. 684). Singh et al. (2010), for instance,

Feminism 75
studied how the risks of climate change vary for women and men due to their different
social, political and economic conditions. They show that women are at greater risk,
more vulnerable and more likely to become victims of climate change because they do
not have the same access to resources, have different living conditions and have more
restricted capabilities than men as a group do. There are more examples in the climate
adaptation literature (Aquilar 2013; Denton 2002; Mearns and Norton 2010; Oparaocha
and Dutta 2011). Disaster relief and adaptive capacity is often considered in terms
of women’s specific roles, concerns and livelihoods (Bee et al. 2013; Dominelli 2013).
When Margaret Alston (2013a, p. 5) argues for the inclusion of these findings in climate
governance, she calls for ‘an understanding of significant gendered consequences: that
climate change has critical consequences for women and men; and that women are par-
ticularly vulnerable to poverty, insecurity and violence during and after climate events’
(see also Alston 2013b).
The tendency in this literature is to reduce the problem of climate governance to one
about women in the rural South. This is also the tendency in adaptation policy practice.
Holvoet and Inberg (2014, p. 272) show in their study of climate adaptation strategies in
31 countries that gender becomes equivalent to women. In light of feminist scholarship
that has shown how gender intersects with other power relations, this homogeneous
perception of women is unfortunate. When the subject of gender and climate change is
defined as relating to one homogenous group—women in the South—vulnerability is
accentuated and women’s agency undermined.
Referring to climate adaptation, Joane Nagel (2012) shows that vulnerability to
climate generated disasters is related to intersectional aspects—such as poverty, economic
activities and modesty cultures—rather than to a homogenous category of woman. The
devastation of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 provides another example.
Marginalized people were less likely to evacuate, could not afford to live somewhere else
and had poorer prospects when displaced (Tuana 2008, p. 189). Similarly, the ability to
cope with the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami 2004 was related to gender but also
to class, race and caste (Juran 2012). For climate issues in the rich North, gender matters
but consumption of transport, energy, food and goods that generates climate emissions
and is relevant for mitigation is also closely linked to class and economic status. Class
matters sometimes more than gender does. Those more affluent consume more and emit
most emissions; ethnicity and age should also be considered (Kaijser and Kronsell 2013).
Hence, to equate gender with women as a homogenous group confers gender with the
meaning ‘woman’ and renders intersectional aspects invisible.
The focus on the South also obscures gender differences that exist in other parts of
the world. Moreover, there are considerable differences within both the North and the
South (Johnsson-Latham 2007). For example, homeless people in the North hardly
produce any carbon emissions, while rich elites in the South may emit more carbon than
the average citizen in the North (EIGE 2012, p. 21). Hence, to focus on vulnerable women
in the South when studying gender and climate change risks deflecting ‘attention from
power relations and inequalities reproduced in institutions at all levels and discourses on
climate change’ (Arora-Jonsson 2011, p. 745). Intersectional aspects are expressed at the
policy and institutional level of climate governance as well (Nagel 2012; see also Newell
2005, p. 78). Climate strategies formulated in the UN, the IPPC and the EU can be argued
to reflect the current gender power of those institutions; that is, the concerns of mainly

male policymakers and male scientists from the rich North. Gender, class and ethnicity
are intersectional aspects that matter here.
The framing of women in the South as vulnerable renders them devoid of agency.
At the same time—and this is highly paradoxical—in reviewing studies of gender and
climate change, women are frequently depicted as virtuous heroes (cf. Arora-Jonsson
2011, p. 745). According to Bernadette Resurrección (2013) this framing—casting
women as both the problem ‘vulnerable’ and the solution ‘heroines’—reflects the persis-
tence in the environment and development discourse to view gender as something that
only regards women. This persistent discourse is recreated in the contemporary climate
change agenda (Resurrección 2013, p. 37; see also Leach 2007; Holvoet and Inberg 2014),
but is also typical of a general discourse on gender in global governance, including gender
and security issues. In the UN Security Council and in UN Peacekeeping, issues relating
to gender in war, conflict and peace are framed in terms of women being vulnerable to
violence of war and conflicts as well as the ones to take care of the problem by rendering
peacekeeping legitimate (e.g., Shepherd 2008). Through this dominant framing, both the
problem and the solution for gender issues are confined to women and leave little room
for an analysis of gender as power. Chris Cuomo (2011, p. 695) suggests that if structural
inequalities are framed as vulnerability or susceptibility to harm, the result is that atten-
tion is drawn to the ‘supposed weaknesses or limitations of those who are in harm’s way,
but says little about whether injustices or other harms have put them in such precarious
positions.’ If virtuous women are the ones who are called on to solve the problem, it
effectively excludes attention from a gender power order.
The celebration of women’s agency as ‘heroic’ and ‘virtuous’ is, however, also an
important element in feminist thought, particularly among feminist standpoint theories
and ecofeminist thinkers. Standpoint theory posits that women’s positions in society
shape ways of knowing and provides other experiences than those lived, for example,
by dominant male elites (Hartsock 1985; Harding 1991). Based on mothering and other
caring experiences and skills, women can show alternative ways of governance, such
as ‘earthcare’ (Merchant 1996). Women are viewed as being able to save the world by
‘reweaving’ it (Diamond and Orenstein 1990) and by ‘healing the wounds (Plant 1989).
These ecofeminist scholars have highlighted women’s specific knowledge and skills about
nature and have thus been dismissed in the feminist debate as essentialist, unjustly so
argues Greta Gaard (2011). Indeed, there is a need for alternatives in climate governance,
but it should be alternatives that question rather than reproduce gender binaries.
There are studies that focus on women as a group and show that they contribute with
less carbon emissions than men as a group does. In this sense, women’s behavior could be
considered more climate-friendly than men’s. The sex difference is most apparent in the
South but is also evident in the North (Bendlin 2014, pp. 684–687; OECD 2008a, 2008b;
Räty and Carlsson-Kanyama 2010; Schultz and Stiess 2009). According to various
surveys, women in the EU and the US are more concerned about climate issues and more
inclined to take climate action (European Commission 2009; McCright 2010) and there
are gender differences in terms of attitudes to climate change issues (Goldsmith et al.
2013; McCright and Dunlap 2011). While we should not deny that gender differences
may be relevant as a basis for climate agency and for generating alternatives (MacGregor
2014), this framing does not address the gender and climate problem in terms of power,
and fails to look beyond women as a homogenous group.

Feminism 77
EQUAL REPRESENTATION IN CLIMATE GOVERNANCE:

FROM CRITICAL MASS TO CRITICAL ACTS?
One of the key concerns for feminist studies in general, and for the women’s movement
since the suffrage debates, has been devoted to women’s possibility to participate in public
and political life (Lovenduski 2005; Phillips 1995). To that end, the presence of women
and of gender balance in political institutions is believed to assure democratic quality,
legitimacy and enhance women’s agency (Lovenduski and Norris 2003; Wängnerud
2009). A strive for gender balance is crucial because a critical mass of women need to be
present for their presence to be felt (Moss Kanter 1977). Informal gender equality quotas
used today aim for gender balance in the 40–60 percent range (Dahlerup 2006). There is
an underlying assumption that women’s presence will lead to a different kind of politics
as well (e.g., Phillips 1995).
Women’s participation in global climate governance is not gender balanced (Hemmati
and Röhr 2009; Röhr et al. 2009). The United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted at the UN Conference in Rio de Janeiro in
Brazil in 1992 at the same time as a number of other conventions. While the other agree-
ments all officially noted the importance of gender, the UNFCCC did not. Due to this
omission, women were not included among the constituencies as observers in the process.
All subsequent efforts to include women’s groups and gender issues in climate negotia-
tions were conducted in the sidelines as parallel events, for the first time in a group called
Solidarity in the Greenhouse, which formulated a series of requests at the Conference
of the Parties 1 in 1995. It took until COP 7 in Marrakesh to recognize women in the
protocol texts. Progress has been slow but there was a major breakthrough at COP 13
in Bali 2007 when the worldwide network Women for Climate Justice (GenderCC) was
established and a commitment to gender was made. As Hemmati and Röhr (2009, p. 25)
conclude: ‘It seems that “gender equality” is finally beginning to be accepted as one of the
core principles of mitigating climate change and adapting to its impacts.’
In 2012 the European Institute for Gender Equality published the report Gender
Equality and Climate Change that investigated women’s participation in different EU
bodies and in 27 member states in some detail. The report presents data on the EU
member states’ representation in UNFCCC and in the COPs and shows that women
hold 39 percent of the seats in national delegations and that there has been a slow but
constant increase over the years of women’s representation in climate governance (EIGE
2012, pp. 53–58). Yet, Gill Allwood (2014) finds that that there is a persistent invisibility
of gender in EU’s responses to climate change in policy actions and thus, it seems that to
date there has been little significant effect of increased representation in the policy bodies
devoted to climate change issues. The equivalent analysis of national climate governance
bodies of the EU member states reveals on average 25 percent representation of women
(EIGE 2012, p. 3) but there is great variation between EU member states. Four member
states have a under-representation with less than 15 percent women, while two countries,
Finland and Sweden, demonstrate an over-representation with more than 50 percent
women (EIGE 2012, p. 65).
As argued above, feminist scholars on representation have made the assumption that
something qualitatively different is added through equal representation. When a critical
mass of women take part in decision-making, their presence also means a substantial

impact on policy; that is, that women can bring something different to climate govern-
ance through ‘critical acts’ (Dahlerup 2006, p. 517). Two studies confirm this link. A
global quantitative comparative study indicated that women’s presence in politics makes a
difference. Nations with higher proportions of women in parliament are also more prone
to ratify environmental treaties (Norgaard and York 2005). A similar study showed that
carbon emissions are lower in nations where women have higher political status (Ergas
and York 2012).
The assumed link between critical mass and critical acts suggested by the above find-
ings and by the literature on women’s representation is that women’s contributions to
political decisions can be expected to be different from men’s contributions. From this
perspective—which is in line with what ecofeminists and standpoint theorists might also
argue—it is not only a democratic argument about equality and justice that makes it
relevant to include women in policymaking and governance, but the prospect that other
perspectives, knowledge and experience can be included in climate governance through
equal gender representation. Gender differences suggest that women may have different
ideas and opinions on climate politics that could come to the fore with their presence in
policymaking. As noted above, the studies of Norgaard and York (2005) and Ergas and
York (2012) appear to confirm this, while Allwood (2014) on the EU climate policy does
not.
In an effort to better understand whether the presence of women in climate policy
making may also have noticeable effects on climate governance, Magnusdottir and
Kronsell (2015) studied climate governance in the most gender balanced of the EU
member states—the Scandinavian countries—and were not able to establish a link
between critical mass and ‘critical acts’ when they looked for evidence through text analy-
sis of climate policy texts and from interviews with climate policymakers. They found
that known gender differences in material conditions and in attitudes toward climate
issues were completely invisible and excluded from climate policy texts. Policymakers
were largely unaware of the relevance of gender differences and how to consider them
in climate policymaking, despite the gender balance of the institutions where climate
policy is made. Magnusdottir and Kronsell (2015) offered two explanations based on
critical feminist perspectives. The lack of evidence of critical acts—despite equal gender
representation—can be explained by material and normative aspects of the gender power
order. For one, female policymakers in Scandinavia are neither ‘vulnerable’ nor ‘virtuous’
but part of the high consuming elite with large carbon emissions and it would be in their
interest to not question the current climate order. Second, masculine norms are so deeply
institutionalized in climate relevant institutions that policymakers regardless of their
sex, accept and adapt their views to the masculinized institutional environment wherein
Scandinavian climate policies are made.
CRITICAL FEMINIST CONTRIBUTIONS TO CLIMATE

RESEARCH
For critical feminist scholars, the focus on women in the gender and climate governance
scholarship and policy is both problematic and limiting (cf. Moosa and Tuana 2014). It
overgeneralizes the presumed binary differences between men and women and it collapses

Feminism 79
the climate problem as one about individual choice and actions. Instead, the difference
between men and women in climate change issues can be analyzed as the effect of his-
toric gender power relations. Fossil-fuel consumption is rarely a personal decision. Chris
Cuomo (2011) writes that here is a ‘widespread disempowerment associated with per-
sonal and household efforts’ because people’s possibility and capability to take complete
control over their general energy consumption options—the way they use and access
public transportation, local foods or renewable energy—are severely circumscribed by the
larger power structures in place in these sectors (Cuomo 2011, p. 702).
Governments and large corporations are deeply implicated in this and form part of
a global power structure, particularly noticeable in its South–North dimension. Ann
Tickner (1992, p. 99) demonstrated how ecological security is gendered in international
relations through the power-seeking behavior of masculinized states. Her analysis of
ecological security ties the nation-state system and the resource exploitation of states,
not the least in colonialism, to the binary gender power order that is expressed sym-
bolically, structurally and individually. As Nicola Detraz (2010) argues, power plays
out at multiple levels in relation to resources and to decision-making in international
relations. Peter Newell (2005, p. 73) argued about global environmental politics that it
exemplifies a new international division of power that ‘feeds on entrenched patterns
of social inequality etched along racial, class and gender lines’ and that in turn gives
rise to ‘new patterns of environmental inequality.’ Karen Bell is critical of conventional
approaches in studies of gender in climate governance because it locks research into
a ‘dualistic global North/global South approach to climate change and new maps of
oppression, disadvantage and privilege inscribed on old maps’ thus becoming just
another form of imperialism but this time cloaked in a concern for climate issues (Bell
2013, p. 56).
Another way to investigate the gender power order is through an emphasis on nor-
mative aspects and on how masculinity and specific male interests shapes climate
governance. Studies have discussed the relation between specific masculinities and risk
behavior, and found that it is conservative, white, middle-class men who are more likely to
deny climate problems and use more risky strategies (McCright and Dunlap 2011). Those
who have power and benefit from the current socio-technological system will be more
motivated to justify it and less willing to change and promote change (Goldsmith et al.
2013, p. 168). Climate governance today focuses mainly on improvements and technical
fixes in the energy and transport area. Hemmati and Röhr (2009, p. 20) write: ‘The debate
on climate change has been very narrow, focusing on the economic effects of climate
change, efficiency, and technological problems.’ These are male-dominated sectors and
it is mainly men who control and benefit from the research, innovations, and jobs in
these sectors. Here male power is material but is also disciplining through the normative
structures that have emerged in the fossil-fuel economy. It can be argued, applying the
insights of Connell (2002) and Hearn and Husu (2011) that climate governance happens
in a context in which masculinity is the accepted norm, while it remains unarticulated and
invisible. The absence of explicit gender symbols or gender recognition is not the same
as being gender-neutral. The lack of conscious and explicit reference to gender within
institutions, organizations or in climate strategies does not mean that gender is irrelevant
for the issue area. An important contribution from feminist critical perspectives is the
notion that power can be expressed through silences. When masculinity is normative,

climate strategies that lack a gender perspective simply reproduce the existing gender
power order.
Feminist critical approaches are useful because they can disrupt the reproduction
of power through a critical ontology that raises epistemological questions. There is a
long tradition of feminist critique of science to build upon, for example, when raising
questions about the knowledge produced about climate change. The IPCC has become
increasingly powerful, as the knowledge is increasingly secured and assured with each
new report. According to its webpage, the IPCC’s objective is ‘to provide the world with a
clear scientific view of the current state of knowledge in climate change.’ The ambition to
‘provide rigorous and balanced scientific information to decision makers’ conveys a sense
that neutrality in science is possible. The IPCC reaffirms this by saying that its work is
‘policy-relevant yet policy-neutral’ (IPCC 2014). The assumption is somehow—because
of the consensual process including a global network of scientists—that the IPCC
produces the knowledge of climate change and that policymakers should act upon it
promptly (cf. MacGregor 2014). It is commendable, and should not be taken lightly that
there is such a serious effort of the international community via the IPCC to understand
the climate issue. Yet, taking feminist theorizing seriously, it gives reasons for doubt and
raises several concerns.
The current body of knowledge is centered on global-scale processes, and it is dominated
by a techno-scientific framing that suggests that it is possible to control and dominate
nature (Neimanis and Loewen Walker 2014). Israel and Sachs (2013, p. 42) find the IPCC
colorful mapping of future climate conditions to be an example of the ‘God-trick’ and
here they build on Donna Haraway’s (1991) seminal work. The IPCC presents an abso-
lute, universal knowledge while alluding to do so from a position from nowhere; that is,
from the position of ‘God.’ The ‘trick’ is that IPCC makes the future climates thoroughly
knowable and controllable. Joni Seager looks specifically at the discourse around the 2°C
target to show this and argues that ‘feminist analysis sheds light on the ways in which the
notion that we can identify levels of acceptable danger, and hold global warming to that
line—and, worse, offer this up as an appropriate global policy and to the crisis in which
we are embroiled’ as ‘God-trick’-thinking (Seager 2009, p. 20). Taking feminist critical
perspectives seriously means as, Nancy Tuana (2013) argues, to view scientific knowledge
on climate change as situated and thus as power-laden. Feminist critical perspectives on
climate change science are well fit to address the epistemological and normative under-
pinnings of scientific inquiry, rather than filling gaps in current scientific understanding.
CONCLUSIONS
Feminist perspectives have only recently begun studying climate politics and govern-
ance and the major part of the literature has focused on how women are affected by
climate change. Thus, gender has come to mean women, either as vulnerable victims of
climate change in local places in the South or/and as virtuous heroes bringing the solutions
to climate vulnerabilities. Men and masculinity—the other side of the gender binary—is
lacking in this research. There is no recognition of intersectional power s tructures—such
as class, ethnicity, place and age—all highly relevant to climate governance. This chapter
suggests that a broader feminist research agenda is called for to bring these aspects to

Feminism 81
the fore in climate governance research. Critical feminist perspectives are particularly
crucial in accounting for how the gender order is implicated in climate p olicymaking,
materially and normatively. A focus on gender as women only obscures that elites in gov-
ernments and corporations have the strongest interest in the current fossil fuel economy.
This is further supported by historically derived normative structures that privilege mas-
culinities and are likely to strongly influence decisions and policies taken on climate issues
today. Critical feminist perspectives provide theories and frameworks to engage in critical
inquiries of the material and normative underpinnings of the gender power order as it is
reflected in climate governance. Finally, it should not be overlooked that different groups,
not part of the masculine elites, should be included in climate governance for democratic
reasons and also because they may have experience, knowledge, views and ideas that can
be helpful to further a more just and equal climate agenda.
NOTE
1. This includes constructivist, post-structural, post-colonial and post-modern feminist perspectives.
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8. Normative theory
Edward A. Page
INTRODUCTION
Global climate change raises profound questions for normative theorists. Many, if not
all, of these questions arise from the challenge of specifying how benefits and burdens
associated with managing climate change should be distributed within and between
generations. In this chapter, I explore three interconnected dimensions of this challenge.
First, the problem of determining the entitlements of states and their populations to
exploit the capacity of the atmosphere to assimilate greenhouse gases (GHGs) (‘justice
in mitigation’). Second, the problem of achieving a fair division of benefits and burdens
associated with activities aimed at adjusting human behavior to limit the adverse effects
of climate changes that cannot, or will not, be avoided through measures of mitigation
(‘justice in adaptation’). Third, the problem of assisting vulnerable populations that face
climate change related losses and damages that cannot be managed by measures of miti-
gation and adaptation (‘justice in loss and damage’). It is argued that achieving justice
on each dimension will involve assigning a range of demanding duties to states and other
users of the atmosphere.
JUSTICE IN THE MITIGATION OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Climate change mitigation has been usefully defined as ‘anthropogenic intervention

to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases’ (Klein and Huq 2007,
p. 750). Consequently, ‘justice in mitigation’ can be seen as the problem of distributing
among states and populations the duty to preserve the capacity of the climate system to
store and absorb GHGs so that a ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate
system’ (DAI) is avoided (UNFCCC 1992, Article 2). The idea is that justice will only
obtain if duties to mitigate are distributed among states and their populations so that
DAI is predictably avoided and established norms of distributive justice and fairness
are upheld. Understanding DAI requires not only natural scientific analyses of the risks
for physical and human systems, but also analyses of normative considerations such as
intergenerational justice; and social and individual perceptions of risk and insecurity
(Schneider and Lane 2007, pp. 13–14). Moreover, climate change can be assessed in
terms of a diversity of spatial scales (regional, national and international), vulnerabili-
ties (physical or social) and temporalities (existing, proximate and distant generations).
Nevertheless, it is a useful simplification to define DAI as a state of affairs where con-
centrations of atmospheric GHG trigger climatic impacts so severe as to threaten global
food production, prevent sustainable economic development and prevent ecosystems
from adapting naturally (UNFCCC 1992, p. 5). Conversely, a ‘safe climate’ can be viewed
as a state of affairs where a DAI is neither present nor imminent.
84
Normative theory 85
The normative literature on ‘justice’ in mitigation focuses on clarifying and evaluating

alternative normative principles that could regulate how a total ‘safe’ budget of carbon
dioxide and other GHGs could be shared among states and generations in a way that
balances fairly their competing interests and entitlements. As Caney (2009, p. 125) puts it,
the question here is ‘how the permission to emit greenhouse gases should be distributed
and among whom.’ Several principles of distribution have been explored of which three
have generated the most philosophical interest: ‘equal sacrifice,’ ‘equal per capita emis-
sions’ and ‘emissions sufficiency’ (Gardiner 2010, pp. 56–60; Caney 2009, pp. 127–137;
Vanderheiden 2008a, pp. 221–257). Each principle recommends a different method defin-
ing a ‘safe’ distribution of present and future GHG emissions such that no agent assigned
a duty under the principle could reasonably reject (that is, have a decisive normative
complaint against imposing) this distribution (Gardiner 2010, p. 52).
Equal Sacrifice
According to one view, each state should bear a roughly similar range of costs in support-
ing the global effort to avoid DAI (Miller 2009, pp. 146–151). If avoiding DAI requires
a mix of mitigation activities that would impose a 2 percent total loss in global world
product over the twenty-first century relative to what it would have been in absence
of the necessity for a coordinated international climate response, the equal sacrifice
approach requires that this burden be borne so that the average citizen in each state faces
a 2 percent loss in future income (Miller 2009, p. 147). In this sense, seeking to equalize
the burden that each state faces in reducing its GHG emissions as part of international
attempts to avoid DAI does not seek to establish any particular pattern of GHG
emissions amongst states or populations. Rather, the present and future distribution
of GHG emissions is permitted to vary so that the loss borne by the average citizen of
each state as a result of changes in lifestyle and consumption associated with climate
mitigation is equalized.
One fairly obvious problem with the equal sacrifice approach is that it seems unjust,
given significant disparities in living standards among developed states, to require that
the poorer states in this group bear identical economic burdens in percentage terms to
their richer counterparts merely because an effective solution to climate change requires
a widespread mitigation effort. On Miller’s (2009) derivation of the approach, for
example, high-income developed states would be required to forgo the same proportional
gains in national income over the next century despite significant variations in total and
per capita income existing among these states. Some developed states may complain,
therefore, that they are being asked to bear an unfair burden and that this complaint is
not answered by the response that the developed world is wealthier than the developing
world. A second problem is that it is difficult to make sense of ‘equal sacrifice’ without
endorsing ‘emissions grandfathering’ (the controversial idea that an agent’s future emis-
sions entitlements are a function of their past emission records) since the sacrifice that
each state can reasonably be required to make is calculated in terms of a cut in its GHG
emissions relative to what they were before the agreement came into force. The existing
level of GHG emissions for each state is treated here as defining the baseline for the effort
that can reasonably be requested of each state. The problem is that such ‘grandfathering’
has been widely condemned as unjust in that it effectively legitimizes the excess historical

GHG emissions of the developed world while also failing to recognize differential
national historical responsibilities within the developed world (Vanderheiden 2008a,
p. 226; Gardiner 2011, p. 425).
Equal Per Capita Emissions
In absence of any strong argument to the contrary, one might think that a principle
of equality should dictate the distribution of the GHGs that humanity may emit over
the coming centuries without triggering DAI (Broome 2012, p. 70). The idea here is
essentially that no one person has a stronger claim to use up a finite unit of the Earth’s
capacity to assimilative GHG than any other person. Emissions entitlements, on this
view, should be allocated among states so that the average citizen in each state should be
able to exploit an identical amount of the assimilative capacity of the atmosphere subject
to its total exploitation not triggering DAI (Meyer 2000, p. 56). There are a number of
positive arguments that could be adduced in support of equal per capita emissions. One
holds that the capacity of the atmosphere to assimilate GHGs is the common property of
mankind and therefore this resource should be equally shared across and between genera-
tions, as with any other ‘global commons.’ Here, the common ownership rights of citizens
belonging to all states shape the duties that states and their populations have to mitigate
climate change (Singer 2002, p. 35). Another argument holds that emissions rights equally
among states might be the only way to express equal concern and respect for the vital
interest of every person to exploit the capacity of the atmosphere to assimilate GHGs as
a by-product of pursuing valued objectives (Athanasiou and Baer 2002, p. 63).
Although a popular view, per capita emissions egalitarianism faces a fierce combina-
tion of normative objections leveled at both its egalitarian ethos and per capita focus.
Thus, it has been argued that equalizing the per capita level of each state’s greenhouse
emissions would neither reduce global inequality nor the number of humans who fail
to fulfil their basis needs due to climate change impacts (Caney 2009, pp. 127ff). Other
critics have also argued that neither of the main justifications are persuasive: atmospheric
commons arguments merely offer a conditional defense of emissions rights equality since
they do not uniquely support an equal right of citizens or states to emit GHGs (Starkey
2011, pp. 116–122) and protecting vital interests—or achieving equality of wellbeing—
may require an unequal distribution in emissions rights since the amount of wellbeing
people derive from activities that emit GHG varies significantly across and within gen-
erations (Caney 2012, p. 266). Finally, it has been suggested that some components of
the atmosphere, notably terrestrial sinks of GHGs such as rainforests, may not plausibly
be seen as the common property of mankind. Consequently, justice in mitigation may
involve greater variations in national GHG emissions than the per capita view will permit
(Blomfield 2013).
Emissions Sufficiency
Some theorists have argued that emissions rights should be distributed so that citizens
of every state have access to enough of the atmosphere’s capacity to assimilate a safe
amount of greenhouse gas to meet their basic needs (such as nutrition, shelter and basic
healthcare), but not non-basic needs (such as access to air travel and many types of

Normative theory 87
c onsumer good). As long as each person can meet their basic needs, and global emissions
remain within safe levels, policymakers need not aim to bring about an egalitarian pattern
of international GHG emissions (Shue 1993, pp. 55–56). Vanderheiden, for example,
posits an interconnected set of rights and entitlements including a ‘basic right to climate
stability’ and a right to a ‘minimum per capita level of emissions’ in defending such a view
(Vanderheiden 2008b, p. 64). Putting these entitlements together entails that each person
has a ‘basic right to their survival emissions but they have lesser rights, if at all, to their
luxury emissions’ (Vanderheiden 2008a, p. 243).
The ‘basic rights’ derivation of emissions sufficiency raises many of the usual problems
associated with accounts of distributive justice that appeal to basic needs, decent lives or
sufficiency thresholds: the claim that there are no significant questions of justice in miti-
gation above the point where all have access to survival emissions seems implausible since
it could tolerate huge inequalities in access to the assimilative capacity of the atmosphere.
Another problem facing the approach is that of distinguishing, in a manner that would
make the approach both philosophically coherent and operationalizable in practice,
between ‘luxury’ and ‘subsistence’ emissions (Gardiner 2011, pp. 424–425). Perhaps the
strongest objection to the approach, however, emerges from the identification it makes
between ‘emissions sufficiency’ and ‘personal sufficiency.’ The quality of any particular
human life is shaped by a broad range of personal and social factors and many of these
factors are insensitive to the amount of GHG a person or their society emits. Since it is
possible to lead a decent life and emit very low amounts of carbon, and lead a miserable
life and emit substantial amounts of carbon, it is unclear whether even those committed
to sufficientarian premises would endorse emissions sufficiency as the correct account of
justice in mitigation.
JUSTICE IN ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE
Climate change adaptation has been usefully defined as ‘adjustment in natural or human
systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moder-
ates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities’ (Klein and Huq 2007, p. 750). Climate
adaptation measures will therefore encompass a wide range of financially costly lifestyle
adjustments to climate changes that cannot, or will not, be prevented by climate mitiga-
tion—including crop or species switching by farmers, healthcare reform in areas vulner-
able to extreme weather, coastal protection measures and policies of migration (Klein et
al. 2014, p. 918). Whereas justice in mitigation involves the distribution of duties associ-
ated with policies seeking to prevent or weaken the causes of climate change, justice in
adaptation involves the distribution of duties associated with policies that adjust existing
institutions, infrastructure, or behavior in order to block or weaken the pathway from
climatic cause to adverse climatic effect. Consequently, justice in adaptation obtains if
the duties associated with adjusting to present and future climate changes are distributed
such that no agent bearing a duty has a reasonable objection to this distribution.
There are three key elements to any comprehensive account of justice in adaptation:
who should pay how much and to whom in respect of the cost of adjusting to climate
change? Given that a range of studies have concluded that the total cost of an effec-
tive global adaptation response will be many billions of US dollars (Chambwera and

Heal 2014, p. 959) per annum—and that is widely agreed that wealthy states should bear
the primary burden of bearing this cost (Baer 2006; Grasso 2010)—the puzzle that has
attracted most interest has been how the costs associated with adaptation should be
distributed within the developed world. The three most commonly defended solutions
to this puzzle are the ‘contributor pays principle,’ the ‘ability to pay principle’ and the
‘beneficiary pays principle.’
According to the contributor pays principle (or CPP) agents should bear the costs of
adapting to climate change in proportion to their causal contribution to climate change
as measured by their cumulative GHG emissions (Neumayer 2000, p. 187; Vanderheiden,
2008b, p. 64). The simple idea behind the ‘contribution to problem’ argument is that, like
other agents responsible for environmental pollution, the largest historical emitters of
GHGs—the developed states—should take steps to internalize the social cost they have
imposed on other states to adjust to the enhanced greenhouse effect. Only in this way can
they compensate those in the present generation who are now being forced to adjust their
behavior in order to avoid the adverse effects to which climate change would otherwise
give rise (Shue 1999, pp. 533–537; Singer 2002, pp. 27–34; Baer 2006).
One problem with the CPP arises from linking climate burdens to the causal process
whereby a state’s cumulative GHG emissions contribute to adverse future outcomes
associated with global warming. There is reason to doubt whether all states can reason-
ably be held fully responsible for the negative consequences of the GHGs emitted within
their jurisdictions given the numerous changes in international borders, as well as internal
political events that have transformed the institutional character of states since 1750.
The changing geopolitical landscape of the post-industrial period, then, undermines the
case for holding an existing state responsible for the cumulative emissions of ancestral
geopolitical units as if they were one and the same entity (Caney 2006, pp. 469ff; Miller
2009, pp. 151ff). A second problem with the CPP is that it presupposes certain minimal
standards of agential capability on the part of the duty-bearer in the sense that each can
be said to be morally responsible for its historical emissions record and the environmental
effects of this record (Farber 2007, p. 1992). Agents imposing harms on others where
these harms could not have reasonably been foreseen, however, appear to lack this ability.
So it seems that the CPP could only apply after a moment in history where the policy-
makers and institutions of a state were not excusably ignorant of the climatic effects of
the GHG emitted by agents within that state’s borders (Caney 2010, p. 210). Given sig-
nificant variations in scientific, policymaker and public knowledge during the twentieth
century, for example, the identification of this responsibility-triggering moment is hugely
challenging.
According to the ability to pay principle (or APP), states should bear climatic burdens
in proportion to their ability to do so as captured by some proxy for this ability such as
national income or wealth (Shue 1999, p. 537; Singer 2002, pp. 27–32). The APP is in this
sense a ‘forward-looking,’ rather than ‘backward-looking,’ justification of differential
climatic burdens: the developed states and their inhabitants should shoulder the burden
of climate justice because their greater comparative and absolute wealth means that they
are uniquely able to underwrite the costs of the international adaptation response. As
Shue explains, the APP rests on a more general principle of justice that ‘among a number
of parties, all of whom are bound to contribute to some endeavour, the parties who have
the most resources should contribute the most to the endeavour’ (Shue 1999, p. 537).

Normative theory 89
As a non-historical approach to justice in adaptation, the APP is not subject to prob-

lems of national excusable ignorance, state continuity, or historical state responsibility.
Yet, it is questionable as a stand-alone solution to climate burden sharing. One problem
is that it is prone to a burden differentiation problem arising between ‘responsibly rich’
and ‘irresponsibly rich’ states. Suppose two developed states have the same high standard
of living and so a similar capacity to finance climate adaptations in the developing world,
but one state adopted a highly efficient (climatically less damaging) development path
while the other adopted a far less efficient (climatically far more damaging) development
path. Although the first state will have contributed far less to climate change, the APP
applied in isolation implies that the climate burdens each should bear will be similar if
not identical. This might seem counterintuitive because it introduces a form of injustice
among the burden bearers. A further injustice appears to arise among those states that
have used the best available technology in the way they have developed and those states
that have not. In circumstances where all states are attributed at least some burden, it
seems unfair to those states that developed in a cleaner manner that they bear the same
burden as those that did not. The APP is blind to this morally relevant difference.
According to the beneficiary pays principle (or BPP), states should cover the costs of
the climate adaptation response in proportion to how much they have benefited from the
activities that have driven climate change since the beginning of the industrial revolution
(Page 2012; Meyer and Roser 2010, pp. 252–253; Gosseries 2004). States, that is, should
shoulder the burdens associated with undertaking measures of adaptation—subject
to a simple affordability test—by surrendering some of the income and wealth at their
disposal that can be traced back to activities that contributed to climate change by emit-
ting GHGs. An important innovation of the BPP arises as a result of its being a hybrid
approach to climate justice which contains forward-looking elements (that target benefits
that could be diverted usefully to reduce the impact of climate change) and backward-
looking elements (which isolate for redistribution only those benefits that can be con-
nected to climate change). This hybrid structure enables the BPP to finesse problems
associated with holding later generations responsible for the injustices of earlier genera-
tions plus given a deeper explanation of why the rich states are bound by an especially
weighty duty to fund adaptation projects in poor states.
One problem with the BPP is that it might seem too demanding—and hence unfair—
to later generations in any temporal sequence, since it will to require them to surrender
benefits in order to discharge their BPP duties even if earlier generations inherited but
decided to consume many benefits rather than surrender them to the climate effort. The
BPP, in this way, seems to require that the present generation pay the normative debts
of all previous generations as well as their own, since many beneficiaries are now dead
(taking an individualist view) or only linked to past political units to a limited extent
(taking a collectivist view) (Caney 2006, p. 473). A further problem for the BPP is that it
does not seem possible to separate the part of present wealth under the control of devel-
oped states that arose from activities that caused climate change from the part that can be
attributed to other factors. Yet, this distinction is crucial for the BPP, since it assumes that
benefits uniquely or strongly traceable to fossil fuel driven industrialization can be taxed
to finance climate adaptation while agents should be permitted to retain wealth that arose
as a direct or indirect consequence of productive activities that had little or no effect on
the climate system (Page 2012).

JUSTICE IN THE MANAGEMENT OF LOSS AND DAMAGE

FROM CLIMATE CHANGE
Some impacts of climate change on human and natural systems cannot, or will not, be
prevented by climate mitigation or adaptation. Many of these impacts will lead to ‘losses
and damages’ befalling vulnerable populations. Climatic losses and damages can u sefully
be understood as ‘actual and/or potential manifestation of impacts associated with
climate change in developing countries that negatively affect human and natural systems’
(UNFCCC 2012, p. 4). Despite the introduction of the Warsaw International Mechanism
on Loss and Damage (WIM) in 2013, and the existence of a substantial literature on the
limits of adaptation and mitigation, the questions of justice raised by climatic losses and
damages have only just begun to be explored. This is unfortunate for three reasons.
First, as reported in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) latest
assessment report, there is increasing evidence that climate change has already had
adverse effects on developing world populations, thereby exacerbating inequality between
rich and poor states (IPCC 2014, pp. 4–6). Given that such impacts have already occurred,
they can neither be mitigated nor ‘adjusted to’ in the standard sense of these terms (James
et al. 2014, p. 938). The emergence of limits to, and constraints on, mitigation and adap-
tation emphasizes the need for just and effective policies managing climatic losses (where
restoration of property, person or lifestyle is impossible) and climatic damages (where
restoration of property, person or lifestyle is impossible) (Burkett 2014, pp. 120–121).
Second, decisions about how much to invest in policies and measures that manage
climatic losses and damages raise profound questions of justice since if they were left
unmanaged they would exacerbate the relative and absolute poverty of developing world
populations. Given the relative lack of economic and political resources available to
respond to sudden weather events (such as tidal surges and windstorms) and gradual
climatic changes (such as sea-level rises and droughts), climatic losses and damages will
be harder to bear for developing states than developed states. Developing states are also
vulnerable to the residual impacts of climate change due to geographical location and
their reliance on ecosystem services (Verheyen 2012, pp. 4–6). The injustice of this situ-
ation is captured by the thought that the poorest states have done least to create climate
problems, they have benefited least from the activities that drive climate change and they
have the least capacity to respond to loss and damage arising in their own territories.
Third, the normative frameworks that have been developed to evaluate justice in miti-
gation and adaptation do not fit well the case of loss and damage. Standard normative
treatments of mitigation, for example, search for the correct principles of justice that
could navigate an equitable pathway to a low carbon global economy (Caney 2009, 2012;
Miller 2009; Vanderheiden 2008a, 2008b). Standard normative treatments of adaptation,
meanwhile, treat it as a matter of fair burden-sharing among states in the developed world
who agree to finance measures to assist developing states to avoid large impacts through
policies of socio-economic adjustment and climate-proofing (Baer 2006; Grasso 2010).
Climatic loss and damage, however, is not readily reducible to a matter of fair shares or
fair burden-sharing. Unlike mitigation, there is no scarce and valuable commodity to be
shared fairly among states and generations. Unlike adaptation, climatic loss and damage
arises when adaptation policies fail or are not attempted, with the result that those affected
are forced to adopt alternatives ways of life rather than making minor adjustments in how

Normative theory 91
they pursue these ways of life. In this way, loss and damage will often g enerate a more
demanding sense of grievance on the part of its victims to be c ompensated for an unjustly
impaired practice, goal or lifestyle (UNFCCC 2012; Klein et al. 2014).
Demands for justice in the management of climatic losses and damages can usefully be
seen as demands for victims of climate change to be made ‘whole again’ after an unjusti-
fied disruption in their lives has forced them to make costly changes in their values or the
means of securing these values. The victim is made whole again when they are restored, as
best as possible, to the condition they would have enjoyed had the injustice not occurred
(Goodin 1989, p. 56). In focusing on a victim experiencing unpreventable disadvantage
through no fault of their own, the underlying structure of the duty to intervene is there-
fore one of corrective (or compensatory) justice rather than distributive justice (Farber
2008; Farris 2010). While distributive justice requires that benefits and burdens be
distributed across some population according to normative principles that none could
reasonably reject, corrective justice seeks to remedy disruptions that arise in existing just
relationships by reversing these disruptions rather than by seeking to create a new just
order (Goodin 1989, p. 59–60; McKinnon 2012, pp. 74–76). The idea here is that, even
if the existing distribution of global resources can reasonably be seen as imperfect from
the perspective of distributive justice, the essential injustice of climate change is that it
imposes a series of serious unjustified changes in the pre-existing distribution of rights
and resources that framed the projects, plans and goals of rich and poor populations.
There are essentially two types of compensation that could be used to correct injus-
tices arising from climatic losses and damages that are projected to befall developing
states over the next century. A ‘means replacing’ approach will seek to make the victims
of climate change whole again by using cash or in kind payments to restore their ability
to pursue the goals and ways of life that were disrupted. Meanwhile, an ‘ends displac-
ing’ approach—which is generally considered normatively inferior to a means-replacing
approach if both are available—will use financial or other resources to make the victims
whole again in the sense that they achieve the same amount of overall satisfaction or well-
being as they did before the disruption despite no longer being able to pursue the exact
same goals and ways of life (Goodin 1989, pp. 60–65).
The literature on climatic compensation is still in its infancy, but three problems facing
this approach to tackling the injustice posed by loss and damage have already emerged.
First, natural climatic variability and imperfect climatic modeling prevent a straightfor-
ward linkage between any particular state’s GHG emissions, a climate event or process
causing loss and damage, and the victims of such events or processes. This complicates
demands for means-replacing or ends-displacing compensation for losses and damages
arising in developing states (James et al. 2014, p. 939). Second, governance failures in
developing states may enhance losses and damages felt by the relevant populations and
these enhanced losses are not easily dealt with in terms of compensation since they do
not arise from the harmful activities of external parties (Verheyen 2012). Third, while
the governments of many developed states have expressed sympathy with the plight
of developing world populations facing large loss and damage from climate change,
they have also denied any legal responsibility to provide climate compensation (Burkett
2014, p. 129). Appealing to the language of compensation, then, might be expected
to hinder rather than further the goal of a successful international climate deal. Such
political considerations do not necessarily undermine the normative case for climate

c ompensation; nor do they render redundant the important task of investigating how a
compensatory mechanism could be operationalized under the auspices of the UNFCCC
(Farber 2012, p. 995). It has been suggested, for example, that an innovative solution to
all three problems might be found in the guise of an international climate insurance and
compensation mechanism that avoided explicit reference to state liability or responsibil-
ity for climate change and instead channeled funds from developed states to developing
states based on a set of normative criteria headed by need, solidarity and transparency
(Farris 2010; Verheyen 2012).
CONCLUSION
I hope to have shown in this brief review of normative theory and climate change that
none of the three key problems of climate change justice is easily solved. In terms of
justice in mitigation, some contributors have suggested that failure to resolve the emis-
sions rights problem reflects a deeper truth that GHG emissions are not appropriately
viewed as a metric of justice to distributed fairly but rather they should be seen as instru-
mental to the realization of a richer metric such as welfare, capabilities, primary goods, or
human rights. In this sense, it may be a methodological mistake to isolate the problem of
justice in mitigation from other problems of global and intergenerational justice (Caney
2012, pp. 271ff.). Others have denied that the right to emit GHG should reflect any ‘ideal’
pattern of justice but instead should track whatever distribution will predictably deliver a
global climate change agreement that each state can reasonably see as being beneficial to
all states (Posner and Weisbach 2010).
Turning to ‘justice in adaptation,’ while the apparent intractability of the ‘who should
pay?’ problem might be seen in some quarters as proof that adaptation burdens should be
allocated through a pragmatic process balancing the interests and resources of all states
(Posner and Weisbach 2010), it has also been suggested that a principled solution can be
found in a pluralist account that draws upon two or more burden sharing principles in
order to circumvent the weaknesses of each when considered in isolation (Caney 2010;
Page 2011; Baer et al. 2008). Finally, as we have seen, the ‘justice in loss and damage’
problem invites a solution in terms of compensatory or corrective justice but faces acute
problems in reconciling this account of justice with the current state of global climate
change politics where a number of key states reject this solution. Is this a problem for the
theory of climatic compensation or a problem of moral and political myopia? The debate
continues.
Suppose that a consensus was reached amongst normative theorists regarding an
appropriate response to justice in mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage. To have
any practical relevance, the entitlements and duties identified would need to be translated
into a coherent system of national, regional and global climate policies and mechanisms.
Such a mix of policies would also need to be reconciled with established goals of global
development, poverty reduction, political legitimacy and state sovereignty. This chapter
has not addressed such challenges directly. Instead, it has focused on clarifying some
foundational problems of climate change justice and attempted to convey the richness of
the emerging academic literature on these problems. It is the hope of the author that the
emerging discipline of climate change justice can contribute to a better understanding of

Normative theory 93
the problem that climate change poses for the international community as well as to its
eventual solution.
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net/download/6877.pdf (accessed 12 February 2015).

PART II
PROCESSES AND SITES OF

CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

9. Climate diplomacy
Radoslav S. Dimitrov
What is the impact of international diplomacy on climate governance? International

negotiations on climate change have become proverbial for their repeated failure to
deliver policy output. Formal United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC) discussions since December 2007 have not produced new policy
agreements except a continuation of the Kyoto Protocol that is considerably weaker
than the original agreement. The argument advanced here is that United Nations (UN)
climate negotiations have already succeeded in facilitating policy change without formal
agreements. Persuasion has played an important role and arguments about the econom-
ics of climate policy have led to reconsideration of national interests. The importance of
the UNFCCC talks is in spreading influential ideas that alter cost–benefit calculations
about domestic policy. The conversations during negotiations help to explain the world-
wide proliferation of climate-friendly policies today that signal a global ‘green shift,’ an
economic transition to low-carbon development.
CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS: THE ACADEMIC LITERATURE
Global climate negotiations attract considerable academic attention. Daniel Bodansky,

Joanna Depledge, Lavanya Rajamani and others have spent decades documenting dip-
lomatic efforts to formulate a global response to climate change in the past 20 years.
Participants in UN climate conferences help us to understand the enormously complex
climate politics with extensive summaries of policy issues, positions of main countries,
political dynamics and major decision outcomes (Bodansky 2010; Fry 2008; Chandani
2010; Depledge 2006; Dimitrov 2010; Kulovesi and Gutiérrez 2009; Oberthür 2011;
Rajamani 2009, 2010, 2012; Sterk et al. 2010). Various studies analyze recent climate
agreements and discuss future prospects for cooperation (Eckersley 2012; Victor 2011;
Sterk et al. 2010; Watanabe et al. 2008; Eckersley and Biermann in this volume). Others
examine negotiation positions of actors (Andresen and Agrawala 2002) such as devel-
oping countries (Najam et al. 2003; Gupta this volume), the United States (Depledge
2005a; Bang this volume), the European Union (Gupta and Grubb 2000; Oberthür and
Roche Kelly 2008; Vogler and Bretherton 2006; Hovi et al. 2003; Harris 2007; Dupont
and Oberthür this volume), China (Harris and Yu 2005, Stalley this volume) and island
states (Betzold 2010).
Persuasion and Argumentation in Negotiations
The international conversation during negotiations is rarely explored in academic

scholarship. A major gap in the literature is the shortage of studies on communication
and argumentation. Sweeping literature reviews conclude that the exchange of arguments
97
is the least explored topic in international negotiation studies (Jönsson 2002; Zartman
2002). ‘The back-and-forth communication . . . the dynamics of mutual persuasion
attempts that we usually associate with negotiations are insufficiently caught’ (Jönsson
2002, p. 224). Important books by Farhana Yamin and Joanna Depledge rectify the
general neglect of process but also leave out the discursive exchange among delegations
(Depledge 2005b; Yamin and Depledge 2004).
One reason for neglecting the conversation in global climate politics is m
ethodological:
scholars rarely have access to international negotiations, particularly behind closed
doors. Thomas Risse (2000) and Harald Müller (2004) cogently argued the need to
study communicative behavior but the few attempts that followed produced inconclusive
results, partly due to absence of verbatim records (Deitelhoff and Müller 2005). Notable
exceptions include a discourse analysis of climate justice statements (Audet 2013) and a
rationalist theory of argumentative persuasion by Christian Grobe (2010) who, paradoxi-
cally, argues that changes in bargaining positions are not motivated by arguments. The
latter work, too, draws on secondary sources and includes no data on the actual conversa-
tion between delegations. There is now evidence that dialogue alters policy preferences.
A recent study explored the micro-dynamics of international discussions and identified
techniques of persuasion in climate diplomacy. A typology of arguments was developed
to show the various approaches to persuasion, and identify effective negotiating strate-
gies (Dimitrov 2012).
GLOBAL CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS: AN ASSESSMENT
Formal global negotiations on post-2012 climate policy began in 2008 under the Bali
Action Plan adopted in Indonesia in December 2007 (Watanabe et al. 2008). Two tur-
bulent years of diplomatic activity produced elaborate proposals from Japan, Tuvalu,
New Zealand and others, and 200 single-spaced pages of draft text on a future treaty.
This effort collapsed in a spectacular public disaster in Copenhagen 2009. Last-minute
efforts to ‘greenwash’ the conference with a short political declaration drafted by heads
of states and grandly titled the ‘Copenhagen Accord’ also failed when diplomats of six
small countries such as Sudan, Cuba and Bolivia refused to support it. The Cancún
Agreements of 2010 were a desperate attempt to save the credibility of the UNFCCC
process as the main forum for formulating global climate policy. In private consultations
behind closed doors, the UN climate boss Christiana Figueres stated that ‘the nego-
tiations process is in free fall.’1 The Cancún conference managed to adopt broad-stroke
decisions on an Adaptation Framework and a Green Climate Fund, among others, that
jumpstarted the UNFCCC talks.
After 20 rounds of negotiations over four years and repeated failure, global climate
diplomacy suffered lasting damage in Durban, South Africa in December 2011. Two
weeks of discussions culminated in a three- day marathon of round- the-
clock talks
between ministers. Eventually, states decided to postpone a global climate treaty for at
least nine years. The collective decision was to continue negotiations with a new deadline
of 2015 for reaching an agreement that would apply after 2020. The adoption of this new
negotiations mandate titled the Durban Platform of Action (ADP) constituted an open
admission that the 2007 Bali mandate had failed and turned the famed ‘post-2012 policy’

Climate diplomacy 99
into a post-2020 possibility. Many regarded this outcome as a disaster. The European
Union (EU) privately considered boycotting the conference and island nations described
the outcome as ‘hara-kiri,’ a deal that ‘places entire nations on death row.’2 Only three
countries openly supported this outcome (Australia, Canada and the United States)
while others accepted it in exchange for continuation of the Kyoto Protocol and its Clean
Development Mechanism. The Kyoto Protocol was extended with a second commitment
period until 2020, with details finalized by the Doha Amendment in Qatar 2012.
The new agreement is weaker than the original Kyoto Protocol. First, Russia, Japan,
Canada and New Zealand refused to join, leaving countries accounting for only
15 percent of global GHG emissions with binding legal obligations in the Kyoto regime.
Second, ‘Kyoto 2’ is premised on the bottom-up approach to climate governance and
relies heavily on voluntary national commitments to be determined by countries domes-
tically (unlike the classical top-down approach in the original treaty). The text does not
even impose reporting obligations and merely ‘invites countries’ to report their policy
goals. More importantly, only seven countries have accepted it as of March 2014—and
none of them are Annex I countries.3 Thus, the Kyoto Protocol, with its binding abso-
lute emissions reductions, evolved into an agreement with voluntary goals, without even
obliging countries to communicate those internationally.
Recent negotiations under the ADP are characterized by stagnation. The Bonn
conference in March 2014 featured conversations that were indistinguishable from pre-
Copenhagen dialogues in 2009. The topics of discussion remain the same: emission
reductions and the division of labor between major emitters in the developing and devel-
oped world; means of implementation such as finance, technology transfer and capacity-
building; and international transparency of domestic policy action. Reminiscent of
the two-track approach of parallel negotiations under the Bali mandate, current talks
proceed in two workstreams. ‘Workstream 1’ on post-2020 policy commitments addresses
six key elements of a future agreement: mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology
transfer, capacity-building and transparency. ‘Workstream 2’ addresses ‘pre-2020 ambi-
tion’ of mitigation policy action, which reflects the interests of the Alliance of Small
Island States (AOSIS), the EU and others who continue to press for action without delay
and are ‘deeply concerned with a 2015 agreement that doesn’t come into effect until 2020
with targets that will likely be 2030 targets while science says we have to peak our emis-
sions by 2015.’4
Recent Political Developments
Three important differences from earlier negotiations deserve particular attention. First,
the geopolitical configuration of interests has changed. New political coalitions have
emerged, notably the rise of the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs). This
new sub-coalition, created in early 2012, unites approximately 30 countries as diverse as
China, India, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Venezuela and the Philippines. They are united by
allegiance to the convention and its principles—particularly the principle of common but
differentiated responsibilities. LMDCs stall the negotiations, by insisting on formal text
negotiations that are generally seen as time-consuming and unproductive, in the absence
of a prior principled agreement on major elements.
The emergence of LMDC has ramifications for the prospects of a future agreement.

First, major coalitions have fragmented even further. As one diplomat stated: ‘There is
no G77 now, there are just groups of countries bashing at each other.’5 More importantly,
this signals a rift among BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), that
is, major developing country emitters. Brazil and South Africa have refused to join the
LMDCs and describe the positions of China and India and other LMDCs as ‘extreme.’
Brazil and South Africa are major emitters that would support a strong global agreement
partly because of genuine concern with the impacts of climate change.6 While BASIC
continues to make common statements, the partners appear to have filed for divorce.
Second, the distinction between developing and developed countries has weakened.
The Durban Platform for Action is a legal mandate to negotiate a single agreement
covering all emitters, including those in the developing world. This suggests a political
move away from differentiation as a fundamental premise for global climate governance
(Rajamani 2012). Today the parallel workstreams are distinguished on temporal rather
than geographical basis: pre-2020 and post-2020 policy for all countries. There is also
an evolution of the concept of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR).
China, India, the Philippines and others are leading a battle to uphold differentiation,
indeed the modified concept of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respec-
tive capabilities’ (CBDRRC) remains in the process. While political divisions and debates
between developed and developing countries remain, however, the process is guided by a
legal mandate towards a single global agreement for all emitters.
Third, in a marked departure from pre-Durban climate negotiations, the process today
follows an alternative approach: informal consultations on key issues combined with
exploratory work on technical issues. The two years of formal negotiations between Bali
2007 and Copenhagen 2009 produced a draft negotiation text of more than 200 pages.
By contrast, more than two years after the 2011 Durban mandate launched negotiations,
there is no draft text of a future agreement. Recent UNFCCC conferences have been
ostensibly void of formal text negotiations and focus on ‘technical expert meetings’ on
energy efficiency and renewable energy. The Bonn meeting of the ADP in March 2014
followed this formula but concluded with the establishment of a ‘contact group’ to begin
drafting an agreement text in June 2014, two and a half years after current negotiations
were launched.
This reflects a new emphasis on confidence-building measures. The choice of this
strategy is deliberate: to prepare the ground for a global deal by increasing domestic
preparedness for action and reassure countries in their cost–benefit calculations.7 This
approach is controversial: skeptics describe conferences as large side-events, an unpro-
ductive exercise in ‘show-and-tell.’ Yet, some ‘pusher’ countries from AOSIS and Europe
interpret this approach as advantageous and hope it will produce action even before a
formal agreement is reached (interview with Hugh Sealy, see note 4).
Current Debates
Current UN discussions are centered on the general approach to negotiations. LMDCs

demand commencing formal text negotiations. This is widely seen by diplomats from
other countries as a stalling technique to block progress by ‘drowning the process in
unwieldy text.’ By contrast, the EU and the Umbrella Group insist on reaching general
agreement regarding the big picture and key elements of a 2015 deal—before a ddressing

other details. They caution against a burdensome process for producing lengthy text—a
reference to the bitter Copenhagen experience. All industrialized countries are very
careful not to be trapped in prolonged text negotiations and prefer settling the main
principles and key issues: the global division of labor in emission reductions and the legal
form of the agreement. Australia, speaking for the Umbrella Group described this as ‘the
helicopter view that can help us obtain a coherent agreement.’8
Another ongoing debate pertains to the sequence of elements to be negotiated. The
US prefers that countries submit their national numbers for emission reduction commit-
ments first, arguing that national pledges should be the basis of the future agreement.
Others argue that domestic decisions require international rules on means of implemen-
tations that would help countries determine policy costs and viability of policy goals.
Australia, for instance, says that the rules of the future regime should be established first
and that countries can decide their domestic actions and goals after the rules are in place
(read, incentives for implementation and compliance). Countries who seek constructive
compromises speak of a global climate regime that is a ‘hybrid system of bottom-up
commitments informed by top-down international rules and procedures.’9
It is fair to conclude that current climate negotiations remain at the agenda-setting
stage and concern general principles of a future agreement. The UNFCCC process
has delivered little formal policy output since 2011. The main contribution is the Doha
amendment to the Kyoto Protocol establishing a second commitment period, a small
achievement given that the principled agreement was reached in Durban. Moreover, the
amendment is not in force since only a handful of countries have ratified it and none of
them are Annex I countries.
Persuasion and Policy Change
Indeed, the story offers strong reasons for pessimism regarding global climate n
egotiations,
and most academic observers are skeptical of future prospects. There is, however, a
positive aspect that has remained unrecognized. In my view, UN talks have succeeded
in important ways. Global discussions have affected state behavior and fostered the
development of domestic policies even in the absence of a formal treaty (Dimitrov
2010, 2012). Arguments waged by the EU during the negotiations changed many actors’
views on the economics of climate policy. Discussions during the 1990s were dominated
by the premise that climate policy is expensive and countries must choose between
economic and environmental interests. In the early 2000s, the EU introduced the concept
of ‘win–win solutions’ to the climate discourse. Their new argument was contrary to con-
ventional wisdom at the time: climate policy can bring economic benefits and there is no
juxtaposition between economic and environmental interests (see McGee this volume).
The benefits of emission reductions are multiple: financial savings, increased economic
competitiveness, improved energy security, increased political independence from unsta-
ble regions such as the Middle East, improved public health—as well as mitigating
climate change and its devastating impacts.
While the idea that economic and environmental interests are mutually compatible
can be found in the academic literature on ecological modernization in the 1990s, in the
climate negotiations the European argument on the economic benefits of mitigation
dates back to the turn of the century. The British government was particularly active

and commissioned a highly publicized report on the economics of climate change.

Released on 30 October 2006, it argued for the first time that climate action is better for
the economy than inaction (Stern 2007).10 By 2007 the notion of ‘win–win solutions’ was
central to the EU negotiating strategy. During negotiations in Bonn, the EU chief nego-
tiator Artur Runge-Metzger gave economic reasons for steep emission reductions.
We think the industrialized countries need to take the lead. They need to make 30 percent cuts
collectively by 2020 . . . and 60–80 percent cuts by 2050. The most striking thing in the IPCC
report is that there are global win-win solutions. The EU is particularly encouraged by the broad
range of mitigation potentials. A significant part is available at low or no cost and brings addi-
tional benefits for energy security and air pollution in what is referred to as ‘win-win’ solutions.
(EU statement at a conference in Bonn, May 2007)
The EU used the economic argument tirelessly over many years of discussions. The
‘win–win’ concept was a constant theme of their statements throughout the negotiations
under the Bali mandate between 2007 and 2009, including the Copenhagen conference. The
essence of the European approach to persuasion was aptly captured in an opening state-
ment by Connie Hedegaard who presided over the conference: ‘We don’t have to choose
between economic growth and climate conservation. A global deal will drive job creation,
a global deal will drive competitive advantage, a global deal will drive energy security.’11
Addressing more than 100 heads of state, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
stated:
To the developed world I say: environmental action is the most powerful engine of job creation
in an economy urgently in need of millions of new jobs. . . . To the developing world I say: the
technology now exists to gain the dividends of a high-growth economy without incurring the
damage of a high-carbon economy.12
The win–win argument was spread also outside the UNFCCC. The EU, the Umbrella
Group, AOSIS and the LDCs (Least Developed Countries) launched the Cartagena
Dialogue on Progressive Action. This consultative forum for regular discussions of ideas
is open to countries ‘committed, domestically, to becoming or remaining low-carbon
economies.’ Notably, the United States is the only member of the Umbrella Group that
abstained from participating in the Cartagena Dialogue.
Europe backed its words with policy actions that are quite consistent. The EU unilater-
ally adopted the 2008 ‘Energy and Climate Package,’ legislation binding all 28 members
to at least 20 percent cuts by 2020 (Morgera et al. 2010; Oberthür and Pallemaerts 2010).
Notably, its text emphasizes the economic rationale: the new policy ‘opens the door to
new opportunities. There is a real potential to make climate-friendly policies a major
driver for growth and jobs in Europe. Europe can show that necessary change can go
hand in hand with . . . securing a prosperous and competitive economy’ (EC 2008, p. 3).
Notably, the EU appears to be overachieving its targets: by 2012 emissions were already
down 18 percent, and the carbon intensity of the economy had declined 28 percent
between 1995 and 2010 while the economy had grown 45 percent since 1990 (EC 2014,
Dupont and Oberthür this volume). This was consistent with the view that climate policy
is an opportunity to expand markets, boost technological innovation and gain competi-
tive advantage (Matthews and Paterson 2005; Paterson 2008).13 The EU maintains the
policy course despite the global economic crisis. On October 24, 2014, the European

Council agreed on new 2030 targets of 40 percent emission reductions below 1990 levels
and at least 27 percent increase in energy efficiency (EC 2014).
The ‘win–win’ rationale was embraced by many communities around the world.
Comprehensive surveys report a substantial increase in domestic policies worldwide. An
astonishing 67 percent of global emissions were under climate change legislation and/
or policy strategies in 2012, compared to 45 percent in 2007 (Dubash et al. 2013). What
is even more remarkable, most domestic actions are taken in non-Annex I countries
(particularly in Asia and Latin America) who do not have international legal obligations.
All major countries have established renewable energy targets; and Australia, South
Korea and China have introduced emissions trading systems (Höhne et al. 2012).
Influenced by European arguments about the economic benefits of green action, in
2008 South Korea officially embraced a ‘Green Growth’ paradigm of economic devel-
opment, committed to 30 percent emission cuts by 2020 below business-as-usual and
established a Global Green Growth Institute to systematize green growth theory. In the
following years, Brazil announced plans for 36–39 percent emissions cuts by 2020 (below
1994 levels); China adopted plans for 45 percent cuts in emission intensity; and Australia
introduced a nationwide carbon tax on major polluters (later repealed). Such willing-
ness to take costly action without international legal obligations requires more academic
attention.
Major international organizations also joined and contributed economic arguments in
favor of the policy shift. Simultaneously, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) published analy-
ses on the low-carbon economy (OECD 2010; IEA 2010). The following year, the OECD
issued an extensive declaration on the virtues of green growth (OECD 2011). In the
meantime, government-sponsored European and Chinese economists reached identical
conclusions confirming that mitigation increases economic competitiveness (Jaeger et al.
2011; Shi and Zhang 2012).
The idea that climate policy is good for the economy helps explain policy changes at
multiple levels. There is a significant shift in China’s domestic climate policy as well as
its engagement in international climate negotiations. Internationally, China made two
major compromises in global negotiations. First, in 2007 it accepted the idea of mitiga-
tion in the developing world by allowing the concept of nationally appropriate mitiga-
tion actions (NAMAs) into the Bali Action Plan that guides negotiations on post-2012
policy. Second, in a historic breakthrough, in 2011 China accepted the Durban mandate
to negotiate a future global treaty that covers all major emitters.14
Domestically, China is emerging as a leading investor in renewables and energy effi-
ciency. Diplomats describe China’s new five-year plan (2011–2015) as the most progres-
sive legislature toward a low-carbon economy in history (interviews). The first official
Chinese government resolution concerning climate change came in August 2009 and
highlighted ‘low-carbon development’ (Tamura and Zusman 2011). This came a few
years after the European Union Energy and Climate legislature premised on the marriage
between climate policy and economic growth: ‘Chinese decision makers have recognized
that fighting climate change represents a “great opportunity” and a made a call in its
official document . . . for the country to seize the opportunity of green growth’ (Zhang
and Shi 2013, p. 71). Scholars confirm that the Chinese shift in the 2000s is a product of a
learning process that altered cost–benefit calculations regarding climate policy and led to

the embrace of low-carbon development in economic management (Tamura and Zusman

2011; Conrad 2012). In a rich empirical study, Antto Vihma (2010) shows that India’s
domestic climate discourse as well as decision-making processes have changed as a result
of the country’s engagement in UN talks.
CONCLUSIONS
The current situation in global climate politics displays a peculiar contrast. On the one
hand, negotiations under the UNFCCC have clearly failed to deliver a formal agreement
and the prospects for resolving political differences between Europe, the US, China and
India remain dim. On the other hand, actual climate policy on the ground is making
progress. Climate and energy policies at multiple levels and in various countries around
the world are proliferating (Bäckstrand 2008; Andonova et al. 2009).
This contrast between multilateral and multilevel climate governance could provoke at
least three different interpretations. First, some expand academic definitions to accom-
modate new phenomena and argue that the climate ‘regime complex’ encompasses
multiple institutions and initiatives (Keohane and Victor 2011; Zelli and van Asselt this
volume). Second, others treat UN negotiations as practically irrelevant. They dismiss
the UNFCCC realm as futile and focus on non-state climate initiatives (Hoffmann 2011;
Dingwerth and Green this volume). After all, if policy action is taking place elsewhere
despite UN failure, why follow UN negotiations? A third perspective maintains the
importance of UNFCCC talks and focuses on their indirect consequences for climate
governance. Paradoxically, it is possible to draw a connection between UN negotiations
and policy progress in climate governance by both state and non-state actors (Dimitrov
2012).
As this chapter goes to print, breaking news of a historic agreement between the
United States and China offers further evidence of the power of diplomacy. The bilateral
deal is expected to transform UN climate negotiations and open a new chapter in global
climate politics. Climate governance is dramatically different today compared to the
1990s. Policy changes are not universal but they converge in one direction: a low-carbon
economy based on renewable energy and energy efficiency. While the driving forces
behind this green shift are likely multiple and complexly intertwined with corporate influ-
ences (Mecking 2011; Levy and Egan 2003), the growing belief in the economic value of
green action cannot be separated from the international dialogue over the past 20 years.
‘The impetus comes through an increased understanding that solving climate change is
not a burden, but a compelling opportunity to create new jobs, new industries, and new
economic opportunities’ (Figueres 2013, p. 539).
Climate diplomacy has succeeded in important ways that have been overlooked. The
idea that climate policy is good for the economy was spread through the UNFCCC nego-
tiations. Its impact was independent of formal negotiation outputs and helps to explain
progress in multilevel climate policy. Establishing a strict causal connection between par-
ticular arguments and state behavior is a methodologically challenging task that requires
a broad academic effort. In my view, the emergence of national policy developments
in a particular timeframe cannot be understood without reference to the international

conversation in climate diplomacy. In particular, the European argument of ‘win–win’

solutions that benefit the economy have gained currency and traction in many countries.
It is tempting to conclude that these developments are driven by domestic factors (see
Viola and Hochstetler, Bang this volume). Yet, the remarkable convergence of domestic
policies in Asia, Europe, South America and parts of North America in the same period
of five years or so (2007–2012) cannot easily be explained as a coincidence. The origin of
the new green growth thinking underlying the global policy shift is international. It can
be found in argumentation made during international discussions. This makes the appar-
ent diplomatic failure somewhat misleading because it obscures the important role that
negotiations have had on domestic policies—without strong formal policy agreements.
Climate diplomacy has not brought a treaty but has changed perceptions of national
interests.
Regime theorists are often preoccupied with legalization (Goldstein et al. 2000).
Scholars need to reconsider the meaning of ‘outcome’ and recognize the diverse impacts
of international negotiations on state behavior, apart from treaty-making. Dialogue in
world politics exposes actors to new information and reasoning that helps them (re)con-
sider their interests. International conversations on climate change helped both state and
non-state corporate actors recalculate their interests in green policies. By elaborating the
precise mechanisms for exerting influence on negotiations, the work presented here could
strengthen existing academic scholarship on European leadership.15 In these intellectual
contexts, further study of persuasion can make valuable contributions to academic schol-
arship on regimes, leadership and governance as well as the practice of diplomacy.
NOTES
1. The account of climate negotiations is based on direct participatory observations by the author who
attended conferences as a government delegate for the EU and reporter for the Earth Negotiations
Bulletin. I thank Karin Bäckstrand, Eva Lövbrand, Franck Petiteville, Sabine Saurugger, Lucile Maertens
and Liliana Andonova for thoughtful comments and suggestions that improved this work.
2. Personal notes during a ministerial discussion behind closed doors in Durban, December of 2011.
3. Countries who have ratified the second commitment period are all non-Annex I countries: Bangladesh,
Barbados, Mauritius, Micronesia, Monaco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates (http://unfccc.int/
kyoto_protocol/doha_amendment/items/7362.php).
4. Interview with Hugh Sealy, government representative of Grenada and chair of the Executive Board of
the Clean Development Mechanism (Bonn, Germany, March 13, 2014).
5. Interview with M.J. Mace, chief negotiator for St. Lucia and former negotiator for Micronesia (Bonn,
Germany, March 13, 2014).
6. Interview with José Domingos Gonzalez Miguez, negotiator for Brazil and program director, Ministry of
the Environment, Brazil (Bonn, Germany, March 14, 2014).
7. Interviews with Katia Simeonova and Lucy Naydenova, UNFCCC secretariat (Bonn, Germany, March
14, 2014).
8. Author’s notes on a Plenary statement by Australia at the ADP 2-4 conference in Bonn, March 14, 2014.
9. Statement of South Africa, ADP 2-4 meeting, March 13, 2014, Bonn, Germany.
10. John Vogler (2010) remarks that the British government made efforts to change other countries’ percep-
tion of the climate problem as well as their economic interests in mitigating it.
11. Statement during the opening ceremony of the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) in Copenhagen,
2009. Personal notes.
12. Statement at the high-level segment of COP 15, December 2009. Personal records.
13. Matthews and Paterson (2005) offer compelling interpretation of the Kyoto Protocol’s flexibility mecha-
nisms of implementation through the framework of ecological modernization. This framework could also
explain post-Kyoto climate policy and the proliferation of multilevel climate governance since 2007.

14. For a detailed analysis on the evolution of China’s positions, see Wu (2013).
15. On EU leadership, see for instance the work of Miranda Schreurs, Sebastian Oberthür, John Vogler, as
well as Kilian and Elgström (2010).
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10. Geopolitics
David Ciplet, J. Timmons Roberts and Mizan Khan
A STRATEGIC APPROACH: MARKETS, STATES AND

ECOSYSTEMS IN CHANGE
As currently configured, the United Nations’ (UN) emissions reduction framework will
allow temperature rise above what scientists predict will trigger catastrophic environmen-
tal events around the world.1 This will likely have disproportionate impacts in the 48 least
developed countries (LDCs), which account for half of the world’s climate related deaths
since 1980, while housing only 12 percent of the world’s population and emitting less
than 1 percent of global greenhouse gases (Ciplet et al. 2014).
How did we arrive at an entirely inequitable and scientifically inadequate climate
regime and what is stopping us from changing course? We argue that the world order has
shifted to create major new obstacles to human action to address climate change, and
some important new opportunities. As such, the political context in which contemporary
international climate change negotiations are taking place is distinct in key ways from
earlier periods. Our analysis is grounded in a neo-Gramscian view of ‘strategic power’:
focused on how the efforts of coalitions for political change are conditioned by how the
broader historic structures of the shifting world order are changing. In his 1992 article
‘Multilateralism and world order,’ Robert Cox argues that one should first study the
tendencies of the world order, identify the antagonisms and key players within it, and
look for turning points for how that structure might be transformed (Cox 1992, p. 177).
Cox saw multilateral agreements (such as climate change treaties) as historically specific,
impossible to understand in abstract or ahistorical terms.2
Analysis of power should consider the historic structures of world order, the balance
of forces that undergirds this order and the fissures or antagonisms that threatens
its stability. We utilize Cox’s formulation of being attentive to three main areas: the
global political economy, the interstate system and the biosphere or global ecosystem
(Cox 1992). He argues that, ‘these three components are both autonomous in having
their own inherent dynamics, and, at the same time, interdependent with each other’
(Cox 1992, p. 161). Our analysis also draws upon the work of World Systems theorists,
Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver to understand common patterns of transitions from
one hegemonic power to another.
This framework directs our attention to the ways that a dominant global political
order is vulnerable to attack and reform, and how it adapts to accommodate bottom-up
challenges. It also calls on us to identify the issues that remain firmly off of the negotiat-
ing table. These are what Gramsci (1971, p. 161) refers to as the ‘essential’ relations of
power. Much of the status of elites and hegemonic nations depends upon where they sit
on global cycles of boom and contraction, and international systems of extraction of
resources and the marshaling of labor power and wealth that are inherent in the w orkings
of global capitalism. Each conjuncture requires different strategies and resources for a
109
hegemon to remain in power, and each offers those wishing to change the system with
different windows of opportunities.3 In the next section we discuss these factors in the
historical context since 2008, after the global economic crisis and during and after the
fateful Copenhagen UN climate change conference.
We discuss three main features of the contemporary world order—those related to its
political economy, the crisis in the inter-state system and the exhaustion of critical eco-
logical support systems. We argue that international climate politics exist at the conflu-
ence of these major tensions in world order.
SHIFTS IN GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY: IMPLICATIONS

OF A WOUNDED NEOLIBERAL DOCTRINE
Climate change is a global problem, and any adequate solution must be global. This is
tricky, since it has long been assumed that the strongest environmental movements and
states with the most monetary resources to address the issue are in the world’s wealthy
nations of Northern Europe, North America, Japan and Australia (the Global North).
These nations are also far more buffered from climate change impacts by their technol-
ogy and level of development. However in the past few years, a handful of developing
countries have surpassed the North and are now emitting more greenhouse gases.4 The
imbalance is becoming more extreme—newly industrialized countries are increasingly a
critical part of ‘the problem,’ and therefore crucial parts of any adequate solution (see
Stalley this volume).
Gaining the enthusiastic participation of newly industrializing states in the climate
negotiations has been an ongoing source of difficulty in the climate negotiations. In A
Climate of Injustice, Roberts and Parks (2006) described how the global nature of climate
change provides the world’s developing nations with greater leverage in negotiations than
they have in economic or trade talks, because global participation is more necessary to
address global environmental public goods issues. Therefore, developing nations are more
likely to resist coercive tactics in environmental talks than they are in other issue areas
such as trade or intellectual property protection where they are in weaker bargaining
positions. They argued there that the roots of distrust, which often reveal themselves in
the negotiations, go far beyond the issue of climate change. That is, having been frus-
trated in other negotiations—such as those over the World Trade Organization, or before
that over issues such as the ‘right to development,’ to intellectual property or domestic
content rules—some nations will be more likely to withhold their participation in climate
talks than would otherwise be the case.
As Adil Najam put it: ‘It is tempting to dismiss the South’s persistent distrust of the
North as the paranoia of historical baggage. However the South’s anger is directed . . .
by what it sees as subjugation today, and its inability to influence what might happen in
the future’ (Najam 2005, fn. 79). Where do these resentments come from? Much has been
written on the roots of developing country dependency, including colonialism, unequal
insertion into the global economy, unfair trade rules and a cycle of debt and conditional
loans with destabilizing impacts. An ideology called ‘neoliberalism’ was promulgated,
which held that free markets and minimal state intervention were the pathway to economic
success and development. John Williamson described this as the Washington Consensus,

Geopolitics 111
because the major agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund
alongside US international agencies and Washington-based think tanks convincingly
sold the idea that state intervention in the economy was necessarily a bad idea, and that
nations should embrace their ‘comparative advantages’ of producing and selling only the
things they were good at. The government cuts were devastating to local economies, and
the whole decade of the 1980s was described in Latin America (for example) as the ‘lost
decade’ for economic and social development (Remer 1991).
Another change was happening as well: rather than making money from producing
things, finance increasingly become the source of people’s wealth. The ‘finance-led
growth regime’ and the globalization of that capital has corresponded with a sharp shift
rightward in economic ideology; a rise in the power of finance business in relation to
manufacturing industries; a rise in inequality within nations;5 and a shift of influence in
global supply chains from manufacturers to buyers, designers, financiers and distribut-
ers (Boyer 2000; Newell and Paterson 2010). A diverse bloc of actors—including trans-
national corporations, globalizing bureaucrats and politicians, globalizing professionals
and consumerist elites—came to identify their interests in relation to the ideological
and organizational basis of financialization (Sklair 2009). Their capital is extremely
footloose, able to leave locations that do not offer them advantageous terms. Less dis-
cussed is that while a commitment to financial expansion is central to this regime (and
not manufacturing), in material terms, like other regimes since the birth of capitalism
and the industrial revolution, it has been fueled by a nearly complete reliance on fossil
fuels (Smil 2005).
However, in the contemporary period there have been notable developments and
antagonisms in the foundation of this order. In the context of stagnated growth and state
shrinking after the global recession in 2008, various movements have threatened the long-
held gospel of open markets and its governance institutions as part of the Washington
Consensus. Such challenges include demands from developing countries, particularly
BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the ‘Pink Wave’ in Latin America
(Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and others) to reform the governance structures of interna-
tional financial institutions and the global distribution of power (Helleiner et al. 2009).
One notable development has been that leaders of the BRIC countries have approved
a new development bank of their own, with US$100 billion in reserves (Griffith-Jones
2014). There have also been widespread calls for a more regulated global financial system
among world leaders (Boudreaux 2008), and resistance to externally imposed austerity
measures and resulting political turnover in some European economies (Pepinsky 2012).
Public debates have arisen about the extent to which these crises constitute an existential
challenge to the legitimacy of neoliberal globalization (Cahill 2011).
In addition, despite decades of discourse that neoliberalism would increase prosper-
ity for all countries, many basic development needs have continued to be unaddressed
in the poorest countries. This reality has been heightened by the global recession,
which since 2009 has caused substantial and persistent stagnation for the 48 LDCs
(Bhattacharya and Dasgupta 2012). And many of these countries have become more,
not less, structurally disadvantaged in the global economy: between 2001 and 2010, the
LDCs as a group became increasingly reliant on a limited number of exports (UNCTAD
2012). This trend implies that LDCs are faced with a threat of becoming increasingly
commodity-dependent and vulnerable to external shocks. Due to simultaneous exposure

to uneven financial globalization and climate change impacts, the LDCs are becoming
‘double losers’ (Khan 2014).
However, more poor people in fact are living in the middle-income countries, rather
than in the LDCs. Larger and middle-income nations in South America find themselves
also becoming more dependent again upon the export of volatile natural resources, espe-
cially to resource-hungry China (Edwards and Roberts 2014; Stalley this volume). The
Washington Consensus is no longer seen as holding the answers, and some nations are
shifting to more state intervention in an attempt to turn themselves around.
Despite these and other challenges, overall there is little evidence to claim the death of
the finance-led growth regime (Cahill 2011). In various states we have seen trends towards
austerity during this period, rather than a reassertion of the welfare state (Blyth 2013).
What is clear is that internationally there are notable trends towards a more heterodox
and multipolar form of political economic organization (Önis and Güven 2011). In this
context, ‘Emerging societies are increasingly fulfilling core functions on the world stage—
acting as development role models, providing stable markets, loans, aid and security, with
China as a leading force’ (Pieterse 2011, p. 25). Moreover, the basic forms of organization
of the global capitalist system are being transformed. This includes a fall in the con-
centration of economic activity in the international system, and within this, the rise of
concentrations outside the previous core (Wade 2011, p. 351). In particular, ‘the systemic
change has to do with the unfolding of a deterritorialized global capitalism made up of
flows, fluxes, networked connections and transnational production networks, but marked
by inequality, instability and new patterns of stratification’ (Hurrell and Sengupta 2012,
pp. 465–466). In simple terms, one can no longer look only to Wall Street or High Street
to attempt to understand this decentered and complex new global economy.
These developments have major implications for international climate change politics.
On one hand, the clear shortcomings of neoliberal doctrine revealed through the global
financial crisis offer new openings for challenges to the intensification of various forms of
inequality. We are also seeing weak oversight by state and international regulatory bodies
over economic affairs, and unbridled corporate power over national and international
political processes. In climate change politics, the hegemonic power (the US) has failed
to lead the world community towards a solution (Bang this volume), and states such as
Bolivia, indigenous peoples networks and various civil society organizations have raised
bold critiques of the neoliberal development model and its deleterious impacts on global
ecologies. In the case of climate finance, there have been broad-based calls for a redis-
tribution of wealth from the North to the South in the name of paying a ‘climate debt’
(Gupta this volume). There have also been widespread calls by more radical civil society
groups and networks against climate finance ‘market mechanisms,’ which they view as an
extension of neoliberal ideology and a ‘false solution’ for social justice and sustainability.
On the other hand, there has been a ‘doubling- down’ on neoliberal policies in
various states, which have adopted austerity measures, rolled back the regulatory state
and become less willing to cooperate in international regulatory agreements. Shifts in
governments in this direction have had notable impacts in rolling back or minimizing
the ambition of domestic and international climate change policies in the US, Canada,
Australia, Japan and states across the European Union (EU). For example, both Canada
and Australia, key players in the negotiations, have rolled back previously ambitious
domestic climate change policies with the election of conservative governments with

Geopolitics 113
commitments to fiscal austerity. These two states now regularly win the daily ‘fossil of
the day’ award granted by the civil society network CAN-International in the UN climate
negotiations. This award is granted to the state that has been deemed most obstructive
to progress.
Some large non-governmental organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund
and Resources for the Future have continued to focus on the importance of leveraging
the private sector and market mechanisms as the most realistic means of addressing
climate change and mobilizing climate finance. In addition, we view these shifts in politi-
cal economy driving a new geopolitics within and between the Global North and South,
which we discuss in the next section.
A NEW GEOPOLITICS: US HEGEMONIC DECLINE, CHINA’S

RISE AND THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH
The great global economic recession has, arguably, intensified what was already a shift
in geopolitical power relations in the new ‘multipolar order’ between the US and China,
and other newly emerging economies (Overholt 2010; Nye 2010). The Chinese economy,
in particular, has continued to grow a rapid pace, even in a time of global economic
distress. This has led to revised forecasts of when China will overtake the US as the
global hegemon, to as early as 2019 (The Economist, cited in James 2011, p. 530). This
trend has been signified by the growing influence of the G20 as a political organization,
and the increasing role of non-Western powers in that organization (Cammack 2012).
Simultaneously, the EU, despite its recent internal strife, has grown considerably in politi-
cal and economic cohesion in the last decade, establishing itself as a powerful force (Wade
2011). The center of political economic power is shifting, and quickly.
Roberts (2011), drawing upon the work of sociologists Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly
Silver, argues that this emerging geopolitical ‘disorder’ is at the heart of the breakdown
of international negotiations on climate change. Perhaps most important is the growing
insecurity of the US in the face of its economic and political decline vis-à-vis China.
Like other declining hegemons before in their ‘autumn,’ the deflation of the hegemonic
power is characterized by three closely related processes: ‘the intensification of interstate
and inter-enterprise competition; the escalation of social conflicts; and the interstitial
emergence of new configurations of power’ (Arrighi and Silver 2001, pp. 270–271). As
a result, the US has become unwilling to make costly emissions reductions that may put
it at an economic disadvantage; China—and its coalition partners of India, Brazil and
South Africa—has yet to demonstrate the capability to constructively lead.
While recognizing geopolitical shifts in the current context, some suggest that the
movement towards multipolar governance, or multilateralism, may be overblown (Wade
2011; Nye 2010). As Robert Wade argues: ‘The United States remains the dominant
state, and the G7 states together continue to exercise primacy, but now more fearfully
and defensively’ (Wade 2011, p. 347). Moreover, China’s very particular model of state-
directed capitalism with huge labor reserves and constrained political freedoms may
prove unable to sustain both economic and political domination internationally.
An additional geopolitical trend relevant to this discussion is the fragmentation of
coalitions within the Global South (Roberts 2011; Vihma et al. 2011; Ciplet et al. 2013).

While in some contexts, including the UN climate negotiations, the G77 plus China coali-
tion still at times formally negotiates as a single body, there are growing tensions within
this bloc as the ‘class’ position of states in political, economic and ideological terms
grows increasingly variegated. This is also compounded by a trend of regionalism and
relative economic prosperity in areas such as Latin America, which poses a challenge to
identity of ‘South’ in geopolitics.
The unity of the G77 was further compromised in the climate negotiations in
Copenhagen in 2009 when the G77’s largest actors—China, India, Brazil and
South Africa—joined with the US in drafting the Copenhagen Accord. By doing this, the
Accord came to represent not merely a US or Northern betrayal of the Kyoto Protocol,
but rather, the fragmentation of a South–South agreement on a path forward. This not
only weakened the practical task for states in the Global South to cohesively organ-
ize against this new arrangement of interests, but also further disrupted the long-held
identity in climate politics of South solidarity in relation to the North (see Gupta this
volume). An additional ‘wedge’ in solidarity among low-income states was fostered by
competition over designations of vulnerability deemed critical for accessing scarce adap-
tation funds (Ciplet et al. 2013).
In sum, there is now a very different world of geopolitics than that prior to 2008. The
US position as global hegemon is increasingly precarious; China’s rise is now foregone,
but it faces stability concerns of its own; the Global South has fragmented along various
lines, with new inter-state class dynamics threatening longstanding ideals of developing
world solidarity. We argue that these new dynamics have been pivotal in international
climate change politics, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. To be clear, the
US is still a very dominant player in international climate politics. However, it increas-
ingly shares the limelight with China, and neither state has been able to assume or sustain
a productive leadership role in the negotiations.
There was some progress between these two superpowers on this issue in late 2014
when the US and China agreed to a joint pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions and
partner on clean energy development. While this partnership on its own is not sufficient
to maintain stable global temperatures, it demonstrated that these two powerful states
are currently embracing more of a leadership role on the issue of climate change than in
the past. It also suggests that the most important decisions on climate change will likely
to be carried out as part of elite bilateral and multilateral agreements outside of the
UN process. It is impossible to understand the outcome of these negotiations without
attention to this reshuffling and highly volatile geopolitical landscape.
ENCOUNTERING LIMITS: ECOLOGICAL EXHAUSTION AND

THE NEW POLITICS OF ENERGY
A final development in the contemporary world order is frequently overlooked in such

discussions: the impact of degradation and exhaustion of ecological systems, including
the destabilization of the climate, on political processes. Some of these changes are still
out in the future: scientists are saying louder and louder that environmental crises are
coming, but it increasingly seems the case that we are already experiencing the first waves
of climate change related extreme weather events.

Geopolitics 115
New access to unconventional fossil fuel reserves are generating new geopolitical and
social conflicts, which have important implications for international climate politics.
There is a finite supply of fossil fuels on Earth, but the reserves now seen as ‘proven’ are
vast, even if the cost of accessing these reserves grows higher the further below the ground
or offshore we have to go to get it, or if rocks need to be squeezed to extract energy. New
access to unconventional energy sources such shale gas and tar sands have extended
access to global fossil fuel resources significantly. And new technologies are continually
developed to access deeper—although often more energy-and resource-
intensive—
energy supplies such as methane hydrate at the bottom of the ocean. Thus, claims about
‘peak oil’ and/or ‘peak fossil fuels’6 may be largely overblown, as long as we are willing to
pay higher prices (both financial and ecological) for our energy.
Such unconventional fuel development is restructuring geopolitics in important ways.
An obvious example has been Canada’s reversal of leadership in both domestic and inter-
national climate change policy in the name of developing its own vast reserves of highly
greenhouse gas intensive oil buried in the Alberta tar sands.
The US provides another example. At the behest of the leadership of Barack Obama,
the US Environmental Protection Agency has taken strong measures to limit domestic
coal use. The domestic downtick in coal use is being largely replaced by production of
relatively cheap and abundant shale gas made accessible by technologies such as hydrau-
lic fracturing and horizontal drilling. The US has increasingly structured its domestic
climate policy around these developments, and has made the supposed transition from
coal to natural gas a key argument of its commitment to leadership in international
climate change negotiations (see Bang this volume). And there are numerous other exam-
ples of new energy players emerging with the discovery of extensive unconventional fossil
fuel reserves (Tucker 2013).
Climate change itself, through melting of deep ice sheets, is also leading to geopolitical
conflicts for newly accessible oil reserves in places such as Antarctica and the Arctic sea
floor. Finally, such access to new fossil resources worldwide are stimulating new social
conflicts, such as resistance by indigenous peoples in the Alberta tar sands, as people
living upon fossil fuel deposits are responding to the appropriation of their land for
clear-cutting, drilling and pipeline development (Klein 2014).
Our dependence on energy from fossil fuels, and growing use of carbon-intensive
non-conventional sources, has also contributed to a scarcity of atmospheric space. There
are now three to five times as much fossil fuel reserves on the books of oil and coal com-
panies (ready to be tapped) than can be safely burned and still avoid dangerous climate
change (IEA 2012; McKibben 2012).
This simple math should in theory have important implications for investment in
fossil fuel resources. This seems especially true when one considers the likelihood of a
proliferation of climate policies in the future, putting a price on carbon and thus further
increasing the cost of fossil fuel development. Indeed, in the case of coal, there have
been notable developments with both private and public investors being less willing to
pony up to support the development of new coal-fired power plants. Major international
development banks such as the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction
and Development and the European Investment Bank have all recently adopted policies
to severely limit their coal lending. The US and UK governments have adopted similar
policies for their development agencies and operations abroad (Washington Post 2013).

Universities such as Stanford, at the behest of student activists, have also recently taken
up policies to limit their investments in coal. Finally, there are indications that private
banks such as Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase are cutting ties with the coal industry
(Rainforest Action Network et al. 2014).
These are important developments, and demonstrate that it is not inevitable that all
known fossil fuel resources will be developed without pushback. However, there is a risk
that investments in coal will simply be displaced by heightened investment in natural gas,
which has its own significant greenhouse gas impacts, sometimes comparable or worse to
that of coal. Overall, despite growing evidence of the unsustainability of reliance on fossil
fuel development, there is little evidence that what Tim DiMuzio calls the ‘petro-market
civilization’ is being meaningfully transformed. As he argues, ‘investors are nowhere near
betting on a future outside of fossil fuel energy—a future that would require immediate
and intensive capital investment for there to be any chance of a successful energy tran-
sition without protracted political, social and economic dislocations’ (DiMuzio 2012,
p. 365). Even when we have seen growth in national non-fossil fuel energy use, this has not
translated into substantial reductions in fossil fuel use (York 2012).
Despite increasingly robust evidence of potentially catastrophic anthropogenic climate
change (Füssel 2009), we have failed to stabilize or reduce emissions levels during two
decades of international negotiations (Le Quéré et al. 2009; Garnaut 2008), and to provide
finance adequate for the countries most vulnerable to a changing climate to adapt to its
impacts (Ciplet et al. 2013). Rather, new multi-billion-dollar ‘carbon markets’ have been
established (some currently at dire risk of collapse), where carbon allowances are traded
on financial markets. This approach of ‘climate capitalism’ has sought to create the pos-
sibility of economic winners from decarbonization, who have mainly been financiers
(Newell and Paterson 2010, p. 10). Fossil fuel interests remain mostly unchanged. As we
have discussed in the cases of Canada and the United States, the changing global energy
landscape is restructuring geopolitics in important ways, influencing the positions that
states are taking in international climate change negotiations. How the tension between
rapidly constricting atmospheric space and growing access to unconventional fossil fuel
resources will play out is entirely unclear.
CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter, we have drawn upon relevant neo-Gramscian and World Systems theories
to elucidate the terrain upon which any efforts at transformative change in international
climate change politics must engage. This has directed our attention to how power
struggles are embedded in historically specific structures of world order. In the post-
Copenhagen period, we have argued, the global political context has shifted in important
ways since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol a dozen years before. Following Robert Cox,
we have discussed major shifts in the contemporary period in three main areas: global
political economy, geopolitics and ecological conditions. In each area, there are impor-
tant tensions that are largely structuring the limits and possibilities for action on climate
change moving forward.
First, this context includes a wobbly and wounded neoliberal doctrine due to the 2008
recession. This has led to discursive openings for state and non-state actors to call for new

Geopolitics 117
forms of regulatory and social action, but also responses by several key states to pursue
austerity measures and to limit state intervention towards environmental goals. At the
international level, since the negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009, the UN climate regime
has taken a notably neoliberal turn. A voluntary ‘pledge and review’ mitigation frame-
work and a focus on leveraging the financial markets for climate gains have replaced
the legally binding regulatory framework established by the Kyoto Protocol. It seems
unlikely that, short of a major political shift, the new mitigation framework to be agreed
upon in Paris in 2015 will establish emissions reduction pledges sufficient for maintain-
ing reasonably safe global average temperature rise. On climate finance, wealthy states
have been reluctant to commit new funds to developing countries to meet their growing
needs for adapting to climate change impacts and shifting to low-emissions technologies.
In 2014, US$10 billion in climate finance was jointly pledged by wealthy states to initi-
ate the Green Climate Fund just prior to the start of the Lima negotiations. However,
many actors noted that this funding, which will be spread out over a four-year period, is
nowhere near sufficient for keeping up with the rising costs of adaptation and loss and
damage. Rather, the focus of wealthy countries has been largely on leveraging the private
sector to increase climate friendly investment.
Second, we have discussed notable geopolitical tensions in the contemporary period.
This includes the hegemonic decline of the United States, the rise of China and an
increasingly multipolar interstate system, and the fragmentation of the Global South’s
identity along various lines, with new inter-state class dynamics threatening longstand-
ing ideals of developing world solidarity. This new context offers the possibility of new
leadership forms emerging in the Global South, or among newly industrialized states, as
the United States loses its ability to lead on the global stage (Parker and Karlsson this
volume). Questions remain as to whether the United States and China can build upon
their recent partnership on climate change without being sidetracked by nationalist
economic concerns.
In the UN negotiations, action may well be spurred by the emergence of challenges
by emboldened negotiating groups in the developing world, such as the Independent
Association of Latin America and Caribbean States (AILAC), the Association of Small
Island States (AOSIS) and the LDC group. However, policy decisions are ultimately
made in national contexts, and thus domestic politics remain central to action. Finally,
competition among developing countries over scarce financial resources to mitigate and
adapt to climate change threatens to be a wedge that further fractures solidarity among
negotiating blocs.
Third, we have discussed the impact of ecological constraints and degradation, and
development in energy technologies, on international political processes. This includes
the changing energy landscape with the development of unconventional fossil fuel tech-
nologies, which extend our ability to access reserves previously considered out of reach.
In this context, previous leaders on climate policy such as Canada have reversed their
positions, while pursuing aggressive development of their own unconventional fossil
fuel resources. Other nations seem to be retreating from bolder negotiating positions
due to renewed dependence upon natural resource extraction, as China invests heavily
in nations of South America and Africa (Edwards and Roberts 2014). There is also a
scarcity of atmospheric space, which requires keeping most proven fossil fuel deposits in
the ground in order to avert catastrophic climate change. In this context, the overall trend

in fossil fuel energy investment has remained constant despite rapid growth in renewable
energy and carbon markets, with the notable exception of coal investment, which shows
important signs of change.
To conclude, constructively addressing the problem of runaway global climate change
will require the emergence of what Gramsci calls a new ‘historic bloc.’ This will include
a broad and powerful coalition of civil society, state and market actors with the capabil-
ity to advance a radically different development vision and pathway. Writing before the
climate crisis was at the current level, Arrighi and Silver (2001) also saw a crucial role for
an internationally linked civil society in keeping these transitions from descending into
violent interstate conflicts. Any such effort to constructively address the climate crisis, we
argue, will have to contend with the major shifts and tensions in the contemporary world
order that we have outlined in this chapter.
NOTES
1. Current pledges are estimated to lead to a global average of 4.5°C of warming (‘The climate scoreboard,’
Climate Interactive, April 19, 2013).
2. What Robert Cox (1992) refers to as ‘problem solving theories.’
3. We are referring here to insights from work in the World System tradition by scholars such as Arrighi
(1994), Wallerstein (1979), etc.
4. For example, Wheeler and Hammer (2010), Oliver et al. (2012). It’s important to note that emissions on a
per capita basis remain far higher in the Global North. An exception may be China’s emissions, reported in
2013 by the EU-JRC (Joint Research Centre) to be nearly equal to the EU average.
5. However, inequality between nations has declined largely as a result of China’s growth.
6. See Deffeyes (2011), Leggett and Ball (2012), Patzek and Croft (2010).
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11. Fragmentation
Fariborz Zelli and Harro van Asselt
INTRODUCTION
The future of climate governance will be marked by the consequences of—and pos-
sible responses to—an increasing institutional fragmentation. The term ‘fragmenta-
tion’ refers to the growing diversity and challenges to coordination among private and
public norms, treaties and organizations that address a given issue area of interna-
tional politics (Biermann et al. 2009; Zelli 2011; Zelli and van Asselt 2013; van Asselt
and Zelli 2014). While the degree of fragmentation varies considerably across issue
areas, global climate governance is characterized by an advanced state of institutional
complexity.
Observers have pointed to the rapidly increasing number of climate change initiatives
taking place outside of the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC) (e.g., Pattberg and Stripple 2008; Andonova et al. 2009;
Okereke et al. 2009; Bernstein et al. 2010; Biermann 2010; Bulkeley and Newell 2010;
Hoffmann 2011; Keohane and Victor 2011; Zelli 2011; Abbott 2012; Moncel and van
Asselt 2012). The amalgam of non-UNFCCC efforts covers a wide range of public,
private and hybrid initiatives at various levels of governance, aimed at reducing green-
house gas emissions (mitigation) and to a lesser extent at adjusting to the impacts of
climate change (adaptation). In the view of these authors, the UNFCCC cannot (or no
longer) be seen as the sole site of global climate governance (see also Dingwerth and
Green this volume).
Against the backdrop of this debate, we argue that the United Nations (UN) process
can still hold a leading and coordinating position in this complex institutional environ-
ment. This implies rethinking the role of the UNFCCC in future climate governance:
instead of following a traditionally high regulatory ambition and further overburdening
negotiations and agencies, the climate regime has to strengthen its profile as a complex-
ity ‘manager’ or ‘orchestrator’ (Abbott and Snidal 2010; Hale and Roger 2014). Through
carrying out this role, the UNFCCC would increasingly acknowledge that it is not the
only relevant institution in the fight against climate change, signaling further willingness
for trans-institutional cooperation. At the same time, with a stronger coordinative role,
the UNFCCC could better ensure that common objectives and principles are not lost out
of sight. It could also facilitate coordinated action across institutions to address unnec-
essary overlaps—and even conflicts—between different elements of the institutional
complex.
To develop this argument, the chapter proceeds as follows: we first take stock of the
increasing fragmentation of global climate governance, before briefly looking at possible
theory-driven explanations for this phenomenon. We then touch upon potential conse-
quences of fragmentation to make the case for a management approach with the UN
climate regime as an institutional orchestrator; we also briefly illustrate for one example,
121
international technology initiatives, what such an orchestrating role of the UNFCCC

could look like.
TAKING STOCK: THE FRAGMENTATION OF GLOBAL

CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
Up to the early 2000s, few observers would have questioned the central importance of
the UN process in global climate governance. In the late 1980s, the UN played a pivotal
role in fostering scientific consensus through the establishment of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change and launching negotiations that led to the adoption of the
UNFCCC in 1992. The adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, as well as the extensive
rulebook developed in the 2000s under both climate treaties, further highlighted the
central importance of the climate regime.
At the same time, however, various initiatives were launched outside of the UNFCCC
context. In part, their emergence can be explained by the US exit from the Kyoto
Protocol in 2001. However, the new governance arrangements (and the shifting focus
of existing ones) can also be related to the increasing profile of climate change on the
international policy agenda. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to exhaustively
list the multitude of non-UNFCCC governance arrangements (for an overview of trans-
national initiatives, see Dingwerth and Green this volume), we distinguish several broader
types in the following.
International organizations, such as the World Bank, have sought to integrate climate
change concerns in their operations (e.g., World Bank 2008). In addition, multilateral
environmental agreements have started to address climate change-related issues falling
within their mandates. For instance, from the late 1990s onwards, parties to the
Convention on Biological Diversity have adopted numerous decisions highlighting the
links between biodiversity and climate change (van Asselt 2012; Zelli et al. 2013a).
Another environmental treaty, the Montreal Protocol, aimed at the reduction of ozone
depleting substances, has even been argued to be more successful in terms of reducing
global greenhouse gas emissions than the Kyoto Protocol (Velders et al. 2007).
Other initiatives comprise high-level, club-like forums involving the political leaders of
a limited number of important countries (cf. Victor 2011, pp. 242–243), such as various
G8 summits held since 2005, and the G20 meetings held since 1999. Another initiative
is the Major Economies Process on Energy Security and Climate Change launched by
US President Bush in 2007, which has been continued as the Major Economies Forum
by President Obama. Other approaches have sought to bring together climate change
negotiators in less contentious, informal settings. An example is the Cartagena Dialogue,
which was credited to contribute to a positive negotiating atmosphere. Whereas some
of these novel ‘minilateral’ initiatives (Naím 2009; McGee 2011, this volume; Eckersley
2012) tend to focus largely on the major economies or greenhouse gas emitters, others
include developing countries with a high stake in climate politics, such as small island
states, least developed countries and oil-producing nations.
Yet other governance arrangements have taken the shape of multi-stakeholder part-
nerships involving governments, the private sector and/or non-governmental organiza-
tions. These partnerships have often focused on particular technologies, such as the

Fragmentation 123
Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum or the Global Methane Initiative; or they

have supported investment and policy development across certain types of technologies,
such as the (now-defunct) Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate
(APP) and the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) (van
Asselt 2007; de Coninck et al. 2008; Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and van Asselt 2009; Zelli
et al. 2013b).
Another category consists of the wide variety of regulated and voluntary markets that
have been established before and (especially) after the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol
(Bernstein et al. 2010). These include large regulatory (or compliance) markets such as
the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) (see Wettestad this volume).
Interestingly, the EU ETS was created with an expectation that it could function entirely
independent from the international legal context at a time when it was still unclear whether
the Kyoto Protocol would enter into force (Biermann et al. 2009). Even more independ-
ent from the UNFCCC process are the voluntary carbon markets, which emerged in
particular to cater to the demand of companies and individuals to offset their greenhouse
gas emissions (Pattberg and Stripple 2008; Dingwerth and Green this volume). The crea-
tion of both regulatory and voluntary markets has in turn led to the emergence of new
arrangements that seek to govern these markets. For instance, voluntary standards for
carbon offsetting such as the Voluntary Carbon Standard and the Gold Standard have
been created to ensure some level of oversight of the voluntary markets in the absence of
(international) regulatory bodies (Lovell 2010).
Other relevant initiatives undertaken by non- state actors include actions to hold
corporations to account for their carbon footprints, either through self-regulation (e.g.,
the Carbon Disclosure Project) or through scrutiny by civil society organizations, such as
Greenpeace (Pattberg and Stripple 2008; Dingwerth and Green this volume). Moreover,
private actors that are specifically affected by climate change, such as the insurance indus-
try, have started to respond to the risks posed by the problem (Ceres 2011).
Finally, numerous subnational efforts have been launched in recent years. Especially
in the United States, states and other subnational actors have become increasingly
active (see various contributions in Selin and VanDeveer 2009). California, for instance,
adopted the Global Warming Solutions Act in 2006, capping its emissions at 1990 levels
by 2020, and setting the additional objective of reducing emissions to 80 percent by 2050.
Furthermore, several states have become involved in emissions trading systems, both
domestically—such as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative—and transnationally—
such as the Western Climate Initiative (involving California and two Canadian prov-
inces). Other subnational initiatives have involved municipal governments. In addition to
stand-alone initiatives at the local level, this also includes the creation of transnational
networks through which urban actors have sought to cooperate on climate change issues,
such as the Cities for Climate Protection program (Betsill and Bulkeley 2004; Bulkeley
2010).
In summary, global climate governance in the twenty-first century has increasingly
emerged from different sources. Some of these initiatives can be seen as a response to
the UNFCCC process—either in support of it or promoting alternative discourses—
whereas others have seemingly emerged in an autonomous fashion. Although governance
arrangements outside of the UNFCCC may come and go, it is nevertheless likely that a
variety of initiatives outside of UN climate negotiations will persist in the foreseeable

future. This, as we argue, alters the role of the UN process, but does not need to under-
mine its leading role if it increasingly takes on the function of an orchestrator.
CAUSES: EXPLAINING FRAGMENTATION
To provide more informed policy recommendations, it is necessary to gain a deeper

understanding of the underlying reasons for the observed degree of fragmentation of
global climate governance. Here, however, lies one of the major research gaps in this
field. Notwithstanding a recent increase in theory-driven approaches, regime theory or
different strands of institutionalism have been insufficiently applied towards explaining
or understanding aspects of institutional fragmentation. Adapting these theories to ques-
tions of increasing fragmentation in global climate governance would offer considerable
opportunities for further theoretical development. In the following, we can only briefly
offer illustrations for but a few such theory-driven explanations.
One possible explanation can be derived from power-based approaches to regime
theory, drawing on tenets of hegemonic stability theory and instrumental multilateralism
(Gilpin 1986; Grieco 1993; Ikenberry 2003; Vogler this volume). One could argue that a
benevolent or coercive hegemon—or a powerful coalition of countries—plays a crucial
role not only in the generation and design of a single institution, but also in shaping an
institutional complex. When a critical point of dissatisfaction is reached, such a coali-
tion would use its resources (economic or military, but also issue-specific) to initiate and
sustain alternative or rival arenas that better suit its interests (or to expand the mandates
of existing arenas that do so).
Apart from ‘more acceptable’ agendas and policy instruments, these alternative
arrangements are also likely to reflect a decision structure that accommodates the inter-
ests of the powerful countries that spurred their creation—for instance, small-n arrange-
ments or clubs where these countries hold the majority of votes. The launch of various
such arrangements on climate change and clean energy by the George W. Bush adminis-
tration, after declaring the Kyoto Protocol fatally flawed, is an often-quoted example that
may corroborate such a hypothesis.
Turning towards interest-based theories of international regimes, one may derive one
possible hypothesis from a situation-structural approach (Zürn 1993). While coopera-
tion is not equivalent to harmony, highly asymmetric constellations of interests are not
conducive for the creation of an overarching institution either. Taking this further, one
can assume that these diverging interests will be reflected in a variety of institutional
solutions. One case supporting this hypothesis would be governance efforts on renewable
energy, such as the creation of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)
out of an asymmetry of preferences over the handling of renewable energy within the
International Energy Agency and the UNFCCC (Van de Graaf 2013).
In the camp of knowledge-or norms-based regime theories, one major scope condi-
tion to explain the genesis and shape of international regimes is the degree of consensual
knowledge or norms; that is, the consensual basis about the structure of problems and
the system to be regulated (see Dimitrov this volume). The more actors share the relevant
knowledge or norms about the nature of a problem and about suitable solutions, and the
stronger this common knowledge becomes (due to enhanced evidence and reasoning), the

Fragmentation 125
higher are chances for agreement and cooperation; for example, for the formation and
maintenance of a regime (Conca 2006; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Haas 1992).
A link can be formed to power here in the sense that a knowledge base or knowledge
coalition prevails in a competition against others. While this reading links knowledge to
power, it is not related to Foucauldian interpretations that would largely dispense with
agent-based formulations of the power-knowledge nexus (Wagenaar 2011; Stripple and
Bulkeley this volume).
One could then argue that global climate governance exhibits a high degree of insti-
tutional complexity, since core questions in this issue area imply high degrees of uncer-
tainty and competing knowledge bases. Indeed, climate change and its many sub-topics
with divergent cognitive or normative stances (e.g., about the preferable shape of emis-
sion reduction commitments, the best possible design of carbon markets, or suitable
approaches to develop and diffuse climate-friendly technologies) offer prime cases to test
such knowledge-or norms-based approaches.
More research is needed, however, to put these and other theory-based assumptions to
the test. As future studies still have to shed more light on the drivers of fragmentation in
global climate governance, our suggestions for a stronger orchestrating role of the UN
climate regime are inevitably of a preliminary nature. Ultimately, such suggestions have
to take into account respective power-, interest-or norms-based drivers to be effective.
This research gap notwithstanding, we have to start thinking about management options
now, as the following brief look at the possible consequences of fragmentation suggests.
CONSEQUENCES: POTENTIAL BENEFITS AND DRAWBACKS

OF FRAGMENTATION
The increasing fragmentation of global climate governance has spurred a heated debate
about potential consequences. Some authors have made strong pleas in favor of the
UNFCCC process (e.g., Depledge and Yamin 2009; Hare et al. 2010), whereas others
have emphasized that this overburdened process will block any progress and that it would
be wise to pin our hopes on decentralized approaches (e.g., Victor et al. 2005; Prins and
Rayner 2007; Ostrom 2010; Rayner 2010; Victor 2011).
However, we so far lack a critical mass of analyses that can help us to understand
whether fragmentation has rather positive or negative implications in general—and more
particularly for whom or for what these implications are positive or negative. Instead, the
literature has so far focused on reviews of theory-driven assumptions or has mostly relied
on normative lines of argument. For instance, Biermann et al. (2009) summarize different
literatures (e.g., neoliberal institutionalism and bargaining theory) and list various poten-
tial positive and negative implications of fragmentation. Similarly, Keohane and Victor
(2011) name the theoretical risks of—and opportunities for—the institutional density in
global climate governance in support of their normative argument for addressing climate
change through a regime complex.
On the one hand, fragmentation may provide more channels or platforms to engage
more actors, such as laggards (e.g., the case of Canada joining the Climate and Clean
Air Coalition addressing short-lived climate pollutants) or non-state actors (e.g., the Oil
and Climate Initiative, launched in 2014, and involving major players in the oil and gas

industry). It can also lead to a new division of labor between institutions (e.g., with the
World Bank financially supporting the realization of UNFCCC goals) and provide the
possibility to re-invigorate larger debates (e.g., with the G20 summits reaching agree-
ments that support UN climate negotiations). Moreover, the diversity of institutions
allows for governance ‘experimentation,’ where possibly more effective governance
approaches and new actor constellations can be pioneered (Hoffmann 2011).
On the other hand, fragmentation may lead to coordination gaps (e.g., for the many
different approaches to emissions trading) and legitimacy gaps. The latter are obvious in
the increase of club-style arrangements that often feature similar memberships, namely
industrialized countries and emerging economies. Least developed countries are locked
out from these discussions, and so are more often than not the agenda items that are of
particular interest to them (Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and McGee 2013). Similarly, as noted
by Dingwerth and Green (this volume), transnational climate governance initiatives
remain relatively silent on adaptation to climate change.
Yet again, these are mostly theoretical deductions or assumptions that need to be
tested. This research gap notwithstanding, many observers seem to suggest that the
level of integration is important from a normative perspective. Keohane and Victor
(2011, p. 16), for instance, argue that ‘coherence’—meaning that different components
‘are compatible and mutually reinforcing’—is one of the criteria against which institu-
tional arrangements should be assessed. Biermann et al. (2009) further conclude that the
various advantages of non-integrated institutions are outweighed by the potential draw-
backs, and that it would be preferable to minimize the cases of conflictive fragmentation.
In particular, higher levels of integration could ensure that different fragments of the
climate governance architecture work towards the same goals rather than against each
other. Moreover, as Falkner et al. (2010) argue, coherence would lead to an increased level
of transparency and trust in governmental efforts to address climate change. Accepting
these arguments does not necessarily have to lead to the favoring of fully integrated
institutions or hierarchical relationships. However, it does make clear that there should
be some level of integration or coordination in a fragmented governance architecture.
A POSSIBLE RESPONSE BY THE UNFCCC: NAVIGATING

INSTITUTIONAL FRAGMENTATION IN FUTURE CLIMATE
GOVERNANCE
How can such a level of integration or coordination be achieved while doing justice to
the dynamics and potential advantages of institutional fragmentation? We argue that
one realistic step is to redefine the role of international institutions—in the case of
global climate governance, the role of the UN climate regime—to navigate the increasing
institutional complexity and to provide meaningful cross-institutional coherence. In this
section, we sketch one such possibility for navigation, namely the concept of institutional
orchestration (Abbott and Snidal 2010; Abbott 2014; Hale and Roger 2014).
The idea per se is not new and has been discussed with different terminologies in
various strands of systems and organization theories; for example, as supervision, context
steering or network management (McGuire 2011; Willke 1995, 1997). What is new is
the setting, namely an intricate global governance architecture in which an umbrella

Fragmentation 127
institution like the UNFCCC should increasingly take the role of a benchmarker and
coordinator instead of—or at least in parallel to—overburdening itself with too many
comprehensive regulation tasks. We briefly illustrate how such a role could look like for
the orchestration of technology initiatives (cf. van Asselt and Zelli 2014).
We partly sketched the increasing number of initiatives aimed at the promotion of
climate change mitigation technologies above (cf. Zelli et al. 2013b). So far, the emer-
gence of international technology initiatives has taken place haphazardly with initiatives
varying, among others, in terms of:
● Technologies covered: some initiatives are established for one specific technology
(e.g., the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, focusing on carbon capture
and storage), whereas others cover a wide range of technologies (e.g., REEEP,
focusing on a variety of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies).
● Participation: different countries participate in different technology initiatives—
although most initiatives have at least some involvement of industrialized coun-
tries. Additionally, some initiatives are bilateral whereas others seek to engage a
wide range of countries. Furthermore, some initiatives promote a more prominent
role of private sector participants than others (UNFCCC 2010).
● Stage of technology cooperation: de Coninck et al. (2008, p. 336) explain how technol-
ogy cooperation activities fall into four different categories: (1) knowledge sharing
and coordination; (2) research, development and demonstration (RD&D); (3) tech-
nology transfer; and (4) technology deployment mandates, standards and incentives.
The result of this institutional development has been a patchwork of technology agree-
ments with little coordination of their activities. There are several arguments for at least
some level of orchestration.
First, orchestration could avoid duplication of work in case of overlapping initiatives:
experiences with the development and deployment of similar technologies could be
shared among the initiatives, thereby ensuring more efficient international cooperation.
Second, countries’ technology needs are different, especially across developing countries.
To ensure that the development and deployment of technologies is effective in practice,
they need to be linked to the assessment of the technology needs of recipient countries.
Such an assessment would likely transcend the more limited scope of most technology
initiatives. A third rationale for coordination is to keep track of how the different tech-
nology initiatives contribute to overall climate change mitigation objectives. For instance,
coordination could facilitate an assessment of the extent to which the emission reduc-
tions achieved by different technologies could lead to a stabilization of greenhouse gas
concentrations in the atmosphere (cf. Pacala and Socolow 2004). Fourth, c oordination
could help to channel public funding to the various initiatives, for instance through
the Green Climate Fund. Finally, coordination could potentially ensure that some of
the current gaps in technology cooperation are better addressed. A review by the chair
of the UNFCCC’s Expert Group on Technology Transfer (UNFCCC 2010) identifies
a number of deficits, including a limited focus on least developed countries, a strong
emphasis on the energy sector (rather than industry, transport, forestry and agriculture,
etc.), and a dominance of mitigation (rather than adaptation) technologies.
Having set out the rationale for orchestration, the question can be raised to which

extent the UNFCCC could play a role. In this regard, it is important to first identify
where it has already taken initiatives for coordination. In the Cancún Agreements, parties
to the UNFCCC were encouraged to engage in bilateral and multilateral cooperative
activities on technology development and transfer (UNFCCC 2011, para. 116). In other
words, parties acknowledged and encouraged a diversity of initiatives. The decision also
established a Technology Executive Committee that is mandated to collaborate with rele-
vant international technology initiatives, stakeholders and organizations, and to promote
coherence and cooperation across various technology activities both within and outside
of the UNFCCC (UNFCCC 2011, para. 121(f)).
While the need to establish links between the UNFCCC process on technology coop-
eration and the various initiatives is an important recognition, it remains unclear how
exactly the UNFCCC could establish such links. Perhaps the least controversial role
that the UNFCCC could play is to intensify the functions that it has carried out already.
This includes, first of all, its information and knowledge sharing function, which it has
in part fulfilled by acting as a clearing house for technology cooperation, and by con-
tinuing the development and compilation of technology needs assessments. Second, the
UNFCCC could likely play a role by supporting technology hubs and innovation net-
works (Tawney and Weischer 2011, p. 4). The Climate Technology Centre and Network
established by the Cancún Agreements has clear potential to link national and regional
centers of technology expertise to each other. Third, the UNFCCC can continue to play
an important role in terms of capacity building in developing countries, particularly
through its emphasis on technology needs assessments. Fourth, the UNFCCC could
form the focal point for the provision of public finance for some technologies through
the Green Climate Fund.
Yet, in addition to the extension of existing functions, a series of additional steps
can be taken to further define and enhance the role of the UNFCCC as an orchestra-
tor in complex climate governance. A more far-reaching change would be to make the
UNFCCC a forum to establish criteria for financing external technology initiatives;
for example, projects in the Climate and Clean Air Coalition could be funded through
the Green Climate Fund, possibly linked to provisions on monitoring, reporting and
verification. Such a decision would undoubtedly be politically charged and might meet
resistance, as it would give the UNFCCC with its one-country/one-vote structure leeway
over considerable financial resources provided by developed countries. At the same time,
it could lead to an accurate and continuous assessment of the contribution of the various
initiatives to the convention’s overall objectives.
Such a coordinating role between international climate technology initiatives is but one
example of possible orchestration by the UNFCCC. In addition, such an orchestrating
function of the UNFCCC is conceivable in various other realms of climate governance;
for example, for the coordination between emerging emissions trading systems (cf. van
Asselt and Zelli 2014; Bodansky et al. 2014). Indeed, first proposals have been developed
that specifically envisage orchestration of the variety of non-state, transnational and
subnational actions (Chan and Pauw 2014; Hale and Roger 2014; Betsill et al. 2015),
although the UNFCCC is not necessarily viewed as the most appropriate ‘orchestrator.’
This said, a few important underlying challenges will remain. First, any attempt at
orchestration will be confronted by the larger geopolitical tensions underlying interna-
tional climate politics (Depledge and Yamin 2009). Such tensions relate to big questions

Fragmentation 129
of what the overall emission reduction goals should be, how the burdens should be dis-
tributed among countries, as well as questions concerning the differentiated legal nature
of commitments and actions for developed and developing countries. Creating a (new)
division of labor between the UNFCCC and other institutions will not necessarily remove
such conflicts—as shown, for instance, by ongoing tensions with the International Civil
Aviation Organization on regulating carbon emissions from the aviation sector (Martinez
Romera and van Asselt 2015), or with the Montreal Protocol on regulating greenhouse
gases used as substitutes for ozone-depleting substances.
Second, orchestration may be impossible because of actor constellations. If a major
actor is not involved in some of the initiatives, that actor might be opposed to the respec-
tive orchestration efforts. What is more, such actors might be inclined to cause or inten-
sify conflictive fragmentation by creating rival institutions. This has, for instance, been
argued by some observers (McGee and Taplin 2009; van Asselt 2007) with regard to the
funding of the APP by the former Australian and US administrations. It relates back
to our argument that, to provide more informed and effective recommendations for the
future orchestrating role of the UNFCCC, we need to know more about the very drivers
of fragmentation.
Thus, while we have talked much about the future of climate governance in this
chapter, we like to end with a call for future climate governance research: institutional
theory generation and application need to take more efforts to incorporate the phenom-
enon of institutional fragmentation; this would provide us with a more detailed knowl-
edge base for assessing which types of complexity management are desirable and which
ones are realistic.
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12. Minilateralism
Jeffrey McGee
INTRODUCTION
Global climate change governance is in crisis. The past decade has witnessed growing
frustration among diplomats, civil society and academic commentators with the lack of
ambition in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
process. This frustration erupted at the 2009 Copenhagen Conference of the Parties
(COP) 15 meeting when hope of an extension beyond 2012 of the binding emission
reduction targets of the Kyoto Protocol was abandoned in favor of voluntary emis-
sion reduction pledges (Dimitrov this volume). The retreat from binding targets was
negatively viewed by supporters of the Kyoto Protocol as a significant weakening of the
UNFCCC. However, states opposed to legally binding targets and timetables defended
the Copenhagen Accord as a way forward to engage large emitters in the developed world
to reduce carbon emissions, which they were exempt from in the Kyoto Protocol.
When states announced their emission reduction pledges under the Copenhagen
Accord in early 2010, this defense could not be maintained. It was increasingly clear that
the pledge-and-review system enacted by the Copenhagen Accord would not be enough
to limit global warming to the 2°C above pre-industrial levels and thereby avoid danger-
ous climate change.
A prominent response to this crisis in climate multilateralism has been the formation of
small group forums or ‘climate change clubs’ involving only large emitting or like-minded
countries. Proponents of such ‘minilateral’ (i.e., small group) approaches argue that if
the key countries capable of solving climate change are gathered together, without the
distraction of smaller countries who have less ability, there will be improved prospects
of achieving effective strides in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions (Naím 2009,
p. 1). The past decade has seen the formation a number of prominent minilateral climate
change forums directed at climate mitigation, including the: Asia-Pacific Partnership
on Clean Development and Climate (APP); US Major Economies Process organized by
President George W. Bush; US Major Economies Forum organized by President Obama;
G8 Gleneagles Process; and the East Asian Low Carbon Growth Partnership.
In the context of various possibilities for institutional architecture, this chapter asks
the following questions: is the recent rise of minilateral climate governance simply a
pragmatic response to a lack of progress on emission reduction within the UN climate
change process? Or are there wider reasons for the rise of climate minilateralism? To
answer these questions, this chapter argues for greater critical reflection on the rise of
minilateralism in global climate governance. It argues that the rise of climate minilat-
eralism must be viewed in the context of the ongoing contestation over the justice of
emission reduction obligations of developed and developing countries. There is strong
evidence that minilateral climate change forums have provided a venue for key developed
countries to contest the meaning of the UNFCCC’s equity principle of ‘common but
132
Minilateralism 133
differentiated responsibilities’ (CBDR), a principle that sits awkwardly with dominant

neoliberal norms in global environmental governance. Minilateralism offers significant
compatibility with the normative structure of neoliberal environmental governance and
has thus received significant support from key state actors and policy commentators.
However, this compatibility with neoliberal economic norms is arguably a problematic
basis for shifting global climate governance down a minilateral path if emission reduction
and justice are to be taken seriously.
The chapter proceeds as follows. The following section provides an overview of existing
literature on minilateralism in global climate governance and explains how constructiv-
ism can offer a useful lens to analyze shifts in global environmental governance (includ-
ing climate governance). This chapter then introduces Bernstein’s constructivist work on
‘liberal environmentalism’ to help explain the pattern of multilateral institutional devel-
opment in early 1990s global environmental governance. The following section explains
the rise of neoliberal environmental governance later that decade and the tension these
norms exhibited with the equity principle of CBDR. The chapter moves on to examine
the significant compatibilities that exist between minilateralism and neoliberal environ-
mental governance and suggests these are important background conditions for the
emergence of minilateral climate forums. The final section and conclusion of this chapter
make a case for greater critical reflection on minilateralism in global climate governance.
EXISTING ANALYSIS OF MINILATERAL CLIMATE

GOVERNANCE
There is a growing body of literature on minilateralism in global climate governance

spanning the spectrum of approaches in international relations theory. Key work that
supports minilateralism largely comes out of the rational choice institutionalism school
of analysis (Victor 2011; Keohane and Victor 2011; Leal-Arcas 2011; Giddens 2012)
that is skeptical of the capacity of the United Nations (UN) climate regime to achieve
emission reductions. This literature instead argues for establishing forms of global
climate governance comprised of ‘clubs’ of like-minded countries that share a common
view on the level and style of climate action to be entertained. This work suggests that
small group forums of up to 20 countries provide greater prospects of climate change
mitigation than large 200-country forums (such as the UNFCCC). It essentially follows
the prescription of Underdal’s ‘law of the least ambitious program’ (Underdal 1998,
pp. 1–12), which suggests that to avoid a weakening of a negotiated outcome, par-
ticipation should be limited to only the key actors with significant ability to influence
the problem. Other authors (Hoffmann 2011; Kellow 2010; Hulme 2009; Prins and
Rayner 2007; Zelli and van Asselt this volume), influenced by theories of complexity
and networked governance, have suggested that ‘experimentation’ with various types of
governance institutions, at various scales, is a productive way forward. These authors
are also skeptical of the top-down approach of the Kyoto Protocol and, in a spirit of
experimentation, are open to the emergence of many varied climate change forums on
mitigation to find institutions that are best able to deliver on emission reduction. By
adopting networked governance theory, Bäckstrand (2008) explores the rise of trans-
national climate change partnerships, many of which have minilateral institutions, and

notes a hybridization and transformation of authority between state and non-state

actors in global climate governance.
The minilateral turn in global climate change governance has also been analyzed by
authors of a more critical theoretical persuasion (Eckersley 2012; Stevenson and Dryzek
2014) concerned with the level and nature of democracy in global climate governance.
These authors share a concern with the slow progress of the UN climate regime, but
are cognizant that any further shift towards minilateralism will by necessity involve
fewer countries and hence exclude and marginalize the voices of smaller and less power-
ful actors. Eckersley (2012, p. 24) therefore calls for a type of ‘inclusive minilateralism’
involving a small group of key countries within the UNFCCC process, but also includ-
ing a selection of smaller players and non-governmental organization (NGO) voices.
Stevenson and Dryzek (2014) explore from a deliberative systems standpoint how mini-
lateral forums might improve the deliberative democratic performance of global climate
governance. Some scholars interested in the justice of global climate negotiations are also
(surprisingly) open to minilateral forums playing a more prominent role in global climate
governance. Grasso and Roberts (2014), for instance, have suggested that negotiations on
emission reduction commitments might be limited to the 13 countries of the US Major
Economies Forum, a minilateral climate change forum established by US President
Obama outside the UN climate process.
Surprisingly, given this significant academic interest in minilateralism, there has been
limited work on the effectiveness of minilateral climate change institutions. One notable
exception is that of Andresen (2014), who found that minilateral institutions have not
been more effective in reducing global greenhouse gas emission than the UNFCCC
process. Andresen (2014, p. 164) points to the ‘malignancy’ of the problem of global
climate change in commenting: ‘it is so severe it cannot be removed by clever institu-
tional design.’ However, Andresen provides lukewarm support for a partial recourse to
minilateralism, in arguing that from a ‘learning perspective, these institutions and forums
may have had some influence by showing that a more pragmatically oriented bottom-up
approach maybe more workable than the traditional legally binding top-down approach’
(Andresen 2014, p. 164).
This chapter argues that constructivism can help to explain why minilateralism has
recently risen in prominence. Constructivism is based on an ontological premise that
agents (i.e., countries, NGOs, intergovernmental organizations) and the structures in
which they are embedded (both material and ideational) are mutually constituted by
intersubjective meaning (Klotz and Lynch 2007, p. 7). Agents create structures but are,
at the same time, created by structures. It is this constant interaction between agents and
structures that shapes agents’ understanding of their interests (Finnemore 1996), identi-
ties (Klotz and Lynch 2007) and hence what they are prepared to do (Finnemore 1996).
So far, constructivist analysis of minilateral forums has largely been limited to discourse
analysis of the normative tension between the APP and UN climate regime (McGee and
Taplin 2009, 2014), legitimacy deficits of minilateral forums (Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and
McGee 2013) and the deliberative democratic potential of minilateralism (Stevenson and
Dryzek 2014). This chapter builds on this earlier constructivist work to better understand
the rise of minilateralism in global climate change governance.

Minilateralism 135
LIBERAL ENVIRONMENTALISM AND GLOBAL

ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE
As discussed above, constructivism focuses on the role that ideas play in shaping institu-
tions and outcomes in international relations. There are various terminologies used within
constructivist research to describe ideas in international relations, including ‘discourses,’
‘frames’ and ‘norms.’ While there are subtle differences between these terms, for the
sake of brevity and conceptual consistency, this chapter focuses on norms, described by
Bernstein (2002, p. 2) as shared conceptions of appropriate behavior or action that desig-
nate and legitimate state (and other key actors’) identities, interests and behavior. There
is limited benefit in taking agents’ interests as fixed, as their own understanding of those
interests is in a constant process of creation and recreation through interaction with the
material and ideational structures of the international system.
Bernstein (2001) analyzed the formation of global environmental governance institu-
tions between the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the 1992 United Nations Convention
on Environment and Development. He found that from the early 1990s a set of ‘liberal
environmental’ norms came to dominate global environmental governance, which predi-
cated international environmental protection on the promotion and maintenance of a
liberal economic order. Bernstein (2002) describes some of the key liberal environmental
norms as follows:
● Common but differentiated responsibilities of developed and developing countries.

● Development takes precedence if costs of environmental protection are too high.
● Free trade and liberal markets are to be promoted. Environmental protection and
free markets are compatible.
● Transfers of resources and wealth should be left primarily to market mechanisms,
except for least developed countries.
● Multilateral cooperation for global economic growth is necessary for other goals.
● Market mechanisms should be favored. The polluter pays principle and precau-
tionary principle should also be implemented in environmental policy.
These liberal environmental norms were embedded within the key international environ-
mental agreements that came out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit: the Rio Declaration on
Environment and Development, UNFCCC and UN Convention on the Protection of
Biological Diversity.
Bernstein (2001, p. 8) was particularly interested as to why this set of norms associ-
ated with liberal environmentalism became institutionalized during the early 1990s and
prevailed over other competing ideas of the time. In answering this question, Bernstein
found that a new norm has a greater chance of taking hold if it has a reasonable ‘fit’
with the key prevailing norms of the wider global governance system. At the time of the
1972 UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the wider norms of global
governance were open to the possibility of wide-scale initiatives in global governance
to redistribute wealth to developing countries on justice-based grounds. As Lumsdaine
(1997) has shown, the foreign aid program of developed countries from the late 1940s to
the 1980s is best explained by its fit with prevailing international ethical norms (cham-
pioned largely by social-democratic countries), which called for an interventionist and

redistributive policy at a global level to assist developing countries move out of poverty.
However, Bernstein found that by the early 1990s the wider norms of global governance
had shifted away from an interventionist model of wealth redistribution towards a liberal
economic model based on facilitating international trade and economic expansion for all
countries through economic liberalization. He found that the early 1990s norms of liberal
environmentalism were accommodated within this new emphasis upon strengthening the
liberal international economic order (Bernstein 2002, p. 9).
The liberal environmentalism of the early 1990s contained a number of internal ten-
sions due to its heavy reliance on economic growth to relieve (rather than exacerbate)
environmental deterioration. Liberal environmentalism did not provide an internally
consistent normative program for environmental protection. Rather, it represented a
convenient set of norms that were compatible with the wider norms of the reinvigorated
global liberal economic order of the post-Cold War period. The norms of liberal envi-
ronmentalism contained difficult tensions between developed and developing countries.
A key example of these tensions is the principle of CBDR, which was developed through
the 1992 Rio Declaration and further specified in Article 3 of the UNFCCC. The CBDR
principle acknowledged that global environmental problems (such as climate change)
required all countries contribute to their solution. However, CBDR also provided that
on justice-based grounds developed countries should have higher initial obligations to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to provide technology transfer and adaptation
funding to developing countries. The CBDR principle—if strongly implemented—could
lead to a significant redistribution of wealth from developed to developing countries
(Gupta this volume).
However, it was never agreed in the UNFCCC exactly how CBDR would be imple-
mented in the longer term. What would be the criteria for differentiation between coun-
tries and how this would translate into specific emission reduction commitments? The
implementation of CBDR has therefore been an ongoing source of conflict among key
developed and developing countries within the UNFCCC process. For the most part of
the past 20 years, the US has opposed taking on binding emission reduction commit-
ments in the absence of similar commitments by major developing countries. The CBDR
principle may have been useful as norm of liberal environmentalism in the early 1990s
that could delay in-depth treatment of the claims for substantive justice from develop-
ing countries in the climate change negotiations (see Page this volume). However, the
potential redistributive effect of the CBDR principle provided a distinct tension with the
pro-market aspects of liberal environmentalism.
NEOLIBERAL ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE
Building on Bernstein’s findings, other constructivist scholars have charted a deepening

accommodation of environmental concerns to the liberal global economic order during
the 1990s and 2000s. For instance, Okereke (2008, p. 190) analyzed a number of key
international environmental regimes and found strong evidence in each of a shift towards
‘neoliberal ideas of justice’ that favored strong protection of existing property rights and
market allocation of resources (see also Lipschutz this volume). Mansfield (2004) simi-
larly describes neoliberal norms restructuring international fisheries management. These

Minilateralism 137
works stress that neoliberal environmental governance is generally hostile to redistribu-

tion of resources from developed to developing countries (Parks and Timmons Roberts
2010, p. 151). Neoliberal governance instead advocates minimal global regulation so as to
allow liberalized markets the best prospect of expanding and otherwise ordering social
relations, including the resultant distribution of wealth and resources (Noël and Thérien
2008, p. 165).
Since the mid-1990s, the position of the US in global climate negotiations has been
broadly consistent with a neoliberal vision for global environmental governance. The US
is the world’s largest economy and second-highest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in
aggregate terms. Over the past 25 years, the US has therefore been a key country in the
international climate change negotiations including a leading role in shaping norms and
institutions. US academics analyzing climate change policy have identified a significant
impact of neoliberal norms on US climate change policy (Driesen 2010, p. 2). US climate
change policy has shown a preference for resisting regulation (wherever possible) and
relying on voluntary schemes that leave agents (countries, companies or individuals) with
the greatest individual choice in responding to climate change (McGee 2014, pp. 196–197)
and thereby avoiding interventionist redistributive outcomes.
The key distinction between early 1990s ‘liberal environmentalism’ and later ‘neoliberal
environmental governance’ therefore lies in the level of willingness to tolerate an amount
of political intervention to formally redistribute wealth from developed to developing
countries. Such redistributive flows were possible under liberal environmentalism through
strong implementation of the principle of CBDR. However, the norms of neoliberal
environmental governance that developed from the mid-1990s onwards were strongly
opposed to global political intervention to provide redistributive flows of wealth. As
Mirowski (2013, p. 63) explains ‘Neoliberals regard inequality of economic resources and
political rights not as an unfortunate by-product of capitalism, but a necessary functional
characteristic of their ideal market system.’ This broad neoliberal stance by the United
States and other developed countries (i.e., Canada, Australia) was the background condi-
tion to ongoing conflicts within the UNFCCC process over any implementation of the
principle of CBDR (Okereke 2008, pp. 121–122).
MINILATERALISM AND NEOLIBERAL ENVIRONMENTAL

GOVERNANCE
Minilateralism is a procedural norm in global climate change governance that reduces

the number of countries involved in key decision-making forums of global climate gov-
ernance. On the issue of mitigation, minilateralism has been strategically used by some
developed countries as a way of side-stepping conflict over implementation of the CBDR
principle. The US (under President George W. Bush), Canada (under conservative Prime
Minister Harper) and Australia (under conservative Prime Minister Howard) all used
minilateral climate change forums (such as the APP and US Major Economies Process)
as part of a wider effort to shift discussion on emission reduction obligations to forums
outside the UN climate regime where CBDR is not formally recognized (McGee and
Taplin 2009, p. 232). Many of these minilateral forums have focused largely on activities
such as exchange of information on best practice in using technology, with the APP task

forces being a paradigm example (McGee and Taplin 2014, p. 344). However, minilateral
forums such as the APP and the US Major Economies Forum were also important in
establishing support among key countries for a non-binding, pledge and review approach
to national emission reduction commitments. These developed countries were clear in
their efforts to use the reduced franchise of minilateral forums to establish new norms
that could challenge the Kyoto model of binding targets and timetables for emission
reductions (McGee and Taplin 2009, p. 232).
The US-led approach of using minilateral forums outside the UNFCCC to advocate
for abandoning the Kyoto template was not in vain. The crisis atmosphere of the 2009 UN
climate conference in Copenhagen was arguably an immediate condition that prompted
the shift towards the non-binding, pledge and review commitments of the Copenhagen
Accord. However, the US and other like-minded developed countries had done the
work over the previous five years, through the APP and other US-sponsored minilateral
forums, of building support among key countries for the idea that non-binding pledges
were a viable type of emission reduction commitment for the post-2012 period. The APP
and US Major Economies Process had provided sufficient acceptance of non-binding
emission reduction pledges so as to create the conditions in which the major countries at
Copenhagen could avoid a ‘no-agreement’ outcome.
One of the key implications of the practice of minilateralism in global climate govern-
ance has therefore been to facilitate a shift from binding, collectively agreed emission
reduction targets (initially for developed countries) to non-binding, nationally deter-
mined pledges for all countries. This outcome represents reduced international regulation
of greenhouse gas emissions and an increase in individual choice of countries in deter-
mining the strength and level of their climate commitments. Consistent with the norms
of neoliberal environmental governance, this has been a way for developed countries
(such as the US) to weaken formal differentiation between developed and developing
countries on emission reduction obligations and any legal right to redistributive out-
comes this may entail.
THE NEED FOR GREATER CRITICAL REFLECTION ON

MINILATERALISM
The most obvious explanation for the rise in support for minilateralism is the ‘pragmatic’
one (discussed above). That is, the slow diplomatic progress of the UNCCC has created
an urgent need for a ‘new approach’ to either replace or augment the UN climate multi-
lateralism. However, there are a number of reasons to question whether this ‘pragmatic’
explanation is fully adequate. First, while it is true that the UN climate process has not
yet delivered mitigation commitments that will meet the 2°C stabilization target, some
of the blame for this failure must lie with key developed countries (such as the US,
Canada and Australia) that have adopted an approach framed by neoliberal norms of
non-intervention (Driesen 2010, p. 3) and hostility to the CBDR principle (McGee and
Taplin 2014, p. 342). Many scholars who argue for a shift to minilateral climate change
forums such as the APP and US Major Economies Process appear to overlook the role
that these forums have played in hosting ideas that undermine strong mitigation commit-
ments under the UNFCCC. Second, the literature on minilateralism is silent on exactly

Minilateralism 139
how minilateral forums will spur faster or more efficient climate mitigation decisions. It
may well be the case that minilateral forums have the same underlying tensions between
key countries as those exposed within multilateral forums (Eckersley 2012, p. 33). Third,
as Andresen (2014, p. 164) points out, to date there is no clear evidence that minilateral
climate forums have any better record in reducing greenhouse gas emissions than the UN
climate process.
If minilateralism is not a clear choice for the future direction of global climate change
governance, it remains a puzzle as to why it receives stronger support in academic and
policy circles than other potential governance designs (e.g., a strengthened emphasis
upon global justice claims). This is where Bernstein’s theory offers a persuasive lens. As
discussed above, for Bernstein new norms in global environmental governance enter into
a social structure of ideas that already exist more broadly in global governance. Bernstein
claims that the norms in global environmental governance with the greatest chance of
being taken up are those that are consistent with, or can easily be accommodated within,
the wider structure of the global liberal economic order. Minilateralism shows significant
consistency with the norms of neoliberal environmental governance as it opens up pro-
cesses for creating multiple and fragmented sites of climate change governance that are
not constricted by the justice-based redistributive claims of developing countries flowing
from the CBDR principle in the UN climate process.
In minilateral climate forums, any differences in emissions reduction obligations of
developed and developing countries (and resultant redistributive flows of wealth) arise
through informal, case-by-case, ‘charitable’ forms of differentiation, rather than from
any legal right or entitlement of developing countries. Charitable differentiation com-
bined with a reduction in binding regulation of greenhouse gas emissions fits well with
the neoliberal environmental governance norms of non-intervention and hostility to
redistributive outcomes. According to Bernstein’s theory, the procedural norm of mini-
lateralism therefore has significantly greater prospects of acceptance within the wider
liberal economic order of global governance. This appears to be a significant background
condition for the rising prominence of minilateralism in both institutional design and
policy commentary in global climate governance.
Young (2014, p. 20) claims that with global environmental problems such as climate
change, which require long-term and widespread cooperation across a range of countries,
the perceived justice of the process and outcome of negotiations is crucial to effective-
ness. That being the case, there is a significant risk that reduced participation of countries
in climate mitigation negotiations will lead to perceived unfairness of process (Franck
1995, p. 7). The poor and powerless will be marginalized. There are also real risks that the
outcomes of minilateral climate forums will fail to achieve substantive justice (Franck
1995, p. 8) in distributing the costs of emission reductions. The literature on minilateralism
therefore needs to better reflect on whether its consistency with the norms of the neoliberal
environmental governance is merely a convenience for the interests of powerful countries.
CONCLUSIONS
To view the rise of climate change minilateralism as simply a pragmatic response to

the slowness of UN climate diplomacy is to miss important aspects of this recent

henomenon. The chapter demonstrates that the interest in minilateral climate change
p
forums amongst scholars and practitioners alike must be viewed in relation to the con-
tested distribution of emission reduction commitments among developed and develop-
ing countries. The analysis shows that the UN climate change process has struggled to
implement the equity principle of CBDR. While this principle arose from the liberal envi-
ronmental period of the early 1990s, it proved an uneasy fit with the norms of neoliberal
environmental governance that gained prominence later that decade. During the 2000s,
developed countries strategically created minilateral climate change forums to develop
norms that challenged the differentiation of the binding targets inscribed in the Kyoto
Protocol. Minilateralism has significant consistency with the norms of neoliberal envi-
ronmental governance. It opens up processes for creating fragmented and multiple sites
of climate change governance that are not constricted by the justice-based redistributive
claims of the CBDR principle.
For these reasons, there is a need for stronger and more critical reflection on the
purpose and role of minilateral climate change forums in global climate governance.
The experience to date suggests that these forums are unlikely to be a ‘silver bullet’ for
global greenhouse gas emission reductions. They carry the significant risk of being used
strategically by powerful countries as sites to contest and weaken the implementation of
justice principles that are required for long-term effective global climate governance. The
UN climate process is indeed moving too slowly to prevent dangerous climate change.
However, the above analysis suggests that a critical eye needs to be cast over any future
attempts to move climate mitigation discussions outside the multilateral forums of the
UN.
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13. The North–South divide
Joyeeta Gupta
NORTH–SOUTH DIVIDE IN A CHANGING GEOPOLITICAL

CONTEXT
This chapter examines the evolving North–South divide in global climate governance over
the past 25 years (Gupta 2014a). Some dismantle the North–South distinction (authors
since Harris 1986 and Toye 1988) as (1) the income data of countries has changed espe-
cially now with the rise of the emerging economies, (2) such distinctions are post-colonial
and no longer relevant, (3) such distinctions polarize relationships and are counterpro-
ductive and (4) they do not take into account evolving geopolitics and new North–South
coalitions such as the G20. However, although the North–South dimension is changing,
this chapter argues that it still is a legitimate lens for assessing global governance. First,
although some countries may change status, the average poor country is significantly
poorer than the average rich country. While power may shift to Asia, 70 percent of the
global population living on less than US$1 per day will still be located in that continent
(EC 2012). Second, the North–South/rich–poor story remains valid as the two groups are
still very different in terms of demography, governance, and social context (Gupta 2007).
Third, evolving relations since colonial days influence future relations and mutual trust,
which is critical for addressing unstructured and wicked problems such as climate change
(Hurlbert and Gupta 2015). This has led to a ‘West versus the rest’ approach where the
rest is framed as inferior, threatening, corrupt or not abiding by universal values (e.g.,
Ramphal 1983; Said 1978); a framing that has not changed much even with the rise of
the emerging economies.
Fourth, the global inequitable patterns of the past are continuously reproduced and
institutionalized in fields from economic, through security, to environmental relations
(e.g., ICLR 2008). Finally, as global environmental utilization space (ecospace) shrinks
on a per capita basis in terms of resources (e.g., land, water, minerals) and sinks (e.g., how
many tons of greenhouses gases (GHGs) can still be spewed into the atmosphere while
still addressing climate change) (Gupta 2014b), the tensions between these two groups
will increase.
Hence, this chapter argues that climate change is the archetypal North–South issue,
discusses the related evolving North–South substantive and procedural issues, before
drawing some conclusions.
CLIMATE CHANGE AS A NORTH–SOUTH ISSUE
Climate change is the archetypical North–South and rich-poor issue. About 70 percent
of the GHGs since 1850 have been emitted by industrialized countries (ICs) (Metz 2010).
These historic emissions are responsible for current changes in the climate to which
142
The North–South divide 143
developing countries (DCs) are more vulnerable (IPCC-II 2007, UNDP 2007). While DC
emissions are growing, (1) their per capita emissions remain limited even for China until
very recently (UNDP 2007), (2) the impacts of current DC emissions will be felt only in
the future; while current impacts have scarcely been dealt with, and (3) many of these DC
emissions are associated with consumption patterns in ICs as the South supplies goods
and services.
If the climate change threat is going to be solved, global concentrations have to be
stabilized implying, first, a global concentration level has to be determined; second,
the related GHG emissions have to be shared between countries; and third the costs of
adapting to climate change have to be allocated.
The DCs are more likely to suffer from the impacts of climate change because of
greater geographical vulnerability (e.g., many are small island states), greater economic
vulnerability (e.g., arising from lower capacity to cope given the quality of the houses and
their ability to face cyclones), and greater political vulnerability (e.g., given the quality of
their governance systems) (Forsyth this volume). However, their cumulative contribution
to the problem, although differentiated between countries, is still significantly lower than
that of the ICs. Hence, it is vital to most developing countries that global GHG concen-
trations are stabilized in accordance with Article 2 of the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Given that the North is less vulnerable to climate impacts than the South, it may
choose a higher stabilization level than the latter. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) has long argued that ‘dangerous climate change’ was a political,
not scientific, question; however, the Fourth Assessment Report in 2006 did explore this
question (Beck this volume). After 20 years of negotiation, negotiators finally agreed in
the Copenhagen Accord, which was reaffirmed at the 2010 Cancún summit, that global
temperatures should not rise above 2°C in relation to pre-industrial years (Dimitrov this
volume), to the dismay of small island states who preferred 1.5°C as a safer level.
Second, this temperature target needs to be converted into a GHG concentration
target and emissions targets. For any given concentration level, the total allowable emis-
sions decreases every year implying that there is a shrinking amount of emissions that
needs to be shared between countries further exacerbating the North–South conflict.1
This also means that emissions have to be reduced drastically and by 2032 there is no
room for either ICs or DCs to emit (UNDP 2007), unless the definition of what is dan-
gerous is revised. About 80 percent of the as yet unused and unexploited fossil fuels need
to stay underground (Carbon Tracker 2012, p. 2).
The North–South dimension also refers to how these emission targets are allocated
between countries. If they are allocated in accordance with existing use (grandfathering)
there is little room for the South to grow (Page this volume). Underlying the issue of
sharing emission rights is the question whether all countries should have equal respon-
sibilities or should undertake equal reduction efforts irrespective of their emission levels
or whether these should be differentiated. DCs see equal efforts as unfair because of
their weaker starting position. Moreover, it is not in line with the principle of Right to
Development (UNGA 1986), which was adopted after decades of diplomatic struggle
only four years before the United Nations (UN) climate negotiations were initiated, when
the issue of who gets to emit GHGs became contentious. But the right to development
is not a license to emit pollutants; it is the right to develop if possible in a sustainable

manner. This call from developing countries led to the adoption of the principles of
common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR) and
the right to sustainable development in the UN Climate Convention (UNFCCC 1992,
Article 3(4)).
The adoption of these principles meant that ICs would have to reduce their emissions
to make space for growing DC emissions (IPCC-III 1990). However, 25 years later the
US, the cumulative largest GHG emitter, has still not accepted legally binding restrictions
on its emissions and it squats on the global commons. The US continues to invest in shale
gas, Canada in oil sands, and many Northern countries are looking at the possibilities of
Arctic gas. Although the US has taken some administrative measures to address climate
change, these measures are far below the initial expectations that they would take action
similar to the nature and extent that the European Union (EU) is taking. At the same
time, some DCs—such as Mozambique and Kenya—have just discovered oil and gas
and expect to thereby become rich. In an attempt to deal with the slow progress made,
the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP 2014) argues that perhaps we can
over-emit now and later drastically reduce to compensate for this over-emission in order
to still stay within the globally agreed temperature limits.
If we simplify the North–South story into the story of the two protagonists—the USA
and China—we see that the cumulative US emissions on a gross and per capita basis is
significantly higher than that of the Chinese gross and per capita emissions (Dellink et al.
2009). The US has breached the North–South trust by not reducing its emissions (ecolog-
ical debt); this is the classic debate between first-comers and late-comers to development.
The DCs argue that they want ‘a solution for the serious global, regional, and local envi-
ronmental problems facing humanity, based on the recognition of the North’s ecological
debt and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities of the developed
and developing countries’ (Group of 77 South Summit 2000). But even if China, which is
developing rapidly, was to take on IC type responsibilities, there will still remain a North–
South divide between the (new) rich (i.e., the emerging economies) and the poor (i.e., the
least developed economies). The limited carbon (equivalent) budget available makes the
North insecure about its own future and the changing South on the offensive. Arguably,
while the North–South membership may change, the North–South divide will continue
until fossil-fuel free technology becomes dominant globally. The question is—when will
this happen? Neither development (Sachs 2004) nor sustainable development (IPCC-III
2007, p. 693) comes automatically; they both need deliberate societal steering.
Since emissions cannot be reduced in time, we also have to develop adaptive capacity
(Dilling this volume). However, who should pay for adaptation, who can adapt, and who
will face the residual impacts (impacts that cannot be dealt with, but have to be faced)?
Thus it makes sense to differentiate between rich and poor; however, such a clas-
sification should be dynamic. The UNFCCC divided the world into ICs (Annex I and
Annex II) and DCs (non-Annex I countries) but not on the basis of clear criteria. This
was acceptable to all in the 1990s except Turkey (classified as an IC; which was removed
from the list by amendment in 2002) and the US (which weakened the target in the
UNFCCC and did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol). Since 2010, Canada, Russia, Japan
and New Zealand have joined the US in not accepting IC responsibilities for the second
Kyoto Protocol period.
Second, in response to protests from the East and Central European countries, ICs were

divided into very rich countries and countries with economies in transition (Annex II) as
the latter did not have resources to transfer to the South. Third, over time new countries
have been added to the IC list: Croatia, Liechtenstein, Monaco and Slovenia, while
Czechoslovakia was replaced by the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1995, and Belarus in
2002. Fourth, one country (Kazakhstan) had wanted to be an Annex I country since 1995
but was not accepted till 2012 when it adopted a target for the Kyoto Protocol second
period. Furthermore, the convention also provided a list of criteria to classify particu-
larly vulnerable countries (see Article 4(8)) and subsequently made special provisions for
least developed countries (LDCs).
While some of the above shifts are shifts at the margin, others contest the IC/DC dif-
ferentiation. I argue that broad-brush differentiation can be justified because of the dif-
ferent development status of countries (including resources, infrastructure, governance
architecture), their past emissions and current vulnerability. However, we need specific
criteria. Singapore, Qatar and South Korea are today conspicuously absent from the IC
list, and this list does not exclusively include rich countries. Many criteria for graduation
in (and out) of the IC list exist in the scholarly literature, but have yet to be formally
adopted.
EVOLVING NORTH–SOUTH RELATIONS IN CLIMATE

NEGOTIATIONS
The North–South dimensions of climate change have evolved during the five phases of
climate change negotiations as elaborated below (Gupta 2010, 2014a).
Phase 1: Defining the Leadership Paradigm
In the pre- 1991 phase, scientists generated scientific knowledge on climate change
synthesized by the World Meteorological Organization (WCC 1979) and subsequently
the IPCC, established in 1988. Policy conferences brought this scientific issue onto the
politicians’ agenda; the right to development was adopted (UNGA 1986) and the World
Commission on Environment and Development called for relevant urgent action (WCED
1987).
The early declarations (Ottawa Statement 1989; Toronto Statement 1988; Noordwijk
Declaration 1989) and publications (Krause et al. 1989; Zaelke and Cameron 1990;
WCED 1987; IPCC-III 1990) recognized the North–South issues in terms of (1) the
greater IC emissions and the need to lead in reducing those emissions; (2) the need to
compensate/assist those affected by the impacts of climate change (Jacobson 1988, p. 39);
(3) the need to provide technological assistance to DCs to reduce their rate of growth of
emissions and new and additional (N&A) funding, over and above official development
assistance (ODA); (4) that environmental conditions should not limit DC growth pros-
pects and that instead space should be made for their emissions to rise; and (5) adopting
a long-term target to stabilize GHG concentrations. The IPCC even proposed a fun-
damental right to a viable environment and not to be subjected to the negative impacts
of climate change (IPCC-III 1990, p. lviii). Twenty-two developed countries (excluding
USA, Japan and Russia) committed themselves to stabilizing GHG emissions in 2000

at 1990 levels (see Gupta 2014a, Table 3.2). Among the DCs, the large countries and the
Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) were particularly active.
Phase 2: Institutionalizing the Leadership Concept
In the second period (1991–1996), IPCC reports set the tone by assessing the causes,
impacts and policy options. North–South scientific controversies focused on the lack of
differentiation between survival and luxury emissions, data in future scenarios and the
‘cost of human life’ (Agarwal and Narain 1991; Parikh 1992; Meyer and Cooper 1995;
Gupta 1997). Around 1996, the first skeptics began voicing their opinions.
IC emissions were significantly higher than DC emissions when the UNFCCC was
adopted in 1992 with a long-term objective, principles and a list of measures. AOSIS
demanded a far-reaching target from ICs (−20 percent in 2000/1990) and in 1995 the
Green G77 (G77 excluding the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries,
OPEC) pushed for stronger targets (Mwandosya 1999). In 1995 the first Conference
of the Parties (COP 1) decided that the convention’s targets were weak and launched a
process towards adopting targets.
In terms of North–South relations:
1. The convention crystallized an ad hoc static divide by establishing Annex I (ICs) and
non-Annex I (DCs) countries.
2. There was intense debate on whether to include targets for the ICs, N&A funding,
the DC’s right to development, and IC’s liability; this led to the convention adopting
targets in unclear language (Bodansky 1993, p. 515), the right to development was
added only to the Preamble and revised as the right to sustainable development in the
principles, and although N&A funding (UNFCCC 1992, Articles 4(3–5), 4(7–8), 11,
and 21) and technology transfer survived, the text on liability disappeared (Verheyen
2003).
3. However, five principles were adopted including the precautionary and CBDR
principles.
4. Market mechanisms were launched through the conceptualization of joint imple-
mentation and its pilot phase.
5. Although adaptation and various categories of vulnerable DCs were identified
(Article 4(9)), these were not operationalized. The bottom line for many DCs
was Article 4(7): ‘effective implementation by developed country Parties of their
commitments under the Convention related to financial resources and transfer of
technology and will take fully into account that economic and social development
and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of the developing
country Parties.’
The convention was designed along the leadership paradigm that emphasized that ICs
should reduce their own emissions (Articles 3(1), 4(1)); help DCs with technology and
finance (Articles 4(3), 4(5); see also Articles 3(2), 4(4), 4(5), 4(8), 11, 21); and make space
for the growth of DC emissions (Preamble #21, cf. Article 3(4)) until they had developed
enough to take on their own responsibilities. However, these commitments paid only lip
service to DC interests (Bodansky 1993, p. 463).

Phase 3: Conditional Leadership
In phase 3 (1997–2001), climate skepticism fueled reluctance to take action (Grundmann

this volume). Although the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, ratifications were
slow. There was growing disunity among DCs (Yamin 1998), especially between the oil
exporting countries and the rest; OPEC, which had been isolated once by the G77, tried
to pre-empt future isolation by chairing the G77 six times over the past 25 years.
The Kyoto Protocol included GHG targets for ICs, even though some targets allowed
for increased emissions (Portugal, Norway, Iceland, Australia) and it was anticipated
that the US would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol because of its Senate’s Byrd Hagel
Resolution (1997, Bang this volume). Furthermore, the combined IC target was quite
small (−5.2 percent in 2012/1990) compared to the AOSIS proposal; the targets included
three new gases, sinks and emissions trading and, at least for the US, meant that the
proposed −7 percent target was at most a −3 percent target (US State Department 1998);
and some countries (Russia and Ukraine) were given targets that were higher than their
emission levels. The Protocol established an Adaptation Fund but this was only opera-
tionalized in 2008. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) for offsetting emissions
in a cost-effective manner was launched and key DCs were pressured to participate mean-
ingfully by the Byrd Hagel Resolution.
The low targets, delayed funding and pressure on DCs contested the CBDR princi-
ple and the need for IC leadership. This heralded a period of conditional leadership as
ICs did not want to lead without others taking ‘meaningful’ responsibilities and N&A
resources remained limited as most ICs did not even meet their 0.7 percent ODA targets.
Phase 4: Leadership Competition
In phase 4 (2001–2007), the US definitive withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol pushed
the EU to persuade others to ratify it and the Kyoto Protocol entered into force in
2005 (Dupont and Oberthür this volume). This period began with the adoption of the
Marrakesh Accords, which operationalized the market mechanisms.
The LDCs emerged as a key actor demanding special treatment. From a North–South
perspective it was important that the ICs ratify the Kyoto Protocol and reduce emissions;
the CDM enter into operation, although most projects bypassed the LDCs; a special
LDC expert group on the National Adaptation Plans of Action was established; an
LDC and Special Climate Change Fund entered into operation; and that discussions on
capacity-building and technology transfer were launched. The compliance committees
also differentiated between ICs and DCs. There was some skepticism about forest policy
as the CDM only included afforestation and reforestation in countries that had already
deforested, and countries that were protecting their forests were unable to raise resources
(Betts and Schroeder this volume). Pressure to take on commitments led to the concept
of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions that DCs were encouraged to adopt and
report on (Muller 2007). The lack of resources for adaptation led to discussions on insur-
ance and disaster management but was not linked to compensation or liability issues
(Warner and Zakieldeen 2012).
The leadership role of the ICs had evolved into a leadership competition role—with
the EU leading the UNFCCC process and the US promoting alternative agreements

on hydrogen, carbon sequestration, methane, renewable energy and clean development

(Parker and Karlsson this volume). Global slow-down was, however, compensated by
local level activity by city networks (Janković this volume).
Phase 5: Leadership from the South?
In phase 5 (2008–2015), following the IPCC’s Nobel Prize for Peace and publication of
the influential Stern Review (Stern 2006), better organized skeptics focused on finding
fault with climate science (Grundmann this volume). Although it was becoming urgent
to adopt a long-term objective and second commitment period targets, recession in the
ICs and growth in many DCs led ICs to focus on domestic issues and see the emerging
economies as potential competitors.
However, following IPCC’s (2007) evaluation, COP 16 in 2010 decided to keep
average global temperature rise to below 2°C. Although it was hoped that COP 15
in Copenhagen would adopt second commitment period targets, only an Annex with
voluntary commitments was adopted. Many DCs, including the BASIC (Brazil, India,
South Africa and China) countries as well as poorer countries like Bhutan proposed
adopting voluntary targets. The Adaptation Fund entered into operation in 2008;
and the Green Climate Fund established in 2009 has yet to be fully operational,
having US$10 billion in pledges (which falls way short of what was planned); and a
new forest mechanism was established—Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and
Forest Degradation (REDD). However, as progress is slow, UN-REDD a collabora-
tion of UN agencies working on REDD is trying to promote its implementation. The
shift from a legally binding approach to a voluntary pledge and review approach since
COP 14 is more consistent with a temperature rise of 4–5°C and led DC negotiator
from Sudan Lumumba Di-Aping to state that the Copenhagen deal was a suicide pact
(cited in Bond 2011, p. 7). The general DC dissatisfaction led many to push for the
recognition of climate change related human rights (People’s Agreement 2010), and
the adoption of the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action at COP 17 to encourage
both developed and developing countries to adopt a legally binding instrument in 2015
that would be effective from 2020. This led some to be very hopeful that this would
break the impasse. However, the departure of Australia, Canada, Russia, New Zealand
and Japan from the Kyoto Protocol second commitment period proved to be a critical
breach of trust.
During the recession, IC leadership evaporated despite the EU’s unconditional com-
mitment to reduce its own emissions by 20 percent in 2020/1990 (Dupont and Oberthür
this volume). In 2014, President Obama agreed with the Chinese government that
China would peak its emissions in 2030; the US in return would reduce its emissions by
25 percent in 2025/2005 levels. However, President Obama may be unable to get support
from the Senate, and will have to use executive power to see if he can set a process into
motion to commit future US presidents. In 2015, he also made a deal with India to help it
reduce its fossil fuel emissions by helping it invest in nuclear power. However, early indi-
cations show that global emissions in 2014 did not exceed that of 2015 despite growth,
probably because of China’s investment in green energy.

Phase 6: United We Stand?
Hopes now rest on the expected Paris Agreement at the end of 2015. While DCs are
more actively exploring ‘inclusive development’ as in Kenya and Philippines, the ‘green
economy’ as in China, and co-benefits as in India, their motivations will also actively
depend on the willpower of IC leadership to stop investing in fossil fuels. This implies
that recent Northern investments may become stranded assets soon. If the South does
not believe that the non-EU North will invest in stranded resources now to convert them
in five years in 2020 into stranded assets, we may all be long past addressing the climate
change problem within the safe landing corridor. If US commitment is hostage to the
locked-in institutional politics of the Senate, the only hope is if China can unleash a
renewable energy revolution worldwide. China’s active participation in the CDM, its con-
sistent reduction of its energy intensity for three decades, its domestic targets, high wind
power installed capacity, solar panel production and proposed voluntary target for itself
are signs of hope (Stalley this volume, Gupta and Yip 2014).
PROCEDURAL GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES
Substantive disagreements between North and South can also be related to the evolv-
ing negotiating challenges for DCs. Since 1990, almost all states have participated in the
negotiations, including the poorest because of their potential vulnerability. In the first
ten years, most DCs had a hollow negotiating mandate (Gupta 1997)—a vague sketch of
their interests and positions that derived from (1) a varying ideological position as some
were toying with the idea of a transition towards a market economy; (2) a structural
imbalance in knowledge vis-à-vis the ICs that endures till today; (3) limited public cover-
age and hence public support for a constructive political position; (4) a focus more on
North–South relations on other foreign policy issues rather than with related domestic
energy, food or transport policies; (5) a tendency to have small delegations of changing
civil servants and environmental ministers; and (6) a position based on principles and
qualitative arguments rather than quantitative facts. These resulted in a hollow negotiat-
ing mandate that, in the G77 coalition, led to the adoption of the highest of the lowest
common denominators becoming their common position. This led to a defensive nego-
tiating strategy. In the second decade, the DCs began to get a better grip over their own
interests and formed specific coalitions. From 2006 onwards there has been significant
rise in the number of delegates they send. However, in terms of average numbers the ICs
still have higher representation. Furthermore, there are considerably more coalitions now
than before (see Table 13.1).
Initially, the key DC negotiating actors were the G77 and China. As G77 represents
the varied interests of 130 countries their position tends to be often defensive and quite
limited in scope. The oil exporters—OPEC—realized early on that they had a critical
stake and have actively protected their interests of selling fossil fuels to the ICs. In 1995,
when they were excluded by the DCs, the Green G77 was briefly born and could generate
a strong position on climate change (Gupta 2014a). Since then, OPEC has made sure that
it cannot be bypassed and has demanded compensation from the North for ‘the adverse
effects of response measures’ and has been sabotaging DC efforts to demand strong

Table 13.1 Evolving coalitions from the South
Phase Southern coalitions

Pre-1991 Possibly
1991–1996 G77 & OPEC AOSIS
China
1997–2001 (± 130 GRILA Africa LDCs
countries) group
2001–2008 CfrRN,
2008 onwards Congo BASIC,
basin, ALBA
Note: GRILA = Group of Independent Latin American Countries; CfrRN = Coalition for Rainforest
Nations; ALBA = Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of our Americas.
targets from the ICs (Barnett 2008). However, while OPEC economies are dependent on
oil exports, the increasing extraction of oil, the role of the US as a potential exporter of
fossil fuels from 2030 onwards and the falling price of oil may imply that these countries
will increasingly have to diversify their economies and change their strategies.
The OPEC and AOSIS have diametrically opposite interests. The AOSIS countries
have actively demanded climate action since the 1990s. However, the differences between
these countries on issues related to forestry have weakened their common stand.
The Group on Latin America emerged after the Kyoto Protocol but did not last long.
However, the Group on Africa has been increasingly active since 2000 and has built up its
negotiation skills since 2006. Within the UN, there has been a longstanding classification
of LDCs, and this group has become more prominent in promoting its own rights in the
international negotiations. In recent years, the Coalition of Rainforest Nations has been
actively negotiating its interests. The BASIC countries have also started coming up with
their positions.
CONCLUSIONS
The North–South divide can be traced back to colonial days. The mistrust between the
groups has not been eased by the way the US has avoided climate targets since 1990,
and the fact that other ICs are not participating in the second commitment of the
Kyoto Protocol. The demand for an equitable global governance regime predates the
climate negotiations. The refusal to provide a new international economic or environ-
mental order, as exemplified by the demand that DCs take on targets before the ICs as a
whole did their share, does nothing to enhance trust. Past inequitable patterns are being
repeated with a vengeance.
However, climate impacts are serious as they will severely limit the development
prospects of the South and may even make a significant dent in those of the North. The
global community is expecting a lot from the South in terms of forgiving the non-EU
North for its non-commitment, and in terms of going beyond this to identify a green and
inclusive path to better wellbeing. The North, and in particular the non-EU countries,

will have to come up with a strategy to gain the trust of the South. It will have to go
beyond a bargaining or divide and rule strategy that exploits short-term Southern differ-
ences. The sooner this happens through a clear legally binding commitment, the sooner
it will be possible to convince the South that it too will need to do its share and forego
cheap and dirty short-term development options. The North–South divide is only evolv-
ing, not disappearing. It is yet to be seen which of the two blocs will be more mature in
its response, but arguably the Global South has more excuse for immature behavior than
the other.
NOTE
1. See Ted Talk on www.tedxamsterdamwomen.nl/tedxamswomen-talk-prof-dr-joyeeta-gupta.
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14. Transnationalism
Klaus Dingwerth and Jessica F. Green
INTRODUCTION
The locus of climate governance is changing. As recently as 15 years ago, the Kyoto
Protocol was viewed as ‘the only game in town.’ Conventional wisdom held that a global
collective action problem such as climate change required global cooperation. Anything
less would be undermined by free-riders—states who chose not to reduce their own
emissions, hoping to reap the benefits of others’ actions. Following this logic, states
negotiated the Kyoto Protocol, a top-down approach to emissions reductions, in which
developing countries committed to ‘targets and timetables’: a fixed amount of emissions
reductions, which varied by nation, by the end of 2012. Developing countries were given
a pass—the result of their adamant refusal to be held responsible for a problem created
largely by the developed world.
But progress on the Kyoto Protocol has slowed, almost to a halt. Some have suggested
that the intergovernmental negotiations are officially gridlocked (Victor 2011; Hale et al.
2013). At a minimum, they are not meeting the pace needed to avoid dangerous climate
change. However, climate policy is no longer strictly an intergovernmental affair; now
actors from all sectors and at all levels of governance are tackling this ‘super wicked
problem’ (Levin et al. 2012). Climate policy has been ‘rescaled’ to include a variety of
actors at all levels of governance (Bulkeley and Moser 2007; Andonova and Mitchell
2010).
In this chapter we focus on the emergence and implications of transnational climate
governance, which we define as governance at multiple scales by a diversity of state, sub-
state and non-state actors. We are not, of course, the first to observe this change. There
is a rich literature on the new actors, mechanisms and bodies now involved in climate
governance. Typologies abound (see, e.g., Andonova et al. 2009). There are also admira-
ble efforts to map empirically the changing governance landscape (Bulkeley and Castán
Broto 2013; Bulkeley et al. 2014; Green 2013; Paterson et al. 2014). To build on this
work, we focus our efforts on understanding the types of interactions that occur between
multilateral and transnational governance. We argue that these interactions are not simply
random, but can be classified into different types, many of which can further intergov-
ernmental policy.
Since climate policy is moving toward a complex, layered system of governance, we
hope to bring some clarity to this system by elaborating the forms of interaction that
occur within it. The chapter proceeds in three parts. First, we describe the emergence
of transnational governance. Second, we discuss three types of interactions among dif-
ferent types of actors, using examples to illustrate. Our general argument is informed
by a liberal-institutionalist perspective that complements the critical political economy
(Newell this volume) and governmentality (Stripple and Bulkeley this volume) perspec-
tives adopted elsewhere in this Handbook. In the concluding section, we examine the
153
implications of our argument for scholarship and policy practice and identify the coor-
dination of the plethora of incremental changes as the key challenge of transnational
climate governance.
THE EMERGENCE OF TRANSNATIONAL GOVERNANCE
Climate gridlock has prompted several shifts in climate policy. First, the approach of the
intergovernmental process itself has changed in two important ways. States have realized
that the ‘top-down’ approach of emissions targets and timetables is not tenable (Falkner
et al. 2010; Stewart et al. 2013; Green et al. 2014). Increasingly, states are making uni-
lateral commitments to emissions reductions, based on domestic political contexts and
preferences. In addition, the hard and fast divisions between developed and developing
countries established by the Berlin Mandate are slowly beginning to ebb. Developing
nations such as Brazil, China, India and others acknowledge that, in addition to devel-
oped country action, they must also do their part.
Second, along with domestic climate policies, subnational efforts have flourished in
the recent past. Cities have become a major locus of climate policy (Betsill and Bulkeley
2006; Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2013; Janković this volume). For example, the C40
Climate Leadership Group is a network of cities claiming to represent one-twelfth of
the world’s population. Mayors and bureaucrats share information, collaborate and plan
mitigation and adaptation activities. Cities, states and provinces including California,
Quebec, Tokyo and the northeastern United States have established carbon markets.
Moreover, sectors have organized transnationally to transform their production practices
in order to reduce their emissions.
Private governance initiatives have also exploded. Voluntary carbon markets run
in parallel to the compliance markets existing under the Kyoto Protocol and within
the European Union (EU). This allows firms and well-meaning citizens to offset their
carbon emissions. Like in other areas of global environmental governance, governance
through transparency has also risen to prominence as corporate reporting schemes such
as the Climate Disclosure Project (CDP) or the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) are
attracting a growing number of participants (Knox-Hayes and Levy 2014; Gupta and
Mason this volume). In 2013, 403 of the 500 largest companies by market capitaliza-
tion included in the FTSE Global Equity Index thus reported information about their
carbon emissions to the CDP (2013, p. 6). It is this rise of private transnational climate
governance—and its link to the existing multilateral climate governance system—that
interests us most in this chapter. Below, we summarize current research on three spe-
cific questions: when, where and why have transnational climate governance initiatives
emerged?
When?
Conservation efforts such as debt- for-

nature swaps engineered by international
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) started as early as the 1980s (Jakobeit 1996).
But systematic efforts by non-state actors to govern climate change did not begin until
the mid-1990s. The Cities for Climate Protection Programme was established by the

Transnationalism 155
International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) in 1993 to help cities

measure and manage their greenhouse gas emissions (Betsill and Bulkeley 2004).
A ‘“Cambrian explosion” in transnational climate change governance’ (Abbott 2012a)
occurred in the early 2000s. On the industry side, BP’s decision in 1997 to set up a pilot
scheme for emissions trading at the corporate level required a new system for measur-
ing, reporting and verifying carbon emissions. The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol,
supported by both industry and NGOs, was created in 1998 and released its first corpo-
rate standard for GHG accounting in 2001. Each group had begun to develop carbon
accounting standards separately but decided to join forces when they recognized the
disadvantages of creating competing rules. Indeed, the World Business Council for
Sustainable Development (WBCSD) became central in organizing corporate support for
a protocol. On the NGO side the US-based World Resources Institute (WRI) was the
key driving force behind the joint initiative (Green 2010, pp. 6–11).
A variety of carbon initiatives were also established in the early 2000s: the Carbon
Disclosure Project (2000) is now the major tool for corporate disclosure of CO2 emis-
sions; and the NGO-driven Gold Standard (2003) and the business-driven Verified
Carbon Standard (2005) are the most widely used standards for voluntary carbon offsets.
In addition, myriad governance efforts focus on aligning climate change mitigation activ-
ities with other policy goals such as biodiversity (Climate, Community & Biodiversity
Alliance 2003) or broader sustainability goals, including social criteria (Roundtable on
Sustainable Biomaterials 2007, Social Carbon 2008). Green (2013) shows that 30 different
standards were created between 2000 and 2009.
The emergence of transnational climate governance is a relatively recent phenome-
non, building on earlier developments in related policy fields. Transnational rule-making
on carbon disclosure, for instance, follows in the footsteps of corporate environmental
reporting as it has been developed by the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible
Economies (Ceres) and the GRI in the 1990s (Pattberg 2007). Ceres created its corporate
environmental reporting standard in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989,
leveraging investor influence to address environmental risks resulting from corporate
activities. These initiatives provided an intellectual and governance model for address-
ing corporate environmental risks, which facilitated similar responses of the investment
and insurance industries in later years (Pattberg 2012). More generally, the field of
transnational climate change regulation as a whole builds on the achievements of the
‘sustainability standards movement’ of the 1990s and 2000s which led to the spread of a
broad range of ‘non-state market-driven’ governance schemes for the sustainable man-
agement of forests, fisheries and agricultural commodities (Cashore 2002; Dingwerth
and Pattberg 2009a; Pattberg 2007). Schemes like the Forest Stewardship Council
(FSC) are thus relevant to climate governance not only as efforts to protect forests as a
greenhouse gas sink, but also as initiatives that proved that ‘non-state authority’ could
actually work.
Where?
The landscape of transnational climate governance schemes is fragmented and

decentralized: most organizations have been created from the bottom up by particular
groups of actors and pursue their individual goals with little if any central coordination

(Abbott 2012a). Abbott’s governance triangle that describes the transnational regime
complex on climate change includes 68 schemes. It shows that not only the func-
tions fulfilled, but also the relative involvement of states, civil society organizations
and firms varies greatly across schemes (Abbott 2012a). Substantially, most schemes
cover one or another facet of ‘carbon management’: including carbon offsetting (Gold
Standard, Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), The Climate, Community and Biodiversity
Alliance (CCBA), Social Carbon), carbon accounting (GHG Protocol), carbon perfor-
mance (Climate Neutral Network; Caring for Climate; BELC—Business Environmental
Leadership Council) or carbon reporting and disclosure (CDP). By contrast, trans-
national climate governance remains relatively silent on adaptation to climate change
(Anguelovski and Carmin 2011). Some schemes, however, focus instead on adapting to
the effects of climate change. For example, the Caring for Climate program, hosted by the
United Nations Global Compact, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), asks
corporate signatories to make significant climate-related commitments and includes
adaptation as a core area of activity.
Geographically, some global initiatives regulate the activities of multinational corpora-
tions active in many countries (e.g., the Carbon Disclosure Project), or link the activities
of actors in industrialized and developing countries (e.g., carbon offsetting under the
Verified Carbon Standard) (Bumpus and Liverman 2008; Okereke this volume). Most
transnational climate standards have originated in industrialized countries, though some-
times in multi-stakeholder initiatives that include Southern actors (Bulkeley et al. 2014,
ch. 6). An exception is the Social Carbon standard developed by the Brazilian Ecologica
Institute.
Why?
A common explanation for the emergence of transnational governance schemes has

been that they respond to ‘governance gaps.’ Where international governance fails, this
argument holds, transnational governance initiatives step in (Abbott 2012b, p. 548). At
first sight, this argument seems plausible: in areas already governed by international
rules, there may be little for transnational rules to add. Moreover, private governance
on other environmental issues seems to follow a similar pattern: transnational standards
on large dams, corporate sustainability reporting or responsible forest management
only m aterialized once attempts to reach consensus among governments had failed
(Dingwerth 2007).
Yet a simple account of the ‘governance gap thesis’ is misleading. First, ‘governance
gaps’ do not only result from the absence of international rules; instead, they may also
be created through international rules. This is, for instance, the case when international
rules sketch the broad contours for regulation in a given issue area, but leave significant
details unspecified. Second, ‘governance gaps’ are not objectively given, but need to
be constructed—and perceived by a significant community of actors—as such. Third,
even successfully constructed ‘governance gaps’ are no guarantee for transnational
regulatory activity. Instead, such activity requires a coalition of actors with the means
to organize transnational governance, sometimes against significant opposition from
other actors.

As a result, it is useful to organize explanations of transnational climate governance

around the concepts of demand and supply (Mattli and Woods 2009; Büthe and Mattli
2011; Green 2014). Put simply, demand-side explanations emphasize that transnational
governance schemes are created in response to the (private) interests of some groups of
actors in transboundary regulation in cases where such regulation cannot be supplied
by intergovernmental institutions, or only at very high costs. Environmental leaders in a
particular industry may thus benefit from stricter standards, and where such standards
cannot be agreed upon in intergovernmental settings, such actors may join or organize a
transnational regulatory project aimed at creating stricter rules.
Demand for transnational climate governance comes from multiple sources. First, the
creation of market mechanisms in the Kyoto Protocol has opened a new regulatory space
that lent itself particularly well to market actors. Second, as in other environmental areas
in which transnational governance flourished, the ‘variable involvement of nation-states
in climate cooperation’ facilitates transnational governance efforts since these can often
count on support from those states that wish to push governance further—or further
along a particular path (Andonova et al. 2009, pp. 57–58).
In contrast, supply-side arguments hold that transnational governance schemes are
mainly created by those seeking to expand the market for the products they offer (Abbott
2012b, pp. 555–556). An example would be the interests of auditing and certification
firms such as Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS) in creating markets for their ser-
vices (Green 2014, p. 166). At a more general level, successful supply of transnational
governance often requires resources held by different actors within civil society and the
business community (Abbott 2012a; Meckling 2011; Dingwerth and Pattberg 2009b).
As a result, the ability to build coalitions is crucial for the emergence and rise of trans-
national governance. Yet this ability is not self-evident, but depends on how different
actors ‘see the world.’ In the environmental realm, the rise of ‘liberal environmentalism’
(Bernstein 2001) and of ‘sustainability’ discourses provides a common platform for
formerly antagonistic actors to join forces or accept the efforts of the ‘other side’ as a
legitimate contribution to global climate governance (Pattberg 2007). Increasingly, these
coalitions have been created through the ‘orchestration’ of NGOs and private-sector
actors by international organizations (Abbott et al. 2015; Hale and Roger 2014; Zelli and
van Asselt this volume).
In sum, the rise of transnational climate governance has added further complexity,
but also further problem-solving potential to global climate governance (Abbott 2014;
Hoffmann 2011). Despite the rapid growth in governance schemes, not all initiatives have
been successful. The Carbon Neutrality Network sponsored by the UNEP, for instance,
closed in 2011 and encouraged its members to join one of three other networks with
similar functions (UNEP 2011). The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) terminated its
activities in the same year, due to the failure of US cap-and-trade regulation and the fore-
seeable failure of a meaningful post-Kyoto deal, which meant that the business model of
the initiative had become dysfunctional (Abbott 2012a). The first example reveals overlap
and competition between different governance schemes. It also points to some form of
consolidation of the governance field as schemes become aware of and interact with
each other (cf. Pattberg and Stripple 2008). The second example indicates that public
and private governance are connected more closely than the two terms suggest. In the
following, we look at these connections in more detail.

MAPPING INTERACTIONS
The shift from multilateral to transnational climate governance is accompanied by a

change in the types of interactions among actors. Whereas climate governance used to be
an interstate affair (see, e.g., Grubb et al. 1999; Barrett 2003), we increasingly see inter-
actions between different public actors, between public and private actors, and among
private actors.
The interactions among public actors have been catalogued elsewhere under various
labels. Keohane and Victor (2011) describe the ‘regime complex’ for climate change,
which involves myriad intergovernmental agreements and actors, from the UNFCCC to
the World Trade Organization. Biermann and colleagues (2009) describe the ‘coopera-
tive governance architecture’ of the climate regime, where multiple institutions focused
on climate are loosely integrated. There is a growing literature that describes substantive
and functional overlaps between climate and forestry, particularly in regards to reducing
emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) (see, e.g., McDermott et
al. 2011).
Less explored, however, are the relationships between public and private actors. We
describe four types of interactions within the transnational climate regime that encom-
pass both public and private actors at multiple levels of governance. In the first, private
governance initiatives gravitate to and build upon public ones. Following Tarrow’s (2001)
work, we dub this the ‘coral reef’ interaction. Second, private governance can serve as an
idea incubator, to be introduced at a later point into public rules and regulations. Third,
public and private actors may interact through delegation, in which public principals del-
egate to private agents. Finally, in instances of orchestration, intergovernmental organi-
zations guide non-state actors to achieve collective goals.
In the first type, public forms of governance serve as a ‘coral reef’ for private actors
(Tarrow 2001). Here, multilateral agreements and international organizations can become
the locus for complementary activities by private actors (Abbott et al. 2013; Green 2013).
The coexistence of the voluntary and compliance carbon markets serves as an example.
The compliance market for carbon offsets was created by the Kyoto Protocol and imple-
mented via the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM was set up in spite
of vehement civil society objections about possibilities for cheating and the potential
deleterious impacts on other environmental goals, such as biological diversity. A number
of civil society actors responded by becoming regulators in their own right, creating rules
to govern carbon offsets that provided benefits beyond emissions mitigation. These ‘co-
benefits’ included biodiversity and local economic development. These private offset pro-
viders jointly constitute the voluntary market, which coexists alongside the compliance
market, and is currently valued at US$379 million (Peters-Stanley and Gonzalez 2014).
Moreover, the public and private markets do not simply exist in parallel. Many private
standards build deliberately and directly on rules created under the CDM (Green 2013),
introducing the possibility of future interoperability among these standards. When nar-
rowly conceptualized as an intergovernmental arrangement, the voluntary market would
be excluded from the definition of climate governance; including transnational actors
such as private offsetters changes the scope of the governance landscape (Abbott 2012a;
Green 2013).
In a second type of interaction, private climate governance serves as an ‘idea

incubator’—an alternate venue to test out new ideas—for public governance (Kingdon
1995; Auld and Green 2012). Private forms of governance can provide an opportunity
to experiment with various governance solutions outside the intergovernmental arena
(Hoffmann 2011). In this view, private actors provide a different institutional approach,
which can coexist with other public responses. This alternative private conceptualization
can remain ‘dormant’ until the demand for a new solution arises and the extant, and
now-tested, solution is coupled to a problem (Kingdon 1995, pp. 172–175).
An example comes from the recently created Nationally Appropriate Mitigation
Actions (NAMAs). In 2007, parties to the UNFCCC decided that developing countries
could voluntarily undertake actions to reduce emissions, in a ‘nationally appropriate’
manner. To date, 57 countries have submitted an action plan to the secretariat.1 As their
name suggests, these plans include a wide variety of activities. NAMAs are an incremen-
tal advancement in the larger political project of reducing emissions in the developing
world. Developing countries have consistently objected to any policies that would require
them to reduce their emissions. As such, it is politically necessary that NAMAs are vol-
untary and can take any form that countries choose.
Despite their non-binding and diverse nature, some have recognized the utility in being
able to evaluate the effects of these actions. Understandably, states want to know whether
their policies are working, and such an evaluation requires measurement methodologies.
Moreover, any reductions achieved by the NAMAs would need to be quantified and
reported to the UNFCCC secretariat. But measuring is political. Evaluating the effects
of NAMAs is politically contentious, since it could lead to a more binding set of policies
on developing countries’ emissions—something they have vehemently contested since the
beginning of the negotiations in the early 1990s. Thus, despite some preliminary work in
the Subsidiary Body on Implementation, states have paid little attention to the question
of whether or how NAMAs will be evaluated.
Private actors, by contrast, have recognized the potential demand for measurement
tools to evaluate progress on NAMAs. The GHG Protocol has created numerous stand-
ards, including the aforementioned corporate standard. More recently, the mitigation
standard ‘provides guidance on tracking progress toward national and sub-national
GHG reduction goals.’2 In other words, this approach allows users to assess their progress
toward a reduction goal—however defined. Thus, a government that wishes to reduce its
energy intensity or achieve carbon neutrality would use this accounting tool. Although
developed countries that are party to the Kyoto Protocol have the tools to measure pro-
gress toward an overall national reduction goal, measurement standards for other types
of goals such as those mentioned have not been developed. Clearly, such a standard is
extremely relevant for the NAMAs, which will define reduction goals in a variety of ways.
States are a long way from agreeing on measurement and reporting of NAMAs. But
the Greenhouse Gas Protocol is now serving as an idea incubator: an apolitical venue
outside the intergovernmental arena where new tools can be developed without the
pressure of negotiations. It is instructive that the advisory committee for the mitigation
standard is comprised of governments, and has a representative from the UNFCCC
secretariat. There is implicit recognition that such rules might be useful for the intergov-
ernmental part of the climate change regime, and that the politics of that venue would
severely constrain the ability of states to agree upon them.3
A third type of interaction between public and private actors in the climate regime

occurs through delegation. In these instances, states either acting collectively or through
an international organization delegate specific tasks to private actors on agreed-upon
and revocable terms (Hawkins et al. 2006; Bradley and Kelley 2008). Perhaps the most
important instance of delegation to private actors in the climate regime is their role as
‘designated operational entities’ in the CDM. The CDM requires that each carbon offset
project be independently audited twice in its lifetime: at the beginning of the project, to
see whether estimated reductions are plausible, and at the end, to verify that the reduc-
tions have occurred. States decided to delegate this task to a third party. But instead of
choosing an international organization, they opted to delegate to private actors. When
designing the CDM, states decided that private actors would be the best suited for these
critical auditing duties for several reasons. Because any private actor that met the quali-
fying criteria could serve as an auditor, multiple private agents would be more efficient
than one international organization, which could quickly become backlogged. Moreover,
states believed that delegating to private actors would be less politicized, and therefore
allow the program to be up and running more quickly. Finally, they thought that private
firms, valuing their long-term reputations, would be less likely to engage in acts of cor-
ruption (Green 2008; Green 2014).
A fourth and final type of interaction is ‘orchestration,’ which ‘includes a wide range
of directive and facilitative measures designed to convene, empower, support, and steer
public and private actors engaged in regulatory activities’ (Abbott and Snidal 2009,
p. 510; Zelli and van Asselt this volume). Orchestration allows states and intergovern-
mental organizations (IGOs) to expand the breadth and impact of their activities by
working through non-state actors at multiple levels of governance (Abbott and Snidal
2010; Abbott et al. 2015). Although the literature on orchestration is relatively new,
there are already a number of documented cases related to climate change. The Caring
for Climate initiative is orchestrated by the UNEP and the Global Compact, and enlists
firms to develop low-carbon policies (Abbott and Snidal 2010, p. 332). The UNEP has
also launched a similar initiative, which encourages firms to commit to carbon neutral-
ity, and to share best practices with each other in order to reach that goal (Abbott and
Snidal 2010, p. 333). Hale and Roger (2014, p. 72) have compiled a database of trans-
national climate governance, in which roughly one-third can be viewed as instances of
orchestration. In general, they posit that orchestration emerges when states are incapable
of agreeing; when sub-and non-state actors have capacity to address a problem; when
orchestrators can help those actors overcome collective action problems; and when
orchestrators are predisposed to bottom up strategies.
IMPLICATIONS FOR SCHOLARSHIP AND POLICY PRACTICE
Global climate governance has become a very densely populated regulatory field in which
a host of multilateral and transnational regulatory schemes coexist in various forms. The
growth in institutional density gives rise to more interactions between public and private
authority, which require further study and explanation—both to advance scholarship
and the creation of effective climate policies.
First, it implies a need to better understand the interactions within ‘regime complexes’
such as the one for global climate governance (Abbott et al. 2013; Eberlein et al. 2014).

Many are quick to assume that the fragmentation of climate governance is undesirable,
but we have little evidence to support this claim. When and how do interactions among
regulatory schemes promote effective cooperation? The proliferation of rules raises
questions about the distribution of power. Does the growth in transnational climate
governance bring new sources of influence and expertise to the table (Orsini 2013), or
merely add to the power of the already powerful actors by allowing them to strategically
select between different institutional forums in which to pursue their ends (Busch 2007;
Urpelainen and Van de Graaf 2014)?
For policy practice, there are two key questions. First, will an à la carte approach
encourage reluctant actors to make incremental change? And second, how will this
complex governance landscape need to be ‘managed’ to ensure effective outcomes?
Recent evidence from the climate negotiations suggests that the answer to the first ques-
tion may be yes. However, the incremental progress we observe is a far cry from catalyz-
ing the more radical changes needed to avert dangerous levels of climate change. On the
second question, some are openly pessimistic about the prospect for avoiding dangerous
climate change altogether (Jamieson 2014). Others, however, suggest that re-organizing
intergovernmental organizations around the purpose of coordination (Abbott 2014) and
identifying, as some form of ‘principled pragmatism’ (Ruggie 2013), common principles
that guide different multilateral and transnational governance schemes might do the trick.
A liberal-institutionalist perspective like the one we have adopted in this chapter suggests
that both questions are closely linked: reluctant actors are more likely to engage if rules
are flexible. But for flexible rules to be accepted by the major actors, a common set of
principles is needed. In the end, our discussion of transnational climate governance thus
suggests that the free-rider problem could be overcome even in the absence of a grand
global bargain, provided that agreement on basic principles and directions is possible.
NOTES
1. As of February 18, 2014. See http://unfccc.int/focus/mitigation/items/7172.php.

2. See www.ghgprotocol.org/mitigation-accounting (accessed October 14, 2014).
3. Interview with Pankaj Bhatia, WRI, March 5, 2013.
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15. Vulnerability
Tim Forsyth
INTRODUCTION
The concept of vulnerability is a key site of climate governance because it refers to why
climate change matters, and who is affected. Policies to address the impacts of anthropo-
genic climate change therefore rely upon understandings of vulnerability. Increasingly,
climate impact, adaptation and vulnerability (CIAV) are discussed as mutually related
terms (Jones et al. 2014).
Climate vulnerability, however, is a controversial concept because different communi-
ties of analysts explain it in varying ways. For many physical scientists, vulnerability can
be indicated by predicting where weather events such as storms and floods will impact
upon ecosystems or sites of human activities such as cities or agriculture. Many social
scientists, on the other hand, argue that vulnerability reflects the varying ability of dif-
ferent societies to cope with these threats. In turn, these analysts argue that the definition
of vulnerability depends in part on how the parallel concepts of risk and resilience are
also defined (see Adler et al. this volume). Governing vulnerability to climate change,
therefore, is not simply identifying where risks will occur, and who is resilient—but
also in considering the implicit assumptions about risk and resilience that are used in
scientific assessments. In particular, there is a need to ask whether assessments of risk
make premature judgments about why societies are vulnerable to climate change, and
hence over-simplify the causes of vulnerability, or overlook diverse ways that people can
become resilient.
This chapter summarizes the debates within social science about vulnerability, and
then applies these to recent research about climate change. It then examines the implica-
tions of these approaches to ways of responding to vulnerability such as social resilience
or adaptive capacity, using the debate about susceptibility to violent conflict resulting
from climate change as a particular case study. The chapter argues that governing vulner-
ability to climate change must involve analyzing social inequalities and levels of develop-
ment, and then using this information in order to make more diverse risk assessments and
interventions to build resilience. By so doing, the chapter also provides complementary
insights to the other Handbook chapters on adaptation (Dilling this volume), knowledge
pluralism (Hulme this volume) and resilience (Adler et al. this volume).
VULNERABILITY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
The analysis of vulnerability within the social sciences has existed in relation to so-called
natural disasters (or disaster-risk reduction, DRR) and overall poverty before the debates
about climate change (Adger 2006; Fussel 2007; Hans-Martin and Klein 2006; Hofmann
et al. 2011). This research on vulnerability has often focused on two key questions.
164
Vulnerability 165
The first is whether vulnerability is driven by the distribution of physical events such
as floods, or the social characteristics of communities vulnerable to risks. The second
is whether social causes of vulnerability can be explained by broader structural trends
of history, political rights and economic development; or by a greater emphasis on the
agency of individual actors and societies to avoid risks.
For example, consider this definition of vulnerability by an environmental scientist:
‘Vulnerability refers to the potential for casualty, destruction, damage, disruption, or
other form of loss in a particular element: risk combines this with the probable level of
loss to be expected from a predictable magnitude of hazard’ (Alexander 2000, p. 13). This
definition presents vulnerability in very descriptive terms as potential damage resulting
from a physical hazard. Moreover, it presents ‘risk’ as the statistical outcome of com-
bining the magnitude of a hazard with vulnerability. These definitions do not offer any
further discussion concerning what might cause vulnerability. They also do not question
how different societies might consider hazards in different ways.
Now, compare that definition with another from some social and political scientists:
‘[Vulnerability is] the characteristics of a person or group and their situation that influ-
ence their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a
natural hazard’ (Wisner et al. 2004, p. 11). This definition, on the other hand, refers to the
‘characteristics of a person or group’ and therefore points to the social origins of vulner-
ability. This definition differs from the earlier one because it does not simply refer to the
statistical incidence of risk, but rather the social factors that can contribute to vulnerabil-
ity that might be innate to how societies are structured, rather than simply what economic
activities or assets might be damaged by hazards.
Yet, the origins of this kind of ‘social’ vulnerability, as it has become known, are also
controversial. Structuralist analysts have argued that ‘vulnerability is still produced in
and by society’ (Ribot 2014, p. 667)—and consequently structuralists have analyzed how
long-term political and economic trends can create situations where states or individuals
can lack the capacity to cope with environmental shocks such as storms or floods (Hewitt
1983; Ribot 1995). The ‘Pressure and Release’ model (Wisner et al. 2004), for example,
presents an analysis of hazards that acknowledges trends and ideologies of development
as well as shorter-term causes of vulnerability such as economic crisis or prolonged rain-
fall. Under this kind of analysis, for example, social vulnerability among pastoralists in
Morocco might refer to the role of French colonial rule that centralized political power in
coastal cities and saw migrant populations as threats to the established rule, and therefore
deprived them of formal property rights for land, or economic opportunities on the same
level as other citizens (Davis 2005).
More agency-based analyses, however, have emphasized the immediate steps that
poorer or more vulnerable populations can take to allow them to cope better with
hazards. The ‘Asset Vulnerability Framework’ (Moser 1998), for example, focuses on the
strategies used by poor urban communities to limit the extreme vulnerabilities associated
with poverty by carefully managing portfolios of assets such as housing, access to food
and water, employment and kinship in order to avoid acute or life-threatening short-
ages of basic needs. A similar approach has been used under Sustainable Livelihoods
Approaches (SLAs), which have designed ways for development agencies to reduce
vulnerability to economic or environmental shocks such as droughts or collapses in com-
modity prices by diversifying sources of income (Chambers and Conway 1992; Scoones

2009). These approaches have been inspired by the work of Amartya Sen, by identifying
ways to increase the capabilities (or options for development) for marginalized or vulner-
able people by increasing access to valued assets, or building communal ‘capitals’ such as
infrastructure, credit or education in order to make livelihood diversification easier, and
hence make households and individuals less reliant on one livelihood alone in the event
of a crisis (Adger and Kelly 1999).
A key additional theme of debate is also how far definitions of ‘hazards’ might
predefine who is at risk (Metternicht et al. 2014; Nkem et al. 2013; Shah et al. 2013).
Discourse analysts such as Bankoff (2001, p. 30) have argued that scientific risk
assessments and common understandings of hazards can ‘render the world unsafe’
by making universal assumptions about the threatening nature of hazards. Using
the example of the Philippines, he argues that ‘reducing vulnerability to a formulaic
expression that explains the way in which human activities affect the physical environ-
ment and increase the impact of hazard, if not the frequency of disaster, is to ignore
the important role that hazard has historically played in actually shaping human
culture’ (Bankoff 2001, p. 30). In the Philippines, many families have experienced death
or loss from volcanic eruptions, typhoons or floods. The purpose of this analysis is
not to suggest that risks should not be avoided, but to point out that many external
assessments of vulnerability are based on assumptions about chaos that do not match
local values.
Discourses might also influence how vulnerable people or social groups are defined.
One common belief, for example, is that specific social categories such as women and
children are more vulnerable than other social groups (Collins et al. 2013; Cutter 1995).
Yet, various scholars have argued that this essentialist approach to social vulnerability
overlooks the importance of socio-economic and political contexts that might increase or
decrease the vulnerability of these groups depending on conditions (Pelling 2011; Webber
2012). For example, societies where women have legitimate access to land and employ-
ment are more likely to have lower levels of vulnerability than those where livelihoods or
access to resources is more limited. Local institutions—or the rules that govern access
to key resources—can therefore be more important in controlling vulnerability than the
identity of people. There is a long history of cultural practices that allow different indig-
enous or other groups to control risks through sharing or regulating access to resources
(Batterbury and Forsyth 1999; Stringer et al. 2009). But there are also examples of com-
munal arrangements enhancing vulnerability. In Mexico, for example, one study showed
that private landowners with access to irrigation and land tenure were less vulnerable to
drought than farmers dependent on ejido (or communally-owned) land (Ibarrarán et al.
2010; Liverman 1999).
VULNERABILITY AND CLIMATE CHANGE
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines vulnerability as:

the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate
change, including climate variability and extremes. Vulnerability is a function of the character,
magnitude, and rate of climate change and variation to which a system is exposed, its sensitivity,
and its adaptive capacity.1

Vulnerability 167
This definition emphasizes the physical aspects of climate change rather than social
characteristics of communities that experience it. In effect, this statement demonstrates
how the definition of vulnerability also depends on a predefined model of risk that
links the nature of hazards to physical changes in the global atmospheric system. Some
analysts have called this model of risk the principle of ‘additionality,’ in the sense that
each incremental unit of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will contribute to
systemic changes that will drive climate change and extreme weather events around the
world (Burton 2009; Lemos and Boyd 2010). Indeed, the IPCC historically has empha-
sized a framework of understanding anthropogenic climate change largely through
climate modeling, which has produced a standard frame of reference from the global to
the regional level, involving scales and categories that are pre-given (Edwards 2010).
Increasingly, however, this coupling of a model of risk based on additionality with a
definition of vulnerability has been challenged by various analysts, and acknowledged by
Working Group 2 of the IPCC. Jones et al. note that:
The rational-linear process that identifies potential risks then evaluates management responses. . .
has been challenged on the grounds that it does not adequately address the diverse contexts
within which climate decisions are being made, often neglects existing decision-making pro-
cesses, and overlooks many cultural and behavioural aspects of decision-making. (Jones et al.
2014, p. 199; see also Dovers 2009; Smit and Wandel 2006)
These criticisms are matters for governance because they indicate that solutions to the
risks posed by anthropogenic climate change require a broader set of activities and con-
sultation with people at risk than focusing on the projected climatic impacts resulting
from increases greenhouse gas concentrations. As structuralist analysts such as Ribot
(2010, p. 47) have noted, ‘vulnerability does not just come from the sky’: instead there is
a need to consider the longer-term implications of socio-economic marginalization such
as within developing countries.
Observations such as these also indicate a growing topic of analysis within climate
risk: the extent to which expert organizations and policy advisers define risk, and the
extent to which these definitions reduce the range of possibilities for understanding the
diversity of risk and response (Jasanoff 2010). For example, Lemos and Boyd (2010) have
argued that the principle of additionality reduces attention to locally significant adap-
tive strategies: ‘Through additionality, adaptation policy at the global level divides and
circumscribes processes that are indivisible at the local level and, in practice, disables the
opportunities for complementarities and synergies in adapting to climate change’ (Lemos
and Boyd 2010, p. 97).
Burton (2009, p. 89) has also argued that definitions of risk can also shape approaches
to managing vulnerability. According to him, the model of additionality inspires ‘pollu-
tionist’ approaches to adaptation to climate change, which seek to reduce vulnerability by
addressing the immediate climatic impacts of additional greenhouse gas concentrations
such as storms and floods. Some examples of ‘pollutionist’ approaches to adaptation
include building sea walls, storm shelters, or other forms of climate-resilience infrastruc-
ture. It is important to acknowledge the value of these activities as one of various steps to
reduce the immediate impact of extreme weather events on vulnerable people. But critics
have also argued that these forms of adaptation define vulnerability in terms of the addi-
tional physical hazards resulting from anthropogenic climate change, rather than from

deeper social or structural origins of vulnerability, or ‘development deficit’ (Schipper

2006; Narain et al. 2011).
As an alternative form of adaptation, Burton (2009, p. 89) refers to the so-called ‘devel-
opment’ approach to adaptation, which seeks ‘to incorporate adaptation to climate in
development planning and implementation.’ These forms of adaptation might include
actions such as livelihood diversification, increasing other forms of social safety nets,
or integrating adaptation to climate change with disaster risk reduction (Huq and Ayers
2008; Pachauri et al. 2004; Preston et al. 2011).
But there is also evidence that the ‘pollutionist’ approach to adaptation might restrict
more diverse forms of ‘development’ adaptation. For example, the online glossary
released with the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (sections 5.5.1–5.5.2) differentiates
between ‘planned’ and ‘autonomous adaptation.’ Planned adaptation refers to deliberate
interventions to anticipate anthropogenic climate change. Autonomous (or spontaneous)
adaptation is ‘adaptation that does not constitute a conscious response to climatic stimuli
but is triggered by ecological changes in natural systems and by market or welfare changes
in human systems.’2 Autonomous adaptation might include practices such as altering
agricultural inputs, introducing water-managing technologies, altering cropping cycles
or diversifying economic activities. The glossary states that these responses can be based
on pre-existing ‘risk-management or production-enhancement activities,’ but which ‘have
substantial potential to offset negative climate change impacts and take advantage of
positive ones’ (see note 2).
But the distinction between planned and autonomous adaptation has been questioned.
For example, much research on problems such as dryland degradation or soil erosion in
developing countries has argued that adaptive responses at the local level are not simply
driven by environmental changes per se, but in how physical changes such as desiccation
or erosion present hazards for vulnerable people’s livelihoods and assets (Kuruppu 2009).
In another example, in Thailand research suggested that planned adaptation to climate
change could actually reduce local smallholders’ ability to diversify livelihoods because
environmental policies sought to reduce the extent of upland agriculture (Forsyth and
Evans 2013). Adaptation therefore need not only include practices that lessen impacts of
climate change on currently productive resources, but also comprise forms of livelihood
diversification that de facto make the impacts of these changes less threatening to sources
of income (Leichenko and Silva 2014; Olsson et al. 2014). Debates in development
studies have suggested that climate adaptation among vulnerable populations ‘should be
done with a deeper awareness of the social, economic, cultural, and political factors that
frame their actions, incentives, opportunities, and limitations for action’ (Christoplos et
al. 2009, p. 3), and that ‘adaptation always has, and arguably should, refer to more than
just responses to climate change’ (Sabates-Wheeler et al. 2008, p. 53).
Similarly, the World Bank’s Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR) has sought
to invest in infrastructure and long-term development projects to reduce local and
national vulnerability to climate change in developing countries. Yet, research on the
PPCR’s activities in Nepal found that there were significant differences in how local
people identified vulnerability. For example, villagers were reported as saying that the
inability to access medical supplies during floods was more important than simply having
a conduit to channel excess water (Ayers et al. 2011). This kind of research should not
be interpreted as criticizing long-term infrastructure development or the need to protect

Vulnerability 169
people against extreme storms and floods. But it does indicate that assessments of risk
can also influence how vulnerable people are defined, and which adaptive strategies are
proposed. Yet these definitions of risk and response can be diversified to achieve better
relevance for people affected by extreme events, and can even sometimes ignore the most
pertinent local risks.
Critics have also argued that climate risk assessments are sometimes gender-blind, or
carry assumptions about gender roles that also predefine understandings of vulnerability
(Cote and Nightingale 2012; Kronsell this volume). For example, Arora-Jonsson (2011,
p. 744) has argued that policies to reduce vulnerability to climate change by building local
resilience can imply increasing women’s workloads to benefit households without acknowl-
edging how additional responsibilities might impact on women’s health. The implication
of this kind of research is that policy approaches to vulnerability can sometimes be pre-
determined by assumptions about risk. Climate governance, therefore, needs to consider
those assumptions when deliberating about potential solutions to vulnerability—and
incorporate diverse perspectives into the identification of risk and response.
EXAMPLE: VULNERABILITY AND THE RISK OF VIOLENT

CONFLICT
The debate about vulnerability is illustrated by predictions of violent conflict following

climate change. Famously, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon (2007) claimed that
the conflict in Darfur in Sudan is the world’s first ‘climate war.’ This statement was based
on a report published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which
stated:
UNEP’s analysis shows that there is a very strong link between land degradation, desertification
and conflict in Darfur. Northern Darfur—where exponential population growth and related
environmental stress have created the conditions for conflicts to be triggered and sustained by
political, tribal or ethnic differences—can be considered a tragic example of the social break-
down that can result from ecological collapse. Long-term peace in the region will not be possible
unless these underlying and closely linked environmental and livelihood issues are resolved.
(UNEP 2007, p. 95)
This report also states that deserts in Sudan and the Sahel have spread southwards by an
average of 100km over the past four decades, linked to an explosion of livestock during
this period from some 27 million to 135 million on fragile soils. This report also cites
climate models that predict long-term declines in agricultural productivity for the Sahel:
The scale of historical climate change as recorded in Northern Darfur is almost unprecedented:
the reduction in rainfall has turned millions of hectares of already marginal semi-desert grazing
land into desert. The impact of climate change is considered to be directly related to the conflict
in the region, as desertification has added significantly to the stress on the livelihoods of pasto-
ralist societies, forcing them to move south to find pasture. (UNEP 2007, p. 60)
Other reports using large- scale regression analysis have also suggested that violent
conflict can be predicted from future anthropogenic climate change. For example, one
large study found that land degradation, freshwater scarcity, population density and

deforestation increase the risk of civil conflict (Hauge and Ellingsen 1998). This paper
used secondary, national-scale statistics of factors such as forest cover, soil degradation,
visible forms of conflict and the type of democracy within each country. Another quan-
titative analysis used historical temperature records in order to predict changes in the
incidence of civil war in Africa under future climate change, using climate projections
from 20 general circulation models that have contributed to the World Climate Research
Program’s Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 (Burke et al. 2009). The
authors’ conclusions are dramatic—arguing that the dangers of temperature increases
far outweigh any potentially offsetting effects such as strong economic growth and
continued democratization.
These studies, however, are questioned by a variety of analysis that considers the adap-
tive capacity of locations affected by climatic changes, and the assumptions that these
earlier studies make (Black et al. 2011; Peluso and Watts 2001). There are also explicit
studies based on local empiricism (rather than modeling) that have referred to how
adaptive changes have avoided conflict (Hartmann 2010). For example, one study found
that there was less social violence in northern Kenya during times of drought and water
scarcity than during periods of relatively higher rainfall (Adano et al. 2012; Witsenburg
and Roba 2007). This study supports the findings of the work above that suggested cattle
raiding increased when vegetation was relatively more abundant. This study also pointed
to the role of local common property regimes. Another study in northern Senegal from
1998 to 2002 found that drought-related migration among pastoralists also encouraged
better and more responsive institutions, or shared behavior concerning adaptation to
scarcity (Juul et al. 2003).
The point of this kind of analysis is to indicate that discussions of vulnerability to
climate change increasingly need to consider the underlying assumptions about risk and
resilience before vulnerability can be analyzed. Indeed, some analysts have explicitly
argued against the representation of the Darfur conflict as a ‘climate war’ (Kevane and
Gray 2008). They overtly criticize the United Nations for arguing that Darfur’s crisis
can be explained in terms of climate change, and especially reductions in rainfall. They
point out that commentators who suggest a climate change explanation for the Darfur
conflict rarely present data to validate their claims, and instead rely on the assumption
that Darfur is part of the Sahel, an area where rainfall has been low, variable and in
decline. The authors argue that discussing rainfall as a cause of conflict reduces attention
to questions of responsibility by the Sudanese government, as well as more agency-based
approaches to enhancing local adaptive capacity.
CONCLUSION: CONNECTING CLIMATE GOVERNANCE TO

CLIMATE VULNERABILITY
Vulnerability remains a crucial theme for climate governance for the significant reason
that millions of people and ecosystems across the world will be affected negatively—and
possibly catastrophically—by anthropogenic climate change. The criticisms of current
debates about vulnerability to climate change summarized above should not be inter-
preted as a suggestion that vulnerability is unimportant. Rather, it is all the more crucial
that vulnerability is understood in an inclusive and relevant way.

Vulnerability 171
Already, the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC Working Group 2 has acknowledged
that risks posed by anthropogenic climate change are mediated through socio-economic
and political influences on vulnerability. As part of this, Jones et al. (2014, p. 214) have
urged attention to so-called ‘triplewin’ interventions where adaptation, mitigation, and
sustainable development goals are integrated within climate-resilient development. This
kind of analysis shows significant advances over older, pollutionist models of risk that
locate climate risks within additional atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. But it
is worth noting that the overarching emphasis of the IPCC Working Group 1 (the physi-
cal science of climate change) is on incremental greenhouse gases; and this principle is
still widely adopted within public policy debates such as the examples involving violent
conflict and climate change discussed above. Rather than suggest that there is a clearly
demarcated and permanent division in how social and physical scientists see vulnerability
to climate change, it is more useful to see these perspectives as changeable. Indeed, land-
use scientists have acknowledged that vulnerability can be multi-causal, as well as influ-
enced by local contexts (Turner 2010; Turner et al. 2003). Moreover, it is widely noted,
as Adger (2006, p. 268) says: ‘The concept of a social-ecological system reflects the idea
that human action and social structures are integral to nature and hence any distinction
between social and natural systems is arbitrary.’
Climate governance is therefore increasingly engaged with vulnerability to climate
change through discussing how the definition of risk and vulnerability are co-related;
but also in terms of how—and with whose involvement—science and policy identify
these terms. Climate governance needs to consider how far policy approaches to vulner-
ability (and similarly, concepts of resilience and adaptation) are linked to tacit models
of risk; and how and why models of risk remain influential and unchallenged within
certain contexts (Cuevas 2011). It is significant, for example, that organizations engaged
in international development have started to embrace community-based adaptation to
climate change (which overtly seeks local perspectives of risk and response from vulner-
able people), whereas the UNEP and some well-known environmental groups such as
the Worldwatch Institute tend to represent risks of climate change in terms of additional
greenhouse gases. The pre-existing objectives and policy contexts of different organiza-
tions can therefore influence which models of risk and vulnerability are used side-by-side
(Smit et al. 1999).
For example, governance can be integrated with assessments of both risk and vulner-
ability simultaneously such as through community-based adaptation, or by acknowl-
edging diverse social values within vulnerability assessments (Malone and Engle 2011;
O’Brien and Wolf 2010). These activities draw from pre-existing debates about citizen
science (asking citizens to become informants and advisers), as well as participatory
approaches to understanding livelihoods and poverty (Preston et al. 2011; Sabates-
Wheeler et al. 2008). It also requires greater public scrutiny of how experts and scientific
organizations present coupled models of risk and vulnerability tacitly and without public
challenge (Machin 2013).
The challenge for climate governance, therefore, is not simply to ensure that vulnerable
people are protected by climate change policies. Rather, there is also a need to understand
how, and on what basis, people and places are considered to be vulnerable. This form of
governance can take place within local scientific assessments of vulnerability, in larger
expert organizations, and in public debates about climate change policy.

NOTES
1. www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/annexessglossary-p-z.html.
2. www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/annexessglossary-a-d.html.
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16. Climate skepticism*
Reiner Grundmann
Climate skepticism has caused much interest in the climate change debate, especially
among those who want to foster ambitious climate policies. The presence of skeptical
voices in the media has been identified as a cause for timid policy responses (see, for
example, Cook et al. 2013). Climate activists and mainstream climate scientists criticize
what they perceive as over-representation of skeptics in the mainstream media. One
could argue that climate change skepticism has become a scapegoat for failed climate
policies. In this chapter I demonstrate how the noble principle of scientific skepticism has
become a bad word in the context of climate change.
I present data about the changing use and meaning of the term ‘skeptic’ in the English
language press, focusing mainly on the US. I will use the New York Times (NYT) as the
main source for the empirical analysis. The NYT is the newspaper of record in the US
(Martin and Hansen 1998) and an important opinion leader, politically leaning towards
the left-liberal spectrum. My focus is on the US because this is an important country in
the industrialized West in which climate science and policy were discussed relatively early
(Grundmann and Krishnamurthy 2010, p. 131) and in which skeptical voices have been
heard in the media for a long time (Grundmann 2007). The US has also been reluctant to
embrace global climate policy targets. The reason for this is often seen in the strength of a
Republican Party that resists climate change mitigation policies. The association between
party support and climate change concern is well documented (see, e.g., Saad 2014). The
US shows an adversarial style of policymaking (Löfstedt et al. 2001) in which the two
main parties mobilize experts at Congress hearings where they are cross-examined. Many
issues about health and the environment have thus seen a contestation of the scientific
knowledge base, with witnesses lined up according to political platforms. Climate change
is a prime example for such a politicization of science (Fisher et al. 2012). This suggests
that the political sphere structures the debate, even reaching into scientific practices.
This structure, established in the US, has influenced contemporary climate change dis-
course suggesting a rift between those who think there is serious cause for concern and
those who think there is no real threat and that we should wait and see. However, there are
many shades in between where science, politics and values do not line up neatly (Hulme
2009). The antagonistic nature of the debate makes these voices seem less important.
TERMINOLOGY
An important aspect is the terms we attribute to the protagonists. There seems to be

no commonly accepted way of labeling the groups in the debate. Not everyone criti-
cal of mainstream climate science and/or policy would wear the skeptic badge with
honor. Skeptics, in turn, call some mainstream positions ‘alarmist,’ which again is often
rejected as an insult. There are skeptical views about climate science (e.g., attribution
175
and predictions about anthropogenic warming), about the institutionalization of expert

advice (e.g., the role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC), and
about the politics of climate change (e.g., the Kyoto Process). However, the term ‘skeptic’
seems to be used in a rather undifferentiated way, often implicitly assuming that being
skeptical about one aspect means being a skeptic about all (Capstick and Pidgeon 2014).
As Victor (2014, p. 1) points out, ‘calling people who disagree “denialists” is clouding
our judgment. If you really want to understand what motivates these people and what
motivates the captains of industry and voters who listen to them, stop calling them
denialists.’ He then distinguishes three types of denial: industry shills, skeptics, and
hobbyists. Shills are professional policy delayers, skeptics are scientists like Freeman
Dyson (the eminent physicist), and hobbyists are mainly active in the blogosphere.
Inspired by this typology I show that the skeptical discourse as represented in the NYT
unfolds in four different stages, which can be labeled benign skepticism (before 1997),
shilling (1997–2002), denial (after 2001) and hobbyism (after 2005). I argue that political
events were associated with these discursive shifts.
Before my in-depth qualitative examination of the NYT, I first present summary quan-
titative data from English language newspapers and the NYT in the LexisNexis database.
NEWSPAPER REPORTING
Let us start with a frequency distribution of the terms ‘skeptic’ and ‘denier/denial’ in the
English language newspaper archive LexisNexis from 1970 to 2013. On average, about 6
percent of articles about global warming or climate change mention the term ‘skeptic,’
mostly in Australian, UK, Canadian and US papers (3.5 percent use the term ‘denier/
denial’).1 About 5 percent of NYT articles on the subject make reference to skeptics, 2.6
percent to ‘denier/denial.’
Figures 16.1 and 16.2 show levels of reporting about ‘global warming’ or ‘climate
change’ in major papers and the NYT. While stories in major papers peak in 2007, the
NYT peaks in 2009. The terms ‘sceptic*/skeptic*’ were on the rise until 2009 and then
diminished in line with the general level of reporting on this issue. Similar trends are seen
with ‘denial’ which rose from 2005–2010.
Unfortunately LexisNexis does not hold a reliable archive as it contains many
duplicates and misses others. There were 89 occurrences of ‘skeptic*’ and 39 ‘denier*/
denial*’ in NYT-Lexis, but 166 and 29 respectively in the NYT archive.
I therefore decided to access the NYT archive (using ProQuest, despite its shorter
coverage, which stops in 2010), searching for stories containing the terms ‘global

warming’ or ‘climate change.’ This search yielded 6,352 articles between 1970 and 2010,
of which 425 carried one of the terms in the headline and 57 of those appeared on the
front page. Eight articles mentioned ‘skeptic’ in the headline, three on the front page.
I selected articles that appeared at key junctures, giving special attention to the early
years of the debate (1981–1997), which arguably influenced later developments.2 In what
follows I shall describe the semantic change that occurred over time and offer some
explanatory speculation in the conclusion.

Climate skepticism 177
GW/CC Major World Newspapers (English) Skeptic/denier

7,000 700
Global Warming/Climate Change
6,000 600
GW/CC + skeptic*/sceptic*
5,000 GW/CC + denier*/denial* 500
4,000 400
3,000 300
2,000 200
1,000 100
0 0
1970–1990
1991–2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
Note: Major world newspapers (English), LexisNexis. Moderate similarity setting for duplicates. Excluding
newswires, articles with fewer than 500 words, websites, non-business articles.
Figure 16.1 Major world newspapers: frequency of ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’

(at start of article) and ‘skeptic*/sceptic*’ or ‘denier*/denial*’ (anywhere)
‘BENIGN’ SKEPTICISM (PRE-1997)
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a skeptic as someone
who doubts the validity of what claims to be knowledge in some particular department of
inquiry (e.g. metaphysics, theology, natural science, etc.); popularly, one who maintains a doubt-
ing attitude with reference to some particular question or statement. Also, one who is habitually
inclined rather to doubt than to believe any assertion or apparent fact that comes before him; a
person of sceptical temper. (OED 2015)
My news analysis shows that a change in meaning occurred slowly over time. In the early
period (1981–1997), the OED definition is very much present. In 1981 the NYT science
writer Walter Sullivan covered a report by seven ‘federal scientists’ who claim to have
found a warming trend in the earth’s temperature extending back to 1880 (NYT, August
22, 1981). They predict a global warming of almost ‘unprecedented magnitude’ in the
next century. This might even be ‘sufficient to melt and dislodge the ice cover of West
Antarctica . . . eventually leading to a worldwide rise of 15 to 20 feet in the sea level.’
The forecast is based on computer simulations projecting a temperature rise by 5–9°F in
the twenty-first century.
Sullivan mentioned that the scientists countered an outspoken skeptic regarding the
carbon dioxide threat, Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, who believes ‘that a doubling or tripling of

GW/CC New York Times Skeptic/denier

300 35
NYT Global warming/Climate Change
NYT GW/CC + skeptic* 30
250
NYT GW/CC + denier*
25
200
20
150
15
100
10
50
5
0 0
1970–1990
1991–2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
Note: New York Times, LexisNexis. Moderate similarity setting for duplicates. Excluding newswires, articles
with fewer than 500 words, websites, non-business articles.
Figure 16.2 The New York Times: frequency of ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ (at
start of article) and ‘skeptic*/sceptic*’ or ‘denier*/denial*’ (anywhere)
atmospheric carbon dioxide would have little effect except to increase agricultural pro-
ductivity by 20 to 50 percent.’ The term ‘skeptic’ is used in a neutral way, denoting doubt
about the validity of a knowledge claim. We can see some early markers for the debate
which came to stick around until the present day: the question of a temperature trend; the
role of carbon dioxide (CO2) and the consequences of continued, perhaps increased emis-
sions; the computer models that predict impacts; the possible dissolution of Antarctic ice
and its effects on sea level rise. Even the question of CO2 uptake by plants has not been
laid to rest, as recent studies illustrate (McGrath 2014). In sum, the term ‘skeptic’ was not
only not used pejoratively but also had not yet settled into meaning skepticism towards
anthropogenic global warming as noted above.
On October 23, 1983 the NYT reported that the ‘greenhouse effect has still its skep-
tics. A major embarrassment for the theory is that the carbon dioxide content in the
atmosphere has been steadily rising for the last 25 years, yet the predicted warming
has not definitely appeared.’ The article makes reference to two reports, one from the
National Academy of Sciences (NAS), co-authored by economists William Nordhaus
and Thomas Schelling (who emphasize the potential for adaptation with regard to sea

level rise and crop growth), the other by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
which said that ‘a soberness and sense of urgency should underlie our response to a
greenhouse warming.’ The NAS by contrast stated: ‘There is little urgency for reductions
in CO2 emissions below an uncontrolled path before ad 1990’ (NYT, October 21, 1983).
President Reagan’s science advisor welcomed the NAS report but called the EPA report
‘alarmist’—one of the first instances of this term in news reports about climate change.
A few weeks later, geoscientist Michael Oppenheimer takes both reports to task,
arguing that both assume ‘little can be done to forestall this climatic change and that
Government efforts should focus on adaptation.’ He thinks this amounts to ‘throwing in
the towel in round one’ (NYT, November 9, 1983). Oppenheimer uses the word ‘skeptical’
in connection to the NAS report as follows: ‘The Academy report is skeptical about the
desirability of fossil fuel substitutes but it presents no analysis of the cost of not prevent-
ing climate change’ (emphasis in original). Oppenheimer was to become an influential
voice in the unfolding debate, and IPCC lead author. He points to the desirability of a
full cost–benefit analysis, which arguably reached peak attention only 23 years later with
the publication of the Stern Review in 2006.
On June 24, 1988, James Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) made his famous witness statement at a Congress hearing saying that that global
warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases was already underway.
The NYT reported this on the same day in its late edition, giving no space to skeptical
voices, only mentioning that ‘[s]ome scientists still argue that warmer temperatures in
recent years may be a result of natural fluctuations rather than human-induced changes’
(‘Global warming has begun, expert tells Senate’). Patrick Michaels, then a professor of
environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and still a leading climate skeptic
today, countered in the Washington Post six months later (January 8, 1989) that ‘of the
hundred-odd scientists in the world actively involved in the study of long-term climate data,
only one—James Hansen of NASA—has stated publicly that there is a “high degree of
cause and effect” between current temperatures and human alteration of the atmosphere.’
Meanwhile Philip Shabecoff wrote (NYT, July 19, 1988) that ‘[s]ome Government
officials and scientists are skeptical about the human ability and will to make the kinds
of broad adjustments necessary to make a substantial reduction in the pace of global
warming.’ The focus is on two different positions, laid out by Irving Mintzer and Lester
Lave, who advocate no-regret policies and caution that policies would need public
support. The skepticism expressed here refers to the technological and economic dimen-
sions of climate change, the emphasis on public support being another mainstay of
the debate ever since.
In early 1989, Stephen Schneider was quoted as saying ‘All the scientists look at the
same data, provided by each other’s models and by climate records. But some read the
data more cautiously than others. Different scientists will retain or shed their scepticism
in different degrees and at different times’ (NYT, February 7, 1989). Again, the skeptical
attitude is seen as legitimate, not a worrying or devious proposition. In late 1989, NYT
journalist William Stevens focused on the dissent amongst scientists, noting that of an
estimated 300 scientists engaged in ‘serious climatic research,’
many of them, perhaps the majority, have not taken a firm position in the debate; they say that
while the greenhouse theory is valid in general, there are too many uncertainties about its future

effects. Both of the other factions – those who believe global warming to be a clear and definite
threat and those who say there is likely to be no significant warming – appear to be in a minority.
Authorities . . . can be found in all three groups. (NYT, December 13, 1989)
The article sets the arguments of the group Stevens termed ‘dissenters’ (such as
Patrick Michaels and Richard Lindzen) against those he called ‘defenders’ (James
Hansen, Michael Oppenheimer and Stephen Schneider). For instance, when Michaels
emphasized uncertainty and expense—‘If the policy is going to be that expensive, the
science should be much less murky than it is now’—the opposite view was also given:
‘“My feeling is that the uncertainty will always remain,” said Syukuro Manabe. “We have
to make decisions based on uncertain information . . . I don’t think we have any other
choice”’ (NYT, December 13, 1989).
This position, despite its obvious truth in virtually all policy arenas, turned out to
become marginal in the developing climate debate where both believers and skeptics
assumed that more research could resolve major uncertainties. But as time went on, they
were neither able to resolve the uncertainties nor to overcome their disagreements. If
anything, disagreement became more pronounced (see Sarewitz 2004).
In April 1990, the NYT reports about a ‘team of scientists’ that sees ‘substantial
warming of Earth’ and writes: ‘Assembled by the United Nations in an attempt to arrive
at an international consensus on global warming, a team of scientists says it is a “virtual
certainty” that the temperature of the earth’s surface will rise substantially in the next
century’ (NYT, April 16, 1990). This is a reference to the first report of the IPCC:
The scientists generally agree with the theory that has been largely accepted by other national
and international panels: that energy trapped in a greenhouse effect by industrial gases will
warm the earth by 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit within the next 60 years. A number of scientists,
though, have raised doubts about the theory and about models of climatic change on which it is
based. Skeptics call the model inaccurate or incomplete. (NYT, April 16, 1990)
Reporting on the second IPCC report, Stevens returns to the issue of mainstream versus
skeptic camps, saying:
While some environmentalists and their allies have long believed potentially catastrophic
human-induced climate change to be a fact, and some political conservatives and industry
groups have been skeptical, experts in the mainstream of climate science have never confirmed
either view. (NYT, September 19, 1995, emphasis added)
Early in 1996, Stevens covers the issue of record global temperatures on the front page
(‘95 is hottest year on record as the global trend resumes,’ 4 January 1996). Interestingly,
he describes James Hansen as ‘one of only a few scientists to maintain steadfastly that
a century-long global warming trend is being caused by human influence.’ The IPCC
panel and other scientists quoted in the article (Tom Wigley and Phil Jones) are fairly
circumspect with regard to the question if a trend has been established and what could
have caused it. The article quotes satellite data analysis by Roy Spencer and John Christy,
two scientists usually located in the ‘skeptical camp,’ in a non-judgmental way. The article
does not refer to them as skeptics; in fact Christy is quoted countering skeptical views.
Just before the Kyoto summit, another front page piece covered the solar influence on
climate under the headline ‘Is global warming tied to solar storms?’ (NYT, September 23,

1997) quoting skeptical scientists Brian Tinsley and Sallie Baliunas, among others. The
article presents their views in a fairly detailed way, without any recrimination. This period
(1981–1997) featured several themes that were defined in the earlier stages of the debate:
the temperature trend; the role of increased CO2 emissions; computer models; growing
or shrinking ice caps; sea level rise; CO2 uptake by plants; economic cost; and feasibility
of alternatives. Record temperatures and the role of the sun can be added to the list. The
path-dependent nature of the debate is vindicated by the presence of early protagonists
who remained visible in the coming decades: Stephen Schneider, James Hansen and
Michael Oppenheimer, and the skeptical Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels. The
legitimacy of skeptical scientists was not called into question in any of the articles up to
this time.
SHILLS: SKEPTICISM AS INDUSTRY PR (1997–2002)
Perhaps the first prominent example of equating skeptics with industry shills comes in
the book The Heat is On, written by Ross Gelbspan (1997), an American writer and
activist. Mark Hertsgaard reviewed it under the headline ‘Hot air: the debate over climate
change, the author says, stems from a strategic PR campaign’:
Step 1 in the industry campaign was to offer financial backing to a handful of academics who
have disputed the conclusions of the 2,500 scientists of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. Step 2 was to demand, on grounds of equal time, that these so-called
‘greenhouse skeptics’ be allowed to make their case before Congressional committees and news
organizations. . . . Gelbspan ably dissects the flimsy sophistry employed by greenhouse s keptics.
He rightly wonders, given substantial evidence that the skeptics are wrong, why so many news
stories still quote them.3 (NYT, August 3, 1997)
This article raised the stakes considerably. Here we see the term ‘skeptic’ taking on a new
meaning. They are ‘so-called skeptics,’ not real skeptics.4 They are funded by industry and
thus have a monetary interest in spreading misinformation. They have nothing to con-
tribute on the level of knowledge creation and are simply ‘wrong.’ This line of reasoning
has become another staple of contemporary debate where the association of individuals
with specific organizations or funding sources is seen as a good enough reason to devalue
the arguments put forward.
The issue of equal amount of media attention has also become a mainstay ever since,
especially as these skeptics are only a ‘handful’ compared with the 2,500 scientists of the
IPCC. This is in contrast to Stevens’ comments cited above (which appeared in 1989 and
1995) in which the ‘majority’ had no firm view. Now almost everyone is on the consen-
sus side. The minority is now delegitimized, rather than seen as similar in numbers to
the ‘convinced.’ The book review also finds this kind of skepticism to be without any
legitimacy and urges that media should pay no attention. The issue of creating ‘false
symmetry’ has become another topic which has not gone away (see Boykoff and Boykoff
2004; Boykoff 2007; Grundmann and Scott 2014). The book review deplores the fact that
skeptics are ‘allowed to make their case before Congressional committees,’ oblivious of
the fact that this is the US style of policymaking.
How to explain this escalation? It seems obvious that the stakes became higher in the

run up to the United Nations (UN) climate conference in Kyoto when the US pondered
its options. Climate change became subject to an intensifying partisan political debate
with the Democrats and Republicans using this issue to gain political capital. While the
Clinton government signed the Kyoto Protocol, this meant little in practice. In July 1997
the US Senate had adopted a resolution brought by Republican senator Charles Hagel
and Democrat Robert Boyd demanding that the US should not sign a treaty that does
not require developing countries to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This
bipartisan initiative, despite its non-binding nature, was unanimously adopted. It defined
the stance of the US in global climate policy until today.
A cover story on April 26, 1998 entitled ‘Industrial group plans to battle climate treaty’
revealed industry documents obtained by the NYT showing plans by a fossil fuel lobby
group to undermine the official IPCC reports. They perceived the Clinton administration
as trying to implement Kyoto policies. Frederick Seitz and Fred Singer are mentioned as
the ‘plan’s advocates’ with an aim to ‘identify, recruit and train a team of five independ-
ent scientists to participate in media outreach’ (NYT, April 26, 1988). Their detractors
hoped that this plan would be undermined by its publication, and people would associate
the fossil fuel lobby tactics with that of the tobacco industry.
One could see the activity of critics of the mainstream science as an important element
of the scientific endeavor, following the norms of science as postulated by Robert Merton
(1973).5 This role is widely accepted during this time period and mainstream scientists
and journalists often use the term ‘so-called skeptics’ to indicate that these people are not
really performing the role as envisaged by Merton but have a non-scientific agenda. Of
course, such a claim will, sooner or later, draw the attention to hidden political agendas
on the ‘other side’ in the debate as well.
Lobby groups have also organized skepticism, which is evident from groupings such
as the Global Climate Coalition (1989–2002), the Heartland Institute (founded in 1984)
or the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC, founded in
2004). Fred Singer, a passionate skeptic in many environmental disputes (Oreskes and
Conway 2012) prepared an NIPCC report called Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the
Climate, which was published in 2008 by the Heartland Institute. There are several other
skeptical outfits, often called ‘think tanks,’ such as the Cato Institute or the Heritage
Foundation.
McCright and Dunlap (2003) documented the lobbying activities of such conserva-
tive think tanks in the USA. Dunlap was quoted in the NYT with a statement about the
Heartland conference in 2008:
[S]uch events were designed to foster the impression of ‘little Davids battling the Goliath of
the environmental establishment.’ But Dr. Dunlap said such activities were well financed and,
‘When you have the full support of some of the wealthiest and most powerful political actors in
the nation, you can hardly be considered to be underdogs.’ (NYT, March 4, 2008)
Comments like Dunlap’s are mirrored on the other side. In 2005 Republican US
congressman Joe Barton wrote to three leading climate researchers, the head of the
National Science Foundation and Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC. Barton
asked for extensive information about their careers, funding and research (Pachauri
2005).

DENIAL (2001 AND AFTER)
The term ‘denial’ in association with climate change or global warming was used occa-
sionally in the 1990s. Things changed in 2001 after the publication of Bjorn Lomborg’s
book The Skeptical Environmentalist (Lomborg 2001). The NYT printed a largely sym-
pathetic feature on August 7, 2001 under the headline ‘From an unlikely quarter comes
a rare sighting: the eco-optimist.’ The New Statesman (June 30, 2003) called it ‘perhaps
the most important book about the environment since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.’
Nature’s book review was less enthusiastic:
The text employs the strategy of those who, for example, argue that gay men aren’t dying of
AIDS, that Jews weren’t singled out by the Nazis for extermination, and so on. ‘Name those
who have died!’ demands a hypothetical critic, who then scorns the discrepancy between those
few we know by name and the unnamed millions we infer. (Pimm and Harvey 2001, p. 149)
The context of the remark is the rate of species extinction, not global warming directly.
Nevertheless, invoking ‘Holocaust denial’ in the debate about Lomborg’s book is cer-
tainly noteworthy.6
This analogy became quite common in the following years, with several high-profile
commentators putting climate change denial in the same moral category as defending
racism or slavery (O’Neill 2006). Mark Lynas (2006) wrote that climate denial is ‘in a
similar moral category to Holocaust denial’ and envisioned Nuremberg-style interna-
tional criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for mil-
lions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead.7 The other side
reacted, using again scientific studies to justify their position of wait and see. In a two-
hour speech on July 28, 2003 on the Senate floor, senator Inhofe famously said: ‘With all
of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global
warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like
it.’ Inhofe (2003) used a controversial research paper by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas
about temperature reconstructions to cast doubt on the rationale for a new climate bill
(the 2003 Climate Stewardship Act, introduced by congressmen McCain and Lieberman,
and modified in 2005 and 2007).
In 2005 congressman Joe Barton initiated an inquiry into the integrity of Michael
Mann’s influential reconstruction of historic temperature trends (the so-called ‘hockey
stick’) ‘after two Canadians with no expertise in climate change published academic papers
and opinion articles challenging the study’s methods,’ as NYT journalist Andrew Revkin
put it (NYT, July 18, 2005). Those critics were named as ‘Steven McIntyre, an amateur
statistician and mining consultant, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University
of Guelph.’ Barton’s inquiry was termed ‘misguided and illegitimate’ by scientists and
policymakers alike (NYT, July 18, 2005). The following year a panel convened by the
National Academies also investigated the issue. This panel’s report was said to largely
endorse Mann’s assertion ‘that recent warming in the Northern Hemisphere was prob-
ably unrivalled for 1,000 years,’ as the NYT reported under the headline ‘Science panel
backs study on warming climate’ (NYT, June 22, 2006).
This endorsement did not silence the critics, partly because of the development
described in the following section, the emergence of the blogosphere in the mid-2000s.
At this stage, a large part of the debate moved away from the traditional media where the

voices of scientists and skeptics were mediated by journalists to forums where they could
speak directly to their audiences.
‘HOBBYISTS’ AND NEW SOCIAL MEDIA (POST-2005)
The above newspaper analysis has shown how several points in the debate have been
constant themes over time, and how the issue escalated when international and national
climate policies emerged. It also showed that visible protagonists have remained constant
reference points for news reporters. Others have joined them, some have dropped out
of the frame. The partisan nature of the controversy in the US is a specially enduring
feature.
With the emergence of the blogosphere in the mid-2000s, skeptical voices found a plat-
form that they could control, becoming in a sense more visible though much less present
in the mainstream press compared to the IPCC and its advocates (Grundmann and Scott
2014).8 Among the most widely read skeptical blogs are Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit,
Anthony Watts’ Watts Up With That, Joanne Nova’s JoNova and Andrew Montford’s
Bishop Hill—based respectively in Canada, the US, Australia and the UK (mainstream
scientists were at least as early into this space, most notably Realclimate). Many other
skeptical blogs followed; Amelia Sharman (2014) identified 171 such in her mapping
study. These blogs became a focus for the critical evaluation of climate science and
particularly for the dissemination and discussion of ‘climategate’ in 2009 (Grundmann
2012). In David Victor’s typology, the bloggers can be identified as ‘hobbyists.’ But is
that label too an attempt to delegitimize these voices? One could interpret their role
as being part of a ‘citizen science’ project, exemplifying the state of climate science as
post-normal (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1990). But the climate bloggers are not welcomed
as co-producers of knowledge in the way that, for instance, amateur astronomers or
ornithologists are.
Some mainstream scientists have instead reacted angrily to these bloggers, using
the labels of shills and denialism, also calling them anti-science (Mann 2014). Other
mainstream scientists, journalists and consensus defenders have set up blogs and use
social media platforms for public outreach, some trying to reclaim the word skeptical
for mainstream science (e.g., www.skepticalscience.com). The more frequent use of the
term ‘denier’ could be a result of this effort. The question of who has a right to comment
and who should be listened to is ubiquitous, and the legitimacy of skeptical voices is
contested. In turn, many skeptical commenters try to delegitimize mainstream science
(Jaspal et al. 2012).
CONCLUSIONS
The climate change discourse shows various stages and forms of dissent. The origins
have been located in the USA of the 1980s, where important frames were defined that
were to shape the unfolding discourse. The meaning of the word ‘skeptic’ changed from a
synonym of legitimate critic to an illegitimate form of dissent. Later the term ‘denier’ was
added, sometimes replacing the label ‘skeptic.’ When new groups of dissenters emerged in

new social media platforms in the mid-2000s, one of the most important industry lobby
groups (the Global Climate Coalition) had been disbanded. Ironically, the emphasis on
shilling (and willful denial) became more pronounced as the ‘hobbyist’ movement spread.
Some skeptical climate bloggers have applied the same tactic of questioning the funding
sources of their opponents, the climate change mainstream, accusing their antagonists
of alarmism and fraud, and of pushing a political agenda in the name of science. Much
of the debate therefore revolves around questions such as: who is a legitimate expert on
climate science and who is merely an interested party? Where are the lines drawn between
real expert and fake expert, and who draws them?
And above all, we must ask why this escalation has happened. At this point I can only
offer a speculation. As the dominant discourse gained momentum, attempts increased
to delegitimize skeptical views. The more expert consensus was achieved, the more it was
felt necessary to ostracize the outliers, arguably because the emerging science consensus
achieved little in terms of policy. The NYT came to align much more openly with the
Democrats’ climate policies, as is apparent in several op-eds after 2006 Nobel laureate
and public intellectual Paul Krugman used the d-word in connection with the Republican
Party and its climate policy.
Each new escalation—from a benign meaning, to industry shill, to denial—was asso-
ciated with political events. The Kyoto Protocol and its echo in domestic US politics
led to ever more polarization. This became evident in 1997, and again in 2001 when
the Bush government retreated from the Kyoto process. It also appeared after 2005
when Republicans questioned the validity of historical temperature reconstructions for
policymaking. The partisan mobilization of science created a heated public debate where
scientific arguments were often used as proxies for policy arguments. A cross-national
discourse formation in the English language press ensued, mainly in Australia, the UK
and Canada who also witnessed domestic policy disputes about climate change. It is an
open question if this polarized structure will be replicated through party politics in these
countries too.
NOTES
* I would like to thank Markus Lederer, Brigitte Nerlich, Ruth Dixon, Warren Pearce, Hans von Storch,
Stephen McIntyre and the editors for very useful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this
chapter. All remaining errors are my own.
1. There is another word used for dissenting voices in the climate discourse, ‘contrarian.’ However, only eight
articles in the NYT archive mention the term. My analysis does not include it.
2. For the importance of path dependency in the climate change discourse, see Grundmann and Scott (2014).
3. O’Neill and Boykoff (2010) suggest to reserve the term ‘contrarian’ to this kind of ideological, industry
funded skepticism.
4. ‘So-called skeptics’ has another meaning, indicating this term is used for the lack of a better word.
5. Interestingly, there is not a single reference in the entire English-language news archive of LexisNexis to
Robert Merton’s norms of science in articles about climate change/global warming.
6. ‘Denial’ is also used in a less morally laden way, denoting rejection of mainstream science.
7. Lynas has taken down the original webpage where the quote appears but it is still available in the web
archive.
8. There are very few news stories in the NYT archive that mention these blogs (one for McIntyre and three
for Watts. Andrew Montford’s blog Bishop Hill is not mentioned but gets about 80 mentions in the British
Daily Telegraph).

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PART III
THE STATE AND CLIMATE

GOVERNANCE

17. Climate leadership
Charles F. Parker and Christer Karlsson
INTRODUCTION
In December 2015, the countries of the world will meet in Paris in pursuit of a new inter-
national agreement designed to ward off the threat of irreparable damages to the natural
environment as a consequence of climate change. While opinions are divided on the like-
lihood of the world’s governments actually succeeding with this task, leading voices are in
agreement about the need for effective leadership if a new global climate agreement is to
materialize. Al Gore, in his Nobel lecture, urged the world’s biggest polluters to form an
alliance to meet the challenge ahead and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, in multiple
addresses to the United Nations (UN), has likewise emphasized that developed countries
need to take the lead in the fight to combat climate change.
The European Union (EU), China and the United States are the three greenhouse
gas (GHG) giants of the world and hence the main contenders for supplying the much
sought-after climate leadership. All three of these key actors have, in fact, pledged to
provide leadership on the climate change issue. The EU in particular has invested much
time and effort to brand itself as a climate change leader. Through the passage of demand-
ing greenhouse gas mitigation and renewable energy commitments, the EU has attempted
to prove that it is prepared to back its ambitions to lead with concrete undertakings.
Under the administration of George W. Bush, the US withdrew from the international
climate negotiations. Barack Obama reversed this policy. Already while campaigning for
the presidency, Obama made it clear he intended to work together with the international
community in devising strategies to fight climate change and he promised US leader-
ship on this issue. However, during its first term in office, the Obama administration
struggled to make any real imprint on the international climate change agenda (see Bang
this volume). After being re-elected, President Obama assured his critics that he is now
seeking to shape an agenda where the US would ‘make a serious dent in climate change
and be an international leader’ (White House 2012).
China has also taken recent steps towards occupying a more active role in the interna-
tional efforts to combat climate change and at the Conference of the Parties (COP) 19
meeting in Warsaw, the deputy chief of the Chinese delegation, Su Wei, confirmed that
‘China will participate in a legally-binding global climate treaty for the post-2020 period
if consensus can be reached among all parties’ (Xinhua News 2013). The recent attitudi-
nal change in China’s approach to climate change together with concrete signs of action,
such as the fact that China is by far the largest investor in renewable energy and that it has
managed to reduce its carbon intensity, has led independent observers such as the Pew
Institute and Australia’s Climate Commission to conclude that China should be regarded
as a world leader in the fight against climate change (Climate Commission 2013).
It thus appears to be the case that there is a demand for as well as a supply of climate
change leadership. The question is to what extent the key climate actors have in practice
191
provided any real leadership within the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties? What leadership visions and
strategies have the leading actors been pursuing? Has the professed climate change lead-
ership materialized and has it made any significant impact during recent climate change
negotiations?
This chapter analyses recent outcomes and developments in the climate change nego-
tiating process through a leadership perspective and by examining the leadership bids of
the EU, China and the US. We concentrate on these three leadership contenders because
they are the world’s largest GHG emitters and they were the three actors most widely
recognized as leaders according to survey data collected at six consecutive UN climate
summits. The next section discusses the importance of leadership and presents the main
leadership candidates. This is followed by an examination of the outcome of the all-
important 2009 Copenhagen summit. The chapter then proceeds with an analysis of how
the competing leadership visions of the EU, China and the US have impacted the post-
Copenhagen negotiations from COP 16 in Cancún to COP 19 in Warsaw. The closing
section looks ahead toward COP 21 and discusses the prospects of reaching a meaningful
agreement in Paris.
THE IMPORTANCE OF LEADERSHIP AND THE MAIN

LEADERSHIP CANDIDATES
The mere acknowledgment of a common challenge that urgently needs to be addressed

is not sufficient for actors to join forces and forge a sustainable solution. Cooperation
may still be difficult to establish because reaching international agreement on appro-
priate action presents a number of vexing problems not easily overcome (Young 1991;
Underdal 1994). The fear of being placed at a competitive disadvantage, whether in the
security sphere or in the global economy, means that states are often unwilling to act in
the absence of international agreements that require similar commitments from other
states. In situations where commitments to act can so easily be blocked by collective
action concerns, leadership is crucial. Indeed, leadership can be considered a necessary,
although not sufficient, condition for forging global governance arrangements (Young
1991, p. 302) to deal with issues such as the climate change challenge.
How do you go about exercising leadership? Scholars have identified four different
modes of leadership through which an aspiring leader can seek to direct the behavior of
others (Young 1991; Underdal 1994). Structural leadership refers to the deployment of
power-resources for the purpose of creating new incentives and changing the costs and
benefits associated with different avenues for action (Young 1991, pp. 288–289; Underdal
1994, p. 186). Directional leadership rests on taking unilateral action and is accomplished
by the demonstration effects of leading by example (Underdal 1994, pp. 183–185; Parker
and Karlsson 2010, p. 926). Idea-based leadership is concerned with problem naming and
framing and the promotion of specific policy solutions to collective problems (Young
1991). Finally, there is instrumental leadership, which is closely related to idea-based lead-
ership as it partly has to do with solving problems to achieve common goals (Underdal
1994, pp. 187–191).
In order to examine the impact of leadership for the UNFCCC outcomes from

Climate leadership 193
Copenhagen to Paris we need first to identify the leadership contenders in the field of
climate change. Looking at the history of leadership in climate change we find that there
have been primarily two actors taking turns in acting as leaders. In the early days of
atmosphere protection politics, the US played the leading role. However, as negotiations
for an international climate convention began in the early 1990s, there followed a period
of co-leadership between the US and the EU. From 2001 to 2007, the US withdrew from
international climate change negotiations and the EU emerged as the clear leader on this
issue. With Barack Obama’s rise to power in 2008, the US has attempted a return to what
it sees as its traditional global leadership role. More recently China has also been a force
to be reckoned with in the quest for climate change leadership. In recent years, Chinese
overseas activities have increased tremendously, fueled by rapid economic growth and
increasing levels of foreign direct investment. As its power has increased, its ambition to
play a leading role in world politics has become ever-stronger and today it is clear that
the leadership landscape on climate change sees three leading actors vying for influence,
seeking to impact the UNFCCC negotiations.
We have currently three self-proclaimed leadership candidates on climate change.
However, aspiring for leadership is one thing, actually being recognized as leader is some-
thing completely different. The obvious fact that the existence of a leader ‘implies follow-
ers who move in the same direction’ (Nye 2008, p. 18), indicates that this component of
leadership is key. Followers are vital because they ‘empower leaders’ (Nye 2008, p. 35). If
followers are required for a leader to be successful, it is axiomatic that the effectiveness of
leadership efforts will be seriously undermined if an actor who aspires to be a leader fails
to be recognized as such (Karlsson et al. 2011).
In recent surveys undertaken at six consecutive COP meetings, we have examined which
actors are recognized as leaders in the field of climate change. According to our results,
the EU, the US and China are the three actors most frequently mentioned as playing a
leading role in the UN climate change negotiations. The G77 was a distant fourth with
25 percent leadership recognition for 2013, and other party groupings (e.g., the BASIC
countries (i.e., Brazil, South Africa, India and China) and the Alliance of Small Island
States) as well as individual countries such as India and Brazil were recognized as leaders
by roughly 10 percent of the respondents, but no other actor came close to the same levels
of recognition as the three actors included in Table 17.1.
Thus, also from a followership perspective, it is appropriate to zoom in on the EU, the
US and China if we want to come to grips with the importance and impact of leadership
for the negotiation outcomes in the climate change regime.
Table 17.1 Leadership recognition 2008–2013, general trend for main actors

(percentages)
COP 14 COP 15 COP 16 COP 17 COP 18 COP 19 Diff.

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2008–2013
EU as leader 62 46 45 50 51 48 −14
China as leader 47 48 52 50 48 44 −3
US as leader 27 53 50 42 39 42 115
Note: Total number of respondents 5 2,390.

THE COPENHAGEN OUTCOME
In the run-up to the COP 15 meeting in 2009, hopes were initially high for what could be
achieved in Copenhagen and the EU especially was dead set on reaching an agreement on
a new global treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol. However, as the conference approached,
it became evident that no ambitious deal was in the cards. The newly installed President
Obama was not in a position to enter into any major binding c ommitments. The major
developing countries, meanwhile, made it clear that they were reluctant to take on any
binding emission targets and expected the industrialized countries to bear the lion’s share
of the burden for solving the climate change threat.
The high aspirations held by the EU in the early preparations for the COP 15 gradually
faded as it proved impossible prior to or during COP 15 for the EU to form a leader-
ship alliance with either China or the US. Getting the US on board proved impossible
as President Obama refused to sign on to an agreement unless the major developing
countries also promised to accept verifiable commitments. China, however, made it clear
that it had no intention whatsoever to accommodate this demand. China, in fact, dem-
onstrated that it was determined to take a firm stand and not budge under the pressure
asserted from the industrialized world.
The performance of the three would-be leaders in Copenhagen dramatically illus-
trated the fragmentation of the leadership landscape. The COP 15 conference proved to
be a contentious event that failed to produce a new legal agreement to replace, enhance
or extend the Kyoto Protocol and instead resulted in an ambiguous interim political
deal—the Copenhagen Accord—that did not even win universal approval at the end
of the conference. This outcome was largely due to the fissures among the EU, China
and the US (Parker et al. 2012). Each actor espoused different negotiation visions,
which they were unable to transcend to reach ambitious shared goals for the good of
the planet.
However, it is also important to note that the Copenhagen Accord represented a
step forward and was the first meaningful accomplishment in many years within the
UNFCCC regime as it was supported by all three of the emission giants. The COP
15 meeting was not a success story, but it was not the full-blown fiasco that some com-
mentators claimed it to be in the immediate aftermath of the conference (see Dimitrov
this volume). The Copenhagen Accord should rather be seen as a pragmatic outcome
and the best result that could be achieved under the circumstances. Most importantly, it
provided the basis for a continued process of meaningful negotiations within the climate
change regime, a process that has now produced the goal of reaching a more comprehen-
sive climate deal at COP 21 in Paris.
The remainder of this chapter is devoted to an examination of the progress made
thus far by looking at the post-Copenhagen negotiation process and outcomes through
the leadership prism. During our examination of the work done by the main leadership
candidates we will focus our attention on words as well as deeds. More specifically we will
throughout the analysis look at: (1) the different leadership visions espoused; (2) the dif-
ferent forms of leadership exercised; and (3) the interplay of these factors (Young 1991;
Parker et al. 2012).

FROM COPENHAGEN TO PARIS: COMPETING LEADERSHIP

VISIONS FOR A NEW CLIMATE DEAL
The post-Copenhagen negotiation agenda has been and the eventual outcome of COP 21
in Paris will be profoundly influenced by the leadership visions, preferences and forms of
the EU, US and China. We will now consider each in turn below.
The EU’s Leadership Vision and Forms
Through its words and deeds, the EU has long demonstrated its ambition of leading
global action to confront the climate change challenge. The EU adopted a climate change
strategy as early as 1992 and already in 1996 the Council of Ministers endorsed the goal
of limiting global warming to no more than 2°C above the pre-industrial level. Through
the passage of its December 2008 energy and climate package, which included GHG
emissions cuts and renewable energy targets, the EU has attempted to lead by example.
After falling short of achieving its goal of reaching a new binding treaty at the COP
15 summit in Copenhagen, the EU is now working hard to produce a new international
climate agreement by 2015 that would be applicable to all parties and enter into force
by 2020 (Council of the European Union 2011). The EU’s first goal after COP 15 was
to establish a working process and a deadline for a new binding agreement. The EU has
stated that the voluntary mitigation pledges under the Copenhagen Accord are inad-
equate. The EU wants the UNFCCC process and a new agreement to result in pledges
for both developed and developing countries that are sufficiently ambitions to achieve
the objective of keeping any global temperature increase below 2°C (Council of the
European Union 2012).
What then has the EU done to make its leadership vision and goals a reality? An exami-
nation of the EU’s actions reveals that it has deployed all four modes of leadership—
structural, directional, idea-based and instrumental—in important ways. Up through
COP 15 in Copenhagen, it is clear that the EU relied primarily, or at least succeeded
better, with idea-based and directional leadership. Post-Copenhagen, while the EU still
emphasizes its idea-based and exemplative leadership, it has increasingly been willing to
deploy instrumental leadership and has been more prepared to compromise on its pet
ideas.
At the COP 15 negotiations, for example, the EU, unwilling to offer concessions, was
sidelined and left out of the room while the US and the BASIC countries finalized the
Copenhagen Accord. Since then, the EU has been more flexible and realistic with its
goals, which has allowed it to better form coalitions and build bridges with the least
developed countries (LDCs), particularly those that also want a legally binding regime
that covers all major emitters, while at the same time being able to compromise with the
US and China over issues such as design principles (Bäckstrand and Elgström 2013,
pp. 1382–1383).
Both inside and outside the UNFCCC process, the EU, in words and actions, has
attempted to demonstrate that it is politically and technologically feasible to slash
GHGs and achieve economic growth. Post-Copenhagen, the EU opted to carry on with
its ‘20-20-20’ goals, released a 2014 proposal for a 2030 framework on climate and energy
that would reduce GHGs by 40 percent below the 1990 level and set a binding renewable

energy target of 27 percent, and has set an objective of deep GHG emissions cuts of
80–95 percent by 2050. This indicates that the EU will continue to rely heavily on direc-
tional leadership as a major strategy to combat climate change and exercise influence in
the UNFCCC negotiations.
Since Copenhagen, recognition for the EU as a leader is on the rise again and in Doha
the EU was again the most recognized leadership contender. At COP 17, the EU was
instrumental in setting the agenda for the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, which
established a new negotiating process to develop a ‘protocol, another legal instrument,
or agreed outcome with legal force . . . applicable to all Parties’ (UNFCCC 2012). At
COP 18, the EU agreed to the adoption of a second commitment period for the Kyoto
Protocol (2013–2020) in exchange for all old negotiating tracks being shut down and
for a work plan for the negotiation round that is intended to culminate in a new deal at
COP 21. The final documents from both of these meetings, reflecting the EU’s ideational
leadership, also acknowledge the ambition gap between existing mitigation pledges and
what is needed to avoid going over the 2°C threshold. As a result, a work plan has been
launched on enhancing mitigation ambition to identify and to explore options for a range
of actions that can close the ambition gap (UNFCCC 2012).
The EU has been very successful using its idea based leadership to set the content and
schedule of the UNFCCC’s negotiating agenda. This was reflected in the Bali Action
plan agreed at COP 13 and in the new negotiation agenda and work plan that has
emerged from Durban and Doha. However, the distance between what was achieved at
COP 15 in Copenhagen compared to what the EU was seeking, suggests that if the EU is
to avoid a similar fate in Paris, it will need to do a better job of melding these leadership
modes with structural leadership as well as partnering more effectively with other struc-
turally significant actors if it is to achieve more substantive negotiation results.
China’s Leadership Vision and Forms
China’s leadership vision for the current negotiating process taking place under the
Durban Platform is for an agreement that will strengthen the structures and provisions of
the 1992 UNFCCC in order to ‘achieve its ultimate objective’ (China 2014, p. 1). China
has insisted that any deal should not ‘rewrite or reinterpret’ the UNFCCC and the final
outcome must be in ‘full accordance’ with the ‘principles of equity, common but differ-
entiated responsibilities (CBDR) and respective capabilities’. Thus, China’s leadership in
the post-Copenhagen negotiations exhibits a great deal of continuity with China’s long-
standing focus on the issues of development, equity, financing, technological transfer and
historical responsibility (Gong 2011; Parker et al. 2012). With regards to its promotion of
these issues, China has demonstrated ideational leadership that is increasingly backed up
with the weight of its growing structural power.
China, which still regards itself as a developing country, presents itself as a leader in
protecting the interests, needs and aspirations of the developing countries. According
to China, poverty reduction and economic development are top priorities for develop-
ing countries. As China (2014, pp. 1–2) stated in a submission on the Durban Platform,
‘developed countries are responsible for the current and future concentration of green-
house gases in the atmosphere because of their historical, current and future emissions,
and developing countries have the right to equitable development opportunities [sic].’

China has engaged in ideational leadership in articulating who should do what to

address the threat of climate change. According to China, the developed countries have
an obligation to dramatically reduce GHG emissions in the short to medium term and
to immediately provide funds, technology and capacity-building help to the developing
countries. As far as mitigation goes, China expects developed countries to ‘take the lead’
and that their GHG reductions should be legally binding commitments. In contrast,
China has said that it and other developing countries should only be expected to take
voluntary actions and whatever contributions developing countries make should be
‘dependent on the adequate finance and technology support provided by developed
country Parties’ (China 2014, p. 2). In short, China’s vision for the institutional design
of a new agreement would be for binding, top-down targets and timetables for the
developed countries and for a voluntary, bottom-up arrangement for the developing
countries.
Due to its structural position as the world’s largest GHG emitter and the world’s
second largest economy, any meaningful climate deal must secure China’s participation.
Thus, China’s ideational leadership on the issues it considers important combined with
the backing of a number of key countries, particularly from the so-called BASIC group
(which, in addition to China, includes Brazil, South Africa and India), means it is a force
to be reckoned with in the climate negotiations. For example, China, with the support
from the other emerging economy countries within the BASIC group, blocked specific
targets and timetables from being included in the Copenhagen Accord.
Paradoxically, the very structural power that provides the clout for China’s ideational
leadership also threatens to undermine China’s credibility as a leader that is fighting for
the interests of all developing countries, particularly the ones most vulnerable to the
threat of dangerous climate change. For example, at COP 15, the Alliance of Small Island
States (AOSIS) together with a number of other LDCs had an open confrontation with
some of the major emerging developing countries over the issue of whether the stabiliza-
tion goal should be 1.5°C or 2°C. The split in G77 between the emerging economies and
the LDCs (Gong 2011, p. 171) is also reflected in survey results, which show increasing
divisions among the developing countries concerning climate leadership (Parker et al.
2012). China, due to its status as an emerging economic superpower, is increasingly being
seen as something other than just another developing country. In the future, China’s
attempt to cast itself as a leader for the entire developing world in the global climate
negotiations may become difficult to sustain.
Since Copenhagen, China, which was heavily criticized in some quarters for the role it
played for the acrimonious tone and ambiguous outcome of COP 15 (Lynas 2009; Lee
2009), has played a more constructive role in the Cancún, Durban, Doha and Warsaw
outcomes. Most importantly, it agreed to the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action at
COP 17, which launched a new negotiating mandate to develop an agreement ‘applicable
to all’ by 2015 for the post-2020 period.
While China has been more flexible on some issues at the post-Copenhagen COPs, its
past concerns have not disappeared and its views on CBDR, who and what should be
subject to review, the legal form of a new agreement and what is meant by ‘applicable to
all’ could prove problematic for reaching a deal in Paris.

US Leadership Vision and Forms
An examination of US actions reveals that it has deployed three of the leadership

modes—idea-based, structural, and directional—in meaningful ways, but it has primarily
relied on ideational and structural leadership in pursuit of its goals. The US leadership
vision calls for a deal that encompasses all the major emitters, especially the emerging
economies of China, India and Brazil. US ideational leadership is nicely captured by its
efforts to promote the concept of ‘legally symmetrical’ arrangements. The US could claim
the COP 15 outcome reflected many elements of its leadership vision. The Copenhagen
Accord was based on the pledge and review architecture that the US wanted, and stated
that all major emitters were expected to act. The accord, despite falling far short of what
the scientific consensus says is needed to address the climate problem, was the most sub-
stantial climate commitment the US had made in a multilateral context in many years.
Post-Copenhagen, the US has backed the new negotiating mandate, the ‘Durban
Platform,’ which has set 2015 as the deadline to reach a new climate agreement
(UNFCCC 2012). In this process, the US is attempting to assert its ideational leader-
ship vision concerning the specifics of what the institutional design and content of an
eventual post-2020 climate change agreement should look like. According to the US, the
new agreement should be ‘applicable to all Parties’ and should have a ‘supple architecture
that integrates flexibility with strength’ (Stern 2013a). In other words, the new agreement
should have a pledge-and-review structure that allows bottom-up, or ‘nationally deter-
mined mitigation commitments,’ rather than top-down, binding targets and timetables,
such as the EU has pushed for in the past.
The US has attempted to back its idea-based leadership with structural leadership
by offering inducements to developing countries in the form of funding for actions to
mitigate and adapt to climate change. The US has, for example, made recommendations
for financing adaptation, energy investment and support for the LDCs by calling for
US$100 billion a year to be collectively mobilized by 2020. However, as Obama noted in
the December 18, 2009 heads-of-state meeting, to ‘channel some of the resources from
our countries into developing countries’ would be ‘a very heavy lift’ without a ‘sense of
mutuality’ (Rapp et al. 2010). Most recently in Lima, the US highlighted its important
role in climate finance, noting that it had pledged a contribution of US$3 billion to the
Green Climate Fund (Stern 2014).
In terms of structural leadership the US is well endowed to offer economic, technologi-
cal and diplomatic incentives, but has had only mixed success with this strategy, as many
of the most vulnerable developing countries have found reasons to doubt the commit-
ment the US has displayed to solving the climate crisis and have expressed frustration
with the US position on issues such as loss and damage. The US, due to its geopolitical
position and emissions power (as the second largest GHG giant after China), enjoys a
certain amount of bargaining leverage that stems from the centrality of its structural
position. Much like China, the US needs to be part of any meaningful solution to the
climate change crisis and the threat of not participating gives the US influence in shaping
any outcome.
The US is aware that directional leadership is important. As Todd Stern (2010) has
observed: ‘If the United States means to assert leadership, it needs to act like a leader.’
For this reason, prior to the COP 15 meeting, the US tried to buttress its credentials as a

climate actor by highlighting its break with the inaction of the Bush years and trumpet-
ing its domestic and international leadership accomplishments (White House 2009).
The US came to Copenhagen ready to commit to specific GHG reduction targets.
At COP 15, the US offered reductions in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels by
2020, with the goal of reducing emissions by 83 percent by 2050. The problem for the
US was whether potential followers actually see this as a credible example of directional
leadership. Historically, because the US often encounters domestic political difficulties
in honoring its international commitments, many parties question whether or not the
US can deliver on its promises. For example, US GHG reduction goals could be difficult
to achieve in the absence of tailor-made legislation. After the 2010 midterm elections in
which the Democrats lost the House, it became clear that domestic climate legislation is
dead for the foreseeable future.
Upon being re-elected for a second term in 2012, Obama relaunched an aggressive
domestic climate policy, relying heavily on executive action and the Environmental
Protection Agency’s regulatory power. The US delegation contends that much is doable
even without legislation. In fact at COP 19, the US touted its large-scale directional
leadership credentials in the power and transportation sectors, which together account
for about two-thirds of total US energy emissions (Stern 2013b). The US also noted that
it doubled renewable energy production in Obama’s first term and planned to double it
again by 2020 (Stern 2013b). In Warsaw and Lima, the US claimed it was making good
progress toward meeting its commitment to reduce emissions in the range of 17 percent
by 2020 and more than 80 percent by 2050 from 2005 levels, an amount it said was associ-
ated with the US being on a 2°C path (Stern 2013b, 2014).
THE ROAD TO PARIS
We can conclude that we are currently facing what has been described, in previous
research, as a ‘fragmented leadership landscape’ within the field of climate change
(Parker et al. 2012). The overall picture, however, is clear: the EU, the US and China are
indeed the ‘Big Three’ when it comes to who is seen as climate change leaders. However,
all three of the main leadership contenders are at the moment struggling to gain rec-
ognition as leaders by even a majority of respondents and therefore the legitimacy and
effectiveness of their leadership bids can rightfully be called into question. Nonetheless,
since the acrimonious process at COP 15 that produced the Copenhagen Accord, China,
the EU and the US have done a better job of putting aside differences on key elements of
their leadership visions to make incremental progress at COPs 16–19 and the contours of
an eventual agreement in Paris are starting to emerge.
The outcome of the COP 16 in Cancún, which built on what was accomplished in
Copenhagen, demonstrated an acute recognition by China, the EU and the US that the
UNFCCC process itself was at stake and allowed for an outcome that in effect imported
the Copenhagen Accord and the national action pledges of each country into the
UNFCCC as a formal COP decision. COP 17 in Durban inaugurated the current nego-
tiating round and set a deadline to reach a new deal. The deals struck in Durban and at
COP 18 in Doha paved the way for a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol
and cleared the decks of unfinished business by shutting down all other negotiating

tracks save for the Durban Platform. The post-Copenhagen COPs have also made pro-
gress in establishing a number of important institutions such as the Cancún Adaptation
Framework, the Green Climate Fund, REDD1, the Climate Technology Centre and
Network, and the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage.
As we have seen above, the leadership visions of China, the EU and the US still differ
substantially in many respects. The negotiating at COP 21 in Paris will show whether the
Big Three can bring these visions together enough to reach a meaningful deal or whether
the interplay between the varying leadership stances will result in a watered-down com-
promise agreement. An inability to compromise over fundamental issues such as the legal
form of a new agreement, CBDR, and obligations and procedures for issues pertaining to
monitoring and review, could be stumbling blocks to a consequential deal. Based on the
progress made at recent COPs, the building blocks for an agreement that brings various
elements of the contending leadership visions together to reach an agreement can also
be glimpsed.
For example, the institutional design preferences of China, the EU and the US con-
cerning whether the architecture of a post-2020 agreement should be ‘top-down’ or
‘bottom-up’ appears to be moving towards a practical hybrid arrangement in which the
various leadership visions are blended. In such an arrangement, countries’ individual
GHG emissions goals would be nationally determined in a stepwise approach in which
the commitments would be subject to international review before being finalized. Once
finalized, the commitments would be subject to rigorous reporting, monitoring and
review to ensure countries were actually following through on their obligations. Such
an approach could potentially create a system that balances the flexibility of bottom-up
pledges with top-down accountability in a meaningful way.
While progress is being made, the political process of international climate change
cooperation is still lagging far behind what the scientific consensus says is needed.
China, the EU and the US have all proclaimed that they take climate change seriously
and it is an encouraging sign that all three have embarked on domestic action to reduce
GHGs at home, which may better enable them to constructively cooperate together and
with others at the global level. The improved working relationships between China, the
EU and the US visible at the post-Copenhagen COP summits could represent the first
steps towards more effective international climate change leadership. Achieving a deal in
Paris that represents tangible progress will require leaders and followers. This provides
an opportunity for China, the EU and the US to come together to exercise leadership
and mobilize the support that will be necessary in order to build on the incremental
advancements achieved in recent negotiations and create a new agreement for the post-
2020 period that is up to the challenges posed to humanity by the threat of climate
change.
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18. China
Phillip Stalley
INTRODUCTION
It is not difficult to make the case that China is the most important participant in global
climate change negotiations. China is the leading emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs),
accounting for about a third of the global total (versus 16 percent for the US). In 2012,
China generated almost ten gigatons (Gt) of carbon dioxide (CO2), more than the US
and European Union (EU) combined (Clark and Hornby 2014). Between 1990 and 2011,
China’s GHG emissions increased by 300 percent. In a single year from 2010 to 2011,
China’s emissions increased approximately 720 million metric tons, an amount roughly
equivalent to Germany’s total emissions in 2011 (EIA 2014c). Even on a per capita basis,
China has become a major emitter. While China’s per capita average is still less than half
that of the US, it is well above the global average. In 2013, China emitted 7.2 tons per
person, surpassing the EU average of 6.8 tons per person (McGrath 2014).
Given its impact on the global climate, China’s decisions in international negotiations
are critical in determining the extent to which the international community can tackle
the climate change challenge. In this chapter, I review China’s evolving diplomacy and
the key factors influencing China’s role in international climate change politics. In the
process I make two key points. First, China’s climate change diplomacy has been charac-
terized by both continuity and change. In important ways, China’s approach to interna-
tional negotiations has evolved and softened. Once a major impediment to international
cooperation, China today favors a climate change agreement that reduces greenhouse
gases and helps states adjust to the impact of global warming. China is also far more
open than it was in the past to the establishment of quantitative targets and external
monitoring. At the same time, however, China’s evolving approach has been one of
strategic adaptation and it has not surrendered its underlying principles, particularly its
commitment to the idea of common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR). Like all
states, China pursues its interests by assuring the benefits of international cooperation
are greater than the costs. However, its interests are defined in part through the lens of
equity concerns and what China deems costly depends on what it deems fair.
The second key point is that China’s climate change diplomacy depends primarily on
domestic trends. China’s international initiatives on climate change take place within its
ongoing need for economic development. Regardless of its concern for the health of the
planet and its own vulnerability to the harmful effects of climate change, China will not
risk growth for the sake of climate protection. This means that going forward no single
factor will influence China’s stance toward a global agreement more than the success of
its economic reform and energy transformation agenda, which aims to put China on a
sustainable path of low-carbon development. Pressure from the international community
certainly provides motivation for China to lessen its reliance on carbon, but the causal
arrow mainly runs from the domestic to the international realm.
202
China 203
The next section traces the evolution of China’s approach to international climate
change politics showing how China, while sticking to its core principles, has adjusted
its negotiating stance in a changing external environment. Then the following section
highlights the array of domestic forces and politics shaping China’s climate change
diplomacy. I conclude with a quick review and offer a few brief comments about the
trajectory of China’s climate change diplomacy.
CHINA’S EVOLVING CLIMATE CHANGE DIPLOMACY

For much of the first two decades of climate change negotiations China was an obstacle
to diplomatic progress (Chen 2012, p. 17). Its position was defined by a consistent oppo-
sition to binding commitments and hard targets along with a steadfast defense of the
principal of CBDR. In China’s traditional interpretation, CBDR means that developed
countries bear the principal obligation for combating climate change and, therefore,
developing countries should not be subject to emission reduction pledges or any other
legally binding commitments.
Over the past decade, however, China has adapted its climate change diplomacy in the
face of a rapidly changing external environment. While not surrendering its principles or
its opposition to binding commitments, it has nonetheless demonstrated increasing trac-
tability on a number of key issues. For instance, in the Bali meeting in 2007, China agreed
in principle to an agreement in which for the first time developing countries would con-
sider taking ‘measurable, reportable and verifiable’ (MRV) mitigation actions. This rep-
resented a significant change from China’s long-held position against developing country
commitments (IISD 2007; AWG-LCA 2007). While China fought stringently against the
inclusion of hard targets at Copenhagen in 2009, it nonetheless softened its opposition
to voluntary commitments for developing countries. First, it announced an emission
intensity reduction target. In addition, only weeks before the Copenhagen meeting,
China hosted the other BASIC nations (i.e., Brazil, South Africa and India) in Beijing
to hammer out a common approach to climate change negotiations. The BASIC text
allowed for developing country Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs),
although it stipulated they must be ‘supported and enabled’ by developed country aid.
Despite falling short of US expectations, the BASIC text nonetheless represented a
new development in multilateral negotiations because for the first time it established an
international link to developing countries’ domestic climate change policies.
At Conference of the Parties (COP) 17 in late 2011 in Durban, South Africa, China
seemingly relaxed its position further when it indicated that it was open to participation in
a legally binding treaty after 2020. It subsequently signed on to the Durban Platform, which
aims to complete negotiations on a new comprehensive legal instrument by 2015. Notably,
the decision establishing the Ad Hoc Working Group for Durban Platform (ADP) did
not explicitly reference the CBDR principle. The fact that China agreed to establish a new
treaty that was not overtly based on the CBDR principle struck many as a radical depar-
ture from its former position. While it certainly demonstrated a clear e volution in China’s
stance, a close look at the Durban Agreement’s language indicates that the outcome repre-
sented less of a change in Chinese diplomacy than originally thought. China did not agree
either to a legally binding treaty or to emission limits. It simply agreed to begin negotiations

on a new ‘legal instrument or agreed outcome with legal force’ (COP 17 2012). Moreover,
Xie Zhenhua, one of China’s chief negotiators, subsequently made clear that participation
was contingent upon five preconditions, including the implementation of the common
but differentiated responsibility and the fulfillment of Kyoto Protocol pledges through
a second commitment period. In short, China relaxed its resistance, but did not drop its
opposition to binding emission limits in a post-Kyoto instrument.
Since Durban, Chinese diplomacy has remained relatively consistent. Although China
has shifted its tactics by working less through the G77 and more with BASIC nations
and, in particular with the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs), Chinese rep-
resentatives have nonetheless sounded familiar themes. Across a range of forums includ-
ing annual COP meetings, smaller conferences held in between COP meetings, BASIC
nation summits, media interviews and statements submitted to the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (e.g., China 2012, 2014; Zou
2012), Chinese negotiators have continued to push for the inclusion of the CBDR lan-
guage in all COP decisions. As part of its defense of CBDR, China has repeatedly dis-
couraged nations from rewriting or renegotiating the principles of the convention. For
instance, in its 2014 submission to the UNFCCC, China made a very strong defense of
the original UNFCCC, stating: ‘The Durban Platform is by no means to create a new
international climate regime, nor to renegotiate, replace, restructure, rewrite, or reinter-
pret the Convention and its principles, provisions, and Annexes’ (China 2014). China
has also continued to defend strict differentiation between developed and developing
countries.
In evoking the CBDR principle, Chinese representatives have given renewed emphasis
to historical responsibility as the basis for equity and the operationalization of CBDR
(see Page this volume), which is hardly surprising given China’s current position as the
world’s leading emitter (IISD 2013a, p. 12, 2013b, p. 14). For instance, in 2013, China,
along with other developing countries, supported the reintroduction of the ‘Brazilian
Proposal,’ which was a plan first introduced by the Brazilian delegation in 1997 that
would allocate future emission reduction requirements based on historical emissions
and past contribution to climate change dating back to the nineteenth century (Morales
2013). China has also aimed to keep the attention on obligations of developed coun-
tries by repeatedly advocating that they offer deeper emission reduction targets and
greater financial assistance. China also frequently supports calls for developed coun-
tries to increase the transparency and standardize reporting requirements for emission
reductions (Carr and Nicola 2014; IISD 2012).
To summarize, China’s position has evolved considerably since the early days of
climate change negotiations. After two-plus decades of participation in international
dialogue, Chinese leaders accept that combating climate change is a legitimate issue
that requires intergovernmental cooperation to address (Lieberthal and Sandalow
2009, p. 30). Moreover, China’s position has evolved on a number of other fronts. Once
opposed to all but the weakest agreement, China has acquiesced to the need for a new
protocol, accepted the listing of voluntary targets for developing countries, and lowered
its resistance to international monitoring of developing country mitigation efforts. It
consented to the demand of many Western countries and small-island nations for the
negotiation of a new agreement, one that could potentially weaken or even eliminate
the firewall between developed and developing nations. And in late 2014, China took the

China 205
dramatic step of offering for the first time a target date for capping its emissions, aiming
for the year 2030 (or earlier).
At the same time, however, there is a great deal of continuity evident in China’s climate
change diplomacy. China continues to argue that: economic development takes precedent
over environmental protection; developed countries have a responsibility to provide
financial resources and technology to compensate developing countries; and countries
must respect one another’s sovereign right to use its natural resources. China has consist-
ently pushed for a strict divide between developed and developing countries arguing that
the former have considerable mitigation responsibilities while the latter’s end once eco-
nomic development is affected, while favoring proposals that lack legally binding targets,
protect developing country autonomy and require industrialized country action.
THE DRIVERS OF CHINA’S CLIMATE CHANGE DIPLOMACY
Like all nations, China’s climate change diplomacy is influenced by a confluence of

factors operating at both the domestic and international levels. These factors affect
China’s diplomacy in complex, often conflicting ways and create both elements of change
and continuity, cooperation and obstinacy, in China’s negotiating position. This makes it
difficult to offer a concise summary of China’s approach to international climate change
politics, let alone determine its trajectory. Nonetheless, in this section I will discuss the
assortment of forces affecting China’s climate change diplomacy and try to offer a sense
of its direction.
Factors Inhibiting More Ambitious Action
China has reservations about a strong climate change regime because its leaders believe
the economic costs outweigh the environmental benefits. There is little doubt that Beijing
is keenly aware of China’s susceptibility to the harmful impacts of global warming and
that this has made the leadership more interested in reducing global emissions (Conrad
2012; Xu 2014). Over the past decade, Chinese representatives have participated in the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate review process and Chinese
scholars have published several reports about the impact of climate change, such as
the 2006 National Assessment Report on Climate Change that involved more than 20
government departments and took four years to complete (Wang 2009). A 2007 report by
Chinese scientists predicted that China, which feeds 20 percent of the world’s population
on 7 percent of its arable land, will experience a 5–10 percent decline in crop productiv-
ity by 2030. A decline of up to 37 percent for staples such as rice and wheat is possible
after 2050 (Lewis 2009). As a result, it has become common for Chinese leaders to speak
openly about the risks China faces from a warming planet (Seligsohn et al. 2009, p. 3).
However, in a country where the overriding goal is economic growth, an enhanced
sense of vulnerability is insufficient to offset concerns about the cost of restricting GHG
emissions. Growth not only helps China reduce the still considerable ranks of poor—as
of 2010 there were an estimated 153 million people living on less than a $1.25 a day in
China—but is also the Chinese Communist Party’s greatest hope for maintaining legiti-
macy and social stability (UN 2014). And the fuel for China’s economic engine is coal.

China has one of the largest coal reserves in the world, and despite its massive investment
in alternate forms of energy, coal accounts for 67 percent of its primary energy use, com-
pared with 24 percent for the world average (Zeng et al. 2008). China consumes almost
as much coal as the rest of the world combined (Lin 2013) and is expected to account
for 60 percent of the growth in coal demand in the five years through 2018 (IEA 2013).
By 2020, China is expected to use 40 percent more energy than it did in 2011. However,
in the previous decade, actual energy use far surpassed predictions. The implication is
that China knows that over the next few decades its much-needed economic growth will
be based largely on coal, but it is hard to pinpoint precisely just how much energy China
might consume in 2020 or 2030. Naturally, this makes China hesitant to commit to an
international regime that involves strict emission limits and confines its range of action.
The interest in protecting economic development is reinforced by the domestic policy
making process. As several scholars have demonstrated, over the course of the past
20-plus years, decision-making power has steadily shifted away from climate scientists
and environmental officials towards economic and foreign affairs bureaucrats (Economy
1997). Prior to 1998, the China Meteorological Administration was charged with coor-
dinating China’s climate change bureaucracy. However, after 1998 responsibility was
transferred to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). There are
two high-level leading groups, one of which is headed by China’s Premier Li Keqiang,
as well as a National Coordination Committee on Climate Change that brings together
ministers from a variety of agencies (e.g., Foreign Affairs, Environmental Protection).
However, this committee is housed in the NDRC and it is widely accepted that the NDRC
wields the most influence in bureaucratic debates. The most powerful of China’s bureau-
cracies, the mandate of the NDRC is overseeing China’s economic development. It is
hardly surprisingly, then, that economic interests have typically trumped environmental
concerns in the process of forging China’s international position.
Another domestic-level factor that complicates China’s climate change diplomacy is
the lack of technical and political capacity to implement an ambitious emission cap. An
inability to implement effectively regulations in China’s fragmented authoritarian politi-
cal system has long hampered all of China’s environmental protection efforts, including
those related to energy efficiency and climate change (Balme 2011). Although China has
met most of its energy and emission targets in the past, such as the goal to reduce CO2
emissions intensity by 20 percent by the end of 2010, it required a significant amount
of pressure from Beijing on local governments who tend to see the targets as impeding
economic growth (Marks 2010). As the deadline approached, some localities complied
by shutting down power to local businesses, including hospitals (Yuan and Feng 2011).
Moreover, much of the low hanging fruit has been plucked as the dirtiest factories and
coal mines have been shuttered. From 2006 to 2011, 72 gigawatts (GW) of small power
plants were closed; only half as much can be closed in the 2011–2016 period of the 12th
Five-Year Plan. The implication is that future emissions reductions will likely involve sig-
nificant investment or tradeoffs in terms of jobs, which could result in greater resistance
from local governments. Uncertainty about its ability to implement new targets is part
of what leads Beijing to avoid hard targets or simply to reduce the scope of its ambition.
While China clearly has a range of material interests serving as a drag on its climate
change diplomacy, ideational factors are just as significant (see Dimitrov this volume).
For instance, China’s longstanding commitment to the principle of sovereignty inhibits its

China 207
cooperation in climate change negotiations. Across China’s international relations, there

is a great deal of distrust over foreign incursions and the principle of non-intervention
has traditionally been deeply embedded in China’s foreign policy. While China’s defense
of the sovereignty principle has relaxed over the course of three decades of climate
change negotiations, China remains sensitive to external interference, as evidenced in its
resistance to external monitoring of its voluntary emission pledges. Equity norms also
heavily influence China’s climate change diplomacy, particularly CBDR. For instance,
China’s concern about equity and justice has made it quick to view developed countries
as seeking to shirk their responsibilities and therefore hesitant to cooperate. Throughout
the 1990s and into the early 2000s, China opposed the Clean Development Mechanism
(CDM), despite its potential to benefit from it, largely because it viewed CDM as an
unethical attempt by developed countries to avoid taking mitigation action at home.
Justice concerns have also led many to suspect environmental issues are being used by
developed countries as a disguised means of constraining China’s economic growth and
to perpetuate an unfair international economic order (Lieberthal and Sandalow 2009; Tu
2005; Wang 2009).
Factors Contributing to the Evolution of China’s Diplomacy
Over the past decade, a number of developments have lowered China’s cost of partici-
pation and heightened the cost of its obstructionism in international negotiations, and
therefore altered China’s climate change diplomacy. Among the most significant of these
developments is China’s heavy investment in green technology coupled with its numerous
policy initiatives to reduce energy and pollution. Over the past decade, China has devoted
tremendous financial and political resources toward low-carbon development. In 2009,
for the first time China exceeded the United States in total investments in clean energy. In
that same year, China became the world’s largest market for wind energy and the world’s
largest maker of wind turbines. In 2013, China invested $54 billion in clean energy (versus
$37 billion for the US) and installed 12 GW of solar power. The total capacity in the US
is 10.5 GW. In other words, in a single year China installed more solar power than exists
in the entire US (Han 2014; PEW 2013).
China has also rolled out an array of policy programs and official targets aimed at
improving energy efficiency, including the 2006 Renewable Energy and 2008 Energy
Conservation Laws, an inchoate regional cap-and-trade program covering six cities, and
the 1000 Enterprise Program, which covered one-third of primary energy use in China
and successfully reduced the equivalent of 100 million tons of coal in its first two years
of operation (Seligsohn 2009). In its five-year plans and other official directives Beijing
has also put forward a number of targets such as increasing the share of renewable energy
to 15 percent by 2020 and 20 percent by 2030, reducing energy intensity by 16 percent
by 2015, and capping coal use to below 65 percent of total primary energy consumption
by 2017.
The investment in clean energy and associated policy initiatives are being driven by
three related interests among key segments of the Chinese leadership: a desire to rebalance
China’s economy, a hope to strengthen energy security and a need to defuse pollution as
a hot-button political issue among China’s middle class. Perhaps the domestic factor with
the most potential to shape China’s climate change diplomacy is the economic reform

program being driven by current President Xi Jinping. While a full discussion of China’s
reform agenda is beyond the scope of this chapter, the basic goal is to transform China
from the workshop of the world into a center for high-value industry. Included among
these high-value sectors are environmental technologies and services, which China seeks
to dominate in order to enhance its economic competitiveness (Ma 2010). Xi seeks to
move China away from an economic model based on investment and pollution-intensive
industries in which key inputs such as land and energy are controlled by the government
and kept at artificially low prices to benefit politically connected state-owned enterprises.
The aim is to introduce greater competition into the economy and allow market forces
to play a larger role in allocating inputs such as capital, land and energy. To the extent
China’s economy becomes more energy-efficient and less pollution-intensive, the costs
of complying with an international climate change agreement decline and p articipation
becomes easier.
The push to develop alternative forms of energy, boost energy efficiency and alter the
composition of China’s economy is given added emphasis by concerns about energy secu-
rity and air pollution. In 1993, China became a net oil importer and by the 2000s there
was considerable debate within the Chinese government about the threat that the volatil-
ity of oil prices and supply posed to China’s economic development and social stability.
In 2004, China experienced a series of blackouts and has subsequently faced major power
shortages almost every year (Ma 2013). China is today the world’s largest consumer of
energy and largest importer of crude oil (EIA 2014a, 2014b). Not surprisingly, decreas-
ing its vulnerability to foreign oil is a primary concern of the Chinese leadership (Balme
2011, p. 46).
Like energy security, air pollution is another issue that likely causes some sleepless
nights in Beijing. The China Daily reported that in 2013, although air pollution improved
in some areas, only three of 74 cities surveyed met Chinese air quality standards (Zheng
2014). While China has suffered from abysmal air pollution for most of the reform era,
in recent years it has become a major political issue for China’s expanding middle class
and there have been a number of protests. In talks with US officials on climate change,
Wang Yang, a vice-premier and Politburo member, indicated that China needs a ‘war on
pollution’ (Stern 2014). Like the concerns regarding energy security, the push to combat
air pollution provides China’s leaders with a powerful impetus to improve the energy
efficiency of its economy and ensures that China will continue to forge ahead with invest-
ment in clean energy and pollution control. While there is no guarantee that China’s
continued embrace of green technology will lead to a greater climate protection or more
cooperative climate change diplomacy, the indication is that China’s policies in this area
are reducing its costs and increasing its willingness to participate in a global agreement.
At the international level, an important factor pushing Chinese diplomacy in a
conciliatory direction is the fracturing of the G77 and the growing threat of interna-
tional isolation. Like any nation, China seeks to fortify its position in climate change
negotiations by building alliances. For many years, China’s position was closely aligned
with the G77, which added legitimacy and strength to its position. One scholar referred
to the G77 ‘the most important lever for China to strengthen its bargaining power’ (Wu
2013). The US rejection of the Kyoto Protocol when it was the world’s leading emitter
of CO2 helped China make a stronger case that developing countries should be free
of obligations. As China replaced the US as the leading emitter and other developing

China 209
nations begin to favor a stronger climate change regime, the pressure on China mounted.
This scrutiny has only increased as the US has eased its own position under the Obama
administration and put forward emission reduction targets. While continuing to operate
through the G77, China turned its attention to other groups of developing countries,
starting with the BASIC nations around the time of Copenhagen. While this was a
potentially viable coalition, eventually the BASIC countries’ interest diverged and,
although they continue to work together, they have split on important issues, includ-
ing the form of a legally binding agreement (Sethi 2013). As a result China turned
elsewhere. In 2012 China hosted the first summit of a new developing country bloc, the
LMDCs. While this allows China to avoid complete isolation, the handful of countries
that c omprise the LMDCs do not enjoy anything close to the influence or legitimacy
that a united China and G77 once did. Thus, China’s coalition is shrinking in both size
and importance and as one Chinese scholar put it, today ‘China faces unprecedented
international pressure’ (Wang 2014). Thus, the growing calls from the developing world
for China to take a larger role, as much as any other single factor operating at the inter-
national level, is pushing China to consider the concessions necessary for a robust post-
2020 agreement.
There are also norm-based explanations for the softening of China’s climate change
diplomacy. The most important factor is China’s acceptance of climate change as a
legitimate issue worthy of the international community’s attention. Many scholars see
considerable progress in China’s acceptance of international environmental norms (Hsu
2000) and tie that acceptance directly to China’s climate change diplomacy (see Dimitrov
this volume). Another important force pushing China in the direction of cooperation is
Beijing’s concern about its international image (Seligsohn et al. 2009, p. 3; Wang 2009).
Scholars of Chinese international relations have shown that a concern with reputation
has led to changes in Chinese foreign policy in a variety of issue areas, including even
high politics issues such as arms control (Johnston 2008). A similar dynamic has been
at play in the climate change arena and reputational concerns have long played a role
in China’s climate change diplomacy (Conrad 2012). Part of the softening of China’s
stance in the 1990s was based on Beijing’s attempt to repair its image in the wake of
Tiananmen Square. More recently, Wang (2009, p. 10) points out that China’s leaders are
concerned with rebutting the pervasive ‘China threat’ argument and therefore engage the
climate change regime more extensively than they might otherwise. As Chinese foreign
minister, Yang Jiechi, stated: ‘Being a major and responsible country, China stands ready
to assume greater responsibilities commensurate with its role’ (Yang 2013). It is China’s
acute concern about its international image that makes the weakening of its alliance with
the G77 so important. China is likely to go to great lengths to avoid being tagged as the
main obstruction to an international agreement.
CONCLUSION
As the leading emitter of GHGs, China is a key player in international climate change
negotiations. Emphasizing its status as a developing country, China has traditionally
demonstrated an aversion to legally binding emission limits. Arguing in favor of the
CBDR principle, which holds that developed countries bear the principal obligation for

combating climate change, China has for most of the past two decades aimed to avoid
commitments while urging developed countries to increase the ambition of their own
reduction pledges and financial assistance. However, over time China has made some
key compromises, and particularly since the Copenhagen talks in 2009, China’s position
has softened. This relaxation is most evident in its decreased opposition to developing
country participation in mitigation efforts and its willingness to offer a target date for an
emissions cap. Both China’s considerable investment in green technology and its expand-
ing web of domestic climate change initiatives contribute to this change. Pressure from
the international community, and especially from the developing world, have also added
to the evolution of China’s climate change diplomacy. Always sensitive about its inter-
national image, China today faces a great deal of stress both because it is the world’s top
emitter and because its traditional alliance with the G77 has grown weaker over the past
decade. While China has helped to forge a new coalition of LMDCs, this group lacks
the size and influence to shield China from external criticism. The result is that China
faces an unprecedented level of scrutiny and pressure to contribute robustly to a climate
change agreement. Going forward it will be increasingly difficult for China to reconcile
some of its competing goals in climate change negotiations such as its desire to be seen
as a developing country leader and a ‘responsible great power’ versus its opposition to
a more ambitious emissions cap. Unless it relinquishes some of its goals, China will risk
having an ineffective, muddled negotiating position.
Does this mean China will relent and radically depart from its previous approach,
perhaps by agreeing to a post-2020 agreement that eliminates the divide between devel-
oped and developing countries or by moving forward the timeframe for its emissions cap?
Given China’s continued need to expand the economy and fight poverty, as well as its
uncertainty about future energy demand and its challenges in implementing environmen-
tal initiatives, China is unlikely to surrender completely its opposition to legally binding
commitments and will continue to push for flexibility in multilateral agreements. Even
if makes more ambitious pledges, it will likely place conditions on its promises such as
making them contingent upon developed countries raising the ambition of their reduc-
tions or meeting financial aid obligations. But as this chapter has shown, there are forces
pushing China in that direction and cause for optimism. The Chinese leadership is com-
mitted to transforming the Chinese growth model and is aggressively investing in clean
technology, which it believes will increase both economic competitiveness and energy
security, while contributing to the battle against pollution. As its domestic circumstances
change and China greens, its climate change diplomacy will follow and China will assume
a larger, more proactive role in global climate governance.
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19. The United States
Guri Bang
INTRODUCTION
For many years the United States declined to participate in the Kyoto Protocol, the most
ambitious mechanism for international climate cooperation. Ever since the Byrd–Hagel
resolution was adopted in the US Senate in 1997,1 two obstacles pertaining to interna-
tional climate treaty participation have been paramount. First, the Kyoto Protocol did not
include obligations to cut emissions for large emerging economy emitters like China and
India. Second, because of carbon leakage problems, the US economy risked setbacks if
unilateral policies were introduced. This chapter discusses both international and domestic
developments that have the potential to increase the chances for US participation in a new
climate agreement. At the international level, recent progress in China’s climate policy is
important to consider. China has pledged to cap its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by
2030 and promised to increase its use of energy from zero-emission sources to 20 percent
by 2030. China’s pledges could make US participation more likely. At the domestic level,
the Obama administration has introduced new regulations on power plants that aim to
cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the utility sector by 32 percent by 2030. This is the
first ever policy regulation of carbon emissions at the federal level, and could increase the
credibility and likelihood of US participation in a new climate agreement.
Previous studies point to the lack of a comprehensive and ambitious US domestic
climate policy as the main reason for the United States’ failed participation in interna-
tional climate cooperation (DeSombre 2011; Bang 2011; Hovi et al. 2012). The US has
frequently signed treaties that are not ratified, and such cases occur when implementa-
tion of treaty obligations requires politically challenging changes to domestic policy
(DeSombre 2000; Bang et al. 2012). This mechanism is institutionalized in the US politi-
cal system (Palmer 2009; Bang 2011), and could potentially thwart future climate agree-
ments because the US is a crucial actor because of its high share of total world GHG
emissions and large economy. For decades, time-and sector-limited policy programs
to increase energy efficiency and to support renewable energy technology development
were the rule rather than the exception. Several attempts at introducing a comprehensive
climate policy with a cap-and-trade system failed in Congress—in 2003, 2005 and 2008.
With the Obama administration, the focus and attention on the climate change
problem increased substantially. In one of his first acts as president, Obama forged
an agreement with the automobile industry to improve the fuel efficiency of new car
models. The deal will have a significant effect on emissions in the transport sector in
coming years (EPA 2014a). Obama then focused attention on building a winning coa-
lition among lawmakers in Congress in favor of a cap-and-trade system, an initiative
that failed in 2010 (Lizza 2010). At the start of his second presidential term in 2013,
President Obama announced a Climate Action Plan with three goals: to reduce domestic
carbon emissions, to prepare the US for the consequences of climate change, and to lead
213
international efforts to curb climate change (White House 2013). In the following two
years, the Obama administration presented key measures to fulfill the goals. First, regula-
tions under existing law designed to cut CO2 emissions in the utility sector and, second, a
bilateral statement with China in November 2014 specifying emissions reductions targets
for 2025 for the United States and 2030 for China. These measures aimed to overcome
previous political barriers that were blocking a comprehensive domestic climate policy
that could allow active participation in a new international climate treaty.
This chapter explores the political feasibility of US participation in future interna-
tional climate cooperation given ongoing changes taking place in the domestic energy
sector, and taking into account developments in the international climate regime. The
chapter first gives an assessment of traditional domestic political barriers to US partici-
pation, and an explanation of why political institutional rules vitally connect decision-
making at the domestic and international levels. In practice, institutionalized mechanisms
for agenda setting, issue linkage and voting in the US Congress deter radical policy
change (Krehbiel 1998; Tsebelis 2002). The implication of strong status quo stability in
domestic climate policy is that signing and ratifying an international climate treaty will
be challenging. Second, the chapter explores the potential that regulations covering CO2
emissions from power plants proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
will be realized as a stable and long-term policy that will put permanent pressure to
unseat coal as the most cost-effective energy source in the utility sector. I also discuss the
role of shale gas in reducing natural gas prices to a level that puts natural gas on par with
coal as an energy input for utilities. Because of the low natural gas price, a shift from coal
to gas is now taking place throughout the US utility sector. Third, the chapter investigates
whether the possibility of US participation would increase under a new type of interna-
tional climate regime that is based on a pledge-and-review approach and where China
has committed to reach a cap for its emissions by 2030. Can the United States credibly be
a leader in international climate cooperation? Such leadership assumes full implementa-
tion of the emissions reductions proposed in the power plant regulations initiated under
Obama’s Climate Action Plan (for a longer discussion on US leadership, see Parker and
Karlsson this volume).
PREVIOUS BARRIERS TO US PARTICIPATION
US participation in international climate negotiations, with specific, binding targets and

timetables for emissions reductions, has been hampered by the US Constitution’s rules
concerning treaty ratification (Bang et al. 2012; DeSombre 2011). The Constitution
gives the president the authority to negotiate international treaties, but gives the privi-
lege of advice and consent to the US Senate. The Senate must give its consent with a
two-thirds majority (67 senators) before a treaty can become the law of the land. In
case no domestic law exists that can ensure the implementation of the treaty, enabling
legislation must be adopted to ensure that a treaty’s objectives can be fulfilled (Palmer
2009; Hovi et al. 2012). The adoption of enabling legislation follows the same proce-
dures in Congress as those of any other domestic legislation. To become federal law,
bills must pass both in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and be signed
by the president. Voting rules in both chambers require a simple majority for passage,

The United States 215
but controversial legislation—like a climate law—would require a three-fifths majority

(60 votes) in the Senate because of Rule 22 that allows filibustering (Lowi et al. 2014).
Because of the filibuster mechanism, passing laws in the Senate is more difficult than
in the House. It is only when common interests and positions can be found among at
least 218 out of 435 House representatives (50 percent) and 60 out of 100 senators (60
percent), that a winning coalition can be formed to adopt policy change on controver-
sial policy issues.
In practice, the ratification rules and the requirement for enabling legislation made it
impossible for the US to participate in the Kyoto Protocol. It was unfeasible to gather
a majority of senators to vote in favor of either Kyoto or enabling legislation. On three
occasions, the Senate voted down climate legislation that could have been used to
enable ratification of the Kyoto Protocol—in 2003, 2005 and 2008. In 2009, the House
of Representatives adopted the American Clean Energy and Security Act, but the bill
died when it was sent to the Senate for deliberation. After months of negotiations and
coalition-building attempts in 2009–2010, a majority of senators was still unwilling to
sign up for a climate law and the bill was abandoned. Previous research has pointed to
two principal factors for this lack of enthusiasm among senators. First, for a majority of
states, a climate law would mean increases in energy prices. More than half of the states
are heavily dependent on coal for their electricity, and the congressional bill proposed to
introduce a cap-and-trade system that would put extra costs on emissions from coal-fired
power plants. Finding support for this measure among politicians representing states
with a strong dependency on coal-fired electricity was hard because the measure would
bring about energy price increases (Fisher 2006; Skodvin 2010). Supporting the measure
would likely jeopardize legislators’ re-election prospects, and re-election is their first
priority (Arnold 1990). Second, congressional Democrats and Republicans are increas-
ingly polarized on climate change (McCright and Dunlap 2011; Skocpol 2013). With the
growth of the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party since 2009, fewer Republicans
are now willing to acknowledge that the climate change problem is real, much less to
support climate legislation in Congress. Hence, among Republicans in Congress, support
for ambitious climate policy has decreased because most moderate Republicans have
failed to be re-elected.
In sum, two factors have made previous attempts at passage of climate legislation in
the US Congress difficult: party polarization and deep fossil-fuel dependency in more
than half of the states. Without comprehensive climate legislation, ratification of an
international agreement that specifies targets for emissions cuts within a specific time-
table is difficult. The lack of a comprehensive domestic climate policy has hindered US
participation in the Kyoto Protocol.
AMBITIONS TO REDUCE DOMESTIC CARBON EMISSIONS
Absent a climate law, the Obama administration actively employed the 1970 Clean Air
Act to develop new climate policies not requiring congressional approval. Following a
2007 Supreme Court decision that classified CO2 as a pollutant that endangers the health
and welfare of citizens, the president in 2010 tasked the EPA with crafting new regula-
tions to limit CO2 emissions from power plants. The decision to empower the EPA was

met with protests on Capitol Hill, and a host of unsuccessful attempts to kill such regula-
tions followed (Wallach 2012).
The Obama Climate Action Plan
Despite protests, Obama pursued the idea of new standards for power plants in his
Climate Action Plan that was presented early in his second presidential term. The
rationale for reducing emissions from power plants is that cuts in this sector would sig-
nificantly reduce total US GHG emissions. Power plants are the largest major source
of GHG emissions in the United States, accounting for roughly 33 percent of total US
GHG emissions (EPA 2014c). Directed by the Climate Action Plan, the EPA proposed
regulations for new power plants in 2013, suggesting a standard for the level of GHG
emissions per megawatt hour of electricity produced. The EPA proposed a separate
standard of performance for fossil fuel-fired power plants that burn coal, petroleum coke
and other fossil fuels. The proposed emission limit for those sources is 1,100 pounds of
CO2/megawatt-hours (MWh). The standard of performance for natural gas-fired station-
ary combustion turbines based on best available technology was proposed as an emission
limit of 1,000 pounds of CO2/MWh for larger units and 1,100 pounds of CO2/MWh for
smaller units (US Federal Register 2014a). The EPA performance standards mean that
the CO2 emission level of a new coal plant must be almost the same as that of a natural
gas plant with state-of-the-art integrated gasification combined cycle technology. In
other words, any new coal plant in the US must have carbon capture and storage (CCS)
technology to meet the standard.
Several key industries protested the proposed new standards. The National Mining
Association announced that ‘by forcing power plants to abandon the use of the nation’s
largest and most reliable source of affordable electricity, EPA is recklessly gambling with
the nation’s energy and economic future’ (Greenwire 2013). Manufacturing industry
interests, who are major consumers of electricity, expressed concern that the new stand-
ards would make electric power more expensive. Industry actors will likely bring lawsuits
concerning the standards, especially since there could be uncertainty whether CCS for
new coal plants meets the Clean Air Act’s requirement that the best available technology
for emissions reductions should be adequately demonstrated (Greenwire 2013). Political
reactions have been mixed. Environmentalists praised the new standards. Traditional
coal-state politicians like Senators Manchin (D-WV) and Barrasso (R-WY), who have
called the EPA regulations a ‘war on coal,’ harshly criticized them (Greenwire 2013).
The second step of crafting power plant regulations was implemented in August 2015
when the EPA announced a rule for limits on emissions from existing power plants. The
goal is to reduce emissions from power plants by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030,
but with individual goals for each state. States’ emissions targets are tailored to take into
account that the current energy mix influences the size of the cuts that states are expected
to make by 2030 (EPA 2014b). State targets are based on the ‘best system of emission
reduction,’ which uses three potential pathways to cost-effectively and efficiently reduce
CO2 emissions. First, states can cut emissions by making coal-fired power plants more
efficient; second, they can shift generation from existing fossil steam plants to existing
natural gas combined cycle plants; and third, they can use more zero-emission renewable
power. State targets vary between 0 to 50% (C2ES 2015).

State regulators are given significant flexibility regarding which policy instruments
to use. EPA has proposed a range of policies that can help cut the carbon intensity in
electricity production. Broad measures covering the whole utility sector—like energy
efficiency, incentive programs for renewable energy, and swift transition from coal to
natural gas in power plants—are proposed. Moreover, efficient energy storage, modern-
ized grid systems and development of inter-state emissions trading systems for the power
sector are also discussed. States are also free to cut emissions from specific power plants,
although such cuts would be less cost-effective (US Federal Register 2014b).
The standards for existing power plants have become even more controversial than
standards for new power plants because they will interfere with the economic prospects
for investments already made in the utility sector. Analyses show that if carbon emis-
sions cuts were met chiefly by switching from coal to low-carbon fuel sources, coal
demand in 2030 could decline by about 12 percent compared to 2013. Cuts in carbon
emissions by 25 percent from 2005 levels through 2020 would reduce coal demand by
26 percent (Energy Wire 2014a). Many coal plants have been operating for 40 or 50 years,
and plans exist to decommission many of them. Other coal plants must find a way to
comply with both the EPA’s new carbon regulations and the Mercury and Air Toxics
Standards, putting many more coal-fired power plants on the retirement list. The US
Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook 2014 points out that
as much as 16 percent of the coal-fired generating capacity that was available in 2012 is
expected to close down by 2020 (EIA 2014a).
Republican outcries about a ‘war on coal’ have strengthened in step with proposals
of new carbon regulations in the power sector. Republican leaders such as Senators
McConnell and Inhofe vowed to introduce a congressional resolution that would remove
the EPA rule, arguing that President Obama’s carbon regulations would drive up costs
for utilities and energy prices for consumers, and shift manufacturing jobs overseas
(Greenwire 2014). Generally, reactions to the rule follow traditional patterns of cleavages
between opposing and supportive coalitions of interest groups and politicians.
Because the states are responsible for implementing the regulations, chances for oppo-
sition and slow progress are quite high, especially given previous experience with opposi-
tion to attempts at introducing restrictions on CO2 emissions in the United States. Both
the ideology of state-level political leaders and the fossil-fuel dependency of the state
economy, as mentioned previously, will likely determine a state’s eagerness and willing-
ness to implement the EPA rules. Many veto points exist within the multileveled US
political system, and they provide ample opportunity for states to slow the implementa-
tion process.
Legal challenges can also be expected. Because of the separation of powers between
the legislative, executive and judicial branches, US courts have an important role to play
in implementing new policies (Lowi et al. 2014). The US political system assigns strong
powers to the judicial branch in the policy implementation phase. Parties affected by
the change of law can sue the government if they can prove that they are unreasonably
harmed by the law or, on the opposite, that the law is not implemented stringently enough
to ameliorate the problem (Lowi et al. 2014). In case of disagreement over whether policy
programs follow a federal law’s intent (in this case the Clean Air Act), the judicial branch
has decisive power. The Supreme Court has the final power to interpret and decide
disputes over federal law. For instance, states could dispute controversial regulations in

court, and appeal any lower courts’ decisions all the way to the Supreme Court. This
process would take many years, which could delay the full implementation and effect of
the new EPA regulations for power plants.
Market-driven Emissions Cuts: the Shale Gas Revolution
In the short term, the market-driven shale-gas boom could have a bigger effect on carbon
emissions than do the abovementioned EPA regulations. Because of abundant access to
cheap natural gas, many US states are currently reducing their dependence on coal and
coal-fired electricity. New technologies for hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling
have opened previously inaccessible reservoirs of shale gas, and since 2009, natural gas
production has increased to record-high levels. Estimates from EIA show that technically
recoverable US natural gas reserves are very large, at least 334 trillion cubic feet (EIA
2013a). Greatly increased natural gas availability has significantly reduced prices, from a
record high of about US$13 per thousand thousand British thermal units (MMBtu) in
2008 to under US$4 per MMBtu in 2013 (EIA 2013b). The low price makes natural gas a
serious competitor to coal in the utility sector, also in traditional coal states. Even in West
Virginia and Pennsylvania, utility companies are now increasingly investing in natural
gas plants (Energy Wire 2013). This trend is nationwide and has resulted in a more or less
full stop in investments in coal-fired power plants (EIA 2014b).
The utility sector’s transition from coal to natural gas has resulted in a significant
short-term reduction in energy-related CO2 emissions in the United States. From 2007
to 2012, total energy-related CO2 emissions declined 12 percent and were at their lowest
since 1994, although increasing slightly again in 2013 (EIA 2014c). With abundant shale
gas reserves and declining emissions because of increased natural gas use, the US seems
better positioned to accept a low-carbon energy policy trajectory. However, public oppo-
sition is building against fracking in many states. Worries are mounting over uncertain-
ties regarding how much leakage of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, is associated
with shale gas extraction. In Colorado grassroots groups tried to pose ‘ban on fracking’
as a ballot question in the 2014 midterm elections, but failed (Energy Wire 2014b). New
York adopted a moratorium on fracking in 2008, and made a final decision in 2015 not
to lift the moratorium. In some places where hydraulic fracturing has occurred for years,
local groups oppose further shale gas extraction because they fear harmful consequences.
Because of the liquid cocktail of chemicals used in the fracking process, local citizens
fear that leakage of chemicals will contaminate ground water. Another problematic side
effect of fracking is the likelihood of initiating earthquakes. The most well-known case is
a series of earthquakes (the largest registered 4.0 on the Richter scale) near Youngstown,
Ohio, in December 2011. The quakes were most likely caused by the underground injec-
tion of shale drilling wastewater, according to Ohio government officials (Greenwire
2012).
Also problematic is the fact that energy sector investments in shale gas extraction
and infrastructure to support natural gas use could lead to less interest and investment
in renewable energy technology. Natural gas emits more CO2 than do renewable energy
sources, which have carbon emissions profiles near zero. In the long term, therefore, the
shale gas revolution could be a barrier to the necessary transition to fossil-free energy
technology in the US.

Despite concerns about the consequences of hydraulic fracturing, the vast reserves of
natural gas—a domestic and secure energy resource—are unlikely to be left in the ground.
Hydraulic fracturing to produce natural gas will most likely continue to increase over the
next decades (EIA 2013c). If the Obama administration’s power plant standards to limit
CO2 emissions are implemented, the market-driven transition from coal to natural gas in
the utility sector will be followed up by political incentives. The standards will then help
force a continuation of the transition away from coal dependency in the utility sector,
even if natural gas prices should rise again. In the absence of power plant regulations, a
return to coal if natural gas prices rise would be a likely option, and indeed happened to
some degree in 2013–2014 when the utility sector’s coal consumption increased slightly
(EIA 2014d). In sum, several rather uncertain conditions—both market-related and
political—seem to determine the speed with which the US can expect natural gas to
substitute coal, and therefore also when and how much CO2 emissions levels in electricity
production will be affected.
AMBITIONS TO BE A LEADER IN INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE

NEGOTIATIONS
An important part of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan concerns US ambitions

to lead international efforts to address climate change. Such leadership depends on two
conditions: a direction and design of international climate cooperation that overlaps
with US interests, and the ability of the US to make credible domestic policy commit-
ments (see Parker and Karlsson this volume). For many years, the direction and design
of international climate cooperation were focused on international- level agreement
on specific national emissions cuts targets for developed countries, leaving developing
countries without any commitments in accordance with the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change treaty’s principle of ‘common but differentiated respon-
sibilities and capabilities.’ The United States had reservations against participating in
a treaty that did not include commitments for all major emitters (Hovi et al. 2012).
However, this situation changed significantly in 2014 when China and the US for the first
time announced that they had mutually agreed to commit to GHG emissions cuts within
a set period. With China accepting a commitment to cap and reduce its emissions from
2030 onwards, conditions for US participation in international climate cooperation have
improved.
Furthermore, crucial changes in the international climate regime over the past few
years have increased US interest and ability to take a more active role. The US was
instrumental in pushing for a new direction and design for international climate coopera-
tion at Copenhagen in 2009, and very clear about not wanting a new climate agreement
designed like the Kyoto Protocol (Christoff 2010; Parker and Karlsson this volume).
Since Copenhagen, most developed countries joined the United States in demanding a
new agreement that will apply for all countries—even for developing countries with a
large and growing share of total global GHG emissions.
For the United States, the Copenhagen Accord succeeded to weaken the firewall
between developed and developing countries. For the first time, developing countries
committed to participate in future climate agreements that would limit their emissions,

and to allow a certain degree of international verification of compliance. The Accord

also contained the important agreement on a 2°C warming above pre-industrial levels as
the maximum, accepting that further warming would cause dangerous climate change.
The consequent pledge-and-review approach to reach an emissions level consistent with
the 2°C target suited the US well. Under this approach, countries pledge the amount
of emissions reductions that are feasible for them within a certain period, and then
commit to undergo review to ensure that they deliver on the promise (Stavins 2010). It
seems increasingly clear that the Paris Agreement in 2015 will be designed according to a
pledge-and-review approach, where for the first time all countries will agree to emissions
limitations. This means that the US will have the opportunity to pledge a certain level
of cuts that it deems realistic to achieve. The China–US deal announced in November
2014 is an important contribution to make the pledge-and-review approach successful.
Overall, the pledge-and-review approach seems to be a more politically feasible option for
US participation in international climate cooperation.
Still problematic for US leadership, however, is the realpolitik of international
negotiations, dictating that action speaks louder than words. With an uncertain situa-
tion regarding US domestic climate policy, as described above, it is by no means certain
that the United States can be a credible leader. A touchy question is whether the Obama
administration can expect Congress to be able to pass climate legislation in the next
decade. With a climate law that can function as enabling legislation, the United States
can credibly engage in the next rounds of international climate negotiations. However,
signs that Congress will be able to agree on a climate law very soon are lacking (Bang
and Skodvin 2014). More realistically, therefore, US engagement at the international
level must be built on further executive action similar to the EPA regulations for power
plants now being discussed in Washington, DC. The problem is that there is uncertainty
whether the Obama administration can instigate even deeper cuts in domestic GHG
emissions based on executive authority alone.
Generally, when US presidents decide to use executive action, they must consider how
political opponents might respond, and thoroughly evaluate the likely degree of com-
pliance and the costs and benefits of acting unilaterally rather than collaborating with
Congress (Mayer 2001; Shull 2006). The EPA regulations are controversial because they
would introduce an implicit cost on CO2 emissions for the first time in the United States,
a decision that the US Congress has opposed repeatedly and that members of Congress
consider being theirs to make, not the president’s alone. Furthermore, the risk of delayed
or failed implementation at the state level grows when decisions with impacts for a state’s
economy are made at the federal level without support from political representatives in
the state.
If President Obama activates a range of climate policies based on executive action
that has little support in Congress, there is a danger that the next US president might
remove them immediately when taking office in 2017. Such action would likely seriously
undermine the credibility for US leadership in international climate negotiations. Hence,
in a new international climate treaty, basing US commitments on domestic policy that
leans on executive authority alone would probably not signal sufficient credibility in the
international negotiations.
A more general problem with a pledge-and-review treaty approach is that when all
major emitters are allowed to pledge only what they think they can achieve, there is

no guarantee that the accumulated pledges will amount to enough cuts in GHG emis-
sions to ensure a 2°C maximum temperature increase. Science clearly states that if the
parties in the negotiations intend to avoid catastrophic climate change, total annual
GHG emissions must be reduced drastically starting as early as 2015–2020 (IPCC
2013).
CONCLUSIONS
The ability of the United States to participate in international climate cooperation
depends on domestic politics. President Obama has announced a Climate Action Plan
to strengthen both domestic climate policy and US leadership internationally. However,
Obama has not succeeded in building support in Congress for a climate law, and without
such support, the credibility of ambitious promises to lead international efforts to curb
climate change is low. The implementation of the Obama administration’s new emissions
standards for power plants is uncertain because it depends on support from state govern-
ments, and even the next president. The most effective push for lower CO2 emissions in
the United States over the past few years has been the transition from coal to natural gas
in the utility sector, which is a market-driven process made possible by new technology
for shale gas extraction. But natural gas prices are known to be notoriously unpredict-
able, and do not provide a stable incentive for a permanent shift away from coal. With
a substantial degree of uncertainty about the long-term trajectory for domestic carbon
emissions and with uncertainties attached to the implementation of domestic policies to
cut emissions, several key barriers to US leadership in international climate cooperation
remain high.
NOTE
1. In July 1997, five months before the Kyoto Conference, the Senate passed the Byrd–Hagel resolution,
stating that the United States should not be ‘a signatory to any protocol . . . which would (A) mandate
new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the Annex I Parties, unless the
protocol . . . also mandates new specific scheduled commitments . . . for Developing Country Parties within
the same compliance period, or (B) result in serious harm to the economy of the United States’ (Senate
Resolution 98. Congressional Record, Report No. 105-5412, June 1997).
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20. The European Union
Claire Dupont and Sebastian Oberthür
INTRODUCTION
The European Union (EU) is frequently considered a frontrunner in the development of
climate policies and the integration of climate policy objectives into energy policies (e.g.,
Dupont and Oberthür 2012; Wurzel and Connelly 2011; see also Parker and Karlsson
this volume). This assessment seems to be based on a comparison with other countries
such as the US or China. In this chapter, by contrast, we investigate the development of
EU climate and energy policies from the long-term perspective of action that is required
to stabilize ‘greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would
prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’ (United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, Article 2). In line with scientific
advice, the European Council of heads of state and government of EU member states
agreed in 2009 that the EU should reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 80–95
per cent from 1990 levels by 2050. Such a level of emission reduction amounts to a ‘decar-
bonization’ of the European economy (see below).
With the energy sector accounting for 80 per cent of the EU’s GHG emissions (EEA
2010), any chance of meeting the overarching decarbonization objective to 2050 will
require reducing energy-related GHG emissions to as close to zero as possible (hence the
term ‘decarbonization’). A host of roadmaps and scenarios to 2050 point out the variety
of choices the EU needs to make on the road to decarbonization – in terms of technol-
ogy use, target-setting and acceptable costs and benefits. While a comprehensive review
of these roadmaps and scenarios is beyond the scope of this chapter, they hold a number
of overarching lessons for the pathway towards decarbonization explored here. First,
renewable energy and energy efficiency will have to play increasingly important roles
on the road to decarbonization. Second, continued use of fossil fuels can occur only if
carbon capture and storage technology is proven to be economically viable sooner rather
than later. Third, continued use of nuclear energy may depend on public support and
cost reductions for this energy source. Fourth, costs for decarbonization are likely not
to exceed business-as-usual fossil fuel development (Dupont and Oberthür 2015). These
lessons help to frame the discussion of this chapter.
In this chapter, we argue that, despite the EU’s relatively advanced ambitions, its
climate policies have so far remained insufficient to ensure the EU achieves its 2050
decarbonization objective. The evolution of EU climate policies has nevertheless seen
important advances and changes in approach over the years, with binding EU measures
growing in the 2000s and later increased attention to incentives (and a concomitant
hesitation to push forward with binding renewables and energy efficiency targets). These
trends can be traced back to a limited number of internal and external factors. We pursue
our argument in two steps. First, we provide an historical account of the development
of EU climate policy as embedded in international climate policy with a focus on the
224
The European Union 225
c hanging dynamics over several phases since 1990, including the most recent develop-
ments in 2014. Next, we briefly discuss key internal and external barriers and driving
forces that help us understand the status and development of EU climate policy. We end
with a brief conclusion summarizing our main argument that EU climate policy has
advanced over time, but remains insufficient to achieve decarbonization.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: TWO STEPS FORWARD, ONE STEP

BACK?
In the following, we first discuss the development of EU climate and energy policy from
the 1990s to 2008. We then turn to EU climate policy developments from 2008, before
discussing the emerging climate policy framework to 2030. While EU climate policy has
made important progress over the years, this progress has been too slow and too incre-
mental to put the EU on a path towards decarbonization by 2050.
EU Climate Policy Pre-2008: Towards Implementing the Kyoto Protocol
The development of EU climate policy began in earnest in the late 1980s and early 1990s
in preparation for, and in response to, the international negotiations on the UNFCCC
adopted in 1992 (Pallemaerts and Williams 2006). In 1990, the then 12 member states
agreed to a target of stabilizing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2000 at 1990 levels,
which also constituted the major demand of the EU to fellow industrialized countries in
the negotiations on the UNFCCC. In the negotiations on the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the
EU suggested that all industrialized countries reduce GHG emissions by 15 per cent from
1990 levels by 2010.
The development of EU implementing measures, however, was slow throughout the
1990s, putting a dent in the credibility of EU claims of international leadership on
climate change (Oberthür and Roche Kelly 2008). In the early 1990s, the flagship policy
proposal of a CO2/energy tax failed, not least because, as a fiscal measure, its adoption
required unanimous agreement in the Council of the EU. Other measures to promote
energy efficiency (SAVE) and renewable energy sources (ALTENER) were much
watered down during the policy process. Furthermore, the EU agreed on a mechanism
to monitor GHG emissions in 1993 (see Table 20.1; see also Oberthür and Pallemaerts
2010). In June 1996, the Environment Council declared – in line with the findings of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 1995 second assessment report – that
global temperature increase should not exceed 2°C, as compared to pre-industrial levels,
an objective that has guided EU climate policy ever since and was eventually also adopted
internationally in the aftermath of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009. Under the
Kyoto Protocol, the EU agreed to reduce its GHG emissions by 8 per cent between 2008
and 2012 compared with 1990 levels. To achieve this target as a region, the EU reached a
‘burden sharing’ agreement among the (then) 15 member states in 1998 (codified in 2002
in Decision 2002/358/EC). Overall, however, the EU’s climate policy in the 1990s was
rather pushed by the international agenda and did not help the EU make much progress
towards the decarbonization of its economy (Oberthür and Pallemaerts 2010; Jordan
et al. 2010).

Table 20.1 Main pieces of climate-related legislation in the EU since 1990
Year Legislation Code

1993 Council directive to limit CO2 emissions by improving energy 93/76/EEC
efficiency (SAVE)
1993 Council decision concerning the promotion of renewable energy 93/500/EEC
sources (ALTENER)
1993 Council decision for a monitoring mechanism of CO2 and other 93/389/EEC
GHG emissions (several subsequent revisions)
2001 Directive on the promotion of electricity produced from 2001/77/EC
renewable energy sources
2002 Directive on the energy performance of buildings 2002/91/EC
2003 Directive establishing the EU Emissions Trading Scheme 2003/87/EC
2004 Directive on the linking of the EU emissions trading system with 2004/101/EC
project mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol
2004 Directive on the promotion of cogeneration 2004/8/EC
2006 Directive on energy end use efficiency and energy services 2006/32/EC
2006 Regulation on reducing the emission of fluorinated GHGs and 842/2006
Directive on emissions from air conditioning systems of cars 2006/40/EC
2008 Directive to include aviation activities in the EU Emissions 2008/101/EC
Trading Scheme
2009 Directive to improve and extend the EU Emissions Trading 2009/29/EC
Scheme
2009 Directive on the promotion of renewable energy 2009/28/EC
2009 Directive on the geological storage of CO2 2009/31/EC
2009 Decision on sharing the effort of implementing the EU GHG 406/2009/EC
emission reduction target for 2020 among member states
2009 Regulation setting emission performance standards for new 443/2009
passenger cars
2010 Directive on the energy performance of buildings (revision) 2010/31/EU
2012 Directive on energy efficiency 2012/27/EU
2014 Regulation setting emission performance standards for new 333/2014
passenger cars (revision/update)
2014 Regulation on fluorinated greenhouse gases (revision) 517/2014
By the 2000s, internal climate policy development began to pick up pace as the EU
moved towards implementing the Kyoto Protocol. Policy development was reinforced by
the US withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, which made the EU play a leading
role in saving the Protocol. This led the EU to push for the agreement on the Marrakesh
Accords in 2001 on implementing the Kyoto Protocol and to carry out significant bilat-
eral negotiations with partners to pursue the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol (especially
Russia). The EU itself ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002, on the basis of the aforemen-
tioned burden-sharing agreement. In tandem with its efforts to save the Protocol, the EU
advanced its internal policy on climate change to achieve its internationally agreed com-
mitments. The European Commission set up the European Climate Change Programme
in 2000, and legislation followed on promoting renewable sources of electricity; improv-
ing energy efficiency in buildings, products and services; the establishment of the EU

100%
EU15
EU28
95%
90%
84.9%
85%
80%
80.8%
75%
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
Note: 1990 5 100%; own compilation from EEA’s online GHG data viewer (www.eea.europa.eu, accessed
31 July 2014).
Figure 20.1 GHG emissions in the EU15 and EU28, 1990–2012
Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) – which would remain a centrepiece of EU climate
policy into the future (Skjærseth and Wettestad 2008; Wettestad this volume); and
other policies noted in Table 20.1 (see Boasson and Wettestad 2013; Jordan et al. 2010;
Oberthür and Pallemaerts 2010).
The policy development in the 2000s laid the foundation for reducing EU GHG
emissions. As Figure 20.1 indicates, GHG emissions in the EU28 started a sustained
downward trend from around 2005/2006 once the new policy measures became effective.
It is certainly difficult to establish clear causality between the elaboration of a diverse set
of EU climate policies and the development of overall EU GHG emissions. The rate of
emission reduction was also not necessarily sufficient to bring the EU on a path towards
decarbonization by 2050. However, it is difficult to account for the GHG emission reduc-
tion without the EU measures taken and the available evidence indicates that these meas-
ures had indeed noticeable and significant effects on GHG emission trends (EEA 2014).
EU Climate Policy from 2008: Improved Credibility
In December 2008, the European Council achieved agreement on the so-called climate
and energy package of legislative measures that established the main EU policy frame-
work towards 2020. The package implemented the threefold targets for 2020 agreed
by the European Council in March 2007: (1) to reduce GHG emissions by 20 per cent
from 1990 levels; (2) to increase renewable energy shares to 20 per cent of final energy
consumption; and (3) to improve energy efficiency by 20 per cent. Adopted implementing
legislation focused on the first two binding targets, whereas the energy efficiency target
was considered aspirational (non-binding).
The legislative package was comprised of (1) a revised ETS Directive; (2) a decision

on sharing the effort among member states to reduce GHG emissions not covered by the
ETS; (3) a new Renewable Energy Directive (with binding targets for 2020 for individual
EU member states); and (4) a directive on carbon capture and storage. Unusually, agree-
ment on this legislative package was achieved among the European Council of heads of
state and government of EU member states, which does not possess legislative power
according to the EU treaties. The Council of the EU (composed of ministers of EU
member states) and the European Parliament (the actual legislative bodies), however,
followed the agreement among EU heads of state and government so that the legislative
instruments were formally adopted into EU law in 2009.
In addition, 2008 and 2009 saw the adoption of other legislation such as a directive
including the aviation sector in the EU ETS and a regulation on mitigating CO2 emis-
sions from cars (see Table 20.1; Oberthür and Pallemaerts 2010). The advances were not
least made in the context of EU leadership aspirations towards the Copenhagen Climate
Summit in late 2009 that was expected to adopt a new international climate agreement
towards 2020 (Oberthür 2011; Parker and Karlsson this volume). Given the failure of the
Copenhagen Summit to deliver a new global climate agreement, the EU’s 2020 goal was
eventually codified internationally in the amendment of the Kyoto Protocol that intro-
duced a second commitment period and was agreed in Doha in 2012.
Policy development in 2008/2009 not only advanced and deepened measures towards
2020, but also enhanced certainty that the targets would be achieved. While most of
the legislation adopted in the early 2000s left large amounts of discretion to member
states in transposition, this room was seriously curtailed in the 2009 policy framework.
For example, the CO2 and Cars Regulation is directly applicable to car manufacturers
and provides for fines applicable in case of non-compliance. Allowances under the ETS
were now distributed from the EU level, and no longer through the medium of member
states’ national allocation plans (Skjærseth and Wettestad 2010). The Renewable Energy
Directive and the Effort-Sharing Decision contained binding targets for each member
state with supervision of progress and achievement by the Commission. Overall, the 2020
EU climate policy framework made climate policy not only more comprehensive but also
much stronger (Oberthür and Pallemaerts 2010).
In addition, the EU also made non-legislative progress on long-term policy develop-
ment. In October 2009, the European Council agreed to reduce the EU’s GHG emissions
by 80–95 per cent by 2050, compared to 1990 – effectively calling for the ‘decarboniza-
tion’ of the EU’s economy. In response, in 2011, the European Commission presented
a low-carbon economy roadmap, a roadmap for the transport sector and an energy
roadmap to 2050 (European Commission 2011a, 2011b, 2011c). These documents set out
a range of possible futures to achieve decarbonization, the realization of which would
require new policies. The roadmaps were not universally welcomed, however, with Poland
blocking the unanimous acceptance of the low-carbon economy roadmap in Council
(Skovgaard 2014).
With several financial, economic, energy and political crises in the years following 2008,
and the disappointing results from the Copenhagen Summit, EU internal climate policy
development slowed. The policy response to the oversupply of emission allowances in the
EU ETS has been prolonged (with solutions proposed considered short-term fixes rather
than the structural long-term changes many believe are required) (Carbon Market Watch
2014; Wettestad this volume). Several legislative acts that have been adopted since 2009

22%
20% Share RE
EE improvements
18%
16%
14%
12%
10%
8%
6%
4%
2%
0%
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
Note: Data for 2004–2012 (share of renewable energy in final energy consumption) and 2005–2012
(energy efficiency improvements against baseline of 2005 and the business-as-usual forecast for final
energy consumption to 2020); own compilation from Eurostat data (http://ec.europa.eu/Eurostat, accessed
18 November 2014); linear trajectories to 2020 targets from 2012.
Figure 20.2 Progress towards 2020 renewable energy (RE) and energy efficiency (EE)
targets in the EU
have been criticized for an insufficient level of ambition, including an Energy Efficiency
Directive in 2012, and revisions of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive in
2010, the CO2 and Cars Regulation in 2014 and the Regulation on Fluorinated GHGs in
2014 (see Table 20.1; Boasson and Wettestad 2013; Dupont and Oberthür 2012; Jordan
et al. 2010).
As of 2014, the EU had made significant progress towards its 2020 goals (Figures 20.1
and 20.2). It is set to (over)achieve its GHG emissions reduction and renewable energy
goals, but is expected to require further measures to meet the non-binding energy effi-
ciency target (EEA 2014). At the same time, this progress may not be sufficient to achieve
decarbonization by 2050. Progress after 2020 will need to accelerate, but the low carbon
price in the EU ETS has dampened the incentive for investments in long-term decarboni-
zation required to avoid carbon lock-in (Wettestad this volume). Realizing appropriate
policy adaptations has proven challenging in light of the economic crisis and increas-
ing internal opposition to strong climate action, especially from Central and Eastern
European member states (led by Poland; see Skovgaard 2014).
Next Steps: the Emerging Climate Policy Framework to 2030
In October 2014, the European Council made a significant step towards updating the
EU climate policy framework to 2030. In particular, it agreed on three headline targets

to (1) reduce GHG emissions by at least 40 per cent; (2) increase the share of renewable
energy to 27 per cent; and (3) improve energy efficiency by 27 per cent by 2030 with an
option to increase this target to 30 per cent before 2020 (European Council 2014). While
the first target is to be binding as in the past, the renewable energy target is intended to
be binding at EU level (i.e., there will not be binding targets for member states) and the
energy efficiency target is non-binding/aspirational. This agreement was the result of
intense discussions throughout 2014, with the European Council showing lower ambi-
tion than other European institutions. The Commission had proposed a formula of
‘40-27-30’ in January/July 2014 (40 per cent GHG emission reduction, 27 per cent share
of renewable energy and 30 per cent improvement in energy efficiency by 2030), whereas
the European Parliament had advocated ‘40-30-40’ (all binding) in February 2014. The
European Council’s agreement serves as the EU’s input to the international climate
negotiations that are expected to lead to a new international agreement in Paris in 2015.
EU heads of state and government also agreed to revert to the discussion on the 2030
climate and energy policy framework after the 2015 Paris conference, which could lead
to changes.
Importantly, the European Council also agreed in October 2014 to establish two
funding schemes. First, building on a similar scheme in place for 2013–2020, a facility
fed from the sale of 400 million ETS allowances will support carbon capture and storage,
renewables, and low-carbon innovation in industrial sectors. Second, another 2 per cent
of ETS allowances will be used to fund energy efficiency improvements and the moderni-
zation of energy systems in low-income member states (especially in Central and Eastern
Europe). Depending on the details to be worked out, both could be significant instru-
ments for advancing the structural changes required for decarbonization (European
Council 2014).
As of late 2014, the Commission still has to put forward more concrete proposals to
implement the 2030 framework. The EU ETS and effort sharing components of the
existing framework will remain in place, but need updating. The first proposals regarding
the EU ETS are expected to come forward in 2015, with other implementing measures
unlikely to emerge before 2016. How delivery of the renewable energy and energy effi-
ciency targets should be pursued without binding national targets for member states so
far remains an open question. The new European Commission (under President Juncker,
2014–2019) has pushed for ‘better regulation’ or less red tape in EU policy in general and
has questioned a number of longstanding environmental and energy efficiency policy
measures in particular, including policies on the energy efficiency of products (including
energy labelling), on the circular economy and on air pollution. Although policies on the
energy efficiency of products have been retained, the approach of the new Commission
may affect the EU’s ability to achieve decarbonization and has raised concerns about
the prospect of securing a firm legal framework for implementing the 2030 framework
(despite the weakening of the renewables target agreed by the European Council).
Overall, the legal framework for 2030 may thus be weakened when compared with the
existing 2020 framework, while important renewed/new incentives may enter the scene.
Eventually, the details of the 2030 framework will have to be decided by the Council
of the EU and the European Parliament on the basis of legislative proposals from the
European Commission.
From a 2050 decarbonization perspective, the 2030 framework agreed by the European

Council moves in the right direction, but nevertheless remains inadequate. Achieving
80–95 per cent reductions in GHG emissions will require transitioning to a low-carbon
or fossil-free economy (Lovell this volume). Achieving 40 per cent reductions by 2030
leaves much of the effort to the remaining two decades to 2050 and is in itself insufficient
to prevent new long-term investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. Further reductions of
40–55 percentage points would be required between 2030 and 2050. Postponing signifi-
cant efforts to later decades may be risky, considering the great role that the energy sector
will need to play in achieving decarbonization, the investments that need to be made in
the medium term and the long investment cycles in this sector. Investment decisions made
before 2020 and 2030, particularly in energy infrastructure, will influence the possibili-
ties and likelihood of achieving decarbonization in 2050: further support for fossil fuel
infrastructure risks a carbon lock-in of the EU’s energy system far beyond 2050 (Dupont
forthcoming).
KEY DRIVERS AND BARRIERS
In the following, we highlight a number of key drivers and barriers toward decarboniza-
tion, distinguishing between internal and external factors.
Internal Factors
First of all, fluctuating overall political dynamics and political commitment both to com-
bating climate change and to integrating long-term climate policy objectives into sectoral
policymaking have driven EU climate policy development (Adelle and Russel 2013; van
Asselt et al. this volume). The 2008/2009 climate and energy package marked a period of
high political commitment to action on climate change. From 2005, with renewed empha-
sis on energy policy, the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol, and the rejection of the
EU’s constitutional treaty in referenda in France (in May 2005) and in the Netherlands
(in June 2005), climate change was seen to provide an opportunity to advance EU inte-
gration generally, and to project EU ‘leadership’ on the issue onto the international stage
(Oberthür and Roche Kelly 2008, p. 43). Since then, the level of political commitment
to combating climate change has receded. The economic crisis that began in 2008 led to
heightened concerns over employment and competitiveness in the EU. At the same time,
concern for climate change among EU citizens has remained high (Eurobarometer 2014).
Even in the face of economic and financial crises, European publics have supported
further policy advances.
Agreeing upon common climate policy objectives among 28 member states has also
become more difficult because of developments in EU member state politics. A number
of Central and Eastern European member states have become more vocal in opposing
stringent climate policies especially for economic and energy security reasons. Internal
politics in other member states such as Spain and Greece, including high unemployment
and sovereign debt issues, have hampered both the desire and ability to agree on climate
policies on a national or EU level. Even states like the UK, Germany and Denmark, which
had previously passed strong domestic policies on climate change, renewable energy and
energy efficiency, have increasingly faced competing priorities at national level leading

to less interest in advancing EU-level climate and energy policy. Increasing EU-sceptic
sentiments in several member states have further reinforced this trend. The dynamic
resulting from these factors could clearly be seen during the negotiations on the 2012
Energy Efficiency Directive that had several states (such as the UK) questioning the need
for stringent EU-level policy on the issue (Boasson and Dupont 2015).
Furthermore, policymakers’ progress in promoting policy coherence and recognizing
the functional interrelations between long-term climate policy objectives and sectoral
policy measures, has arguably remained too limited (Dupont forthcoming). Energy
efficiency, renewables and, more recently, electricity grid development have become rec-
ognized as important climate policy areas. Nevertheless, long-term climate policy objec-
tives are not fully reflected in these policies. It can also be argued that the co-benefits of
ambitious action on climate change across a multitude of policy sectors (jobs, health,
energy security, environmental protection, resource efficiency, among others) may not be
centre-stage. Policymakers working on transport, energy, agriculture and other portfolios
may need specialized training on the climate issue and high-level political guidance to
ensure decarbonization objectives are fully taken into account in policy development in
their sectors. Traditional policy development, where different ‘ministries’ work in silos on
their portfolio priority, requires meaningful policy coordination to achieve decarboniza-
tion (Peters 1998). Sustained or strengthened political commitment to decarbonization
could help to overcome the usual conflicts among political priorities and competing
policy portfolios and rather highlight potential win–win policy options.
Finally, decision-making rules and the institutional set-up of the EU also affect the
extent to which decarbonization objectives can be achieved. EU decision-making on
climate and energy policy generally follows the ordinary legislative procedure between
the Council of the EU, the European Parliament and the European Commission, with
the Council deciding by qualified majority, except if these policies are fiscal measures
or interfere with a state’s choice of energy mix (unanimity would then be required; see
Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, Articles 192 and 194). Thus, the com-
petence given to the EU to make policy in an area, as enshrined in the treaties, is crucial.
The possibility of majority voting facilitates decision- making on ambitious climate
policies. However, with climate change establishing itself firmly in the realm of high
politics in the 2000s, the European Council has increasingly become involved by provid-
ing political guidance and even making decisions (2008/2009 climate and energy package
and 2030 framework). Since the European Council generally decides by consensus, this
has arguably given climate laggards, such as Poland, additional leverage. The involve-
ment of heads of state and government may have diminished the role of the European
Parliament that has traditionally been the greenest of the European institutions and has
often been regarded as a friend of environmental stakeholders (including representatives
of the renewable energy industry, industries providing energy efficient solutions and
environmental non-governmental organizations) and a willing receiver of input (Burns
et al. 2013).
External Factors
Processes and politics external to the EU may also affect the Union’s ability or effi-
ciency in agreeing ambitious climate and energy policy. First of all, international climate

egotiations under the UNFCCC have created critical windows of opportunity and deci-
n
sion moments for EU policy development, as the EU has attempted to demonstrate inter-
national leadership (Oberthür and Pallemaerts 2010). The negotiations on the UNFCCC
itself in 1992 led to the EU committing to stabilizing CO2 emissions at 1990 levels by 2000.
Negotiations on the 1997 Kyoto Protocol made the EU push for a 15 per cent reduction
of GHG emissions by 2010. As a result, the EU committed to a reduction of 8 per cent
under the Protocol, which paved the way for dynamic domestic policy development in
the early 2000s. The Copenhagen Summit in 2009 motivated and drove, to a significant
extent, the EU climate and energy package of 2008/2009. Agreement on the cornerstones
of the policy framework for 2030 in the European Council in October 2014 was not least
prompted by the shadow of the 2015 Paris conference, which is expected to adopt a new
international climate agreement for beyond 2020. A successful Paris conference would
probably help to maintain the importance of international climate politics, which has
been increasingly questioned as a point of reference for EU policy development after the
disappointment of the Copenhagen Summit (Groen and Niemann 2013). Over the past
ten years or so, other international and transnational venues and forums, such as the G7
or the G20, have also acquired importance, without yet creating focal points of attention
and policy development in the same way as the official UN negotiations (Bulkeley and
Newell 2010; Wurzel and Connelly 2011; Zelli and van Asselt this volume).
Climate and energy policies of EU partners may also affect the EU’s stance on climate
change. As climate change is a global issue requiring action by many or all countries,
there is less incentive for the EU to increase its own level of ambition if others do not
play along (especially other main emitters). With the US under President George W. Bush
having neglected climate policy in the 2000s and emerging economies’ (especially China’s)
GHG emissions rising starkly, the continuation of EU policy development has come
under scrutiny for reasons of environmental effectiveness and economic competitiveness.
As a result of diverging policy developments across different countries, the share of the
EU in global GHG emissions has dropped to about 10 per cent. Climate policy advances
in the US and China in the 2010s, which together account for about 40 per cent of global
GHG emissions, possess the potential to improve the conditions for further EU policy
development, if properly acknowledged (see Bang and Stalley this volume). The joint
US–China announcement in November 2014 that China would aim to peak its CO2 emis-
sions by 2030 and the US would reduce its GHG emissions by between 26 and 28 per cent
by 2025, compared to 2005 levels (US and China 2014), may contribute thereto.
Finally, the broader context of international relations and politics also affects EU
climate policy development in different ways. Thus, the high energy import dependence
of the EU (Eurostat 2014) has, at times, provided an important motivation for advancing
the climate policy framework. Energy security considerations were also a driver of the
2008/2009 climate and energy package, in the wake of the Ukraine gas crises of 2006 and
2009. The 2014 crisis in Ukraine particularly highlighted the risks involved in the energy
partnership with Russia and underpinned the European Council’s agreement on the EU’s
2030 climate policy framework in October 2014. Even more broadly, international politics
at large has an impact. For example, the financial crises after 2008, the conflicts in Syria,
Palestine and Iraq, increasing terrorist attacks, and the Ebola crisis in Western Africa in
2014 have all constituted powerful competitors of climate change for political attention.
Relations with major emitters such as China and the US regarding climate change are

embedded in broader relationships that affect the prospects of progress. The increase in
domestic action on (renewable) energy installations in China and the US, for reasons of
their own economic development, provides a backdrop for relations with these partners.
These broader political events and contexts have affected the EU’s own strategy-making
in the short and long term. In sum, the international political context can place limits on,
or create opportunities for, the EU’s capability or willingness to advance towards decar-
bonization in a timely manner.
CONCLUSIONS
From a long-term historical perspective, EU climate and energy policy has come some
way since its early days in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After a few timid steps in the
1990s, policy development significantly accelerated in the 2000s with a series of legisla-
tive acts increasingly advancing GHG emission reduction efforts in different sectors and
subsectors (products, cars, renewable energy, ETS sectors, etc. – see Table 20.1). The
overall ambition of climate protection has also evolved substantially from an emission
reduction of 8 per cent on average in 2008–2012, to 20 per cent by 2020, to an intended at
least 40 per cent by 2030 (all from 1990 levels). Targets for renewable energy and energy
efficiency have also moved up, even though the legal quality and effectiveness of both is
in question for the 2030 policy framework, which may be considered a step backward
(especially regarding renewable energy). At the same time, the EU seems to be increas-
ingly emphasizing incentives for funding the transformation of both energy production
and consumption that is required to achieve decarbonization.
From a long-term decarbonization perspective, the progress made nevertheless remains
insufficient and can be characterized as ‘catch-up’ governance. Climate and energy policy
in the EU needs to move to decarbonization more quickly and prevent carbon lock-in if
the objective to reduce GHG emissions by 80–95 per cent by 2050 is to be achieved. The
successive steps of policy strengthening have over the years consistently lagged behind
what would be required. The 2030 climate and energy framework has continued that
pattern and has put off much of the effort required to later decades. When compared
with decarbonization requirements, the agreed targets lack ambition and mandatory
legal obligations (for renewables and energy efficiency). They thus do not provide suffi-
cient incentives for the cross-sectoral transformation that decarbonization calls for. If the
pattern of ‘catch-up governance’ continues, EU climate policy may not by itself achieve
its long-term decarbonization objectives.
Although overall conditions of EU climate policy development have worsened rather
than improved since the late 2000s, there may still be ground for some hope for the future.
Growing impediments to climate policy advances in the EU include the strengthening
of climate policy opposition among EU member states (led by Poland), the economic
and financial crises since 2008, competing international political priorities, and the crisis
of multilateral climate policy since the Copenhagen Summit in 2009. Increased con-
cerns over energy security have only provided a rather limited counterweight. From this
perspective, it may actually be surprising (and promising) that the EU still seems to be
on its way to significantly strengthening its climate objectives to 2030. This may be a sign
not only of a rising narrative that emphasizes growing opportunities and co-benefits of

action (Dimitrov this volume), but it may also indicate that a further leap forward may be
possible if the balance of the various internal and external factors shifted in favour of EU
climate policy. While it may not be obvious how such a shift could occur, policymaking,
societal debate and dynamics at different levels of governance can help to shape at least
some of the factors at play and may create windows of opportunity for shifting focus
towards stronger climate action.
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21. Brazil
Eduardo Viola and Kathryn Hochstetler1
INTRODUCTION
Brazil’s domestic climate politics has significant global implications. In international
negotiations, Brazil has positioned itself as a leader of developing countries, sometimes
challenging and sometimes advancing global agreements. Increasingly, it has allied with
other large emerging powers in the negotiations rather than its own neighbors in Latin
America. These international positions arise from a complex domestic context. Brazil has
an unusually low-carbon energy matrix based on large-scale hydropower, but unusually
high rates of emissions from land-use change and deforestation—although the last has
come under increasing regulatory control. Politically, Brazil has strong actors arrayed
both in support of immediate climate action and against it. Finding the right balance
between developmental and environmental goals is a constant theme in its political
economy—reflecting Brazil’s previous history of strong economic growth (1940–1980)—
that is accompanied by ongoing inequalities that leave many Brazilians outside the gains
of a large, modern economy.
Throughout this chapter, we stress the domestic origins of Brazil’s climate policy
and politics. This emphasis follows a strong academic tradition that traces how politi-
cal coalition-making can lead to changes in policy direction, both at the international
level (e.g., Meckling 2011) and domestically (e.g., Darst and Dawson 2008; DeSombre
2010; Hochstetler and Viola 2012). Coalitions of industrial actors and environmentalists
appear often in these stories, and in our account here, and can be especially influential.
In this chapter we also trace the unraveling of that coalition over time, as economic and
political sectors unfriendly to climate reasserted their influence over Brazilian climate
action after 2010.
We begin with a survey of Brazil’s emissions profile, summarizing the extent and nature
of its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We pay particular attention to recent changes
that may change Brazil’s future emissions profile. The next section presents an analysis
of the domestic politics of climate action, showing the advances and then retreats in the
twenty-first century. A remarkable set of developments and realignments brought Brazil
to both pass a national climate law and make its first (voluntary) global climate action
commitments in January 2010. Since then, however, a change of government and slip-
page into the economic doldrums have stopped and partially reversed those advances.
That timing reappears in the next section, which surveys Brazil’s strategies in global
climate politics. The history of Brazilian participation in the UN climate negotiations
is briefly traced, as that history lays a foundation for Brazil’s ongoing preoccupation
with historical responsibilities for GHG emissions. We also discuss Brazil’s negotiation
alliances, with special attention to the 2009 birth of the BASIC coalition (Brazil, China,
India and South Africa) since they appeared as a common force at the Copenhagen
negotiation session.
237
BRAZIL’S CLIMATE EMISSIONS PROFILE
The Brazilian GHG emission profile is unusual for a large industrial economy.
Non-fossil fuels are especially prominent in its energy matrix. Alternative renewables
such as wind power went from essentially none in 2002 to 8.4 gigawatt (GW) installed or
contracted by 2017 (Hochstetler and Kostka 2015, p. 82). They joined an energy matrix
that already saw about 85 percent of its electricity generated by large hydropower while
ethanol was the source of around 60 percent of the fuel used by cars (Viola et al. 2013).
Hydropower was once thought to be GHG neutral, but studies over the past decade
have found varying amounts of emissions, with the highest quantities at plants with
very large reservoirs in tropical locations. With very few exceptions, however, hydro-
power is still much cleaner as an energy source than are fossil fuel plants (Barros et al.
2011; Dos Santos et al. 2006). Brazil’s sugarcane-based biofuel also has more emissions
than once thought, as calculated through the product lifecycle, but it continues to be
one of the cleanest of commercial-scale biofuels and some of its emissions and other
environmental effects can be minimized (Scharleman and Laurance 2008; World Bank
and IPEA 2012).
By the Brazilian government’s calculations for 2005 in its Second National Report to
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), still the
most current inventory, emissions from the energy sector were just 19 percent of all emis-
sions, while deforestation and land use change were 77 percent of the total (Government
of Brazil 2010, p. 15). Under the Copenhagen Accord, Brazil had pledged to reduce
its emissions by 36.1–38.9 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. With deforestation in the
Amazon dropping 83 percent from 2004 to 2012 (Government of Brazil 2012, p. 14), a
significant part of that goal had already been achieved at the time of the pledge, although
deforestation jumped back up in 2013. In the next inventory and national report, other
sources of greenhouse gas emissions will be weightier as the shares from land use change
and deforestation have dropped. In 2010, Brazil’s large-scale industrial agriculture had
already become the major emitting sector at 35 percent of total emissions followed by
energy at 32 percent (Viola et al. 2013).
The other major recent change that may increase Brazil’s climate emissions is the dis-
covery in 2007 of large oil and gas reserves that lie deep offshore in the so-called ‘pre-salt’
area, which have received massive public financing support through the Brazilian
National Development Bank (BNDES). The pace of potential production is slower than
was estimated at the time. The shale gas revolution in the USA has significantly dimin-
ished the expectations about the pre-salt area, as reflected in the reduced international
interest in the first auction in late 2013. Yet while environmentalist mobilizations target
and delay (but do not successfully block) most new large hydroelectric plants in Brazil,
there has been much less resistance to developing the pre-salt, which is considerably
worse from a climate change perspective (Hochstetler 2011). Since Brazilian industry,
agri-business, and transportation sectors are all inefficient and intensive in their energy
use, GHG emissions could explode if Brazil shifts from less to more carbon intensive
sources of energy. As these paragraphs suggest, however, current and future climate emis-
sions in Brazil depend on numerous ongoing policy and political debates. For this reason,
we turn next to the domestic politics of climate action there.

Brazil 239
THE DOMESTIC POLITICS OF CLIMATE ACTION IN BRAZIL
Brazilian climate politics has long involved a complex set of actors, some of which favor
climate action while others resist it. In earlier work (Hochstetler and Viola 2012), we
described how a ‘Baptists and bootleggers’ coalition of long-time believers in reducing
emissions joined with actors who saw short-term economic interests in climate action.
The influence of their coalition peaked in 2009–2010 as Brazil passed national climate
legislation and made its first international commitments in the Copenhagen Accord.
Here we summarize those developments, but also point out that the coalition has deterio-
rated since 2010. A new president and environmental minister operating in a context of
anemic economic growth have opened the door for the renewed influence of petroleum,
industrial agricultural and automotive sectors in ways that do not bode well for future
climate advances. Both short-term stimulus programs and longer-term concerns about
Brazil’s ability to grow and avoid deindustrialization in the face of Chinese competition
have led to policies that give little priority to a low carbon transition.
The period of 2004–2009 was characterized by the growth of reformist forces within
Brazilian society, fueled by relevant movements in areas such as deforestation control and
public attention to the climate agenda. Examining deforestation first (for more details,
see also Hochstetler and Viola 2012, pp. 759–761), the backdrop to success was the new
approach developed by the Ministry of Environment (MMA). Marina Silva, a major
historic figure of the Brazilian environmental movement, headed this ministry between
2003 and 2008. She was able to lead the formation of a vast but loose anti-deforestation
coalition, and convinced then-President Lula da Silva to deactivate the tacit alliance gov-
ernments had had with the illegal deforestation sector. The strategy was motivated by the
arguments that illegal deforestation was inconsistent with a middle-income society and
had little beneficial impact on economic growth. In the end, deforestation control policies
proved to be almost cost-free, both in political and economic terms.
Concretely, the anti-deforestation policies included significant increases in the insti-
tutional capacity of the relevant ministries and improvements in the legal enforcement
system at the federal level. These made extensive new protected forest areas actually func-
tion largely as designed. A gradual process of improved cooperation between Amazonian
state authorities and the federal government coincided with periods of decline in soybean
and meat prices, providing less incentive for land to be deforested for agriculture and
pasture. After 2007, prices rose again, but the improved institutional capacity broke
the tie between deforestation and both prices and economic growth that had been long
established (Hochstetler and Viola 2012, p. 760). Big national and international non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) also played an important role in raising public
awareness of deforestation.
By 2009, there was a strong increase in public attention being given to the climate
agenda. This came from new media coverage, public events, and NGO mobilizations, as
well as scientific conferences and corporate meetings. Both governments and the private
sector responded. As deforestation came under control, subnational governments from
the Amazonian states, under the leadership of Amazonas and Mato Grosso states,
created the Amazon Forum in July 2009. They argued for a change in the Brazilian inter-
national position in relation to forests. The Amazon Forum wanted Brazil to accept the
inclusion of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD1)

in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) or some related market mechanism that
would allow them to earn resources for avoided deforestation. This position had long
been resisted by the Brazilian Foreign Ministry Itamaraty. Three corporate coalitions
launched documents in September 2009 asking the political authorities to modify Brazil’s
climate policy stances, both domestically and internationally, toward more climate action
(Viola and Franchini 2014). They were motivated by both growing consumer awareness
and fear of possible border carbon taxes. The emergence of these kinds of actors moti-
vated some of the changes in Brazil’s negotiation stances discussed in the next section.
Marina Silva stepped down as environment minister in 2008 and became an unexpect-
edly strong presidential candidate by mid-2009. Her presidential candidacy for the Green
Party changed the whole political scenario around environmental issues, enhancing the
importance of topics such as sustainability and the transition to a low carbon economy.
This forced President Lula and the candidate he chose to be his successor, Dilma
Rousseff, to pay much more attention to climate issues in the national public debate, with
several immediate impacts.
Lula named Carlos Minc, another famous and forceful environment activist and
politician, to replace Marina Silva as minister of the environment. Minc expanded
the opportunity open to him to push for more substantial climate action at home and
abroad. The Brazilian Ministry of Environment has historically been staffed by people
who come from the environmental community or who are at least very friendly toward
the environment and climate agendas. In contrast, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has
always been conservative in its approach to climate affairs, promoting positions that
protect Brazilian national sovereignty, especially over the Amazon and activities there, as
well as stressing key coalitions with other developing countries and emerging powers. It
has worked closely with the Ministry of Science and Technology in developing Brazil’s
climate positions, but that ministry is considerably more conservative in its climate posi-
tions than are many Brazilian scientists (Viola et al. 2013). In the political context of the
day, environment minister Minc was able to prevail over Brazil’s usual climate diplomats
to an unusual degree in October 2009. Clear signs of change were Brazil’s announcement
of voluntary climate emissions reductions that later became its Copenhagen Accord
commitments and a reshaping of the Brazilian position on REDD1 that has allowed
those negotiations to advance.
Also in October 2009, the House of Representatives passed a national climate bill,
after significant efforts by a cross-party environmental coalition. In an atmosphere
where all three of the major presidential candidates went to the Copenhagen meetings
and committed Brazil to climate action, the Senate quickly debated and approved the
bill in December 2009, and Lula signed it in January 2010. The climate law establishes a
National Policy on Climate Change, adopts the 2009 voluntary commitment to reduce
the emissions trajectory, and mandates that the Executive will establish specific adap-
tation and mitigation sectoral plans that will pursue the transition to a low carbon
economy. This national and international highpoint was when our previous work largely
ended, only to be followed by a series of less salutary developments. Some of these were
new, but others reflected the working out of a number of forces less conducive to climate
action. These have largely stopped the momentum towards improved climate action and
even moved Brazil backwards in some ways since 2009, although some of the gains of the
earlier period continue.

Brazil 241
In the October 3, 2010 election, Marina Silva won an unprecedented 19 percent of the
total valid vote, by far the highest vote total of an environmental presidential candidate
in Brazil and probably Latin America. (Her party gained only 2 percent of the total vote
for the House of Representatives, however.) This was not enough for Silva to win, but
it required a second round election, which was then won by Dilma Rousseff. Rousseff,
an economist who had been Lula’s minister of mines and energy, has a technocratic
bent and chose a minister of environment of the same type. Izabella Teixeira has ample
technical skills—with a PhD thesis on environmental impact assessment in the oil and
gas sector (Teixeira 2008)—but lacked the political weight and charisma of her predeces-
sors and their ties to the environmental movement. Under her leadership, the Ministry
of Environment has returned to the ‘second line’ position it has often held in the federal
government, backing up the government’s plans more often than challenging them (Viola
and Franchini 2013).
Rousseff’s government generally has been much more reliant on pork barrel politics,
reflecting the economic problems that have plagued her administration. Brazil had sur-
vived the 2008 economic crisis comparatively well, with growth dipping for two quarters,
but employment remaining high and economic expansion at an astonishing (for Brazil)
7.5 percent rate in 2010 (IILS 2011, p. 5). This expansion was due in part to a number of
policies taken in response to the crisis, but similar policies under Rousseff have not fared
as well and growth has languished at 1.6 percent during her administration, compared
with 3.8 percent in the eight years of Lula’s administrations. Climate action has suffered,
as a number of the specific sectors chosen for support by the government have been
high rather than low in their carbon emissions. For example, the employment-friendly
responses to the international financial crisis meant providing incentives to automobile
manufacturers and other heavy industries (Barbosa 2010, p. 6) where both employment
and carbon emissions—in production and use of their products—are concentrated. In
contrast, underinvested sectors such as public transportation saw few new resources and
dissatisfaction with the chaotic situation spilled over into giant street protests in June and
July 2013.
For related reasons, the Rousseff government has also exercised its considerable
control over energy prices in ways that have expanded emissions. In an effort to control
lurking inflation dangers, the government has set domestic oil prices below global market
prices almost continuously since 2007 (the only exception being the period between
October 2008 and April 2009). By October 2014, the financial situation of Petrobras was
disastrous, worsened by various charges of corruption that had occurred since 2004. The
artificially low prices have accelerated the use of fossil fuels for transport, especially since
cars built in Brazil since 2004 have flex-fuel technology that allows consumers to drive
on any mix of gasoline and ethanol. In 2012, economic stimulus programs introduced
additional incentives to promote domestic automobile manufacturing with no reference
to carbon intensity and reduced taxes for fossil fuels. At the end of the year, the govern-
ment lowered electricity prices across the board to try to stimulate the economy and its
popularity, which also stimulated associated consumption and emissions and contributed
to problems of electricity supply in 2013–2014.
The oil and gas sector had been growing significantly since the discovery of the pre-salt
deposits deep offshore in 2007, but its development path was accelerated in 2009–2010.
The state-controlled oil company Petrobras received a massive, globally record-breaking

capitalization of US$120 billion in 2010, from BNDES and from an international capital-
ization drive, among other sources. These discoveries were probably the main obstacle to
Brazilian policymakers more decisively choosing a transition to a low-carbon economy.
Some negative effects have already been seen in growing GHG emissions from oil refin-
ing, petrochemical manufacturing and the relative decline of ethanol as a fuel.
Alongside these new policies, which have emissions impacts but are directed at the
economy, implementation of the National Policy on Climate Change (NPCC) itself has
languished. Only the deforestation sectoral plan has seen many results, and those might
be threatened by other legislative developments (discussed below). The low carbon agri-
culture plan has offered new funding for sustainable practices, and those loans began
to be distributed to farmers in 2013. The energy plan is complicated in ways that have
already been discussed. In part to reduce emissions, the NPCC calls for building hydro-
electric plants with small reservoirs and run-of-the-river designs. These reduce emissions,
but make them less reliable as sources of electricity during dry years like 2013–2014;
modeling shows that the changes in rainfall expected from climate change will actually
make it even less likely that the new plants will deliver the electricity that is expected
(Stickler et al. 2013). Other sectoral plans in vital areas—such as transportation, health-
care, construction, mining and chemical, paper and cellulose, and the manufacturing
industry—have been delayed altogether and there are many uncertainties about their
future. Negotiations over the plans within these sectors are very difficult, and there are
no major political or social forces pressuring for immediate regulation. While there are a
significant number of corporations committed to a low carbon transition, most private
sector actors are conservative on this issue. Political leaders have supported the climate
agenda when it was helpful in electoral terms, but lack a clear commitment to the agenda.
The brightest spot in recent Brazilian climate politics has been rates of deforestation
that continue to be substantially below the high rates that predominated until 2004. Yet
continuing gains in control over deforestation are threatened by reform of the Forest
Code in 2012. The reform actually lowered the level of forest protection in Brazilian
law after several successive reforms had strengthened protection. By exempting many
landowners from previous obligations to reforest land they had illegally deforested, the
law also appears to reinforce the traditional impunity for forest clearing. More broadly,
it showed that the conservative agricultural sector (known in Brazil as the ruralistas)
had recovered its power in the National Congress, after more progressive actors there
had joined with the executive branch to pass the climate change law. As the Forest Code
bill progressed, Rousseff’s administration tried to broker a deal between conservative
and progressive forces in the Congress, vetoing numerous provisions of the bill with
Rousseff’s line-item veto, but the final product favored the conservative side after many
rounds. Annual deforestation in the Amazon was almost 21,000 km2 in 2000–2004, falling
to a record low of 4,656 km2 in 2012.2 The jump back up to 5,600 km2 in 2013 may be just
annual variation, or may be an ominous sign of the impact of the new law.
Three major candidates competed in the presidential elections in 2014: the incumbent
Dilma Rousseff being the least climate-friendly; the PSDB candidate Aecio Neves having
as a secondary part of his program the transition to a low carbon economy; and the PSB/
REDE candidate Marina Silva having the transition to a low carbon economy at the core
of her platform. Despite these differences, corruption, inflation, state interventionism
in the economy and social programs targeting the most poor were at the center of the

Brazil 243
debates; this time climate policy had only a marginal role. Rousseff won the election in
the second round by the smallest difference in Brazilian history: 51.5 against 48.5 percent
of the valid votes.
Rousseff appointed Joaquim Levy as minister of the Treasury, an economist linked
to losing candidate Aecio Neves, producing a lot of anger in her own party. She also
appointed a leader of the anti-environment forces as minister of agriculture and a politi-
cian who does not believe in anthropogenic climate change as minister of science and
technology. Both appointments shocked public opinion. Rousseff started the second
term with a low level of legitimacy, threatened by a multibillion-dollar corruption
scandal at Petrobras, major economic unbalances, a feeling of betrayal among many of
her voters and low credibility with key economic players.
In short, many political and economic developments since 2009–2010 have limited
Brazil’s transition to a low carbon economy. A political coalition that had pushed for
real changes in both the domestic and international politics of climate change has been
sidelined. In the next section, we examine Brazil’s participation in international climate
politics in more detail, seeing related signs of a return to some of Brazil’s more traditional
climate positions. Here too, however, there are general advances beyond the climate posi-
tions of the twentieth century, even as Brazil—with its emerging power counterparts—
both advances and delays global climate action.
BRAZIL AS AN ACTOR IN GLOBAL CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS
Brazil has been an important part of global climate negotiations since their beginning. As
host of the 1992 United Nations (UN) Conference of Environment and Development,
it presided over the opening of the UNFCCC for signature. It is possible to identify
several enduring themes and preoccupations in Brazil’s climate participation, and they
are one of the focuses here. However, Brazil’s climate diplomacy also began to change in
important ways in 2009, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was temporary defeated
by the Ministry of the Environment and it began to coordinate some of its positions with
the BASIC countries. Thus in this section we also assess whether significant changes are
underway (Viola et al. 2012).
Brazil took its responsibilities seriously as host of the 1992 conference in Rio de
Janeiro. It wanted the conference to result in important outcomes, especially if they
could address the ongoing development demands of the South. To this end, Brazilian del-
egates and other developing countries argued for having the climate change negotiations
proceed under the UN General Assembly rather than the UN Environment Programme
or the World Meteorological Association. These ‘would have led to a “depoliticization”
of the negotiations and a focus on scientific and technical aspects,’ according to the
delegation, while the General Assembly setting would keep economic concerns more
central (Brazilian Delegation 1993, p. 25). Arguably, their success on this issue has pro-
foundly shaped subsequent climate negotiations. If politicization and a concern with
economic development were Brazilian aims for the climate regime in the early 1990s, they
were decidedly achieved.
In the UNFCCC negotiations, Brazil was already insisting on what has been its
constant position in subsequent years: that climate negotiations should result in


requirements ‘with more teeth’—for developed countries (Brazilian Delegation 1993,

pp. 26–27). This position, known as the ‘historical responsibility’ argument (Hochstetler
2012) is one that Brazil shares with its BASIC partners and much of the G77/China.
It posits that since the developed countries of the world freely emitted carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse gases through the very economic activities that allowed them to
become the disproportionately wealthy and high-consuming developed countries they
now are (Roberts and Parks 2007, p. 147), they permanently hold a special obligation to
solve the problem they caused. The historical responsibility doctrine has been increas-
ingly contested in Brazilian society in the past decade, but remains strong within Brazil’s
diplomatic corps (Viola et al. 2013).
While many developing countries agree on the principle, they do not necessarily endorse
the Brazilian approach, which is to develop detailed protocols and methodologies for
calculating the carbon debt for which developed countries must pay. Brazil approaches
these carbon debts in much the same way that developing countries were forced to pay
their financial debts to institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary
Fund: as real debts, with accrued obligations to repay with interest. The 1997 version
of their proposed calculations (Government of Brazil 1997) was roundly rejected by
developed countries (who also reject strong formulations of the underlying principle),
but it eventually became one of the sources of the CDM (Johnson 2001). In 2013, Brazil
once again pushed a proposal to develop an ‘objective and science-based’ methodology
to measure historic responsibilities as a foundation for the post-2015 agreement at the
annual Conference of Parties in Warsaw. This proposal implied a return to the position
abandoned in 2009 when Brazil accepted commitments for reducing greenhouse gases
emissions. This shift happened as the Foreign Ministry reasserted control over negotia-
tions and was reinforced by the rise of Luiz Figueiredo to be minister of foreign affairs
in August 2013. Figueiredo, a former top climate negotiator, belongs to the more nation-
alistic sector of the government.
The BASIC countries spoke to support Brazil’s 2013 proposal on historic responsibility
along with Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, and the G77/China also endorsed
it, but developed countries uniformly opposed raising the issue and it was not included
on the agenda (Chasek 2013, p. 26). Yet even if countries were to begin to develop such a
methodology, it is unclear whether the details of Brazilian accounting would hold. Even
among only the BASIC countries, for example, expert proposals on ‘equity’ from the dif-
ferent countries have very different historical starting points. Only the Brazilian expert
proposal began with measuring historical responsibility with the industrial revolution in
1850, while the others chose dates after 1975 (BASIC Experts 2011).
Alongside the argument about the historical responsibility of developed countries to
act first and more comprehensively is the associated idea of ‘common but differentiated
responsibilities,’ which comes from the original UNFCCC (Stone 2004). Brazil has also
consistently upheld this principle in all climate negotiations, interpreting it as the Kyoto
Protocol does, to suggest that there should be legal obligations to reduce emissions for one
set of developed countries, who also should help to finance the non-obligatory climate
actions of developing countries. The insistence on strong differentiation among countries
continues to be central to all of Brazil’s negotiating positions since 1992, except for in 2009.
The most significant area of change in Brazilian positions is in its growing agreement
after 2000 that it might take on voluntary actions to reduce emissions. An array of

Brazil 245
omestic shifts, as just outlined, and international pressures brought Brazil to this point.
d
The change became part of global negotiations when BASIC formed in 2009 and helped
to broker the Copenhagen Accord (Hochstetler and Viola 2012). Much maligned by
those who want a binding, multilateral climate protocol, the Copenhagen Accord and
its call for promises of nationally determined, voluntary actions matched Brazilian
diplomatic preferences well for developing countries. Brazil has continued to argue that
developed countries needed firmer obligations than the Copenhagen Accord provides,
however. As environment minister Izabella Teixeira remarked to the closing plenary
of COP 18 in Doha: ‘At the center of the Doha outcome, we see the agreement on the
Kyoto Protocol Second Commitment Period. This was our main objective, this is our key
success . . . The Kyoto Protocol is the standard of environmental integrity, even for those
Annex I Parties who decided not to join it or to leave it’ (Teixeira 2012, p. 1). Teixeira also
reiterated Brazil’s ‘support for a legally binding agreement in 2015, to enter into force by
2020,’ but also excoriated developed countries for not only not doing their part, but also
trying to shift the burden to developing countries (Teixeira 2012, pp. 1–2).
As Brazil’s own emissions drop with declining deforestation, the failure of developed
countries to do their part has become a more prominent theme. Developed countries are
not only decreasing their mitigation ambition, in Brazil’s view, but are repeatedly failing
to provide promised financing. In its heavy criticism of developed countries, Brazil has
always been incapable of differentiating different performances among them. On the
other side, Brazil has always offered an exaggerated defense of non-Annex I countries’
performance. This distorted and simplistic approach has undermined Brazilian credibil-
ity (Viola and Franchini 2013).
Yet on the issue of financing, Brazil has begun to play a more transitional role as well.
In the Copenhagen meeting in 2009, for example, President Lula said for the first time
that Brazil would not need external funds to take climate action, and was already taking
action without compensation. He even suggested in an informal plenary that Brazil might
offer funds to other countries if the offer would help break the negotiation impasse (Lula
da Silva 2009). When Brazil hosted the Rio120 conference in 2012, 20 years after the
original Rio conference, Brazil pledged US$10 million for climate assistance to least
developed countries, small island developing states and African countries, specifically ref-
erencing the failure of developed countries to meet their financing obligations (Rousseff
2012) at the same time that it opposed European efforts to include climate change as a
main subject of the conference.
In the backdrop of these newer Brazilian positions is a partial shift in its interna-
tional identity and roles. Already in 1992, Brazil thought of itself as a bridge between
the developed and developing worlds and uniquely positioned to speak for developing
countries (Brazilian Delegation 1993, pp. 26–27). After 2000, the rest of the world also
came to think of Brazil as a larger power through its inclusion in the BRICS (Brazil,
Russia, India, China and, after 2010, South Africa), the Major Economies Forum, the
G20 Presidential Summits and other venues that recognized Brazil as a key emerging
power (Goldemberg and Viola 2014). The years 2006–2010 of the Lula presidencies were
the peak of Brazil’s international projection. This identity as an emerging power was one
of the most important glues within the BASIC coalition, even as they differed on ques-
tions like whether they should commit to emissions reductions if developed countries
did (Hochstetler and Milkoreit 2014, p. 233). Also, the BASIC coalition, since it includes

India, has been instrumental for hiding the fact that per capita emissions of Brazil, China
and South Africa are already higher than some European countries.
Whatever the divisions among BASIC countries, and there are many, it is still a more
coherent grouping than the Latin American region is for Brazil. Despite being often
identified as a regional leader, Brazil has no climate followers in Latin America. Instead,
the region is split among vocal participants like the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of
our Americas (ALBA), the Independent Alliance of Latin America and the Caribbean
(AILAC), the Central American Integration System, and larger partnerships like the
Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC). Only the G77/China holds nearly all of
them (Roberts and Edwards 2012), although Mexico left that grouping when it joined the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the mid-1990s and Chile
has been out most of the time.
CONCLUSIONS
Climate politics, for Brazil, is mostly domestic politics. While it has been an active par-
ticipant in global climate negotiations, shifts in Brazil’s positions can be best explained
with a close view of environment and development stances within the country. Some
characteristics, like its comparatively clean energy matrix, are longstanding (and based
more on developmental than environmental considerations). Newer features such as the
striking decrease in Amazonian deforestation resulted from institutional changes and
new political coalitions. We argue that a constellation of such domestic developments
created an unusual opening for progressive climate politics in 2009–2010, resulting in a
national climate law and Brazil’s first and only formal international climate action com-
mitment. Developments since have been less salutary, as economic stagnation has struck
the low carbon transition back off the political agenda and reinvigorated traditional rural
powers, who may be undermining the gains in controlling deforestation. Internationally,
Brazil has returned to long-time themes about the historic responsibility of developed
countries to undertake most of climate mitigation action and finance. This does not
mean that Brazilian climate positions are exactly back to where they were a decade ago,
but they show that gains in climate action cannot be assumed to be linear and locked-in.
Electoral outcomes are central to climate outcomes. By the beginning of 2015 there is a
lot of uncertainty about the short/middle-term future of Brazilian climate policy. The
cabinet profile of Rousseff’s second term is the most conservative in relation to climate
change since 1998, but it will not be easy to consolidate that stance since it is far more
conservative than the mainstream of Brazilian society.
NOTES
1. Viola’s research was funded by a grant from the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological
Development (CNPq). Hochstetler’s research was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. See Hochstetler and Viola (2012) for an extended
earlier version of these arguments.
2. Data are from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisa
Espaciais), online at www.obt.inpe.br/prodes/prodes_1988_2014.htm.

Brazil 247
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PART IV
NON-STATE AGENTS AND

INSTITUTIONS OF CLIMATE
GOVERNANCE

22. NGOs
Michele Betsill
INTRODUCTION
In December 2009, more than 12,000 representatives of non-governmental organi-
zations (NGOs) gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark on the occasion of the 15th
Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC). They arrived amid high hopes that the world’s leaders
would finally agree on a new multilateral climate treaty for the post-Kyoto period.
Many NGO representatives were busy running from meeting to meeting in the Bella
Center where the negotiations were taking place. Often sleep- deprived and over-
caffeinated, these smartly dressed individuals tried to keep up with the latest develop-
ments in the highly technical negotiation process and enter interventions when possible.
Each evening, environmental NGOs gathered to present the ‘Fossil of the Day’ award to
a state delegation seen to have been especially obstructive. Meanwhile, others marched
around the Bella Center in colorful costumes, waved provocative signs outside the
conference hall, organized protests on the streets of Copenhagen and set up public
art exhibits in city squares. These NGOs were much less concerned with the particular
details of the text under discussion. Instead, they sought to focus public and media
attention on the talks in hopes of putting pressure on diplomats to reach an agreement,
to call attention to issues that were not getting sufficient attention in the negotiations,
and to highlight the urgency of the climate challenge. Still other NGOs hosted gather-
ings at venues around Copenhagen to discuss new issues and share ideas about alterna-
tive strategies for g overning climate change through carbon markets, local policies or
the use of low-carbon technologies.
The Copenhagen experience reflects three distinct but overlapping roles played by
NGOs in global climate governance today: as activists raising awareness and calling
for action; as diplomats working with governments to craft climate policies; and as
governors developing new mechanisms for steering society towards a low- carbon
future.1 This chapter begins with an overview of how NGOs are conceptualized in
global climate politics before looking at these three roles in greater detail. I argue that
as activists and diplomats, NGOs have long been relegated to the sidelines of global
policymaking where other actors (states, IGOs, companies) are seen to hold decision-
making authority. This is changing, however, as NGOs engage in new forms of climate
activism and become global climate governors. Rather than trying to influence rule-
making processes controlled by others, NGOs are moving to the frontlines of global
climate governance by reframing the terms of the debate and asserting themselves as
global governors in their own right.
251
CONCEPTUALIZING NGOs
In academic research and practice, the term ‘NGO’ generally refers to a broad spectrum
of formal non-profit organizations that are independent of government, do not advocate
violence and seek to advance public goals. While this definition clearly excludes other
types of ‘non-state’ actors such as political parties, terrorist organizations and corpora-
tions, there is some debate about whether non-profit associations representing particular
business and industry sectors, such as the International Chamber for Commerce (ICC)
and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) should also
be included, at least for analytical purposes. Although they operate in distinction to the
state—they do not (formally) represent governmental interests and are active participants
in public debates around climate change—they are often seen to pursue private rather
than public goals and in some cases have actively worked to obstruct policymaking
processes (Jordan and van Tuijl 2000; Pasha and Blaney 1998). In this chapter, I adopt
a broad definition of NGOs, which includes business/industry associations as well as
transnational organizations representing municipal governments, such as ICLEI-Local
Governments for Sustainability. While not clearly ‘private’—in that their members are
part of the public sector—the key is that transnational municipal networks often allow
for the expression of views that are distinct from national governments.
It is difficult to say exactly how many NGOs have been engaged in global climate gov-
ernance over the years. More than 1,300 organizations have been accredited to the
United Nations (UN) climate negotiations (Cabré 2011), but many more participate in
climate politics outside the UN arena and there is no formal mechanism for tracking their
numbers. NGOs involved in global climate politics work at and across different levels of
social and political organization (often in coalitions or networks with one another), focus
on a broad set of issues, and engage in a variety of activities from research, to lobbying, to
project development. They include international NGOs such as the World Wide Fund for
Nature (WWF) and the WBCSD, which operate in two or more countries and often have
large budgets along with highly professionalized staff as well as smaller and less formal
grassroots organizations, which operate on a shoestring budget and rely heavily on vol-
unteer staff. NGOs engaging with global climate politics have many different substantive
interests as well, including the environment (e.g., Friends of the Earth International), devel-
opment (e.g., Oxfam) and energy (e.g., the International Network for Sustainable Energy).
Scholarship on NGOs in global environmental politics took off in the mid-1990s,
in part as a response to their significant presence at the 1992 UN Conference on the
Environment and Development (the Rio Conference). This research has been shaped
by theoretical debates on transnational relations (e.g., Nye and Keohane 1971; Risse-
Kappen 1995) and the constructivist turn in international relations with its focus on the
role of ideas and norms in world politics (e.g., Keck and Sikkink 1998). In the 1990s and
early 2000s, much of the scholarship on NGOs in global climate politics focused on their
role as activists raising awareness about the climate problem as well as their involvement
in multilateral negotiation processes (e.g., Arts 2001; Betsill and Corell 2001; Newell 2000;
Wapner 1996). More recently, a growing body of research has analyzed the role of NGOs
as global governors in the climate change arena (Bäckstrand 2008; Andonova et al. 2009;
Pattberg and Stripple 2008; Bulkeley et al. 2014). As discussed below, international rela-
tions research on NGOs in global climate politics has been informed by a broad range of

NGOs 253
theoretical perspectives, which highlight different aspects of NGO engagement and focus
on different types of questions about how NGOs are shaping prospects for addressing
global climate change. Much of this research consists of in-depth case studies drawing on
data collected through interviews, participant observation and archival research.
NGOs AS ACTIVISTS
Environmental NGOs were instrumental in calling attention to the climate change

problem in the 1980s and marshaling the issue onto the international political agenda.
Research-oriented NGOs such as the Beijer Institute (now the Stockholm Environment
Institute), the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Resources Institute (WRI) and
the Woods Hole Research Center helped to organize a series of conferences in 1987
designed to move from an emerging scientific consensus that climate change posed a
legitimate threat to the international community to policy action (Jaeger 1992). Building
on these conferences, participants to the 1988 World Conference on the Changing
Atmosphere, held in Toronto, Canada, adopted the ‘Toronto target’ calling on states to
reduce their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions 20 percent below 1988 levels by 2005 setting
the stage for subsequent multilateral treaty negotiations under UN auspices.
Once climate change was on the political agenda, climate activists began using
‘indirect’ or ‘outsider’ tactics such as public protests, educational campaigns and art
exhibits to raise public awareness and concern about the problem, propose possible solu-
tions, call attention to activities that contribute to climate change and/or challenge the
pace of government action (see Fisher and Galli this volume). Climate activism tends to
be dominated by environmental and socially oriented NGOs, especially those working
on human rights and development issues. NGOs frequently join with more informally
organized civil society associations and grassroots organizations to engage in climate
activism through transnational networks.
The annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings are a major site of NGO climate
activism. Whenever representatives of the world’s countries gather, activists follow. While
diplomats meet to deliberate over technical issues and draft text, NGOs organize a broad
range of activities, some of which occur in public spaces inside the conference hall while
others are held at various sites around the host city. For example, during the Hague COP
in 2000, NGOs piled sandbags to create a flood barrier around the conference hall (O’Neill
2014). In Copenhagen, an ice sculpture of a polar bear slowly melted in a city square
during the two-week negotiating period as a poignant reminder of the threat climate
change poses to endangered species. For many NGOs, the goal is to generate media atten-
tion as an indirect way of reaching diplomats and pushing delegates to agree on stronger
action. NGOs such as Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature use activism to
complement their work inside the negotiations (Gulbrandsen and Andresen 2004).
Recently, contentious and disruptive forms of climate activism have become more fre-
quent. Hadden (2014) identified 77 protest activities at COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009,
more than a threefold increase from previous COPs. Observers have linked this devel-
opment to the rise of the climate justice movement, which connects international and
grassroots NGOs working in the climate and global justice arenas through transnational
networks such as Climate Justice Now! and Climate Justice Action (Chatterton et al.

2013; Fisher 2010; Newell 2008; Schlosberg and Collins 2014). The climate justice move-
ment represents a more radical perspective on the climate issue, highlighting the vulner-
abilities of marginalized populations across the world and calling for structural change
to the global economy. They seek to unsettle existing understandings of climate change
as a collective action problem and challenge the neoliberal economic context in which
climate debates take place. Climate justice NGOs come to the COP meetings primarily
to protest outside the negotiations and in some cases to bring the talks to a halt (Fisher
2010; Schlosberg and Collins 2014).
A great deal of climate activism takes place beyond the world of institutionalized
global climate politics. Here NGOs are more focused on mobilizing for social change at
the grassroots level than influencing elite decision-making processes. This form of NGO
activism often includes education efforts to make climate change more meaningful for
individuals in hopes of prompting changes in their daily behaviors and political action
directed at public officials. For example, 350.org helps to coordinate locally driven cam-
paigns in 188 countries and provides resources to train climate leaders worldwide.
Climate activists also target the private sector on the assumption that it may be more
important to change the behavior of a few large companies than to persuade the world’s
governments to sign another multilateral agreement (Newell 2008; Macleod and Park
2011). Scholars argue that NGOs turn to this form of activism to bypass states that are
either unwilling or unable to regulate corporate practices (Falkner 2003, 2008; Macleod
and Park 2011; McAteer and Pulver 2009). As major companies adopt corporate social
responsibility measures, NGOs seek to hold them accountable through petition or
boycott campaigns such as the Stop ESSO campaign in the UK and protests at annual
shareholder meetings (Newell 2008). These activities target some of the world’s largest
multinational corporations including Ford, General Motors, ExxonMobil and J.P.
Morgan Chase.
Academic research on NGO climate activism tends to be informed by literatures on
civil society (e.g., Cohen and Arato 1992) and transnational social movements (e.g.,
Della Porta and Tarrow 2004; Keck and Sikkink 1998). The most recent wave of research
explores developments post-Copenhagen with a particular focus on the ways in which
the climate justice movement is reshaping NGO activism and global climate politics more
broadly. In addition to engaging a broader range of NGOs (and grassroots associations)
in the climate issue, research suggests the climate justice movement has allowed some
NGOs to expand their repertoire of collective action (Carmin and Bast 2009; Hadden
2014). Chatterton et al. (2013, p. 603) argue that the movement’s use of contentious poli-
tics to highlight issues of inequality has altered the terms of the global climate change
debate and generated a new political agenda. At the same time, Fisher (2010; see also
Fisher and Galli this volume) notes the climate justice movement has created tensions
within the NGO community. In particular, ‘insider’ NGOs increasingly find it more dif-
ficult to gain access to the multilateral negotiation process. Since Copenhagen, where
the number of participants exceeded the capacity of the Bella Center and many NGOs
had to be turned away, the accreditation process has become much more bureaucratic
and the number of observers has been limited, raising some concerns about the demo-
cratic legitimacy of the multilateral process (Bernauer and Gampfer 2013; Fisher 2010;
McGregor 2011).

NGOs 255
NGOs AS DIPLOMATS
Many NGOs come to the annual UN climate talks to engage in ‘NGO diplomacy’ with
NGO delegates often outnumbering government representatives (Betsill and Corell 2008;
Cabré 2011). These non-state actors represent constituencies bound together by common
values, knowledge and/or interests (rather than territory) and often perform many of the
same functions as state delegates. They exchange information, make formal statements
on specific proposals and provide policy advice. Through the use of these ‘insider’ tactics,
NGOs work directly with government representatives and try to influence the negotiating
process and outcome.
Most NGOs participate in climate negotiations as observers, a status conferred by the
UNFCCC secretariat and formally approved by states, which gives NGO representatives
access to the conference hall, plenary sessions, and contact group meetings and provides
valuable opportunities for face-to-face interactions with state delegates (Dimitrov this
volume). It also allows them to organize side-events, which ‘are seen as an important way
to raise critical debate and explore issues that are not considered in the formal negotia-
tions’ (Vormedal 2008, p. 50; see also Schroeder and Lovell 2012). Although international
norms make it difficult for states to deny NGOs access to the talks, they frequently place
restrictions on NGO access by holding closed-door meetings, especially in the final
stages of negotiations over a specific issue (Gulbrandsen and Andresen 2004). However,
NGO diplomats, some of whom have been participating in the negotiation process for
nearly three decades, are adept at working around these restrictions using their personal
relationships with state officials and other informal channels of communication (Betsill
2008a; Vormedal 2008).
NGO diplomacy is dominated by groups representing environmental and business
interests (Cabré 2011). The environmental community, which includes activist groups
(e.g., Friends of the Earth) as well as more research-oriented organizations (e.g., Union
of Concerned Scientists), is generally united around a desire for strict emissions reduc-
tion targets, financing for adaptation, as well as a strong monitoring and compliance
system but vary in their support for market mechanisms (Betsill 2008a; Gulbrandsen and
Andresen 2004). The business/industry NGO sector is even more diverse, ranging from
‘gray’ groups, which are opposed to international regulation, to ‘green’ organizations that
see climate regulation as a business opportunity (see Vormedal 2008 for a good overview).
Research suggests that the ways in which NGOs participate in climate diplomacy is
shaped by their particular material resources and sources of leverage as well as the politi-
cal opportunity structure created by the negotiation process (Betsill 2008b). Some schol-
ars argue that NGOs representing business/industry interests have ‘tacit’ or ‘structural’
power over states because their members occupy a central position in national economies
and the global economic order (Newell 2000; Levy and Newell 2005; Vormedal 2008).
More socially oriented NGOs derive leverage from their specialized knowledge and
expertise (which can also be a source of leverage for business/industry NGOs) and/or
their moral claims to speak on behalf of underrepresented groups in society and even
nature itself (Bernstein 2011; Betsill and Corell 2008; Gulbrandsen and Andresen 2004).
A great deal of NGO diplomacy is coordinated through constituency groups, which
are designed to facilitate participation by providing a focal point for communication,
information sharing and developing common positions. In the climate change arena,

these represent each of the ‘major groups’ recognized in the UN system and include
environmental NGOs, business/industry NGOs, local governments and municipal
authorities, indigenous peoples organizations, research and independent NGOs, trade
unions, farmers and agricultural NGOs, youth NGOs and women and gender NGOs
(Cabré 2011). Some constituencies are highly organized. For example, the Climate
Action Network (CAN), a global network of more than 300 NGOs, serves as the voice
of the environmental community in the climate negotiations (Betsill 2008a; Duwe
2001; Gulbrandsen and Andresen 2004). Research looking more closely at these con-
stituencies reveals considerable differences in the extent to which these different groups
are represented as well as significant disagreements and debates within constituency
groups (Betsill 2008a; Cabré 2011; Duwe 2001; Gulbrandsen and Andresen 2004;
Vormedal 2008).
NGOs may also shape negotiations by working through other channels and by engag-
ing with government delegates outside the formal two-week negotiation sessions (Newell
2000; Vormedal 2008). Many NGOs work at the domestic level to shape states’ positions
before delegates arrive at the COPs (Newell 2000; Gulbrandsen and Andresen 2004).
Working simultaneously at the international and national levels allows NGOs to invoke
the ‘boomerang strategy’ and put pressure on states from above and below (Hochstetler
2002; Keck and Sikkink 1998). Finally, most governments appoint NGO representatives
to sit on their national delegations, providing additional opportunities for NGO interests
to be taken into account (Böhmelt et al. 2014).
Studies of NGO influence in multilateral climate change negotiations generally find
that NGOs have some success in shaping negotiation processes (e.g., catalyzing debates
or keeping issues on the agenda) but often fall short in having their positions reflected
in the final treaty text (Betsill 2008a; Gulbrandsen and Andresen 2004; Vormedal 2008).
These studies also suggest the importance of considering the attributes of different types
of groups (even within a single constituency) as well as features of the negotiation context
in explaining variation in NGO influence (Betsill 2008b). For example, Gulbrandsen and
Andresen (2004) found that ‘advisory’ environmental NGOs had greater influence in the
negotiation process on the Kyoto Protocol’s compliance system and Vormedal (2008)
concluded that business NGOs only had influence over states that had not yet formulated
a clear position on carbon capture and storage.
Some scholars argue that NGO involvement democratizes the negotiation process by
giving voice to a broader range of interests, which in turn may enhance the perceived
legitimacy of negotiation outcomes (Dombrowski 2010; Bernauer and Gampfer 2013).
At the same time, there are questions about the diversity of interests actually represented
at the climate talks (Cabré 2011; Jordan and van Tuijl 2000). Dryzek and colleagues
(2011) argue that NGO diplomacy does little to enhance the deliberative nature of multi-
lateral decision-making, which would require moving away from the adversarial bargain-
ing and lobbying activities that characterize the UN climate talks.
NGOs AS GLOBAL GOVERNORS
Over the past decade, NGOs have been recognized as global governors in their own right.
States routinely delegate specific governance functions to NGOs, such as monitoring and

NGOs 257
Table 22.1 Examples of NGO-led global climate governance
Initiative NGO(s) involved Description

The Gold Standard WWF A certification standard to assess the
quality of carbon mitigation projects
in the compliance and voluntary
carbon markets.
Carbon Disclosure Ceres A reporting system for companies
Project to disclose their GHG emissions
and exposure to climate risks to the
public and shareholders.
Climate Savers WWF A partnership with corporations to
promote voluntary GHG reductions
through efficiency measures.
GHG Protocol WRI and WBCSD Accounting standard for measuring
firm-level GHG emissions.
Climate, Community, CARE, Conservation A certification standard to evaluate
and Biodiversity International, the Nature the social and ecological impact of
Alliance Conservancy, Rainforest Alliance carbon mitigation projects.
and Wildlife Conservation Society
Cities for Climate ICLEI-Local Governments for A climate governance model based
Protection Sustainability on five milestones for municipal
climate action.
GHG Registry International Emissions Trading A platform to document the
Association, Center for Climate holding and exchange of emissions
and Energy Solutions, WBCSD, allowances and credits.
WRI and WWF
reporting or capacity building (Dingwerth and Green this volume; Newell 2008; Green
2010). In addition, NGOs also are involved (often with other actors) in establishing
private and transnational forms of global climate governance, such as emissions account-
ing and reporting standards, certification schemes, transnational municipal networks
and public–private partnerships (Andonova 2010; Andonova et al. 2009; Bäckstrand
2008; Betsill and Bulkeley 2006; Pattberg 2005; Pattberg and Stripple 2008). In contrast
to their role as activists and diplomats where NGOs direct their efforts toward changing
the decisions of other actors who are recognized as having decision-making authority,
here NGOs take it upon themselves to steer society towards a particular public purpose
and exercise ‘agency beyond the state’ (Andonova et al. 2009; Dellas et al. 2011). In many
cases, these new forms of NGO-led governance arise in an attempt to fill the regulatory
and implementation deficits related to the global climate change regime (Bulkeley et al.
2014). Table 22.1 includes examples of NGO-led global climate governance.
Scholars attribute the rise of NGO-led global governance to globalization processes,
which simultaneously challenge the ability of states to respond to complex, multi-scalar
problems, such as climate change, and empower new actors to participate in decision-
making. Rosenau (1995) argues that NGOs and other non-state actors have emerged as
‘new spheres of authority’ and differentiates between a ‘state-centric’ world dominated
by intergovernmental interactions and a ‘multi-centric’ world of sovereignty-free actors

(see also Lederer this volume; Ruggie 2004; Wapner 1996). In addition, Bernstein and
Cashore (2007) argue that shifting international norms related to state sovereignty, neo-
liberalism and democracy create an enabling social structure in which NGOs can assert
their authority as global governors.
Breaking with the tradition of case study research to explore the role of NGOs, several
scholars have compiled databases of NGO-led governance arrangements that allow for
more systematic analysis of general patterns and trends related to these new forms of
climate governance. Several studies indicate that a great deal of NGO-led climate govern-
ance activity is organized around carbon markets and involves working cooperatively
with businesses and subnational governments (Hoffmann 2011; Bulkeley et al. 2014;
Bernstein et al. 2010). As global governors, NGOs appear to be engaged in what Newell
(2008, p. 148) calls ‘liberal civil regulation,’ which is primarily ‘aimed at working privately
with business actors as partners in seeking solutions to climate change.’ This is in contrast
to the more critical approaches often employed in climate justice activism involving more
confrontational strategies that seek to reveal the ways in which the private sector and the
structure of the global economy more broadly are implicated in causing climate change
in the first place.
The emergence of NGO-led governance raises questions about how NGOs come to
seen as authoritative. By definition, these types of arrangements are voluntary since
NGOs lack the ability to compel other actors to participate and comply through coercion
or command (Bulkeley 2012). In contrast to states, whose authority to govern is often
taken for granted, NGOs seek to govern without the legal authority to do so and thus
must secure recognition from those who they seek to govern (Bernstein 2011; Bulkeley et
al. 2014). To understand how this process works, scholars engage with theoretical debates
about the relationship between legitimacy and authority and the process of legitimation
(Bernstein 2011; Bulkeley et al. 2014). Bernstein (2011, p. 20) argues that legitimacy is the
glue that joins power to authority. ‘By justifying authority in the eyes of the governed,
legitimacy empowers authorities and increases the likelihood that their commands will
be obeyed.’ Legitimacy claims may be accepted explicitly through delegation or implic-
itly through recognition and must be routinely reiterated as they are often contested.
Empirical research reveals that the types of NGO legitimacy claims and their acceptance
are a function of resources available as well as the social context in which legitimacy
claims are made. In the realm of transnational climate governance, legitimacy claims are
most frequently based on appeals to expertise within a broader discourse of efficiency
and market governance, reflecting the dominance of ‘liberal environmentalist’ ideology
in the climate governance system (Bernstein 2001; Bulkeley et al. 2012, 2014; McGee this
volume).
Many of these arrangements engage government actors, thus NGO-led governance
blurs the ‘public–private’ divide that is often taken for granted in international relations
and political science scholarship (Bulkeley 2005; Pattberg and Stripple 2008). For example,
ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability is an NGO whose members deploy public
sources of authority to implement local climate protection measures (Betsill and Bulkeley
2006). Hoffmann (2011) argues that cities are a key site of NGO-led climate governance
‘experiments’ because non-state actors hope to capitalize on the subnational g overnments’
political authority. The complex relationship between public and private is further illus-
trated in the context of the global carbon market where governments are generally seen as

NGOs 259
holding the authority to design trading systems (e.g., set caps and determine how permits
should be allocated) but where discussions about design options are structured by the
nature of the market infrastructure (e.g., registries and verification systems) that have
been established by NGOs (Bernstein et al. 2010; Betsill and Hoffmann 2011).
The rise of NGO-led governance is reshaping understandings about the nature of the
global climate governance system (Bernstein et al. 2010; Bulkeley et al. 2014; Hoffmann
2011). Specifically, these initiatives are part of the fragmentation of global climate gov-
ernance and serve to analytically decenter multilateral treaty-making from the analysis
(Biermann et al. 2009; Zelli and van Asselt this volume). At the same time, it may be
premature to see NGO-led governance as a stand-alone alternative to the treaty regime
(Bulkeley et al. 2014).
CONCLUSION
NGOs are a formidable presence in global climate governance, operating in many differ-
ent arenas and engaging in a range of activities. For many years, NGOs have been seen as
operating on the sidelines of global climate governance by focusing their efforts on direct
and indirect strategies ultimately targeted at shaping the decisions of other actors. These
climate activists and NGO diplomats have tried to pressure the world’s governments
and corporations to take bolder action on the climate issue by raising public awareness,
generating media attention and providing policy advice and expertise. Today, NGOs are
moving into the frontlines of the global effort to address climate change, taking matters
into their own hands rather than relying on others. The rise of the climate justice move-
ment and more contentious forms of climate activism along with the shift to NGO-
led climate governance reflects growing frustrations with the pace of the multilateral
treaty-making process. Whether these NGO activities will lead to a more effective global
response remains to be seen.
NOTE
1. For similar distinctions, see O’Neill (2014) and Burgiel and Wood (2012).
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23. Business
Chukwumerije Okereke
INTRODUCTION
One of the most distinctive features of the global governance of climate change is the
prominent roles played by non-nation-states actors (NSAs) (Hoffmann 2011; Newell
2000; Okereke et al. 2009). These include businesses, environmental non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and civil society organizations, which, unlike national govern-
ments, do not have coercive authorities or decision-making powers.
Of these different types of NSAs, businesses are generally known to command the
most significant influence (Leggett 2000; Levy and Newell 2005). Through their central
role in economic development, influence on behavior, investment and innovation, busi-
nesses have enormous power to facilitate or hinder low carbon societal transformation
(Bumpus et al. 2015). The unique power of business to shape the direction of global
environmental change was aptly captured by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)
in 1998 when it stated, that ‘while business represent perhaps the single biggest threat
to society and the natural world; it can also represent one of our greatest allies in our
mission to safe guard it and provide for its sustainable development’ (cited in Marsden
2000, p. 9).
Relevant scholarship has provided comprehensive descriptions of business climate
activities with analysis suggesting that while corporate action on climate change is
increasing in scope, the pace of change still falls far short of what is required to curb
rising carbon emissions (Hoffman 2006; Kolk and Pinkse 2004, 2005; Okereke 2007;
Okereke et al. 2011). There remains, however, significant gaps in the u
nderstanding of the
broader logic that explains collective business attitude towards climate change and relat-
edly how best to catalyze corporate sustainability transformation.
How, for example, does one account for the consistent mismatch between rhetoric and
action? Are businesses deliberately refusing to deploy the enormous resources at their
disposal to help society shift towards a low carbon future, and if so, why? Are businesses
desirous to lead societal low carbon transformation but are constrained by wider struc-
tural forces? Who is to blame when businesses do not do their fair share to address climate
change—is it managers, market forces, governments or profit-seeking shareholders? And,
critically, where exactly does the momentum for change lie and how can this be activated?
With notable exceptions (e.g., Levy and Newell 2005; Levy and Egan 2003; Okereke et al.
2009), scholarship on business climate governance has dwelt more on descriptions and
less on theoretical exposition.
This main argument of the chapter is that the explanation of the slow pace of business
action requires a socio-cultural theory that transcends the narrow premises of dominant
corporate social responsibility (CSR) and business management approaches. I assert that
only a critical political economy approach that captures the complex interplay between
cultural ideas, power, politics and economic interests can provide a basis for explaining
262
263
Business
the prospects and limits of corporate climate governance. My argument, which draws
from similar existing works (Levy and Egan 2003; Levy and Newell 2005; Okereke
et al. 2009) is focused on carbon-intensive multinational companies (MNCs) whose
activities are generally considered crucial in shaping societal response to climate change
(McKibben 2012).
To begin, I first provide a quick overview of business climate actions followed by
a short account of the four broad epochs in big business orientation towards climate
change—covering from 1980 till the present.
CORPORATE CLIMATE STRATEGIES: AN OVERVIEW
Scholarship on business activities on climate change has generated a detailed list of the
actions and categories of activities that businesses take in response to climate change.
Hoffman (2006) and Okereke (2007) have both compiled a very long list of categories
of actions that businesses take on climate change, which range from basic technologi-
cal changes (e.g., installing low energy light bulbs) through medium-cost activities (e.g.,
installing waste heat recovery facilities); to fundamental process or product innovation
changes.
Kolk and Pinkse (2005) provided a three-by-two classification of business responses
to climate change based on organizational level of action and the ‘orientation’ of the
action. In terms of organizational level of actions, the typology distinguishes between
actions centered on: (1) internal firm activities; (2) supply chain of companies; and
(3) collaboration with firms or entities in other sectors. Concerning orientation, the
model makes a distinction between developing emission-reducing technologies or ser-
vices (‘innovation’) versus buying or using emission reducing technologies developed by
others (‘compensation’).
Based on the inclusion of activities that cover not only climate mitigation but also
climate adaptation, Okereke et al. (2011) have grouped business climate activities along
four categories namely: (1) capabilities (climate measurement, reporting and accounting);
(2) culture (e.g., waste recycling); (3) structure (organizational or infrastructural change);
and (4) processes based changes (new technology, feed stock or production practices). It
is obviously difficult to rank business climate activities according their impact because
what a firm can do often depend on its size and sector. However, there is a strong recogni-
tion (Bumpus et al. 2015) that some of the most significant contribution of business to
climate change mitigation will come through product and technological innovation that
help to drive broad low carbon societal transformation.
THE FOUR ERAS IN BUSINESS CLIMATE ACTIVITIES
Looking at the history of the market and political climate activities of big carbon
intensive business, it seems possible to identify, four distinct if overlapping eras.

These are the eras of: (1) opposition, (2) reluctant support, (3) backtracking and
(4) ambivalence.

Era of Denial and Opposition (1985–1999)
Although the rise of climate change as a subject of public policy concern in the mid-to
late 1980s at first provoked mixed reactions from big business (including hope, optimism
and caution) (Levy 1997) it was the attitude of denial and negativity that eventually domi-
nated the landscape (Leggett 2000). The business group that epitomized this negative
reaction was the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) created in the US by the petroleum and
automotive industries. At its peak, the GCC had more than 50 companies and trade asso-
ciations in the oil, coal, utility, chemicals and auto industries as active members and was
spending nearly US$1 million a year on its campaign to convince governments against
strong climate action (Levy 1997, p. 58). It is also reported that the group ‘spent $US13
million on television, newspaper and radio advertising in the three months leading up to
the Kyoto conference to promote public opposition to the treaty’ (Beder 1999, p. 120).
Apart from the GCC, other notable anti-climate groups included the European Steel
Association (EUROFER) and the Climate Council, which worked closely with oil export-
ing countries such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, as well as with oil and coal companies.
The main strategy of this ‘“rejectionist” coalition of industry interests’ (Levy 1997,
p. 60) was mostly to cast doubt on the integrity of prevailing climate science indicating
human induced global warming as well as the socio-economic and environmental merits
of strong climate action. Together, they sought to portray climate change as an anti-
growth agenda of environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and caricatured pro-
posed climate mitigation measures as portending a return to antiquity. They also spent
large sums of money funding climate skeptic scientists in the US and around the world in
order to create evidence to discredit strong action (Beder 1999).
Levy (1997) has suggested that the success of these rejectionist energy intensive busi-
nesses in deflecting strong climate action at global level and the in the US was due to
a range of factors including well-funded campaign machinery, the structural powers
of the industries involved and, crucially, the support received from some governments.
Many recent analyses continue to indicate that a set of powerful anti-climate industry
lobby groups are primarily responsible for undermining effort to create strong climate
regulations both globally and in specific industrialized countries (Böhm et al. 2012;
Meckling 2011).
Era of Indecision and Reluctant Support 2000–2008
The next era that can be identified in the orientation of big businesses towards climate
change is that of indecision and reluctant support. Within this period many big
businesses appeared to have changed approach from opposing climate policy as they
made gestures towards engaging with various mitigation actions. A clear evidence of
this apparent shift in mood was the rate at which businesses withdrew their membership
from the notorious GCC between 1997 and 1999; forcing the group to disband in 2000.
One of the notable companies to first show real sign of direction change was British
oil giant, BP. Following its withdrawal from GCC in 1997, BP spent US$45 million
to fully acquire a solar energy company called Solarex, which it then integrated with
its own BP solar division to create what was then the biggest solar company in the
world. Subsequently BP launched a US$200 million public relations campaign branded

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‘Beyond Petroleum’ to reposition the company as being in favor of strong action to
address climate change (Beder 1999).
Shell was another high-profile business that, in addition to pulling out from GCC, also
made considerable investment in its renewable energy portfolio where the company is
reported to have committed around US$1.2 billion between 1999 and 2006 (Bergin 2009).
Shell was also one of the first companies to launch an international trading scheme,
which it said was designed to build experience and crucially to persuade governments
that emission trading was a feasible option to tackling climate change. In the automo-
bile industry, companies such as Ford, Daimler-Chrysler and General Motors who were
founding members of GCC also defected and initiated various actions to respond to
climate change (Jones and Levy 2007). Similarly, notable signs of progress were seen in
the steel (Kim and Worrell 2002), cement (Okereke and Küng 2013) and chemical (Hart
1997) industries.
This period was also the era of the proliferation of multi-stakeholder partnerships
involving businesses, governments and NGOs (Pattberg 2010). It has also been described
as ‘the decade of sustainability reporting’ (Kolk 2004) with the most famous example
being the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP)—a voluntary initiative that publishes annual
data disclosing the greenhouse gas emissions of a large number of companies around the
world.
It is generally believed that a major factor responsible for the change in strategy of
business towards climate change was the agreement of the Kyoto Protocol in December
1997, which sent a clear signal to industry that governments will act to limit climate
change in their respective jurisdictions (Hoffman 2006). Other factors often cited include
rise in public concerns and criticisms from environmental NGOs, some of which began
to run national divesture campaigns targeting the climate skeptic companies (Meckling
2011).
Era of Cooling Off and Backtracking (2006–2009)
The short period from 2006 to 2009 can be described an era of cooling off and eventual
backtracking in corporate climate orientation towards climate change. This era, which
coincided with the onset of the global economic crisis, saw several proactive companies
quietly toning down or even completely retracting their climate commitments.
Shell offers a good illustration of this swift tactical shift. Having previously made a
huge public campaign deal of their investments in renewables and its commitment to low
carbon transformation more broadly, Shell in 2006 spun off its solar business, which had
more than 600 staff and manufacturing plants in Germany, US and Canada. Then in
2007 it quietly sold off its photovoltaic operations in Indonesia, India, Philippines and
Sri Lanka which had a combined total of more than 260 staff in about 28 offices (Bergin
2009). Furthermore, in 2008 Shell defied public outcry and pulled out from a major wind
farm project (London Array offshore scheme) which it had agreed to fund (Bergin 2009).
Commenting on this action environmental activist George Monbiot reported that in fact
‘Shell’s spending on renewables – except biofuel – appeared to have fallen from US$ 200m
a year to zero’ in the years between 2000 and 2009 (Monbiot 2009).
Interestingly, it was in about the same period that Shell announced that it was investing
heavily into oil tar sand oil extraction in Canada—a move that BP promptly replicated in

a matter of weeks. It was also within this period that the carbon price crashed and, along
with it, the once high hopes that the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS)
would spur radical innovation in renewable technology (and societal low carbon transfor-
mation). Broadly speaking, with the onset of the financial crisis, the attention of business
as well as governments and the general public shifted away from climate change towards
a concern to ‘reboot’ the conventional economy (Wittneben et al. 2012).
Era of Ambivalence and Incongruity (2010 to Present)
The current era can be perhaps described as a period of ambivalence and incongruity.
This era is characterized by a simultaneous growth in business climate activities and
rapidly rising carbon emissions.
On the positive side, modern renewable energy now provides an estimated 10 percent
of global final energy consumption with the most significant growth having ‘occurred
in the power sector, with global capacity exceeding 1560 gigawatts (GW), up more than
8 percent over 2012’ (REN21 2014). Furthermore, the global prices of key renewables
such as solar and wind have continued to fall as the percentage of renewables in energy
portfolios are rising in both the US and Europe (Feldman et al. 2014). A report by
the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA 2014) found that the average price of a
residential photovoltaic installation in the second quarter of 2014 dropped 41 percent
from 2010. Since the second quarter of 2010, the average price of a solar panel dropped
by 64 percent.
The number of hybrid and purely electric cars are rising steadily in the US and other
parts of the world (Bianco et al. 2014). To date, there are now an estimated 405,000
electric cars globally with some figures suggesting that electric car sales increased 228.88
percent in 2013 compared to 2011 figures (Bianco et al. 2014). Equally notable is the fact
that many more MNCs (about 3,000) are now reporting their emissions under the CDP;
and that the number of institutional investors backing the voluntary reporting project
has grown to 767 with a net worth of US$92 trillion in assets (CDP 2014).
But at the same time as these initiatives are increasing, carbon emissions continue to
rise steadily. In May 2011, the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced that global
carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy use in 2010 reached its highest in history.
Critically, the IEA estimated that 80 percent of projected emissions from the power sector
in 2020 are already locked in, as they will come from power plants that are currently in
place or under construction today (IEA 2011). Moreover, the Carbon Tracker Initiative
(2011) estimates that the amount of carbon in proven oil, gas and coal reserves which the
fossil-fuel industry is committed to burning is 2,795 Gigatonnes—more than three times
the amount required to keep the global mean temperature below 2°C.
A number of big companies (e.g., Shell) that are openly calling for stronger climate
mitigation targets belong to industry groups that oppose policies seeking to undercut
efforts at reducing carbon emissions (e.g., the American Legislative Exchange Council,
ALEC). Oil companies are investing in sand tar, an intensely polluting fuel source that,
as Monbiot said, ‘makes conventional petroleum extraction look green’ (Monbiot 2009).
While many Western governments are trumpeting green economy, only about 15 percent
of the several trillion dollars spent on fiscal-stimulus packages around the world has
been directed towards the promotion of low-carbon development. Global subsidy

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on conventional oil is US$1 trillion compared to the US$200 million subsidy spent
on renewable energy related subsidies. The result, says McKibben (2012, p. 7), is ‘there’s
simply too much money to be made on oil and gas and coal to go chasing after zephyrs
and sunbeams.’
Public concern with climate change has declined in both the US and the EU with ‘the
economic insecurity caused by the Great Recession’ being cited as the principal reason
(Scruggs and Benegal 2012). Restarting growth has become the priority following the
economic decline and climate skepticism is again on the rise (Grundmann this volume).
Green economy has become a mantra in policymaking circles, but the expectation that
green stimulus will help to create green jobs, diversify economic activity away from oil
and lead to greater social equity has failed to eventuate, at least thus far (Ehresman and
Okereke 2015).
EXPLAINING THE INCONGRUITY: TOWARDS A SOCIO-

CULTURAL THEORY OF CORPORATE CLIMATE
GOVERNANCE
The apparent mismatch between the scale of climate change and the pace of business
transformation has been a subject of much commentary in literature. Pointing at the dis-
crepancy between proclamations and actions, some accuse businesses of ‘green washing,’
hypocrisy and deception (Hart 1997; Laufer 2003). Yet others (including some firms)
have defended business’ contribution to climate mitigation and suggested that the blame
for the slow pace of action lies in national governments for not putting in place stronger
and more long-term climate policies (Foxon and Pearson 2015; Lye 2015).
Although there are notable exceptions, a major limitation of scholarship on corpo-
rate climate governance has been that the growth of fairly comprehensive descriptions
of business climate activities has not been matched by robust conceptual treatments.
Specifically, neither of the two leading theoretical approaches—CSR and business
management—provides enough tools for understanding the complexity of the business
climate strategies, the reasons for prevailing inertia and clear options for propelling the
needed change (cf. Le Menestrel and de Bettignies 2002; Wittneben et al. 2012).
CSR-based accounts generally tend to suggest that business’ actions on climate change
(and other environmental issues) are strongly linked to morality and common good (He
and Chen 2009). It is true that from a narrow perspective of ‘being good citizens,’ CSR
approaches have more recently widened to include many other variations including criti-
cal strands that accommodate a measure of instrumentalism (Garriga and Mele 2004;
Windsor 2006). Nonetheless, a key idea remains that, just like ordinary people, busi-
nesses ought to view themselves as good citizens, with moral obligations to contribute
to societal good (Klintman and Boström this volume). Even the critical strands of CSR
literature still tend to stress the ‘win–win’ philosophy or the notion that a core motivation
for business engagement with climate change is to do well (financially) by doing good
(sustainability). It is this commitment to ideological holism and related ethical ideals
like ‘common good’ which led Friedman (1970) to insist that CSR at its core remains ‘an
explicitly collectivist doctrine.’
Now, there is no doubt that businesses can be a major force for good in societies. There

is in fact evidence that a lot of business activities on climate change in the early period
may have stemmed from the ethical (CSR) perspective. For example Okereke (2007)
found that an overwhelming majority of the 100 largest companies in the UK by market
capitalization (FTSE 100 companies) reported their carbon management as part of their
CSR, with many citing duty of care to environment and society as a motivation. It also
seems to be the case, even currently, that while most big businesses now say they recognize
the strategic importance of climate change (Okereke and Russel 2010) there remains a
tendency to treat it as an exogenous peripheral concern.
The main problem with the CSR approach, however, is that the win–win mantra
(which may well apply in select cases) glosses over pervasive tradeoffs between carbon
polluting processes and self-interested consequences inherent in many major decisions
of big businesses (Le Menestrel and de Bettignies 2002). For example the CRS win–win
thesis grossly underappreciates the chronic tensions between undertaking expensive
climate action for potential long-term benefits and coveting immediate short-term gains
by sticking with ‘business as usual’ approaches. It goes without saying that the primary
concern of business is not environmental morality but how to survive in a cut-throat com-
petitive market world. Hence while business may not be uninterested in environmental
sustainability, it is very difficult to see how any climate activity that would not result in
immediate or long-term financial advantage can gain mainstream attention.
The above does not imply an endorsement of some Marxist or firm-theory-based
accounts that seek to portray business as heartless greedy monsters incapable of appre-
ciating anything other than short-term profit maximization. Yet it is hard to escape the
conclusion, that ‘a leitmotiv of wealth creation’ (Windsor 2001, p. 226) will forever domi-
nate the managerial conception of responsibility (Friedman 1970).
Some have suggested moving away from depicting business climate action as a matter
of CSR towards emphasizing the business strategic implications (Hoffman 2006; Le
Menestrel and de Bettignies 2002). The argument is that incorporating climate change ‘as
an explicit aspect of strategic business management and as an endogenous component of
business model is crucial in making progress towards a carbon neutral economy’ (Okereke
2007, p. 477). However, it is not clear how far such a shift in practice can be expected to
occur if it is not accompanied or perhaps even predicated on wider social and structural
changes.
Some scholars have drawn from institutional theory—a popular strand of thought in
business management—to show how the social and institutional contexts within which
companies operate creates varying constraints and motivations that shape corporate
climate behavior (Kolk et al. 2008). Institutional theorists (DiMaggio and Powell 1983)
argue that managerial decisions are strongly influenced by three institutional mechanisms:
coercive, mimetic and normative pressures. Coercive pressure results mostly from the pre-
vailing regulatory environment; mimetic pressure originates mostly from membership of
industry organizations; and normative pressures stem predominantly from NGOs, civil
societies and the wider public. These mechanisms, it is argued, create and diffuse shared
sets of values, norms and rules that eventually produce similar practices across organiza-
tions that share a common organizational field, creating greater ‘isomorphism.’
Several analyses have indeed found that business climate activities are driven by mul-
tiple factors, prominent among which are regulations, public pressure and competitive
dynamics (Kolk and Pinkse 2004, 2005). Moreover, studies have consistently shown that

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Business
companies that operate in the same institutional settings display plenty of similarities
in their approaches to climate strategies; while those operating in different institutional
environment tend to show greater diversity (Levy and Newell 2000; Skjærseth and
Skodvin 2001).
However, despite its obvious appeal, institutional theory harbors the important weak-
nesses of not explaining the underlying logic that shapes these coercive, mimetic and
normative pressures (Wittneben et al. 2012). As a result it is very weak as a means for
understanding conditions for and barriers against societal transformation. It is no doubt
important to know that regulatory and societal pressures will make business act, but what
is perhaps more important is to understand under what conditions these pressures will be
exerted and in what direction. Granted that business will act if pushed by governments;
the question that is more pertinent at least from an investor’s perspective is whether gov-
ernments will in fact push business and under what conditions is this likely to happen?
To say anything meaningful about the core dynamic of corporate climate governance
and by implication its prospect and limits, one must focus one’s mind on the fundamental
structures and ideas that govern modern societies. Concerning structures, a good starting
point is the recognition of the intimate and reciprocal connection between the political,
social and economic domains. In other words, that the market is not a separate domain
operating in isolation but rather is mutually co-constitutive with the social and political
spheres (Levy and Egan 2003). This does not completely void the often repeated observa-
tion that companies’ behavior is ultimately fixed by the market. However, it undercuts
the business management theories that tend to focus solely on market forces as a way
of explaining corporate climate activities by recognizing that competitive dynamics are
hugely shaped by a web of political and social forces.
Furthermore, it is critical to understand that the social organization of production is
actively structured and reproduced according to relations of power. Accordingly, neither
politics nor market is a natural phenomenon resulting from spontaneous interactions.
Rather, these are both arenas for power contestations and tools for distributing and redis-
tributing material and political resources. On the one hand, power and self-interested
politics play key roles in shaping the structures within which ‘free’ exchanges take place;
and, on the other hand, market structures and relations of production confer power and
other advantages that in turn are used to sway the political process. The above implies
that corporate climate strategy must be understood in terms of fierce contestations for
social power, profit and political gains. Insofar as effective climate response demands
some form of societal transformation, the key questions are who wins and who loses in
such a new socio-political order. It is about who gets what, when and how.
In terms of ideas, it needs to be better recognized the extent to which the hegemony of
free market capitalism has conditioned the behavior, expectations and the perception of
interest of large segments of the society along a path that reproduces the existing social
order while undermining conditions necessary for the emergence of a radical alterna-
tive. They key here is to underscore the point that while businesses as a collective may
indeed represent a central force in shaping the direction and pace of climate response,
they will not act radically on climate change unless there is strong alignment between
civil society, consumers and business interest. Hence, transformation is only possible
by altering the broader culture, politics and incentives that shape the action of business
and larger society. Levy and Spicer (2013, p. 659) put this point across very forcefully

when they observed that in each society, there is a dominant ‘imagery’ and set of ‘shared
socio-semiotic systems that structure a field around a set of shared understandings of the
climate’ and what constitutes responsible corporate climate behavior (see Neimanis et al.
this volume). Hence, it would, for example, seem futile to expect businesses to transform
their ways towards sustainability while the larger societal culture is steeped in greed, con-
sumption and materialism.
The forgoing suggest that rather than look towards business managers and technol-
ogy innovation for ‘climate salvation,’ focus should probably be on the institutions of
civil society—media, church, academia, NGO groups, etc.—which philosopher Antonio
Gramsci (1971) long identified as the crucial site for both the maintenance and successful
challenge of hegemonic ideologies. It is in these arenas, Gramsci argued, that the moral
and intellectual leadership required to recast the interest calculations of the ruling elite
and initiate a new social order can be found. It is now increasingly recognized that climate
change is not as much a technical problem as it is a political problem, imposing essentially
the difficulty of deciding what type of social order that will be created in the context of a
low carbon societal transformation and crucially the implications of such a new order on
how resources and power are (re)distributed.
Hence, rather than naively looking up to individual businesses or the unseen hand of
market forces to bring about the desired change, society must face up to the reality that
only a strategic and concerted challenge of the status quo through intellectual, discursive
and democratic revolution holds the prospect of bringing about a societal low carbon
transformation. It may well be that the market is the most efficient way to address climate
change; but accelerated technological innovation will not happen unless governments
around the world individually and collectively provide the right framework of incen-
tives. This in turn is unlikely to happen until climate change becomes a matter of serious
electoral consequences for politicians. But none of these is likely to occur insofar as the
general public continues to believe that their long-term interest is best served by propping
up a system that is fundamentally designed to reproduce the dominance of a coalition of
the ‘carboniferous bloc’ (Dalby and Paterson 2008) and their allies in government. A poli-
tics of vested interest that transcends the collectivist premise of CSR is therefore crucial
to instigate critical engagement of both governments and businesses with climate change.
CONCLUSIONS
Businesses occupy a central place in the quest for societal transformation in the face of
climate change. It is not possible to envisage a sustainable transformation that did not
implicate business in significant ways. So far the climate strategies of business have oscil-
lated from opposition through reluctant support to ambivalence. The ultimate result is
that societal change to the extent that it can be said to be happing is mostly incremental.
Understanding the direction, dynamics as well as the prospects and limits of corporate
climate governance requires looking beyond a narrow focus on social responsibility and
competitive dynamics to the capitalist logic of the current society and how that locks
governments, business and civil societies into a framework that reproduces the current
order. Only by recognizing ‘the embeddedness of markets in contested social and political
structures’ (Levy and Egan 2003, p. 803) is it possible to move away from the narrow view

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of ethics and competitive dynamics in explaining the prospects and limits of corporate
climate governance.
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24. International bureaucracies
Bernd Siebenhüner
INTRODUCTION
Parallel with the spread and increasing diversity of climate governance and climate nego-
tiation platforms, the landscape of international bureaucracies concerned with climate-
related questions has also developed rapidly over the past decades. While the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed in 1992 foresaw
the establishment of one single secretariat to manage the businesses of the convention,
climate governance is nowadays a concern for numerous international bureaucracies in
differing degrees and perspectives. Not only those bureaucracies in charge of core envi-
ronmental issues such as the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity or the
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) work extensively on climate change
issues, but also general-purpose bureaucracies such as the secretariat of the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or the World Bank with their
respective mandates and orientations.
International bureaucracies as an actor category in global governance are concerned
with a specific international and, in the case of climate governance, global scope and
focus exceeding national or partial economic interests. While some authors view them as
primarily self-interested agencies seeking to maximize their budgets (Nielson and Tierney
2003; Barnett and Finnemore 2004), others view them as advocates of common concerns
and anchor institutions to provide public goods (International Task Force on Global
Public Goods 2006). In addition, international bureaucracies fall in between the state and
non-state actors, since they have been created by and are accountable to national govern-
ments, but are not state agencies by nature. It is thus worth venturing a closer look at this
specific type of actor and its development over time in the field of climate governance in
particular. This chapter will therefore discuss why international agencies matter, how the
landscape of international agencies developed in climate governance, whether their influ-
ence on climate governance has changed and what factors might have been influential in
this development.
WHY DO INTERNATIONAL AGENCIES MATTER?
In the political science debate, international bureaucracies as an actor category emerged

rather lately out of the discussion on international organizations and their role in inter-
national politics. Contributions by Barnett and Finnemore (2004), Reinalda and Verbeek
(2004), Biermann and Siebenhüner (2009) and Trondal (2011) paved the way towards
intensified scholarly attention on international bureaucracies in different policy fields
including environmental governance. While previous concepts broadly addressed interna-
tional organizations in their entirety, including the administrative functions, discussions
273
on international bureaucracies started with the deliberate distinction between the

overarching international organizations and the core administrative bodies. Following
Biermann and Siebenhüner (2009, p. 37), international bureaucracies can be defined as
‘agencies that have been set up by governments or other public actors with some degree
of permanence and coherence and beyond formal direct control of single national gov-
ernments (notwithstanding control by multilateral mechanisms through the collective of
governments) and that act in the international arena to pursue a policy.’ In most cases,
they are characterized through a hierarchically organized group of international civil
servants with a given mandate, resources, identifiable boundaries and a set of formal
rules and procedures within the context of a policy area.
In public perception and political debates, various international bureaucracies and
their related international organizations often play a noticeable part. Appointments of
a new United Nations (UN) secretary-general or the general debates of the UN General
Assembly usually generate wide media attention. Hitherto, the strongest media interest is
regularly focused on the World Security Council. However, ever-more environmental and
in particular climate change-related UN-events make it to the front pages of most news-
papers and other media services. Most notably, the Conference of the Parties (COP) of
the UNFCCC in 2009 in Copenhagen was the biggest international gathering of heads of
states in the history of the UN. It was organized by an international bureaucracy, namely
the Secretariat of the Convention, that is, the climate secretariat.
And yet, international bureaucracies enjoy a mixed reputation. There is widespread
criticism of the UN and its bodies as an assembly of ineffective, inefficient and unre-
sponsive bureaucrats. By contrast, UN agencies are highly attractive as employers for
many highly qualified people worldwide and many see them as powerful voices of global
concerns of humankind (see, e.g., Reinicke et al. 2000). Conflicting views on the role and
inefficiencies of international bureaucracies are also common in the academic debate
about them. For a long time, international relations literature was heavily focused on
nation-states as central actors of world politics and tended to ignore the autonomous
role of international bureaucracies. In most theoretical schools of international rela-
tions, they were rather seen as epiphenomenal of state action than as independently and
in large parts autonomously acting agencies (Vogler this volume). This view, however,
changed around the turn of the millennium (Reinalda and Verbeek 1998, 2004; Ege and
Bauer 2013). As part of the debate on global governance and its new actor categories
(Dingwerth and Pattberg 2006), other actor types than nation-states and their govern-
ments appeared on the radar screens of international relations scholars. Among these
were not only non-governmental activist groups (Betsill, Fisher and Galli this volume)
and transnational corporations and networks (Okereke this volume), but also the inter-
governmental bodies of the UN and other international bureaucracies.
Different disciplines, however, disagree about the role and potential autonomous influ-
ence of international bureaucracies. In the field of international law, an autonomous
influence of international bureaucracies is largely ignored or denied by most scholars.
International lawyers in most cases concentrate on the interpretation of the official
mandate and its implications rather than on analyzing the real activities of international
bureaucracies as such. In contrast, organizational theorists and public administra-
tion scholars increasingly gain interest in this type of organization, acknowledging an
autonomous actor status of international bureaucracies. They follow a particular interest

International bureaucracies 275
in internal processes such as recruitment policies, international norms and intercultural

collaboration, reform options as well as leadership and their relevance for the organiza-
tional behavior of this actor category (Dijkzeul 1997).
Bringing the internal and the external perspective together, Biermann and Siebenhüner
(2009) developed an explanatory scheme that identifies several causal factors for varia-
tion in the influence of international bureaucracies in global environmental governance.
These include (1) the specific problem structure of the related environmental issue area,
(2) the institutional context factors such as member state behavior and the mandate, as
well as (3) internal processes and procedures such as organizational culture, leadership,
internal decision-making processes. The following analysis of international bureaucracies
in the field of climate governance starts out from this mixed account of an autonomous
influence of international bureaucracies on international decision-making processes.
A closer look into the field of climate governance also reveals a growth in the number
and a high dynamic of interaction among international bureaucracies. Thus, the central
question to be addressed is whether this growth and interaction also lead to more influ-
ence on climate governance. The following section therefore analyses in particular those
categories of influence that have been studied by Biermann and Siebenhüner (2009). In a
second step, causes for the growing interaction and interplay will be analyzed.
HOW DID THE LANDSCAPE OF INTERNATIONAL AGENCIES

DEVELOP IN CLIMATE GOVERNANCE?
Among the central actors relevant in the field of climate governance, international
bureaucracies have, however, attracted scholarly interest recently. While states and
national governmental actors had been the prime focus of most social science research in
the field from early on (Hooghe and Makrs 2003), other actor groups increasingly became
subject of related studies, such as business corporations and associations (Hoffmann
2011; Meckling 2011), transnational networks (Andonova et al. 2009), non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) (Betsill this volume; Dombrowski 2010), and city actors (Betsill
and Bulkeley 2006; Bulkeley 2013; Janković this volume). Studies such as by Depledge
(2007) and Busch (2009a) addressed the secretariat of the UNFCCC as a central actor
in the field of climate governance. The role of other bureaucracies in this particular field
grew stronger over time and will be explored in the following section.
The Climate Secretariat
Notwithstanding the rising influence of other forums and actors, the climate secretariat
can still be categorized as the central international bureaucracy for multilateral climate
governance. It not only prepares the international meetings of all relevant bodies of the
convention, but also is responsible for the accurate documentation and communication
of the decisions taken by the COP and other convention bodies. Moreover, the secretariat
is also a monitoring agency that collects self-reported data from the parties to the conven-
tion to track the national and global greenhouse gas emissions and the climate policies
implemented by national governments.
Based on the mandate specified in the UNFCCC, the secretariat was founded in 1996.

Its main responsibilities have been detailed as collecting and disseminating information,
compiling reports and reporting back to the negotiating parties and the broader public,
and to organize the COPs and of the Subsidiary Bodies of the Convention (UNFCCC,
Article 8). What Busch (2009a) finds in his empirical study of the first decade of the
secretariat is that it fulfills the assigned tasks in particular in the field of providing infor-
mation as well as in facilitating negotiations fairly well without much independent inter-
pretation of its mandate. It was most effective in implementing the tasks formulated by
the parties to the convention, but it was hesitant to develop its own initiatives in shaping
public or political discourses or to foster specific negotiation outcomes. However, the
advice given by the members of the secretariat was welcomed by the users from the nego-
tiating parties. Where Busch (2009a) sees the secretariat as least effective is in the area
of practical implementation of projects or changes on the ground or in specific thematic
fields such as energy transition or legal instruments. By way of explaining this profile
of the secretariat, both Depledge (2005) and Busch (2009a) see the behavior of national
governments as well as the unprecedented problem structure as key factors that leave the
secretariat little room for further autonomy. Any perceived deviation from the mandate
through the secretariat is likely to be sanctioned by the parties to the convention and
their specific national delegates. This role was adopted by all secretariat leaders and staff
members (Depledge 2007).
The second decade of the secretariat’s existence, however, has brought changes in the
behavior of the secretariat in two directions. First, the secretariat became more proactive,
in particular during the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 (Dimitrov 2010a, this
volume). The organization of this particular COP through the secretariat differed from
previous COPs. Under a media-experienced executive secretary, the secretariat targeted
high and raised expectations that were seen by many as unattainable. In terms of turnout,
the conference was most successful: more heads of states and government had never
been present at one single UN conference before. However, at the same time, the success
in bringing climate change to the highest levels of political decision-making limited the
possibilities of consensus. Through its public communication and the role the secretariat
played throughout the conference, it took a more activist role as compared to the merely
technocratic one it had adopted so far. For instance, in the preparation of the conference,
the executive secretary lobbied with the European Union and other key players to achieve
a non-binding agreement (Dimitrov 2010b, p. 806; Dupont and Oberthür this volume).
Thus the leadership role of the executive secretary promoted a different approach from
the secretariat at that time.
Second, the interaction and interplay between different international bureaucracies
and the respective governance processes and issue areas increased substantially during
the second decade of the existence of the climate secretariat. Thematic overlap between
issues of climate change and other environmental and non-environmental issue areas
became more apparent, with growing knowledge about the causation and impacts of
climate change and with a broader public awareness and political saliency of the problem.
This interplay has been taken up by numerous international bureaucracies, as well as the
governance processes they are involved in, through various forms of interaction between
the different governance processes (Oberthür and Stokke 2011). The following non-
exhaustive list of cases can illustrate these developments in the thematic interplay and the
interaction of the related bureaucracies. The discussion here, however, can only be a first

step in answering the question of whether the growth and interaction of agencies in the
field of climate governance contribute to a larger influence of international bureaucracies
in the field or not.
The Biodiversity Secretariat
Within the field of international governance of biodiversity, climate change issues play
an increasing role due to the severe influence climatic changes have on species and their
habitats (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). In particular, issues of adaptation to
climate change that gained international prominence in the years around the Copenhagen
conference in 2009 are highly interrelated with biodiversity concerns that relate to land
use and land cover changes, the speed of species to adapt or to migrate to changing cli-
matic conditions and the like (Dilling this volume).
On the level of bureaucratic interaction, both the climate and the biodiversity secre-
tariat together with the secretariat of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification
(UNCCD) formed a Joint Liaison Group in 2001 to exchange experiences, coordinate the
respective convention processes and develop common strategies addressing overlapping
problems. The exchange of knowledge intensified over the last few years – for example,
through the participation of members of the biodiversity secretariat in UNFCCC
workshops (e.g., on loss and damages, SCBD 2014, p.17), in the UNFCCC Adaptation
Committee. Vice versa, the biodiversity secretariat invited climate change experts also
from the climate secretariat to a workshop on the ‘Integration of Climate Change and
Ecosystem based Adaptation into National Biodiversity Planning Processes,’ held in
March 2013. The outcome of this intensified exchange has been described in a document:
‘Through these actions, there is a better understanding within the climate change com-
munity of the role and contribution of the CBD, and work taken under it, to the work of
the Adaptation Committee and to address loss and damage’ (SCBD 2014, p. 18). What is
more, the secretariat also actively shaped the climate–biodiversity interface cognitively as
Jinnah (2011) finds. By reframing biodiversity from a passive receiver of climate impacts
to an active part of adaptation to climate change, the secretariat gave the relationship
between the climate governance institutions and the biodiversity bodies a new twist.
The Desertification Secretariat
The other member of the Joint Liaison Group is the secretariat of the UNCCD, the
desertification secretariat. Climate change has been identified by the UNCCD process
as a thematic priority given the significant influence of climate change on the ongoing
and intensifying processes of desertification worldwide and in particular in Africa. The
desertification secretariat put its focus in the field on desertification, land degradation
and drought and tried to advance its concerns directly into the climate negotiations. Its
Committee for the Review and Implementation of the Convention (CRIC) developed
a policy framework document indicating the fields of interaction between the two con-
vention processes (UNCCD 2011). Most suitable fields of interaction identified by the
Committee include adaptation, the programme, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation
and Forest Degradation (REDD+), implementation of land and soil issues in the
Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) and financial issues (Betts and

Schroeder this volume). Thus far, the collaboration efforts by the UNCCD bureaucracy
have not been fully matched by the UNFCCC secretariat. The implicit hierarchy between
the convention processes and their related bureaucracies might play a role in this, as well
as the differences in the organizational culture of both bureaucracies (Bauer 2006).
The UNEP
The UNEP has been the first UN agency to take up climate change as a global govern-
ance issue. It was instrumental in the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and still serves as its host institution together with the
World Meteorological Organization (WMO) (Siebenhüner 2006). Also the first negotia-
tions about a climate change convention were arranged by UNEP leading to the signa-
ture of the UNFCCC in 1992 and its ratification in 1994. Since then UNFCCC became
formally independent from UNEP and is still directly accountable to the UN General
Assembly. In this regard, UNEP served as an agenda setter in the field of climate change
in the early phase of the climate negotiations, but its role in the following years has been
curtailed to mere supportive functions for the negotiations (Bauer 2009).
Nevertheless, climate change remained a key issue area for the UNEP, in particular
in its project work advancing practical solutions in various local and regional contexts.
While the UNEP was not originally meant to embark on capacity-building on the
ground, it increasingly developed activities in this regard, mostly based on requests by
its Governing Council. Examples include the improvement of legal and juridical capaci-
ties in environmental law in developing countries and the UNEP’s engagement in global
partnerships with private or NGO actors as in the field of phasing out lead from gasoline
worldwide (Ivanova 2003; Bauer 2009). More and more climate change mitigation and
adaptation projects were taken up by the UNEP in the early 2000s.
In the aftermath of the COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009, the UNEP fostered its activi-
ties in the field of knowledge dissemination and awareness-raising in the field of climate
governance. The UNEP published two brochures about its role in climate change and
its climate change strategy (UNEP 2010a, 2010b). The latter can be read as a policy
statement that the UNEP is determined to stay involved in climate governance and
not to let the issue area completely out of its grasp. In doing so, UNEP highlights the
close collaboration with the climate secretariat as well as with national governments,
companies and civil society actors. In biennial Joint Work Programmes, the UNEP and
UNFCCC officially coordinate their activities, in particular in their strategic communi-
cation, in conference facilitation, in support for developing countries and in promoting
renewable energy technologies. Thereby the implicit competition about the main bureau-
cratic responsibility has developed more into the joint use of the existing forces of both
agencies in particular in the field of communication and knowledge dissemination. The
UNEP was thus successful in its fight against being chased out of the climate debate and
managed to establish itself as a key bureaucratic actor in the field. What is more, it can
be seen as a complementary agency that took over specific functions that the climate sec-
retariat was not allowed to fulfill, namely project work. This collaboration therefore can
be seen as promoting the influence of the group of international bureaucracies in climate
governance.

The OECD
The OECD provides the bureaucratic hub for the economic policy issues of its 34
member states and has been engaged in climate governance since the early 1990s. Its
main work consists of economic and policy analyses of particular countries and regions.
It addresses both mitigation and adaptation and is most active in providing policy advice
to its member states with regard to financial policy instruments and their role in climate
policies. Over the years, more issues were addressed under the particular focus on climate
change including agriculture, energy, transport, tourism and development cooperation in
general (OECD 2013).
Following its legacy in environmental policy advice (Busch 2009b), the OECD sec-
retariat took up the issue of climate change rather proactively and with a strong focus
on economic policy implications and effective public finance instruments such as eco-
taxation and other incentive schemes. This service is mainly offered to the 34 member
states and has a strong focus on advising governments and the respective public admin-
istrations. The global dimension of the issue of climate change and its North–South
dimension are not in the core focus of the bureaucracy. However, based on the strong
performance in knowledge production and dissemination through expert advice, the
OECD secretariat also is involved in UN climate governance processes. In doing so, it
collaborates with the climate secretariat within the Climate Change Expert Group on
the UNFCCC (CCXG), founded in 1994 and managed together with the International
Energy Agency. Bringing together government delegates and experts from OECD and
other industrialized countries, it supports the member states’ activities in the climate
negotiations. The basic goal is to advance technical and political solutions to specific
climate problems such as national reporting schemes and emissions trading. Whether
this collaboration results in lasting effects in climate governance, would be worth deeper
scrutiny.
Growing Influence?
The overall question to be asked would be whether the growing population of interna-
tional agencies active in the field of climate governance and their increased interaction
lead to effects in the international decision-making processes. While it is difficult to discern
an overall growing influence, there are different tendencies regarding the different areas
of influence analyzed by Biermann and Siebenhüner (2009), namely ‘cognitive,’ ‘norma-
tive’ and ‘executive’ influence. Observations reported here suggest that the bureaucracies
develop initiatives to create autonomous influence in the fields of knowledge generation,
dissemination and discourse development, that is, cognitive influence. This can be seen
in the case of the climate secretariat, the biodiversity secretariat and the UNEP. Also in
the field of practical project implementation that has been labeled as ‘executive influence,’
the agencies, in particular the UNEP, developed practical projects that others could not
develop due to strong member state pressure. However, in the field of normative influ-
ence that looks into effects on international negotiations, the growing number of agen-
cies has thus far not lead to significant influence on international agreements. After the
failure of the Copenhagen climate conference, international bureaucracies, nevertheless,
were active in promoting the urgency of international agreement and continuous efforts

in international negotiations. They were successful insofar that the negotiation process
carried on and developed some moderate agreements in subsequent COPs.
FORMS AND FACTORS AFFECTING THE INTERACTION OF

INTERNATIONAL AGENCIES IN CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
The other question to be raised is: why is it that interplay and interaction among different
bureaucracies grew? A few factors can be hypothesized providing explanatory pathways
for this particular phenomenon that have already been identified in the literature on
regime interaction and interplay (Young 2002; Oberthür and Gehring 2006). However,
the specific role of international bureaucracies within individual regimes or larger inter-
national organizations as well as between different regimes given the growing institutional
fragmentation needs to be considered (Zelli and van Asselt this volume). They constitute
only one organizational actor in the field and cannot explain all observed forms of
interaction that might also be caused by national governments, non-governmental actors
or others (Gehring and Oberthür 2009). Thus far, little systematic empirical research
has explored the causes of this interaction on the level of bureaucracies. The following
factors therefore merely provide initial hypotheses that might serve future empirical work
in this regard.
Growth of International Treaties and Growing Specialization of International

Bureaucracies
Over the past two decades, in the context of the emergence of hundreds of international
environmental agreements, numerous international bureaucracies have been formed to
administer them (Young 1994; Mitchell 2002). Numerous older international organizations
– such as the World Bank and the OECD – have included environmental and more spe-
cifically climate governance issues in their agendas, organizational structures and work pro-
grams. There is thus a tremendous growth in the number of international bureaucracies in
the environmental field that are more and more specialized in their assigned area of respon-
sibility (Biermann this volume). Among the environmental issue areas, climate change
became the dominant theme in the past decade, impacting on other fields and requiring
many of the other international agreements to position themselves about their relationship
to climate change. Typical examples include the biodiversity and the desertification regimes.
This structural factor of growing complexity in vertical and horizontal differentiation
has been discussed at some length in the literature on regime effectiveness and architec-
tures (Andonova and Mitchell 2010) and can be applied accordingly also to the level of
interacting bureaucracies. However, agency-related factors need to be taken on board,
since the structural interplay does not automatically determine the actual mode of inter-
action and the intensity of exchange and collaboration.
Problem Structure of Climate Governance
As discussed by Depledge (2007) and Busch (2009a), the specific characteristics of the
climate problem constrains the room to manoeuvre for the respective secretariat due to

the strict control through numerous member states of the UNFCCC and the level of
politicization of climate governance. The close link between climate and energy policies
as well as conventional economic growth in general creates a degree and form of political
saliency that is unprecedented by any other environmental problem. Many national gov-
ernments thus watch not only the international negotiations and possible legally binding
agreements, but also the behavior of the respective international bureaucracy, namely the
climate secretariat. However, it is not yet entirely clear whether this effect also pertains to
the other interacting bureaucracies in climate governance issues. Experience with differ-
ent international bureaucracies shows differing degrees and forms of autonomy vis-à-vis
national governments and the respective governing bodies (Bauer et al. 2009).
Moreover, the climate problem can be characterized as an extremely multi-connected
and multifaceted environmental, economic and social issue. The extraction of fossil fuels
is directly or indirectly connected to most industrial production and consumption pro-
cesses, and mitigation can hardly be separated from economic and social governance pro-
cesses, nor from other environmental issues. Adaptation and climate impacts broaden the
scope of connections even further (Dilling this volume). It links climate governance to
risk management, flood and coastal protection, water management, landscape planning,
public health, food security and vulnerability (Forsyth this volume; Urwin and Jordan
2008). Therefore, the encroachment of climate governance and its central bureaucratic
agencies into other related fields are in parts implied in the problem structure itself.
Knowledge, Expertise and Communication
As argued by Biermann and Siebenhüner (2009), international bureaucracies can gain

external influence through thematic expertise and accepted knowledge brokerage. In the
interaction between different international regimes information, knowledge, and ideas
have been identified by Gehring and Oberthür (2009) as central causal mechanisms to
explain, for example, why one regime takes up concepts and solutions from another
regime. A typical diffusion in this respect can be found in the establishment of the
Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) following
the example and the experiences of the IPCC (Beck et al. 2014; Beck this volume).
Also, in the direct influence of international bureaucracies in the field of climate
change, knowledge, expertise and communication strategies are likely to play a key role.
However, the abovementioned examples show that most of the influence travels from
other bureaucracies to the climate secretariat and not the other way around. The OECD
set up its Group of Experts in the attempt to influence the climate negotiations organ-
ized by the climate secretariat; the Joint Liaison Group between the Rio Convention
secretariats largely keeps the biodiversity and the desertification secretariats in the loop
of on-going activities in the climate secretariat; and the UNEP was deprived of a grip on
the climate secretariat from early on and re-established its role and expertise in climate
governance in parallel, but in coordination with the climate secretariat.
Leadership and Organizational Culture
Another agency-related factor comes into sight when looking into the interactions
between international bureaucracies, namely leadership and organizational culture at

large. Leaders of respective bureaucratic bodies significantly contribute to the bureau-

cracy’s reputation and its external influence (Biermann and Siebenhüner 2009). In par-
allel, studies on the role of leaders in international institutions found that leaders can
promote or hamper the effects of an institution in various ways (Young 1991; Andresen
2002). Specific personalities can help to develop a reputation of a technocratic or a rather
activist international bureaucracy through their diplomatically skilled management and
balanced communication. More proactive leaders can either advance specific issues, con-
cerns or solutions among national governments or the broader public, or can promote
the impression of unbalanced action of the bureaucracy, which is seen rather critically
by most national governments. The leader’s behavior needs to resonate with the larger
organizational culture in the bureaucracy to become effective on an organizational level.
Staff members and in particular managing personnel significantly influence the external
effects of the bureaucratic agency and often have a longer-lasting effect after the change
of top executives. They constitute the organisational culture together with the leaders
themselves. Whether, and in which ways, specific personalities and the organisational cul-
tures of climate related bureaucracies played a role in the interaction patterns described
above will require further empirical studies.
CONCLUSIONS
This chapter makes the case that international bureaucracies developed into an actor in
global environmental governance in general and in climate governance to some degree as
well. It argues that the growing number of international agencies active in the governance
of climate change also generate some effects. However, the observation of growing inter-
play and interaction between different international bureaucratic actors in the field of
climate governance would require more research whether they lead to stronger external
influence of international bureaucracies in climate governance and how these dynamics
can be explained. As demonstrated in this chapter, the dynamics of climate governance
also translate into a growing role of the climate secretariat as the central bureaucratic
actor as well as into a growth of interactions towards other bureaucracies such as related
treaty secretariats, the UNEP or the OECD. What became visible is the focus on knowl-
edge and communication efforts where numerous agencies developed stronger initiatives.
Moreover, some effects of international bureaucracies can be observed in the field of
project implementation. However, little indication of autonomous influence by interna-
tional bureaucracies can be found in the international negotiations themselves.
Since the forms and intensities of this interaction vary largely, more rigorous empiri-
cal research would be necessary to assess better why this is the case and what further
effects this might have. In particular, it would be important to understand whether there
are success cases where interaction between agencies led to significant external effects.
Moreover, this research would also be helpful in the discussion about organizational
reform and an improved cooperation or mergers of agencies in the field. The dispersed
structure of international bureaucracies and some observed overlap nurture this debate
regarding how to create a more effective and integrative bureaucratic structure. In par-
ticular, the closely interconnected field of climate change as one environmental problem
field might benefit from more integrative approaches.

Significant starting points for this research are provided, first, by the literature on
institutional interplay and interaction or regime inter-linkages (Young 2002; Oberthür
and Gehring 2006; Gehring and Oberthür 2009; Oberthür and Stokke 2011). Therein,
in addition to structural and legal factors, bureaucratic actors and in particular treaty
secretariats are seen as crucial agents that foster or hamper interaction among regimes.
A second source of inspiration for this research program can come from the literature
on international bureaucracies and their role in international relations at large (Haas
1990; Haas et al. 1993; Barnett and Finnemore 2004; Biermann and Siebenhüner 2009;
Trondal 2011). Important lessons to be learned from this research can be expected not
only in the understanding of this interaction, but also in how effective interactions can
be designed, which models and patterns of interaction work best and what to leave
aside.
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25. Science
Silke Beck
INTRODUCTION
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become established as a
pioneer in science-based global policy: it has conducted the most comprehensive synthe-
sis of scientific knowledge on climate change to date and has managed to include experts
from around the world in policy advice activities. Experts have come to play a significant
role in global environmental governance. The growing demand for policy-relevant knowl-
edge has led to the emergence of a novel set of expert organizations to fulfill this role.
These organizations are entrusted with the task of assessing available scientific informa-
tion on environmental change and presenting it in a form that is useful to policymakers.
This process (and its outcome) is referred to as an ‘assessment’ (Mitchell et al. 2006, p. 3).
Due to its achievements, the IPCC has also become a role model for the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) and the newly established Intergovernmental Platform
on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).1 The growing demand for expertise
reflects the extent to which policy has become science-based in fields such as global
warming, biodiversity, stratospheric ozone depletion, air pollution, forest conservation
and indeed sustainability policy as a whole, all of which are increasingly linked to issues
such as international security, development and economic growth (for an overview, see
Gupta et al. 2012).
The first part of this chapter asks what constructivist approaches can contribute to
explaining the role of experts in climate governance. It then goes on to discuss existing
empirical findings on the IPCC’s role in policy in the light of these different constructivist
approaches. Finally, the chapter asks what lessons can be learnt from these empirical find-
ings to inform the debates about the future role of the IPCC. It also suggests a number of
questions arising from the analysis that need to be addressed by future research.
ADDRESSING THE ROLE OF INTERNATIONAL EXPERT

ORGANIZATIONS IN GLOBAL CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
Constructivist work on the role of international expert organizations has burgeoned in

response to the case of the IPCC and includes such diverse literature as scholarship in
international relations (IR), research on global environmental assessments and work
in science and technology studies (STS). The question we need to ask, therefore, is: what
do different constructivist approaches to international expert organizations offer to
describe the IPCC as a political actor in climate governance?
Work done by Peter Haas is widely considered to be the most influential in this debate.
Haas’ approach is located at the intersection of actor-oriented social constructivist and
neoliberal IR theories. In the field of IR, constructivism is defined by the claim that
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s ignificant aspects of world politics are not just ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered; they
are historically and socially constructed through social interaction. Adler (1997), Barnett
and Finnemore (2004) or Siebenhüner (2008) are other examples in that tradition (see
Fierke 2007). Haas, as a pioneer of constructivism in IR, refers to transnational networks
of professionals with an authoritative claim to possessing policy-relevant knowledge in
a particular area as epistemic communities (Haas 1992, p. 2). Over the years, his research
has sought to identify the conditions under which such networks of experts are able to
exert political influence in the international system (Haas and Stevens 2011).
Contested Autonomy
Constructivist approaches all share the assumption that international (expert) organiza-
tions are autonomous actors in global politics as far as they constitute distinct institu-
tions in their own right, consisting of internationally accepted principles, norms and
decision-making procedures for producing expert knowledge (Biermann 2002).
While the influence of epistemic communities, for example, on the behavior of states
and international cooperation has already been discussed in considerable detail, the inter-
nal dynamics of such processes of knowledge production have thus far remained largely
obscure (Siebenhüner 2008). At first glance, constructivist approaches offer new insights
to the debate on climate governance because their attention is focused not so much on
the output of these organizations as on the manner in which they conduct their work.
When it comes to the nature and the extent of autonomy of international expert organ-
izations towards nation-states, however, a number of major differences become apparent
between these different constructivist approaches: IR scholars focus on the formalized
interplay between science and policy as wholly separate domains, the former being able
to provide the latter with consensual knowledge on which policy decisions can be based
(speaking truth to power—see, for example, Haas 1992). Work in STS can be designated as
belonging to the radical post-structuralist/constructivist accounts (Jasanoff 2004, 2012;
Miller 2001, 2009). They challenge the idea that science is an autonomous ‘republic’ as a
given social entity with clear-cut and stable boundaries separating it from political actors.
As an alternative, they pay attention to how claims to epistemic and political authority
come into being, how they are challenged and how they are sustained (‘in the making’)
(Jasanoff 2012) and they also turn from ‘who’ to ‘how’ questions by drawing attention to
the practices and devices through which experts acquire status and authority (Jasanoff
and Martello 2004; Hajer 2009). Such approaches insist that the autonomy of experts is
not a factor that explains the dynamics at work inside an organization (as constructivist
IR approaches claim, see Haas and Stevens 2011); instead, its (often contested) making is
a phenomenon that needs to be explained. Following the work of Latour and Foucault,
they also regard authority of actors as the outcome and the (co-)product of contingent
interactions rather than existing in a natural state and waiting to be discovered (Jasanoff
2004).
The Neutral or Political Nature of Expertise?
The co-productionist turn has at least three implications, as explained in the following.
First, while constructivist IR approaches defend the political neutrality of experts, STS

approaches, by contrast, highlight the intensely hybrid character of knowledge produc-

tion. They stress the constant interplay of the cognitive, the material, the social and the
normative (Jasanoff 2004, p. 38). As a result of their mutual co-production, epistemic
commitments to what a thing is (ontology) are inseparable from normative commitments
to what ought to be (norms).
Second, the STS perspectives explored here draw our attention to the ways in which sci-
entific or expert representations are performative in themselves. The co-production idiom
seeks to identify a feedback loop between analysis and behavior: providing expertise is
always an active intervention that ‘performs’ and alters the real world phenomena it seeks
to represent (Jasanoff 2012). The way problems are framed by experts shapes our view of
social needs and of the kinds of political responses that count as scientifically ‘sound’ and
politically necessary. What is of interest, from a STS perspective, is how the emergence of
new configurations of expertise transforms processes of knowledge-making and political
action (Jasanoff and Martello 2004, p. 18).
Third, STS approaches pay attention to the politics of expertise into the debate by
drawing our attention to the political dynamics and the epistemological underpinning of
the hybrid organization. The main contribution of STS from which IR research could
benefit is a more thorough understanding of what takes place behind the formal design
of assessments (Lidskog and Sundqvist 2011). Yet these approaches also open up under-
standings of how these ‘front stage’ performances are governed by ‘back stage’ practices
inside the organization, and how they are shaped by (and also shape) wider social, eco-
nomic and political orders.
Constructivist work in IR has been preoccupied with the influence of experts in defin-
ing state interest, thus maintaining a rather rationalist and institutionalist outlook. While
these approaches hold that the autonomy of the agents and their scope of action are
determined by the design of their organization (Haas and Stevens 2011), STS approaches
highlight that there is potential room for maneuver and choice for reconfiguring the iden-
tity of actors and the respective institutional design (Jasanoff 2004). The emergence of
an organization is viewed as an open-ended social experiment in itself. Radical construc-
tivist approaches highlight the way globalization processes challenge previously unques-
tioned arrangements such as state sovereignty, resulting in a normative and institutional
‘void’ in which alternatives to existing transnational arrangements become visible.2 This
condition, also known as the ‘post-national constellation’ (Zürn et al. 2012), also offers
opportunities for the reflexive politicization of expert organizations, including ways of
reconfiguring statehood and performing power.
The constellation can lead to shifts and thus to conflicts over the allocation of power
and values. If the scope of action and political intervention for state and non-state actors
can be reconfigured in the course of globalization, the formal delegation of author-
ity between governments and scientists as well as the clear-cut and stable demarcation
between their responsibilities cannot be taken for granted anymore but is instead open
to challenge and change. As a result, tensions between governments and the intergov-
ernmental expert authorities arise, forcing renewed examination of concepts such as
national sovereignty. Various ‘hard’ constructivist approaches apply here: conflicts over
the allocation of epistemic and political authority (first-order conflicts) are often rooted
in more fundamental differences over values such as the role of science in society and
standards and sources of legitimation (second-order conflicts, or reflexive conflicts over

Science 289
legitimization) (Zürn et al. 2012). Both idioms revolve around the same idea: given the
normative and institutional void, the criteria and standards of appropriateness according
to which, for example, experts are selected or the quality of expert reports evaluated may
also become a matter of dispute (Hajer 2009).
To sum up, then, radical constructivist approaches discussed here differ from the
approaches in IR in two constitutive features. First, they insist on the potential for recon-
figuring previously unquestioned identities and arrangements such as the role of experts
in policy (Zürn et al. 2012; Jasanoff 2012). Second, they call attention to their epistemo-
logical and normative underpinnings and raise ontological questions about the nature of
expertise, statehood and the way these are challenged and thus made open to redefinition
and change.
KEY EMPIRICAL FINDINGS
What can we learn from constructivist scholars to understand the role of IPCC in climate
governance? The IPCC was set up jointly by the World Meteorological Organization
(WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988. Its task
is to undertake a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent review of the status
of research on global warming, its observed and projected impacts, and on the policy
response options available (UNGA 1988).3
Intergovernmental Status: Political ‘Leash’ or ‘Muscle’?
The IPCC is set up as an intergovernmental panel. According to Haas and Stevens (2011,
p. 147), the IPCC ‘is designed to keep science on a tight leash.’ They apply the principal–
agent theory to the IPCC: in this scheme governments are the ‘principal’ and the sci-
entific community is the ‘agent’ (Haas and Stevens 2011, p. 148). In other words, they
take the material interests and preferences of governments as the ‘principal’ for granted.
Following this theory, the principals design the institution by establishing and enforcing
the parameters within which the agents have to act (Haas and Stevens 2011, p. 148). As a
matter of fact, the member states have decision-making authority in the IPCC’s plenary
sessions.4 This is a significant factor in the self-organization of the IPCC, as the plenary
decides not only on the structure, content and results of the assessment reports but also
on the procedures of reporting and quality control and the division of work within the
IPCC (between plenary, secretariat and working groups) as well as on the organization’s
decision-making procedures per se.
The ‘leash’ metaphor suggests that governments have designed the IPCC mainly for
strategic reasons, namely, in a way that ensures they are able to exercise maximum control
over individual scientists. The main rationale is ‘to minimize surprises from the agent and
to ensure that the agent will not provide advice that runs counter to the principals’ ex ante
interests and preferences’ (Haas and Stevens 2011, p. 147). Haas and Stevens work with
a simple form of politicization in terms of governmental control over experts and thus
focus only on the instrumental use of expertise for the purpose of political legitimation.
From a STS perspective, it is empirically open whether or not intergovernmental status
fully determines the extent of autonomy of experts inside the IPCC. The interests and

preferences of governments are neither clear nor ex ante determined, but they can be read
as the outcome of contested hybrid negotiations involving a broad range of actors and
organizations. The decision to grant the newly emerging organization intergovernmental
status was a ‘lowest common denominator’—a minimum outcome accepted by all parties
involved at the time. It serves different functions rather than simply controlling experts:
IPCC representatives, such as its first chairman Bert Bolin, describe the intergovernmen-
tal status as the IPCC’s political muscle (Agrawala 1998). The inclusion of governments
in the negotiations is one of the key linking strategies that creates a connection between
the IPCC as provider of assessment reports and its clients and customers—nation-states
and intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the WMO.
It guarantees the political relevance of the IPCC’s scientific agenda and results and the
legitimacy of its ways of working. Another aspect is that once the assessment reports have
gone through a process of scientific peer review they are approved and authorized once
again by governments, which greatly contributes towards lending them political weight.
IPCC procedures such as the approval of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) by
governments remain highly contested, as the IPCC plenary held in April 2014 in Berlin
shows, where governments approved the third of three reports comprising the Fifth
Assessment Report (AR5).5 According to Haas and Stevens (2011, p. 148), governments
use this procedure to monitor the IPCC’s findings, to ensure ‘cautious’ outcomes and to
shape the agenda for climate change negotiations. One of the IPCC lessons from Berlin
2014 is that line-by-line approval of its reports yields the lowest common denominator of
what is scientifically accurate and ‘not too toxic for governments.’6 Coalitions of govern-
ments often try to exclude certain passages from the SPMs—such as those pertaining to
the governance of geoengineering and geoengineering research—which they do not want
to play a role in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
discussions.7
From the perspective of radical constructivist approaches, intergovernmental status
does not automatically imply the loss of authority of experts; it can also—apparently
paradoxically—indicate the opposite, namely, the political power that is attributed to the
IPCC. The very establishment of the IPCC attracted remarkable attention, and it has
increasingly been subject to monitoring by international and national actors such as the
UN and the US. Once representatives of the UN and the US had recognized the key sig-
nificance of the envisaged body as a potential driver of international climate policy they
immediately attempted to exert influence on its organizational setup (Agrawala 1998).
These observed forms of politicization can be explained as a consequence of the epis-
temic and political authority that is assigned to the new established expert panel (Zürn
et al. 2012).
Policy relevant but not prescriptive?

During its first assessment cycle (1988–1990), the IPCC also had the task of assessing
existing legal instruments and additional elements of an international framework conven-
tion in the run-up to the Rio conference (UNGA 1988, Article 10). In doing so it laid out
the bare bones of the UNFCCC, which was adopted at Rio in 1992. Since the IPCC at
that time was also the forum in which political negotiations were conducted, it became
the target of heavy-handed attempts by lobby groups and nation-states to influence its
work. These forms of politicization proved to be problematic for the scientific integrity

Science 291
of the entire o rganization. As a response, the IPCC decided in 1990 to withdraw from
political functions and no longer put forward policy recommendations. This decision is
reflected in the redefinition of the IPCC’s mandate to provide policy-relevant informa-
tion without being policy prescriptive. This self-description is used by all IPCC repre-
sentatives to define the IPCC’s role in relationship to policy.8 Interestingly, Haas’ concept
of science-driven, autonomous expertise is consistent with the self-understanding of
many government-designated scientists and experts in the IPCC.9 This example illustrates
that the IPCC has redefined its role in order to respond to its political vulnerability and
its potential loss of scientific integrity. It demonstrates that the IPCC’s role in policy is
not static but is rather subject to readjustment. This is clearly highly significant in terms
of the organization’s capacity to adapt to challenges and changing expectations in its
environment. When the IPCC withdrew from political functions in 1990, the external
division of tasks between the IPCC and governments was reorganized in order to uphold
the IPCC’s basic understanding of its own identity—its political neutrality and the strict
demarcation between science and policy. These forms of boundary work—whether
intentional or not—serve to maintain the stability of the boundary and a clear-cut line of
demarcation between each sphere and its respective realm of responsibility.
Political Impacts
The extent to which experts have been effective in influencing state responses to envi-
ronmental problems has been the subject of considerable debate (Lövbrand 2014).
According to Haas and Stevens (2011, p. 145), the IPCC has failed to help bring about
internationally binding agreements for the reduction of greenhouse gases. Empirical find-
ings demonstrate that the IPCC nonetheless exercises a considerable amount of political
influence: it has spoken on behalf of global science with one uniform voice and has played
a key role in providing the epistemological foundations for climate policies and raising
political and public awareness of climate change (IAC 2010, p. 63). The IPCC has deliv-
ered ‘sound’ scientific proof that climate change has already set in and that its causes are
predominantly human induced. It was jointly awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along
with former US vice-president Al Gore. More than anything else, the Nobel Peace Prize
is seen as an acknowledgment of the political ‘impact’ and ‘influence’ of the IPCC (IAC
2010). Events such as this have contributed to putting the IPCC onto the world stage.
Even if the IPCC claims to be neutral and not prescriptive, it acts as a politically power-
ful ‘intergovernmental actor in climate politics. These findings speak to the constructivist
IR literature on the independent power of international organizations (see Barnett and
Finnemore 2004; Siebenhüner 2008). In that sense both STS perspectives and construc-
tivist IR perspectives help to illustrate the impact of IPCC in complementary ways.
In the aftermath of the 15th Conference of the Parties in December 2009, a media
storm arose over the illegal publication of e-mails written by leading climate researchers
(‘climategate’) and errors in the IPCC assessment reports (Beck 2012). These seemingly
paradoxical events again indicate that the IPCC has become a victim of its own success
such that, as a consequence of the authority ascribed to it, the IPCC has attracted a
remarkable amount of public attention and critical public scrutiny. The degree of its
politicization can thus be seen as an indicator of its epistemic authority (Zürn et al.
2012, p. 87).

These achievements lead to a paradoxical situation. The IPCC’s responses to public

scrutiny10 show that the organization is caught in a dilemma: the same mechanisms that
have served to maintain the IPCC’s political authority (such as its intergovernmental
status and consensus-based procedures) also turn out to be obstacles that constrain polit-
ical debate (Beck et al. 2014). The quest for increasingly integrated and consensus-based
decision support can be regarded as one of the key reasons for the inertia of the organiza-
tion and the consequent lack of political action. The IPCC’s political muscle—its inter-
governmental status and consensus-based procedures—turns out simultaneously to be
its Achilles’ heel.11 They result in a ‘lowest common denominator’—a minimum outcome
accepted by all the parties involved at any one time. As result, they have also limited the
range of solutions put forward for debate in the reform negotiations. Alternatives to
existing institutionalized procedures (such as the introduction of minority votes, major-
ity decision-making and elevating the official status of observer organizations) have been
virtually excluded from the debate. These reform efforts have ultimately served to protect
and stabilize the IPCC’s organizational structures rather than to critically examine them
and enable it to change its mandate and its guiding principles. As a result, the IPCC
reforms do not address the causes of the organizational inertia (intergovernmental status,
consensus-based procedures) but merely the symptoms (incremental revisions of pro-
cedures). Even if there is ‘no appetite for revolution,’12 incremental change may not be
enough to address future challenges.
From a radical constructivist perspective, this lack of organizational reflexivity and
policy impact points to the more profound issue of how the problem is framed. It is
widely assumed that a global problem such as climate change can be solved by rational
expert consensus. The mantra of being policy relevant but not prescriptive goes back
to an idealized form of policymaking based on neutral scientific advice that serves as a
rational foundation for political decision-making (see also Haas 1992). Since epistemic
authority counts as the sole foundation of political authority, policy debates can be
decided by scientific evidence alone (Wynne 2010). Empirical findings, however, indi-
cate that political effectiveness and public trust cannot be reduced to a function of the
breadth and depth of scientific consensus alone. While the IPCC has been able to provide
a common knowledge base for international climate policies, the degree of uptake of its
messages and its credibility in the eyes of citizens and policymakers around the world still
vary significantly. These differences cannot be explained solely by the quality of scientific
knowledge available, because they refer to the same body of knowledge (produced by the
IPCC). As responses to the so-called ‘climategate’ affair show, public trust in experts is
also related to the performance and persuasive power of the people and institutions who
speak for science (Hajer 2009) and to deeply embedded styles of evaluating knowledge
claims in the public sphere (Beck 2012; Jasanoff 2012). The public controversies sur-
rounding climategate thus show that a shared set of values or universally valid norms or
their convergence, as suggested by Haas (1992), cannot be taken for granted. From a STS
perspective, the controversies surrounding climategate can be seen as symptoms of a civic
epistemology in the making. When the IPCC was created in 1988, it faced the challenge
of inventing its own forms of procedural rules and organizational culture ‘from scratch.’
Since then, the IPCC has become a pioneer in developing and enacting rules of procedure
at the global level. As a result, key categories such as political relevance, transparency
and accountability have themselves become contested. These conflicts reflect crucial

Science 293
political and normative disagreements rather than being a means by which to transcend
such reflexive conflicts over legitimization (Gupta et al. 2012). They demonstrate its status
as a ‘hybrid’ organization representing both scientific experts and representatives of its
constituent member states.
FUTURE RESEARCH ISSUES
Civic Epistemologies in the Making
The future research issues arising from these empirical findings can be considered
in relation to three major challenges of relevance to scholars and practitioners alike.
The case study demonstrates that—even if no political decision-making authority is
granted to it (as is the case, for example, with the International Criminal Court)—
the IPCC nonetheless exercises a considerable amount of political influence. This
conclusion is precisely the prediction of the principal–agent approach, namely that
the principal cannot fully control the agent and that there is slack (see Haas and
Stevens 2011; Biermann 2002). The IPCC provides an illuminating example of gov-
ernments having delegated the task of articulating a shared epistemic foundation for
global policy to a centralized international institution (Miller 2009, p. 142). From a
STS perspective, the key challenge arising from this form of delegation is how expert
organizations are to navigate between difficult questions of expertise and political
accountability and representation rather than insisting on their neutrality. Is it to be a
closed conversation between (accredited) experts and policymakers? Or do the views
of the public matter?
The events surrounding ‘climategate’ can be read as second-order conflicts over the
proper form of legitimation and civic epistemology of the IPCC. The IPCC has faced
the challenge of developing practices of public reasoning capable of bridging the various
divides between different countries and research disciplines. The controversies inside the
IPCC plenary also indicate that particular requirements and standards remain contested:
is the IPCC sufficiently legitimized by the quality of its expertise and its rational out-
comes or by the formal mandate of the UN? Should it be accountable first and foremost
to the public and thus satisfy more exacting standards of transparency and accountabil-
ity towards civil society? The empirical findings discussed above show that the epistemic
and political authority and their implications in terms of democratic theory have been
understood only vaguely thus far but are sure to acquire greater significance as evidence-
based policy becomes more commonplace.
Responsiveness and Embeddedness in Changing Contexts: the Role of Expert

Organizations in a Post-Kyoto Architecture
One of the key empirical outcomes of research on expert organizations is that science is
rarely effective in terms of compelling public policy (Haas and Stevens 2011; Jasanoff
2012). This result suggests a need to shift the focus from the production of expert
knowledge to the forms and practices of its reception in the global policy community
and to take into account the broader political setting in which they are embedded. There

is a growing need to understand whether science-based policies contribute towards

transforming global forms of governance and, if so, in what way. Empirical findings so
far point to an ever-more pressing need to understand the nature of effective institutional
arrangements for representative, accountable and democratic public policy (Gupta et al.
2012). One of the key research issues at this point is how to link micro-analysis of expert
organizations to the macro-political and economic institutions that shape social and
environmental change on global scales and raise broader questions around what are the
appropriate normative and institutional foundations of more democratic and account-
able global governance.
International climate research and policy, in which IPCC activities are embedded,
are in a phase of reorientation. One sign of this is that the trend towards integrated sci-
entific approaches and standardized procedures is gaining ground internationally. For
example, in the last few years all international Global Change programs have been com-
bined together within the Future Earth—Research for Global Sustainability initiative.13
Another indication is that in international environmental and sustainability politics, there
is talk of a crisis of the multilateral system and of a trend towards greater institutional
fragmentation (Zelli and van Asselt this volume). It can be assumed that these develop-
ments will lead to novel demands being placed upon boundary organizations such as the
IPCC, as well as to new conflicts within them. The IPCC case provides few indications
that comprehensive forms of international collaboration promote transnational conver-
gence and uniformity by expanding the base of shared knowledge. There is little evidence
that policy-relevant issues (e.g., procedures) and standards (e.g., public accountability)
are starting to converge as a result of multilateral cooperation; instead, the evidence
suggests that they remain context-sensitive and path-dependent, thus highlighting not
convergence and uniformity but rather divergence and diversity (Beck 2012; Jasanoff
2012). These trends indicate that the tension between the globalization of research and
standardization of scientific approaches and the regionalization of politics and diversifi-
cation of standards is intensifying.
The IPCC faces the challenge of adjusting to a changing political architecture. When
the IPCC was formed in 1988, however, it fitted neatly into the UN’s multilateral order
based on national representation and the search for internationally negotiated solutions.
Since the international community failed to negotiate a successor agreement to the Kyoto
Protocol at the Copenhagen Summit in 2009, its political context has changed to a more
fragmented, polycentric order where governance occurs not simply at the level of nation-
states alone and where policy needs to address diverse citizens with multiple values and
sources of knowledge (Dimitrov, Lederer this volume). In an increasingly complex post-
Kyoto landscape, the IPCC has to respond to diverse political communities and distrib-
uted governance structures. While IPCC reports may provide legitimacy for international
climate policies, a disjunction exists between the IPCC and many other reports being
produced that are regional, national or local, and sector-specific. The regionalization
of IPCC assessments is called for in order to give policymakers and practitioners more
and better regional information. Leading IPCC representatives, however, argue that this
approach would require fundamental changes to the established and successful IPCC
assessment process that has been in place since 1988.14 This also implies that the global
character of the climate change problem exemplified by the IPCC and the ponderous,
centralized IPCC-style assessment will not work in this setting.15 Thus, what role can the

Science 295
IPCC play in the post-Kyoto regime and how can it contribute to a fragmented climate
governance order? That there is considerable need for more thoroughgoing political
reform and scientific research seems clear, however. This can be fruitfully enhanced by
closer dialogue between different social science traditions such as IR, STS and delibera-
tive theory.
NOTES
1. In January 2014 a new scientific advisory body, the UN Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), was created by
UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. It is worth noting that, in addition, a new advisory body has also
been formed in 2014 to serve the UN Convention on Combating Drought and Desertification (available
at www.unccd.int/en/programmes/Science/International-Scientific-Advice/Pages/SPI-1st-meeting.aspx).
There are also calls for an IPCC-like global effort in the field of emerging disease and health (available at
www.nature.com/news/policy-an-intergovernmental-panel-on-antimicrobial-resistance-1.15275, accessed
September 21, 2014).
2. These features are enhanced by the ‘institutional void’ and by the absence of shared rules and responsibili-
ties. As a result, organizations have to develop a shared understanding of what the problem ‘really’ is and
to ‘set the stage’; they have to work out the rules according to which (legitimate) decisions are to be made
and they need to secure mutual trust (Hajer and Versteeg 2005).
3. For an overview of the genesis and early development of the IPCC, see Agrawala (1998). For its organiza-
tion and rules of procedure, see Petersen (2011).
4. Available at www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization_procedures.shtml (accessed May 21, 2012).
5. Available at www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6192/34.1.summary (accessed September 21, 2014).
6. Available at www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6192/34.2.full.pdf (accessed September 21, 2014).
7. Available at http://geoengineeringourclimate.com/2014/09/09/the-emergence-of-the-geoengineering-debate-
within-the-ipcc-case-study (accessed September 21, 2014).
8. Available at www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n5/pdf/nclimate1178.pdf (accessed September 21,
2014).
9. Available at www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization.shtml (accessed May 21, 2013).
10. In 2010, as a response to this public criticism, the IPCC’s procedures were subjected to several national
and international processes of review. For this purpose an alliance of national scientific academies—the
InterAcademy Council (IAC)—was set up at international level, whose results were published in August
2010 (IAC 2010). Its final report rejected the accusation of deliberate manipulation and concluded that the
key statements contained in the IPCC reports were correct. The IAC also emphasized that in its present
form, the IPCC was no longer able to cope adequately with the challenges it faced (IAC 2010, pp. 6, 39).
The mismatch indicated a lack of organizational adaptability, which—according to the Council—had led
to a situation in which its entire work had become discredited. A statement of this kind additionally sug-
gests a need for comprehensive reform.
11. The IPCC’s website has a dedicated page summarizing the reforms made by the IPCC to its processes and
procedures in response to the IAC’s recommendations (see Review of IPCC processes and procedures,
http://ipcc.ch/organization/organization_review.shtml#.UIE_UsWkqTV, see also www.ipcc.ch/apps/future
(accessed September 21, 2014)).
12. Available at www.ucl.ac.uk/steapp/docs/ipcc-report (accessed September 21, 2014).
13. Available at www.csap.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/1/fdsaw.pdf (accessed July 22, 2012).
14. Available at www.nature.com/news/climate-policy-rethink-ipcc-reports-1.15848 (accessed September 21,
2014).
15. Available at www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6192/34.2.full.pdf (accessed September 21, 2014).
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26. Civil society
Dana R. Fisher and Anya M. Galli
INTRODUCTION
Climate policy plays out within a multilevel governance system in which responsibility is
shared across the local, subnational, national, regional and international scales (Bulkeley
and Betsill 2003). Multiple social actors work at these variable levels to negotiate and
establish regulations that ostensibly have an impact on the degree to which greenhouse
gases contribute to a changing climate. Although decision-making usually is driven by
government actors, non-state actors, including civil society groups, transnational cor-
porations and others contribute to the discussion and attempt to influence its outcomes
with varied levels of effectiveness (for a full discussion, see Fisher and Green 2004). This
chapter focuses on the diversity of ways that civil society engages in climate governance,
focusing particularly on its involvement in the international climate negotiations (see also
Betsill this volume).
Since its founding at the United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and
Development in 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) has held regular meetings at locations around the world with the goal of
strengthening the commitments of nation-states to reduce greenhouse gases and protect-
ing the planet from anthropogenic climate change. The climate regime has been found
to provide significantly more access to civil society actors than most, and these meet-
ings have been relatively open to stakeholders from its various constituencies (Corell
and Betsill 2001; Fisher and Green 2004). In particular, the annual Conferences of the
Parties (COPs) are open to registered non-governmental organization (NGO) observers
who wish to participate in the meetings1 (Betsill this volume; Fisher 2010). However, civil
society groups also experience what Fisher and Green call ‘disenfranchisement’ in that
they remain constrained in their ability to participate in decision-making processes and
influence policy outcomes (Fisher and Green 2004; see also McGregor 2011). Thus, civil
society participation also occurs outside of, and in some cases against, the meetings of
parties engaged in climate negotiations.
Civil society actors engaged in climate governance include more formalized NGOs,
which tend to participate in education through side-events and other types of advocacy
at the negotiations, as well as through less formalized collectives and as individuals that
focus their efforts on gaining attention outside the meeting itself (for a full discussion
of formal and information organizations, see Meyer and Tarrow 1998). In this chapter,
we focus specifically on civil society participation and protest that occurs outside of the
meetings of the climate regime (for a detailed account of NGO participation within
the climate regime, see Betsill this volume). We begin by presenting a framework for
understanding the roles played by ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ civil society groups in the
climate movement (Fisher 2010). Then, we present a history of outsider mobilization
at the climate negotiations: we explore how outsider coalitions developed around early
297
egotiations, describe the upswing in outsider mobilization at the COP 15 negotiations in

n
2009, and outline instances of outsider mobilization in the years following COP 15. We
conclude by discussing current and future avenues for outsider mobilization in multilevel
climate governance.
CIVIL SOCIETY PARTICIPATION IN THE CLIMATE

MOVEMENT
Civil society is conceptualized as a self-organized social sphere that is separate ‘from
both state and economy’ (Cohen and Arato 1994, p. ix; Emirbayer and Sheller 1999;
see also Hann and Dunn 1996). The civil society sphere includes social movements,
civic associations, international NGOs and citizens who voice their political preferences
through their demonstrations, votes, and donations. Civil society actors have engaged
in a diverse range of tactics in their efforts to address climate change (Bulkeley and
Betsill 2003; Bomberg 2012; Saunders et al. 2012), in some cases as part of the transna-
tional climate movement. Transnational climate activists are part of a broad movement
composed of diverse networks, organizations, tactical repertoires, and structures. The
‘climate movement’ is consistent with Tarrow’s definition of a transnational social move-
ment as a ‘socially mobilized [group] with constituents in at least two states, engaged in
sustained contentious interaction with powerholders in at least one state other than their
own, or against an international institution, or a multinational economic actor’ (Tarrow
2001, p. 11). Scholars have noted that civil society participation in transnational politics
involves both insider and outsider tactics, with the rise in transnational activism coincid-
ing with increases in social protest, professionalization of movement organizations and
institutionalization of movement goals (Della Porta and Tarrow 2005; Keck and Sikkink
1998; Meyer and Tarrow 1998; see also Tarrow 1994). Accordingly, the climate move-
ment includes groups ranging from professionalized international NGOs to radical anti-
capitalist collectives. A single activist in the climate movement may participate at multiple
scales and engage in a range of tactics (North 2011, p. 1583). However, Bomberg (2012)
describes the ‘core’ of the climate movement as being made up of members of NGOs and
umbrella coalitions of NGOs concerned with climate issues. Scholars have documented
how these groups, which Fisher (2004, 2010) calls ‘insiders,’ employ a range of non-
contentious tactics that are institutionalized within international governance structures
(see Betsill 2008, this volume).
Formed in the late 1980s as a coalition of professionalized environmental NGOs con-
cerned with influencing climate, the Climate Action Network (CAN) has been one of the
most dominant players in civil society-driven lobbying at the climate negotiations (Duwe
2001). Today, CAN includes more than 850 NGOs—with a few large NGOs dominat-
ing the coalition’s decision-making and capacity—from more than 90 countries.2 The
participation of CAN and its member NGOs has centered on influencing the negotia-
tion process from the inside: these activities include lobbying delegates, presenting policy
recommendations, publishing a newsletter for delegates and holding press conferences
(Hadden 2014; see also Betsill this volume).
These formalized NGOs also play a leadership role in organizing demonstrations to
take place in the streets of the cities in which the negotiations are taking place. This dual

Civil society 299
role for some civil society actors is consistent with the findings of Meyer and Tarrow
(1998, p. 5), who note that transnational civil society actors have ‘often acted within
institutional politics and movement activists have learned to combine institutional modes
of action with non-institutional convention.’ In many cases, protests at the meetings of
international institutions and multilateral regimes represent this type of combination
in that civil society organizations work both inside the meetings as NGO participants,
and simultaneously organize protests to take place outside the conference centers that
house the meetings. Most notable are large-scale demonstrations intended to show public
support for action on climate policy. These actions usually take place on the Saturday
between the two weeks of negotiations so as to allow NGO observers to participate both
inside and outside the meetings (Fisher 2004).
For example, NGOs coordinated the building of a ‘human dike’ of more than
5,000 people around the conference building at the COP 6 negotiations in The Hague
in 2000 (Duwe 2001; Fisher et al. 2005). The purpose of this protest was to demonstrate
support for states participating in the negotiations and call for a strong multilateral
agreement, not to disturb or stop the meetings. At the end of the event, the president of
the negotiations, Dutch environment minister Jan Pronk, came out of the meeting to
lay the final sandbag on the human dike in front of demonstrators and press from around
the world (Fisher et al. 2005). Similar ‘green’ demonstrations—ones that are legally per-
mitted and do not aim to break the law—have become standard at COP negotiations.
Although these demonstrations are organized by NGOs who are also formally regis-
tered with the UN as observers, other groups and individuals who reject the more institu-
tionalized insider tactics are also participating outside the climate meetings. Contentious
actions against the climate negotiations include disruptive protests, blockades, walkouts,
meeting boycotts and direct actions such as banner drops, among others. The difference
in the tactical repertoires employed by these civil society actors is, in part, due to the fact
that insiders and outsiders differ in their views of the utility of the UN-sponsored climate
negotiations. Insiders tend to view the conferences as an opportunity to develop inter-
national climate policies and treaties. In other words, insiders go outside the meetings to
provide public support for the negotiations taking place inside.
On the other hand, outsiders tend to be associated with more radical groups that reject
the climate regime and its structure as problematic, rather than as an institution within
which activists can achieve solutions (Uldam 2013). Outsiders are likely to identify with
facets of the ‘climate justice’ movement, which emphasizes the unequal social and eco-
nomic impacts of climate change in addition to its environmental risks (Chatterton et al.
2012). Because it builds off of the tactics and ideologies of the global justice movement
(see Della Porta 2007), climate justice tends to attract and recruit radical, anti-capitalist
environmental activists (Den Hond and De Bakker 2007). This more radical movement
aims to stop the climate negotiations, which are seen as part of a flawed system.
Whereas the structure of insider organizations is centralized and professional by
necessity—the UN Charter offers recognition only to groups with NGO status3—

outsider groups take on less formal organizational structures (Meyer and Tarrow 1998).
The institutional mechanisms for civil society participation are incompatible with infor-
mal organizational forms and the accreditation procedures required for NGO recognition
create obstacles to participation for small, grassroots groups (Fisher and Green 2004).
A climate group having a decentralized organizational form may be the product of a

lack of resources, as small groups have limited or no funding for paid staff and budgets
(Staggenborg 1989; Den Hond and De Bakker 2007). In some cases, however, decentrali-
zation is a tactical or ideological choice, as activists who identify with anti-capitalist and
global justice frames are also likely to organize via consensus-based decision-making
structures (Della Porta and Tarrow 2005; Della Porta 2007). Thus, informal groups tend
to remain on the outside of negotiations either by intent or as a product of their inability
to achieve NGO status.
Because outsiders engage in disruptive tactics and tend to lack organizational and
institutional legitimacy, they have more contentious interactions with authorities than
insider groups (Earl 2011; Della Porta 2007; North 2011; Tarrow 2005). Some protest
tactics, such as blockades, are intended as non-violent civil disobedience; as such activists
plan for arrests and subsequent engagement in jail solidarity as they prepare for protest
(Wood 2007). Other forms of outsider protest, like organized riots and property destruc-
tion, lead to more violent interactions between protesters and police (Chatterton et al.
2012). There has been limited attention paid to outsider mobilizations at the meetings of
the climate regime (but see Fisher 2004; Hadden 2014). However, as the climate justice
movement grows and mainstream actors in the climate movement become frustrated by
the lack of meaningful action on the issue of climate change, it is likely that more radical
civil society engagement in the climate regime will emerge in the coming years.
OUTSIDER MOBILIZATION AT CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS
Although levels of outsider mobilization have shifted over the course of the climate
negotiations, outsiders have voiced their opinions through demonstrations and direct
action since the first COP in Berlin in 1995. At this meeting, activists chained themselves
to buses outside the negotiations and members of the International Youth Climate
Campaign held an alternative climate conference.4 However, confrontational protest was
fairly uncommon at early COPs and most protests and demonstrations were intended to
influence, rather than disrupt, the negotiations (Hadden 2014). By the COP 6 negotia-
tions in 2000 in The Hague, however, outside tactics had become more common. During
this round of negotiations, members of Rising Tide staged anti-capitalist protests against
the Kyoto treaty (O’Neill 2004).5 In addition, at this round of climate talks, the first
alternative ‘climate justice conference’ was held concurrent with the actual negotiations
in the city hosting the meeting. Beyond meeting in an alternative space to discuss climate
policymaking, activists also attempted to disrupt negotiations through direct action
(property destruction, paint bombings, banner drops and throwing a pie in the face of the
Chief Delegate) and by storming the conference building (Hadden 2014). These limited
instances of radical protest at the COP 6 meeting triggered a strong response from UN
security, and the more formalized NGOs were quick to distance themselves from such
radical tactics (Duwe 2001).
In following years, ties between the climate movement and the global justice move-
ment began to develop, expanding the range of outsider participation in climate
protest. Broadly, the global justice movement engages in collective action to promote
justice within the global economic system and to protest global economic institutions
(Della Porta 2007; Fisher et al. 2005). The global justice movement fits Della Porta’s and

Civil society 301
Tarrow’s (2005) description of a transnational social movement in that it is d ecentralized,

engages in direct action and other disruptive tactics, and addresses a broad range of
issues. Although global justice activists had long been concerned with environmental
issues, interest in climate change increased between 2007 and 2009 as activists began
to frame the issue in terms of its connections to broader frames of global injustice and
economic inequality (Hadden 2015). The arrival of global justice activists brought about
what Bennett (2005, p. 213) identifies as ‘second- generation transnational activism’
within the climate movement: whereas NGOs had been the dominant force in civil society
participation in the climate regime up to this point, these new multi-issue coalitions
created new opportunities for individual involvement in ‘setting the agenda from below.’
As a result, coalitions of organizations and activists evolved to form the climate justice
movement, which focuses on ‘principles of democratic accountability and participation,
ecological sustainability, and social justice and their combined ability to provide solu-
tions to climate change’ (Chatterton et al. 2012). During the 2007 climate meeting in
Bali (COP 13), activists and organizations dissatisfied with CAN’s insider tactics joined
forces to form Climate Justice Now! (CJN). Whereas CAN’s work aimed to create change
within the institutional process of the UNFCCC, CJN focused on broader issues of
social justice, system change, and consumption reduction. CJN was informally organ-
ized, with few stable financial resources and no formal membership criteria beyond an
email list (Hadden 2015). Despite their decentralized structure, CJN managed to secure
NGO observer status from the UNFCCC, allowing their members to register as NGO
observers for the next round of climate negotiations.
At the same time, members of the ‘climate camp’ faction of the climate justice move-
ment joined with radical left activists and eco-anarchists to form Climate Justice Action
(CJA) as another alternative to CAN (Uldam 2013). Unlike CJN, CJA members would
not participate in the negotiations in any institutionalized capacity. Instead, CJA planned
to mobilize for ‘system change, not climate change’ through civil disobedience actions
(Chatterton et al. 2012). CJA’s statements ‘bordered on antagonism toward the UN and
interstate system’ and focused on solutions to the climate crisis that would arise from
grassroots movements rather than international institutions (Reitan 2010, p. 18). Global
justice activists participating in CJA called for the use of more radical ‘Seattle tactics’
similar to those used to disrupt the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in
1999. These tactics include jail solidarity, protest puppetry, affinity groups and blockades
(Wood 2007).
Leading up to the climate negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009 (COP 15), these new
tactics were combined with a call to mobilize activists in honor of the ten-year anni-
versary of the ‘Battle in Seattle,’ which took place when Global Justice Activists aimed
to shut down the meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999
(Smith 2001). Groups called on activists to memorialize this tenth anniversary of the
WTO protests by engaging in non-violent direct action throughout the climate negotia-
tions in Copenhagen (Lawton 2009). In the lead up to the COP 15 round of negotiations,
another climate justice-aligned group—the Never Trust a COP (NTAC) network—was
formed (Reitan 2010). Like CJA, NTAC’s plans for the COP 15 meetings included con-
frontational demonstrations and street riots intended to disrupt negotiations.6
In part due to these new civil society actors’ participation, the 2009 climate nego-
tiations (COP 15) in Copenhagen were host to the largest number of civil society

articipants—both insiders and outsiders—of any climate meeting since the UNFCCC
p
began in 1992. Because the negotiations were expected to yield a new international
climate agreement, organizational applications for UNFCCC credentials far surpassed
previous years: the provisional list of participants for the meeting reported that 30,123
people were registered. Media accounts were even higher, with the New York Times
reporting that 45,000 people had been accredited to participate (Rosenthal 2009). In
contrast, at the COP 6 negotiations in The Hague in 2000, where the Kyoto Protocol
was scheduled to be finalized, only 6,994 people registered. Prior to COP 15, the COP 13
round of negotiations in Bali in 2007 had had the highest number of registrants (10,828).
At most negotiations, NGO observers account for about half of those participating. In
Copenhagen, however, more than two-thirds of those registered (20,611 individuals)
were NGO observers (Fisher 2010). This unprecedented level of civil society participa-
tion during COP 15 was the result of the expansion of delegations that had participated
in earlier meetings, along with new delegations registering to participate in what was
expected to be an historic round of negotiations. It is worth noting that many of these
registered civil society observers were not permitted to enter the Bella Center and instead
participated in protests outside the negotiations (for a full discussion, see Fisher 2010).
The scale of outside protest at COP 15 also exceeded that of previous negotiations.
Using protest event analysis, Hadden (2014, p. 14) shows that civil society protests at the
COP 15 round were more numerous than at any of the previous negotiations: between
ten and 29 protests occurred at each round of the negotiations between 1995 and 2008,
whereas 77 distinct protests were reported at the 2009 meeting. The most concentrated
incidence of contentious protest occurred on December 16, 2009 (the same day as
planned, permitted NGO demonstrations) in coordination with a global day of action
for climate justice that included protests in 108 countries.7 In all, an estimated 100,000
people took part in collective actions in Copenhagen on this day (Fisher 2010). On a dif-
ferent day, the ‘Reclaim Power’ actions organized primarily by the climate justice-focused
CJA and CJN took place. This event included a disruptive action outside the conference
site, a walkout of NGO observers from within the negotiations, a rally and a ‘people’s
assembly,’ during which participants discussed their ideas for solutions to the climate
crisis (Hadden 2014).
This increase in outsider protest at COP 15 can, in part, be traced to spillover between
the global justice and climate movements that formed coalitions such as CJN and CJA.
Walgrave and colleagues (2012) found that 43.9 percent of activists surveyed at COP 15
identified with the global justice movement. Similarly, in her book on the climate move-
ment, Hadden (2015) found that more than half of the outsider organizations present
at COP 15 were linked to the global justice movement, compared to only 6 percent of
CAN-affiliated insider organizations. The addition of large numbers of global justice
activists and organizations expanded the frames and issues addressed by civil society at
COP 15: whereas only one-third of the climate justice organizations in Hadden’s survey
at COP 15 identified primarily with environmental goals, 79 percent of CAN member
NGOs were predominantly environmental in focus. Fisher (2010) notes that this ‘merging
of movements’ brought a new wave of transnational activists who, rather than coming to
Copenhagen to participate inside the negotiations as NGO observers, came specifically
to protest outside the event.
This merging of movements also expanded the range of protest tactics employed by

Civil society 303
activists outside the climate negotiations. By adapting tactics previously used to protest at
meetings of the World Trade Organization and other international financial institutions,
global justice activists introduced a new repertoire of contentious actions into the climate
movement’s repertoire of contention (Uldam 2013). Part of the plan for Reclaim Power,
for example, was for a group of protesters to ‘take over the conference for one day and
transform it into a People’s Assembly.’8 Although the approximately 3,000 activists who
gathered outside the Bella Center were unsuccessful in their attempts to cross police
lines to gain entry to the negotiations, direct action erupted across the city: climate
justice activists marched in solidarity with protesters who had been arrested or injured in
demonstrations, NGO observers who had been denied access to the negotiations joined
forces with outsider activists to protest the UNFCCC proceedings and members of
NTAC and other anarchist groups engaged in disruptive protests (for a full discussion,
see Fisher 2010).
Despite unprecedented participation and protest at the COP 15 round of negotiations,
civil society actors experienced disenfranchisement and repression as a result of multiple
factors. Police forces in Copenhagen were concerned that activists would use extreme
or violent tactics during the negotiations, a perception that led to the use of repressive
tactics aimed at preventing protests. Preemptive arrests of activists were widespread and
participation in planned protest suffered accordingly. Concerns about disruptive protest
also led UN security to revoke the credentials for NGOs including Friends of the Earth
International, Avaaz and TckTckTck, which had ties to outsider coalitions (Vidal and
Watts 2009). Thus, the potential for radical protest at COP 15 led to repression of civil
society participation both inside and outside the negotiations. Fisher (2010) contends
that this repression, in conjunction with the high registration and poor planning, meant
that the climate regime became more closed off to civil society than it had been in previ-
ous years.
LOOKING FORWARD: COLLABORATION AND CONFLICT IN

CLIMATE ACTIVISM
Since the COP 15 round of negotiations, civil society participation around the meetings
of the climate regime has returned to previous levels (Hadden 2014). Arrests and secu-
rity crackdowns at COP 15 had a chilling effect on outsider protest (Fisher 2010, 2011;
North 2011). Further, the perception of the UNFCCC as a failed institution incapable
of producing meaningful policies is a disincentive to participation. Increasingly, partici-
pants are staging walkouts to protest stagnant policies. For example, more than 800 NGO
participants handed back registration badges and walked out of the 2013 negotiations in
Warsaw (Vidal and Harvey 2013). Although local activists have continued to protest at
the climate negotiations, transnational civil society mobilization around recent rounds of
meetings has declined.
Protest has continued to occur at the climate meetings, albeit at rates and levels of con-
tention much lower than seen in Copenhagen. Most protests the following year in Cancún
took a more traditional and lighthearted approach, with groups using creative protests
and visual tactics in an effort to gain publicity through media ‘photo ops.’ Members
of La Via Campensina marched in colorful costumes, protesters from Greenpeace and

TckTckTck dressed as negotiators and gathered around a giant life preserver in the ocean,
and activists lay in the sand on the beach to spell out the word ‘hope.’9 UN Security was
much less accommodating than at previous meetings: youth activists who staged a press
conference and protest on the front stairs of the negotiations were detained, stripped of
their badges and ‘evicted’ from the conference.10 Overall, the 2010 Cancún negotiations
were seen as a failure by insiders and outsiders alike.11 As negotiations continue to fail to
produce any meaningful or effective policy outcomes, insider organizations are becoming
increasingly critical of the negotiations process. As a result, organizations have pursued
more collaboration between insider and outsider groups than expected post-COP 15 (see,
e.g., Hadden 2014; Fisher 2010).
For example, outsider coalitions, including CJN and NTAC, joined forces with inter-
national NGOs to march in a Global Day of Action12 at the COP 17 round of negotia-
tions in Durban in 2011.13 Groups also organized a ‘flashmob’ in which citizens sang a
traditional South African folk song while calling for action on the final day of the
negotiations.14 Despite a heavy police presence,15 radical groups also protested in Durban,
including a group of activists calling themselves ‘Occupy COP17’ who were associated
with the then-emergent Occupy movement (Uldam 2013). In fact, CJN coordinated a
protest that involved activists staging a disruptive protest inside the conference hall in
conjunction with Occupy COP17.16 During the COP 18 round of negotiations in Doha
in 2012, concerns about police repression resulted in fairly conciliatory protests and
local participation was low.17 Perhaps the most visible action in Doha was a ‘sing for
the climate flashmob’ on the last day of negotiations, during which citizens and NGO
members gathered to encourage participating countries to ‘do it now’ before the crowd
was forced to disperse by security forces.18
In contrast to the calm during the Doha round of negotiations, protesters associated
with NGOs took to the streets of Warsaw to ‘register their anger at the lack of progress’
taking place at the negotiations during COP 19 in Warsaw in 2013.19 Civil society groups
with NGO credentials including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth International, Oxfam
International, Action Aid and 350.org staged a walkout at this round of negotiations
under the theme ‘polluters talk, we walk.’ The activists criticized the negotiations for
being ‘on track to deliver virtually nothing’ and more than 800 activists participated in
the walkout.20
Increased access to transnational communication, in particular the rise of internet
tactics and mobilization, has reduced barriers to political participation and may present
an opportunity for civil society groups to overcome some aspects of disenfranchisement
within the climate regime (Fisher and Boekkooi 2010). Scholars have explored the role
of digital communications technologies—the internet, social media websites and mobile
technologies in particular—in transnational social movements and large-scale protest
(e.g., Myers 2002; Rheingold 2002; Almeida and Lichbach 2003; Bennett 2003, 2005;
Kahn and Kellner 2004). Overall, this research indicates that the internet has changed the
way social movements and activists are able to connect across geographic and cultural
borders, or in Garrett’s (2006, p. 202) words, the ‘ways in which activists c ommunicate,
collaborate, and demonstrate.’ Because civil society actors tend to be limited in funding,
the internet provides a relatively inexpensive channel through which they can transmit
messages and connect to a global network of supporters. Anyone with an email address
or internet- enabled cell phone and access to the World Wide Web can participate

Civil society 305
(Fisher 1998). In Lichbach’s (2003, p. 42) words, the internet has ‘facilitated the forma-
tion of a transnational civil society.’
The internet has been used to overcome barriers to participation at large protests
attended by international activists by allowing the logistics of attendance to be publicized
and worked out online (Bédoyan et al. 2004; Van Aelst and Walgrave 2002). Although
organizing online may open activists up to police repression as their protest plans are
broadcast publically (e.g., Hadden 2015), the internet has expanded the net that activists
are able to cast as they organize actions. For example, Fisher and her colleagues (2005,
p. 117) found that more than 80 percent of protesters at the COP 6 round of the negotia-
tions in The Hague had used the internet to find out about details of the protest. More
recently, the internet has been found to provide opportunities for self-emergent online
participation in climate protest. Segerberg and Bennett (2011) note that the #Cop15
Twitter hashtag, which was used during the COP 15 negotiations in Copenhagen by
users around the world, was employed particularly by activists who were engaged in the
Global Day of Action that was scheduled on the day of the large scale protest event in
Copenhagen: December 12, 2009.
Professional organizations have been successful in using online campaigns to mobilize
participants and publicize actions (see Segerberg and Bennett 2011). Also, the technol-
ogy appeals to new types of organizations. Perhaps the best known example is 350.org,
which was founded in 2008 as a way of linking citizens with climate organizations around
the world through online tools that ‘leverage’ local grassroots efforts.21 Although 350.
org supplies online organizing tools to small grassroots groups, its most notable achieve-
ments have been online petitions and helping to organize Global Days of Action since
2009. Overall, coordinated online tactics are more accessible to large, professionalized
groups than to smaller grassroots coalitions and tend to legitimize, rather than mobilize
against, the UNFCCC policy process. Uldam (2013) argues that online action is gener-
ally more conducive to ‘reformist’ or insider tactics—for example, creating petitions to
deliver during negotiations and collecting signatures from web users across the globe—in
effect constraining the opportunities for online media users who are participating from
afar. Thus, questions remain about whether online tactics will actually change the land-
scape of civil society participation in the climate regime, or whether they will continue to
reinforce the insider/outsider dichotomy that currently dominates.
As the international regime limps forward with its attempts to craft a policy mecha-
nism that works, there is no doubt that civil society actors will continue to engage in a
variety of ways. Given the lack of political progress at the transnational level along with
the increasing knowledge of the implications of global climate change, it is likely that civil
society engagement will continue to evolve as more people from around the world try to
influence the decision-making progress. Unless significant progress is made on the policy
side, civil society actors—both insiders and outsiders alike—are likely to become increas-
ingly radicalized as concerns grow around the world.
NOTES
1. It is worth noting that, in some cases, the UNFCCC allocates fewer seats to an NGO observer organiza-
tion than is desired, but these cases have been rare.

2. www.climatenetwork.org/about/about-can (accessed June 1, 2014).

3. 1945, Article 71.
4. http://exacteditions.theecologist.org/read/resurgence/campaigns-updates-(january-february-
1995)-6230/4/3 (accessed June 1, 2014).
5. http://risingtide.org.uk/about/political (accessed June 1, 2014).
6. https://westsideclimateaction.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/graphix.png?w5270&h5667 (accessed June 1,
2014).
7. ‘Global Day of Action 2009,’ www.globalclimatecampaign.org (accessed June 1, 2014).
8. ‘Reclaim power! Pushing for climate justice,’ www.climate-justice-action.org/mobilization/ reclaim-power-
pushing-for-climate-justice (accessed June 1, 2014).
9. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/12/cancun-climate-protests-photos-cop-16-images.html
10. www.climate-justice-now.org/protests-inside-and-outside-cop-16-climate-summit-expose-the-corrupt-
cop-process (accessed June 1, 2014).
11. www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2010/dec/06/cancun-climate-change-conference-2010
(accessed June 1, 2014).
12. www.climate-justice-now.org/civil-society-at-the-un-climate-change-conference-african-activism-at-
cop17/#more-3221 (accessed May 25, 2014).
13. http://montreal.mediacoop.ca/story/never-trust-cop/9298 (accessed May 22, 2014).
14. http://oneworld.org/2011/12/09/flashmob-protest-on-last-day-of-cop17-durban-south-africa (accessed May
25, 2014).
15. www.climate-justice-now.org/protesters-square-off-against-police-at-cop17/ (accessed May 22, 2014).
16. www.climate-justice-now.org and www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/south-africa/111209/
cop-17-africa-protests-occupy-cop-17-durban (accessed May 25, 2014).
17. http://treadsoftly.net/will-doha-tolerate-climate-protests-at-cop18 (accessed May 22, 2014).
18. www.singfortheclimate.com/en/News/828/Sing-for-the-Climate-flasmob-in-Doha.aspx (accessed May 22,
2014).
19. http://climatechange-tv.rtcc.org/2013/11/18/cop19-activists-protest-climate-criminals-attendance-at-talks
20. www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/11/21-1 and www.rtcc.org/2013/11/21/ngos-walk-out-of-un-
climate-talks-in-protest-at-lack-of-progress (accessed June 1, 2014).
21. http://350.org/about/how-we-work (accessed June 2, 2014).
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27. Citizen-consumers
Mikael Klintman and Magnus Boström
INTRODUCTION
Climate governance presents a tremendous challenge for contemporary policymakers.
Increasing focus is placed on people’s hybrid role as ‘citizen-consumers,’ their potential
for both reducing climate gas emissions through changes in consumption and for impact-
ing social norms and politics in a climate friendly direction. This chapter advances the
concept of citizen-consumer, which we argue refers to two roles with important impact
on society and nature. ‘Citizens’ implies our role where we have a social and political
outlook and interest; ‘consumers,’ on the other hand, is a concept traditionally referring
to our more individualistic sides, where we are mainly concerned about price and quality
of products and services, with the goal of improving the direct conditions for ourselves
or our household. As citizen-consumers the two roles partially overlap in the daily life of
today (Trentmann 2007). Scholars in environmental sociology, politics and sustainable
consumption use this concept to examine whether or how sustainability issues may moti-
vate people to change their activities beyond direct self-interest (Shaw and Black 2009).
Around the industrialized world a plethora of climate policy ‘experiments’ (Hoffman
2011) addressing citizen-consumers has been formulated, developed and tested: infor-
mation disclosure, smart energy monitors in the households, climate labeling, carbon
offsetting for flight trips and so forth. Climate governance has become a virtual labora-
tory for new policy arrangements, where citizen-consumers have become a category of
actors approached intensively. Policymakers’ interest in such ‘soft’ modes of govern-
ance addressing the public is easy to understand. They present an opportunity to do
something, without reducing their re-election chances.
Although policies promoted through slogans such as ‘saving the climate’ is the main
theme when discussing citizen-consumers and climate governance, this chapter acknowl-
edges the need to look elsewhere as well. Two delimitations are particularly common but
unnecessary and counterproductive when searching for the full potential of greenhouse
gas emission reductions that involve citizen-consumers: (1) a narrow focus of citizen-
consumers as actors only, ignoring the social structures that facilitate or hinder their
action in the first place; (2) a narrow focus on solely the action where mitigating climate
change is the main explicit goal. Both limitations are founded on a view of actor-based
formal rationality. Yet, as this chapter indicates, a more comprehensive picture is needed
to better acknowledge citizen-consumers as embedded in society’s structures, including
cultural aspects.
The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of what wider role citizen-consumers
could play in relation to climate governance. It should be noted that the dimensions that
this chapter distinguishes between do not reflect clearly delimited disciplines or schools
of thought. Instead, the dimension refers to perspectives that cut across disciplines:
sociology, political science, psychology as well as in multidisciplinary scholarship. This
309
Table 27.1 Types and examples of actor-and structure-oriented climate mitigation

strategies
Focus on actors’ purposes Focus on structural arrangements

Climate mitigation as Buying carbon-labeled products Constructing carbon labels and
explicit, primary goal Developing carbon-sensitive other information devices
diets Carbon tax arrangements
Carbon rationing
Urban mobility policies
Non-climate primary Buying organic and other Mobility management
goals eco-labels Urban planning
Vegetarianism Policies for ‘green jobs’
Health bikers Public procurement policies
Quality of life movements
Economies of sharing
chapter identifies areas often overlooked in climate governance, but that may be at least
as important as the typically covered dimensions addressing citizen-consumers.
We present four dimensions that refer to citizen-consumers in climate governance,
which can be summarized in Table 27.1.
In the concluding section following the sections on each dimension, the chapter
discusses how actions of citizen-consumers and the structure of society interact and
co-evolve. We point towards the need for policy initiatives that acknowledge this human
and societal complexity.
ACTOR-ORIENTED WITH CLIMATE MITIGATION AS

EXPLICIT, PRIMARY GOAL
The first dimension focuses on citizen-consumers as individual actors where the reduc-
tion of greenhouse gas emissions is an explicit goal. The idea behind this dimension of
climate governance is the following: by learning about climate threats, citizen-consumers
are likely to develop attitudes stimulating them to make behavioral change towards
reducing such threats. Information about the connection between individual purchasing
choices and climate harm leads citizen-consumers to awareness, which in turn may entail
attitudinal change, which in the end may lead to behavioral changes.
Examples include two action types, commonly discussed in literatures on political
consumerism, which are boycotts (of climate burdening goods and services) and so-called
‘buycotts’ (of climate friendly goods and services). Many scholars, policymakers, market
actors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) argue that citizen-consumers may
have an important role to play in reducing climate change. Political consumerism in the
form of boycotting has been rather stable in recent decades, while buycotting—the act
of consciously choosing a product or a service instead of another for political or ethical
reasons—is growing (e.g., Stolle and Micheletti 2013). The actor-oriented dimension with
the ‘saving of the climate’ as primary goal is highly dependent on information as a trigger of
change. Media coverage and NGO’s data on adverse climate impacts of goods and services

Citizen-consumers 311
are crucial. Moreover, this dimension indicates various types of voluntary initiatives, where
citizen-consumers use carbon labels or use other tools for calculating climate gas emissions
of purchased products and services. Through such tools, individuals and groups of citizen-
consumers worldwide have initiated initiatives, such as climate dieting (Nerlich et al. 2011).
However, a common criticism of approaches focusing on pro-green attitudes among
consumers concerns the so-called value–action gap. Why are people not acting according
to their green attitudes expressed in surveys? Studies discuss various factors explaining
the gap, such as: lack of willingness-to-pay a price premium for green products; social
dilemmas (the free-rider problem); motivational complexities; and absence of practical
arrangements that facilitate green shopping (see, e.g., Pedersen and Neergaard 2006).
Many people are more inclined to express individual responsibility in talk rather than in
action. Green attitudes translate to actual shopping behavior only occasionally and only
for a few types of everyday products (e.g., vegetables). Taking into account an abstract
issue such as the carbon footprint, the value–action gap is certainly not closed (cf. Röös
and Tjärnemo 2011).
Irrespective of this value–action or attitude–behavior gap, this dimension of climate
governance, which is geared towards citizen-consumers, can have an effect as it does not
threaten the existing political and economic system. It is highly in line with institutions
and discourses of liberal democracy and market economy (Bernstein 2001). All that is
called for (in reality a big challenge) in this dimension is better information of climate
gas emissions and climate impact of our various practices. Climate calculation, labeling,
standards, green awareness-raising and maintaining debate will do. Whether this ‘easi-
ness’ is a strength or a problem is debated. Maniates (2001) argues that this ‘10 simple
things to save the planet’ type of problem and solution framing can be problematic in the
long run. People can do and feel good by planting trees, switching off the light, recycling
and taking the bike. The message is that global threats are serious while on the other hand
it is not too difficult to change lifestyles. However, if the general message continues to be
that climate change is still taking place despite all individual efforts, it is not unlikely that
people reason that their actions play no role and they cease to ‘do their bit.’
Yet, another potential advantage of this dimension concerns the possibilities to express
political interest, identities and power through new channels. Several studies indicate how
the majority of people believe that they have a stronger power to make a positive societal
change as consumers than by using traditional means such as voting in general elections.
In a more optimistic view, this development is a sign of increasing reflexivity and predis-
position among individuals to shoulder some responsibility for complex global matters
(Stolle and Micheletti 2013).
Yet another strength of this dimension is its flexibility. While it has often been criticized
as overly individualistic, it may well be developed into group and social movement action.
Initiatives where workplaces, religious communities or neighborhoods have arranged this
dimension have turned out to provide the social catalyst that is of crucial importance for
motivating individuals to change their practices in a direction towards reduced climate
harm (Lockwood and Platt 2009). Initiatives mobilizing an entire social movement can
become quite powerful (Holzer 2010), at least temporarily, in impacting, for instance,
the fossil fuel industry. It is fair to assume that the main potential of this dimension can
only be developed if it is placed in a group, organizational and social movement setting:
a social structure.

STRUCTURE-ORIENTED WITH CLIMATE MITIGATION AS

EXPLICIT, PRIMARY GOAL
As citizen- consumers, people are inseparable from the structures of society, which
include institutions and rule-systems, resources, socio-material infrastructures and cul-
tural values. Actions are facilitated and limited by such structures. These structures need
to be reformed, thereby changing the situations of citizen-consumers drastically in terms
of their potential and inclination to reduce climate harm.
A basic sociological lesson is that individuals are never free- floating atoms
in societal space. Nor are the initiatives towards reduced climate harm entirely
spontaneous and informal. Climate information to citizen-consumers, either in the
form of antecedent strategies (e.g., goal- setting, modeling) or as monitoring and
feedback on actual performance, sometimes tied to rewards, is a key policy measure
for engaging individuals in reduced climate harm (Abrahamse et al. 2005). The rela-
tion between the goods and services that people purchase and their relative climate
impact is invisible; policy instruments are crucial for making this relationship transpar-
ent and visible (Klintman and Boström 2008). As we have shown elsewhere, climate
calculators, climate labels, standards or other initiatives are tools fully dependent on
governance arrangements and trust, which in turn are shaped by political, technologi-
cal and e conomic structures (Boström and Klintman 2011). Without well-developed
organization, multi-stakeholder participation, as well as a comprehensive apparatus
of monitoring, standard revision procedures and enforcement systems, the voluntary
initiatives face the risk of being targeted as not trustworthy, in turn rendering them
worthless.
In cases of climate offsetting, climate taxes, and climate rationing (Paterson and
Stripple 2010) the challenge of organization, criteria-setting and policy acceptance have
been debated more intensively than concerning schemes of climate labeling and informa-
tion. The relative responsibility (shared between companies, government and citizen-
consumers) and structure dependence of citizen-consumers are here brought in to clearer
light.
Carbon offsetting builds on the idea that diverse practices such as driving a sport utility
vehicle (SUV) in Sweden, running a refrigerant plant in China or managing a forest in
Tanzania can be made ‘the same’ in the carbon accountant’s book; one activity can offset
another. Hence, carbon offsetting schemes, either through the UN’s Clean Development
Mechanism or through the voluntary carbon market, rely on intricate systems of calcula-
tion, monitoring and verification to both estimate the emissions foregone and verify that
the projects realize these gains (Lövbrand and Stripple 2011, Turnhout et al. this volume).
Since the complex and highly technical character of such information is hidden from the
purchasing of a carbon offset certificate, a functioning market presupposes a high degree
of trust in its expertise. Yet, one considerable problem for the carbon offsetting industry
is the vast disagreements and differences concerning calculation criteria across different
carbon offsetting schemes (Dodds et al. 2012). This has resulted in an impression of
arbitrariness of the schemes, which in turn has prevented the growth of citizen-consumer
engagement in the schemes.
Taxation on greenhouse gas emissions such as the carbon taxes is another instru-
ment, which is highly dependent on governance arrangements (see Matti this volume).

Although there is general agreement on the importance of the proactivity of policymak-

ers and politicians in this area, a stated skepticism among citizen-consumers is often
portrayed as one of its main obstacles. As to public acceptance of increased climate
taxes and fees, certain studies try to assess the preferences among citizen-consumers with
regard to climate taxes and fees. Studies point towards a preference among the public for
voluntary measures such as information schemes (Schumacher 2010). Based on results
of a survey conducted in Sweden, Jagers and Hammar (2009) claim that people prefer
positive incentives and do not appreciate policy modes that involve penalties or fees, such
as climate gas taxes on gasoline. Similarly, Lundqvist (2006, p. 25) maintains in a research
review that policy instruments addressing individual citizen-consumers, for instance in
their automobile use, are subject to stronger public criticism than a more general climate
tax directed towards the entire population to an equal degree, even if each taxpayer has to
pay more. These studies reflect a fixed view of citizen-consumer preferences. Moreover,
the studies imply that such policy preferences are translatable to preferred policies in
other countries. However, we argue that these studies concern changeable social norms,
in analogy with attitudes to smoking, racism and sexism. Therefore preferences regarding
climate-related instruments need to be examined longitudinally, over time. Whereas it is
currently easier for policymakers to provide more climate information than to demand
more climate taxation, this is only because the main social norm that concerns climate
today has not yet been developed into a stage where citizen-consumers prefer harder
regulation.
The strength of the structural dimension of citizen- consumer-oriented climate
governance is that it is highly relevant to the soft, voluntary initiatives as well as to
the harder ones. Concerning climate taxes and more hierarchical/hard instruments
such as carbon rationing, citizen-consumers remain crucial actors. But their roles
are in the latter case more geared towards those citizens less inclined to voluntarily
change lifestyles. The data results are mixed concerning how far citizen-consumers
are ready to go in terms of accepting such structural change. A substantial challenge
here is that experiments with carbon allowances and carbon reduction action groups
(CRAGs) have so far not been tried at a wider scale, but only in very limited groups
(Howell 2012). To scale up, politicians and policymakers would need to overlook
initially skeptical attitudes among the public to these structural changes, and follow
strong visions for comprehensive reductions of climate gas emissions. Although this
may seem like very risky policy strategy, other cases of trial periods, referenda and
permanent policy change indicate that initially skeptical public attitudes are often
changed in a positive direction once people have experienced the changed conditions
in practice (see Winslott-Hiselius et al. 2009 about attitude changes to congestion fees
in Stockholm).
Neither the actor-oriented nor structure-oriented dimensions of climate targets do
justice to the relationship—tradeoffs and possible synergies—between climate targets
and non-climate goals/interest. Therefore, the following two sections will look at dimen-
sions that have been given far too little attention in climate governance research: action
and structure where carbon emission reductions have not been the explicit, primary goal,
but yet led to reduction in emissions.

ACTOR-ORIENTED WITH NON-CLIMATE, PRIMARY GOALS
Most initiatives oriented toward changes in consumer practices are not framed and justi-
fied as climate action. Yet, quite a few of the non-climate-oriented activities are highly
relevant to the climate. They might even be far more important towards reductions of
negative climate impacts than the explicitly climate-oriented ones.
A strong reason why the dimensions of climate-focused agency and structure are
so dominating in climate governance is modern society’s (normative) view that people
as well as organizations, companies and policymakers should act purposefully, out of
formal rationality. Since climate seems to be an urgent issue, changes in action and struc-
ture should be done for the very purpose of reducing climate risks. Although numerous
studies in various disciplines indicate that humans only to a limited extent are rational
actors in this formal sense, the clean purpose seems to maintain its strong status in many
areas, not least in climate governance (Simon et al. 2008). The public discourse and a
large part of research on green consumerism assumes a simplified rational choice model
(see Peattie 2010), where the green consumer has pre-given and consistent sets of prefer-
ences, relevant and clear-cut information, and is isolated from wider social influences.
In reality green consumers face situations of uncertainty, ambivalence among values,
and practical complexities, which prevent consumers from acting in consistent manners
(Moisander 2007).
As an alternative to the focus on purposeful climate values triggering behavior
change, it seems appropriate to study action and changes of action through the wide
range of interests on which they are founded. A social motivation approach, advanced
by Klintman and examined by other scholars who use other terms (Krause 2009), tries
to examine and understand, for instance, climate-related action through the various
interests that are involved. This approach contends that social motivation overrides eco-
nomic, practical and even moral factors. Financial savings, convenience and ‘doing the
right thing’ become powerful only once they coincide with people’s social motivation to
strengthen and maintain social relations, mark status, make cultural distinctions, and an
interest to teach as well as learn (cf. Klintman 2012).
To illustrate the dimension of actor-oriented dimension with non-climate factors,
and to do this with the social motivation approach, we can take the example of what is
sometimes called ‘peak car.’ Some argue that we have reached the peak of car use and
ownership in the Western world. The increase in car miles and car ownership seems to
have halted (Metz 2013). Why is this so? From the dimension of climate-oriented action,
a hypothesis would be that years of climate information have finally sunk in: citizen-
consumers have reduced their car use based on concern for the climate. However, air
travel, meat consumption and several other climate-harming practices do not seem to
have decreased. Economic explanations highlight that car use has become expensive,
and that the economic crisis has stifled car sales. Still, although the economic situation
is often important, even The Economist admits that financial explanations do not by far
suffice in this case (The Economist 2012). The most obvious argument against a financial
cause of peak car is that the latter began prior to the economic crisis of 2008. Scholars
and policymakers in the transport sector have pointed towards other explanations. One
is that people take driving licenses several years later than they used to (Schoettle and
Sivak 2014). Another is that the automobile has faced competition as a status symbol

from several other types of ownership and practices, including travelling to distant places
during long periods. Many young people prefer such travelling instead of saving for a car
(which is in line with still-increasing air miles combined with peak car). Furthermore,
people do large parts of their socializing over the internet instead of meeting in real life.
This results in a decrease of car use for driving between friends. All of these factors are
rooted in people’s social motivation, which has been partly redirected from the automo-
bile and toward other experiences and ways of socializing.
From a social motivation approach, the question that is most relevant to climate
governance is not so much ‘how should we make people even more aware of the climate
challenges related to daily practices and behavior?’ Instead, the question would be, ‘how
can society further stimulate the socially motivated, climate-friendly changes that have
already been initiated?’ It is plausible to assume that since people have already reduced
their car use to some extent, and do not seem to suffer from this but might even be happy
with these changes, society should try to stimulate more of the same changes.
However, this actor-oriented dimension seems to view climate-relevant activities as
spontaneous and fairly unpredictable. Climate-harming practices run the risk of being
replaced with other harmful practices, such as from car use to flying. This phenom-
enon has long been discussed in economics under the label ‘the rebound effect.’ Akenji
(2014) argues that actor-oriented dimensions of non-climate targets fail to address the
root problems. Sustainable consumption ought to require reduced consumption. Yet,
the rebound effect implies that reduced climate harm in one area of consumption can
encourage more efficient use of natural resources and energy, while such savings per
unit mean that people can buy even more goods and services, thereby outperforming the
efficiency gains. Climate-friendly consumers may engage in low carbon consumption in
some areas of their everyday life, while their total carbon footprint may remain constant
or even increasing.
In isolation, the actor-oriented dimension makes it difficult to foresee what roads
citizen-consumers will take. Citizen-consumers are free souls with a wide range of
interests and motivations. All we can do is hope, or inform, about changes in daily life
that make several ends meet: health, economic savings, enjoyment, socializing and—
incidentally—reduced climate harm. To reach its full explanatory as well as political
potential, the social motivation approach needs to acknowledge one of its own, most
important parts: citizen-consumers’ social motivation to perform practices embedded in
social structure.
STRUCTURE-ORIENTED WITH NON-CLIMATE, PRIMARY

GOALS
Actions are facilitated and limited by social structures (Spaargaren and Oosterveer 2010).
Here, we highlight two aspects of this structural integration of agency. The first one is
practical. For instance, in the case of a partial transition from automobile use to internet
use for socializing, a well-functioning internet, with technical and in other ways practical
opportunities for convenient communication is obviously necessary. Moreover, to avoid
purchasing a car, alternative modes of transport must be in place, whether safe bicycle
lanes or public transportation. To further stimulate changes in practices towards those

that coincide with reduced climate harm, these supporting structures need to be further
improved (Evans 2011).
A second aspect is cultural. A key claim of the social motivation approach is that
people are fundamentally—and, yes, genetically—driven to care endlessly about the
social norms of their culture, either by complying with them, stretching them or break-
ing them (Bolsen et al. 2014). Social structure involves not just ‘hard’ structures, such as
formal rules and technological infrastructures, but also norms, including structures that
many people are highly socially motivated to comply with. For example, although it is
technically possible to commute limited distances by bicycle, norms surrounding ‘body
freshness’ and cultural aversions to sweat may constitute an obstacle to bicycle com-
muting. Moreover, the normal standard of living among large segments of middle-class
people may be to own a house of a certain size, where each child has his or her own room.
This requires that people either accept to live in a house far away outside the city center,
becoming car-dependent by commuting to work, or accept to break this norm to live in a
small flat more centrally that is closer to their workplace. Some people will be willing to
break the suburban norm and will run the risk of being perceived as odd, irresponsible
to their children and so forth. On the other hand they can also hope for being perceived
as cultural pioneers who break with the norm in a novel way, something that may raise
their status (Klintman 2012). The majority of people, however, are likely to follow the
mainstream norm, out of habit, security and so forth (Maréchal 2010).
The actor- oriented dimension with other main goals than reduced climate harm
becomes much more powerful in reducing climate harm if it is combined with the
structure-oriented dimension, which concerns how politics, planning, and culture can
become more climate-friendly.
Examples of areas where such combinations show initial signs of success include:
● Mobility management (schemes for facilitating the use of public transportation

and bicycling, combined with health and quality of life framing) (Brög et al. 2009;
Winslott-Hiselius et al. 2009).
● Meat-free Mondays (combined with health, global food security, animal welfare,
and environmental framings) (Upton 2009).
● Urban planning efforts to reduce urban air pollution and congestion (framed as
health and economic issues) (Lubell et al. 2006).
● Densification of cities (framed as connected with economy of scale, convenience,
enjoyment, and quality of life) (Hofstad 2012).
● Travel-free, virtual meetings in the workplace (framed with economy, time saving,
quality of life and environment) (Voytenko and Abrahamsson Lindeblad 2013;
Voytenko et al. 2014).
● Promotion of green jobs (linked with economic development, job creation, and
other environmental gains) (Hess 2010).
As diverse as this brief list is, the initiatives have two things in common. First, they are
not promoted as carbon emission reduction as the main rationale. Second, they necessi-
tate a degree of structural change, organization and so forth, in order to become efficient
and mainstreamed.
Theories of social practice stress how individual practices are embedded in structures

and avoid the overly individualist focus by direct attention to practices (showering,
cycling, washing, commuting, cooking, etc.) as the most relevant basic unit for analysis
(see, for instance, Halkier et al. 2011; Spaargaren 2011). Seeing the individual as embed-
ded in practices encourages asking how climate-harming practices such as far distant
automobile-based commuting have become normal in certain cultures. It entails studying
citizen-consumers as embedded in socio-material infrastructures, cultures, communities,
groups, economies, technologies and so on. In terms of climate impact, social practice
theory would focus on the carbon footprints of practices rather than of individuals. By
this analytical focus, the perspective attempts to overcome the split between structural-
ism and actor-oriented approaches, and also allows for taking into account both climate
friendly intentions and other intentions in the search and experimentation for climate
friendlier practices.
CONCLUSIONS
We have argued that there are four roles of citizen- consumers in the overview of
citizen-consumer-related climate governance. The first role is that of empowered
citizen-consumers acting on climate information and motivated by climate concern.
The second role refers to citizen-consumers acting within given structures that limit or
facilitate reductions of climate-gas emissions. The third role refers to empowered citizen-
consumers acting on the basis of a wide range of motivations, where climate concern is
only one among several motivations, and where the social motivation is fundamental. The
fourth, and final, role is that of citizen-consumers as practitioners, where the practices
are embedded in structures. According to this fourth role, citizen-consumers’ practices,
as well as the structures, should not be judged by whether they have their basis in inten-
tions of reducing climate harm but by whether their consequences are harmful or not to
the climate.
In our view, the four dimensions do not constitute a taxonomy indicating progress of
citizen-consumer-oriented climate governance from bad to good. We argue that none
of these roles is perfect or ideal in climate governance. To be sure, this chapter, with its
sociological basis, has stressed the importance of acknowledging and improving social
structure rather than changing individual attitudes. On the other hand, scholarship,
which entirely ignores the potential of agency, runs the risk of overlooking the signifi-
cance of grass-root initiatives and social movements from below, although such initiatives
and movements always need facilitating structures to grow strong. Moreover, while parts
of practice theory, mentioned above, downplay the importance of purposive agency of
citizen-consumers, by maintaining that many daily practices with climate relevance are
‘inconspicuous’ and thus not part of social signaling, these theories run the risk of over-
looking the fact that much of our social signaling is done inwards, towards ourselves as
citizen-consumers, strengthening our social identity.
In addition to this classical actor-structure issue, our distinction between climate goals
and non-climate goals is arguably where climate governance has its strongest potential as
regards citizen-consumers. By leaving the preoccupation with climate intention, schol-
ars and practitioners of climate governance have a vast field of unexplored territory to
examine and develop into novel types of governance and policies. Combining soft and

hard regulation over time may reveal new types of policy instruments that can prove
highly productive for climate mitigation, even where climate concern is not the point
of departure. A lot is done already, some things spontaneous and others more planned.
Climate governance has very much to learn from other policy domains, since climate is
closely tied to many if not most other aspects of human and planetary wellbeing.
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28. News media
Alison Anderson
INTRODUCTION
This chapter will survey recent scholarship on the media politics of climate change,
outlining key debates and signaling the most promising new directions that research
is taking in this fast-moving field. Increasingly the media occupy the space where
public and policy agendas are shaped and the parameters of debate are formulated.
While there is no simplistic relationship between media coverage and public attitudes
and action on climate change, studies demonstrate that they play an important role
in framing issues. In an increasingly multi-digital, fragmented and interactive media
context, the very nature of what constitutes news is being redefined. ‘Old’ and ‘new’
media are increasingly intermeshed. Journalists reporting on climate change (at least
in North America and Europe) have had to contend with significant cutbacks in
science and technology staffing, tighter deadlines, growing multi-platform demands
and a fiercely competitive environment. Specialist journalists are generally reducing
in number (Painter 2014). Evidence suggests that these organizational and economic
pressures tend to result in journalists relying more heavily upon wire agencies and press
releases from public relations companies, government bodies and corporate sources.
While this is by no means a new development, it has clearly intensified, leading news
organizations to be generally less equipped to investigate and question information.
The chapter will examine the major conceptual and methodological difficulties in
researching this complex, dynamic and evolving field. Scholarship in this area focuses
mostly on the textual rather than the visual and generally lacks an internationally com-
parative dimension, although this situation is improving. Moreover, it tends to concen-
trate on analyzing media content and messages and neglects to look in conjunction at
wider questions around news production dynamics. More recent work in the environ-
mental communication field has begun to draw greater attention to the power of the
unseen; the ability of some news sources to strategically contain news through block-
ing or slowing the circulation of information (Anderson 2014a; Lester and Hutchins
2012). Most studies examine traditional newspaper coverage of climate change and,
even where studies examine online coverage, little attention tends to be paid to the
interaction between the two. We also need systematic empirical studies on the effects of
social media campaigns by advocacy groups and counter-movements on public values
and beliefs. The complex new media environment requires that we develop approaches
that are sophisticated enough to capture dynamic flows and the complexities and
contingencies of social processes. The chapter will conclude by arguing that we need
a new toolbox if we are to adequately analyze the impact of socio-political factors on
the reporting of climate science.
320
News media 321
PUBLIC ATTITUDES, FRAMING AND PATTERNS OF MEDIA

ATTENTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE
The news media play a key role in framing climate change. Through the priority they give
to the topic and the framing of the issues through their choice of words, images and news
sources they potentially exert an important influence on how the public view the problem
(Anderson 2014a; Antilla 2010; Boykoff 2011). A number of studies have analyzed the
relationship between patterns of media attention to climate change (including frequency
and prominence) and levels of public awareness (e.g., Brulle et al. 2012; Sampei and
Aoyagi-Usui 2009). Various explanations have been offered as to what drives fluctuating
levels of public concern over climate change. In addition to the role of popular media,
other (not completely un-related) explanations that have been offered include: extreme
weather events; exposure to, and understanding of, scientific information about climate
change; the activities of advocacy groups; the role of elite cues (political agenda-setting)
and broader economic and political factors (see Brulle et al. 2012). Studies suggest that
the prominence of climate change in the news media may result in a temporary rise in
levels of awareness, but this is easily nudged off public agendas by competing issues that
are perceived to be more immediately compelling (e.g., Sampei and Aoyagi-Usui 2009).
Previous research suggests that there is a close relationship between political agendas and
news agendas (e.g., Anderson 1997; Carvalho 2005; McGaurr and Lester 2009). Also,
studies reveal a close correspondence between media and international policy discourse
on climate change although this varies among specific news outlets according to ideologi-
cal leanings and economic interests (Anderson 2009; Olausson 2009). Indeed, a US-based
study undertaken by Brulle et al. (2012) concludes that it is economic and political factors
that constitute the key drivers:
While media coverage exerts an important influence, this coverage is itself largely a function of
elite cues and economic factors. Weather extremes have no effect on aggregate public opinion.
Promulgation of scientific information to the public on climate change has a minimal effect. The
implication would seem to be that information-based science advocacy has had only a minor
effect on public concern, while political mobilization by elites and advocacy groups is critical in
influencing climate change concern. (Brulle et al. 2012, p. 169)
This is confirmed by a recent study undertaken by Ungar, which examines why the excep-
tional weather events of the summer of 1988 led to a social scare about global warming
in the US, while they did not in 2012 (Ungar 2014). He concludes that the reason that
climate change did not emerge as a leading social problem in 2012 was because it was
overtaken by the economy and did not feature highly on the political agenda:
By 2012 the economy trumped all else, political leaders eschewed the climate issue, and scientific
and grassroots activism had diminished significantly. Where the media had been proactive in
1988, in 2012 they seemingly ‘collaborated’ by indulging the silence in the political arena and
for the most part dissociating the extensive coverage of extreme weather impacts from climate
change. (Ungar 2014, p. 245)
The media landscape itself has significantly changed since the late 1980s. The following
section highlights some of the key shifts that have occurred and assesses their significance
for the reporting of climate change.

THE BLURRING OF NEWS AND PUBLIC RELATIONS
The contemporary global 24/7 news culture is characterized by extensive interconnected

flows, round-the-clock deadlines and increased competition. ‘Multiskilled’ journalists
are expected to work much more flexibly by digital convergence, increasing casualization
of the workforce and short-term contracts (see Cox 2013; Mitchelstein and Boczkowski
2009; PEW 2013, 2014). Over recent years, budgets for science and investigative report-
ing have been substantially cut in the US and some parts of Europe and many reporters’
workloads have considerably increased (Boykoff and Yulsman 2013). Commercial pres-
sures have intensified the tendency for news outlets to place increasing emphasis upon
personalization, drama and human interest (Anderson 2014a; Weingart et al. 2000). As
climate change has become increasingly politicized, where once scientists were the domi-
nant news sources in news stories about climate change, now celebrities and politicians
have become the new authorized definers of climate change (Anderson 2011; Boykoff
2008; Brockington 2013).
At the same time, business interests may powerfully shape the content of news stories
about climate science (see Beder 2002; Boykoff and Yulsman 2013). Some evidence
suggests that editors’ decisions may be affected by the fear that running items that are
critical of business (e.g., the oil industry) may lead to lost advertising revenue (Anderson
2009). Indeed, the dependence of many journalistic outlets on PR copy is such that the
boundaries between PR and news have become increasingly blurred (Lewis et al. 2008).
Journalists have become more and more reliant on pre-packaged information from
PR professionals, industry and news agencies. In fact, by 2006 there were more public
relations executives in the UK than there were journalists (Davies 2009). A study that
sampled UK domestic national news coverage in 2006 described the dependence on
such material as ‘extensive’; almost 50 percent of all press stories reproduced at least
some copy from the press association agency service, and agency stories themselves are
known to be based on PR material. Nearly a fifth of newspaper articles were found to
be either totally or mainly derived from such material or related activities and the most
successful spin doctors were from industry (see Lewis et al. 2008). This in itself is not a
new development. For example, Sachsman noted that in the mid-1970s more than half
of environmental news reports in the San Francisco Bay area of California originated or
drew directly from press releases or PR copy. Often these reports simply regurgitated the
copy verbatim (see Sachsman 1976). However, with the arrival of digital media and the
increasingly desk-bound nature of journalism, this tendency appears to have intensified
(Sachsman et al. 2010). As the PEW State of the News Media 2013 Report notes:
Efforts by political and corporate entities to get their messages into news coverage are nothing
new. What is different now—adding up the data and industry developments—is that news
organizations are less equipped to question what is coming to them or to uncover the stories
themselves, and interest groups are better equipped and have more technological tools than ever.
(PEW 2013)
Along with the blurring of news and PR, traditional journalism is declining and new
opportunities have arisen for the growth of citizen journalism (see Allan and Thorsen
2014). The rise of video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and social networking sites
such as Facebook and Twitter, have influenced who voices their views and how these

News media 323
circulate. However, it is questionable as to whether this has significantly opened up the

public sphere, since most people are not content producers and popular sources of online
news tend to reflect mainstream media agendas (Anderson 2014a; Philo and Happer
2013). In an increasingly competitive media scene, news values associated with conflict
and controversy tend to dominate, especially in those news outlets targeted at the mass
market.
FALSE BALANCE
It has been widely recognized that the journalistic norm of balance (presenting ‘both
sides’ of an issue dispassionately with roughly equal attention) has led to a situation
where journalists may give equal weight to the views of climate skeptics (Grundmann
this volume). This ‘he said/she said’ formula tends to lead to the distorted impression that
there is a lack of consensus among climate scientists about anthropogenic climate change
(Boykoff and Boykoff 2004; Shuckburgh et al. 2012). As Boykoff observes:
In an intensely competitive news environment, reliance on this norm can also be preferred when
journalists do not have time or deep scientific knowledge resources in order to verify the legiti-
macy of competing claims . . . When it comes to the coverage of anthropogenic climate change,
balanced reporting has the potential to actually be a form of informational bias. (Boykoff 2011,
p. 125)
The practice of giving roughly equal attention to conflicting sides of the climate change
debate still appears to be a powerful journalistic convention to fall back on, especially
when reporters are under pressure to play safe and have little time to investigate complex-
ities and check information (Anderson 2014a). For example, a recent report by the UK
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee concluded that the public service
broadcaster, the BBC, must avoid continuing to present the issue in terms of two equally
valid points of view (House of Commons Science and Technology Committee 2014). A
recent Ipsos MORI poll suggests that public concern in the UK about climate change
has fallen significantly and people are less convinced that human activity is to blame. In
2013, only 60 percent claimed that they were concerned about climate change, as com-
pared with 82 percent in 2005 and 71 percent in 2010 (Ipsos MORI 2014). According to
this survey, concerns over the economy and immigration far surpassed the environment.
Similarly a recent Gallup poll undertaken in the US in 2014 suggests that public concern
about environmental issues fell to its lowest point since 2001 (Riffkin 2014). The two
issues that Americans appeared most worried about were the economy and the healthcare
system. The same poll found that only 24 percent claimed they worry a great deal about
climate change and 25 percent a fair amount. There were clear political differences on
the issue: only 10 percent of Republicans/Republican-leaning respondents responded
that they worry a great deal about climate change while the figure was 36 percent for
Democrats/Democrat-leaning respondents (Riffkin 2014; see also McCright and Dunlap
2012). In 2013 only 41 percent of Americans believed global warming is happening and
caused by humans, and three in four Americans said they ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ discuss global
warming with their family or friends (see Leiserowitz et al. 2013, 2014).
While it may be tempting to identify causal links between media coverage of climate

skepticism and public attitudes, the relationship is complex. People’s attitudes to climate
change are influenced by multiple factors. For example, Sweden, Finland and Belgium
have been found to exhibit lower levels of concern over climate change than the US and
yet climate skeptics are generally not prominent voices in media coverage (see Painter
2011). Also, comparing survey findings can be problematic since question wording can
significantly impact on findings, and even the choice of whether to frame a question in
terms of using the phrase ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ can affect participant
responses since they often carry different associations (see Schuldt et al. 2011; Schuldt
and Roh 2014).
There has been little detailed systematic analysis of the prevalence of climate skepti-
cism in the media, although this is starting to change (Gavin and Marshall 2011; Painter
and Ashe 2012; Painter and Gavin 2015). The most extensive research to examine more
generally the influence of the balance norm on media coverage of anthropogenic climate
change has been undertaken by Boykoff and Boykoff. Their content analyses of a sample
of US elite newspapers and TV network news programs revealed a significant tendency
towards divergent reporting away from the scientific consensus about anthropogenic
climate change (see Boykoff and Boykoff 2004, 2007). Over the 14-year period covered
by the newspaper analysis (1988–2002) more than half (53 percent) of the newspaper
articles were found to provide a ‘balanced account,’ while seven out of ten TV news seg-
ments between 1995 and 2004 (70 percent) ‘balanced’ the views of climate scientists with
skeptics. News reporting, then, increasingly emphasized uncertainty and debate, reflect-
ing the growing politicization of the issues. However, a later follow-up study undertaken
by Max Boykoff suggested that by 2006 this tendency in US reporting to conform to the
balance norm had become much less apparent (see Boykoff 2011). Likewise his study of
UK elite newspapers over the same timespan concluded that ‘balanced’ reporting was no
longer evident, and thus ‘we may now be flogging a dead norm’ (Boykoff 2007, p. 479).
Yet this was not found to be the case in a content analysis study of UK red-top newspa-
pers covering the period 2000–2006, where there was a very noticeable divergence away
from the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change (Boykoff and Mansfield
2008). Generally, however, the tendency in Anglo-Saxon media to emphasize controversy
and uncertainty around climate science has been much less evident in news coverage else-
where across the globe (Bailey et al. 2014; Painter 2011, 2014). It is worth remembering
that there are significant variations between different news outlets in the same country
and the prevalence of skeptical voices. For example, James Painter examined the coverage
of skeptics in ten UK newspapers over two periods, 2007 and 2009/2010, and concluded
that there was a close correspondence between the political leaning of a paper and the
amount of space devoted to the views of climate change skeptics. A more recent study of
climate skepticism in British newspapers between 2007 and 2011 adds further weight to
the conclusion that skeptical voices have regularly appeared in the UK press over recent
years (Painter and Gavin 2015). Also the ‘climategate’ controversy clearly increased the
presence of climate skeptics’ voices in many parts of the Western world in late 2009 (Beck
this volume; see also Painter 2011).
In the US, climate change skepticism is strongly entrenched and a whole climate
change denial industry has built up linked to conservative think tanks, designed to sow
the seeds of doubt (Grundmann this volume; Jacques et al. 2008). Oreskes and Conway
identify a number of parallels between the climate change debate and earlier controver-

News media 325
sies over tobacco smoking, acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer, where powerful
industry groups, special interest lobbies and public relations companies manipulated
scientific claims and exploited the American news media (see Antilla 2005: Oreskes
and Conway 2010). For example, the Global Climate Coalition (GCC)—comprised of
54 industry members—was established in the US in the late 1980s to challenge the sci-
entific basis of global warming. One member of the coalition, the American Petroleum
Institute, reportedly spent $1.8 million in 1993 on a PR company to try and defeat a
proposed tax on fossil fuels and, according to The Los Angeles Times, the GCC spent in
the region of $13 million on its 1997 anti-Kyoto advertising campaign (Gelbspan 1995).
Indeed a New York Times investigation found that Phillip Cooney, a previous lobbyist for
the American petroleum industry and lawyer with no scientific training, frequently edited
government climate reports to emphasize doubts about the connection between climate
change and fossil fuel emissions (Monbiot 2006; Revkin 2005).
Having outlined some of the key issues and debates within the literature, and signaled
some of the conceptual and methodological challenges, the final section of this chapter
turns to examine future avenues for research.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
Given the fast pace of change and the complexities discussed above, we need to develop
a new toolbox for researching this field that moves beyond earlier approaches. Here, I
suggest, there are a number of very promising avenues for future research. The limita-
tions of past research noted below are not peculiar to climate change research since they
reflect broader tendencies in mass communication research as a whole. A case in point
is the tendency to focus on examining elite newspapers rather than television and online
media, to which we turn now.
Online and Offline Flows
To date, most of the research examining media coverage of climate change has focused
on traditional print media (see Anderson 2009). A small but growing number of studies
have examined online newspaper sites and social media (see Schäfer 2012; Schäfer
and Schlichting 2014). Relatively few studies examine the different kinds of effects of
online and offline media (see Gerhards and Schäfer 2010; Schäfer 2012). However,
recent years have witnessed a growth in studies examining online media (Gavin 2009;
Schäfer and Schlichting 2014). Some interesting work is beginning to emerge analyzing
online blogs (e.g., Sharman 2014). Social network analysis could provide new insights
into the complex interaction of flows and help to visualize digital networks (Anderson
2014b; Anderson 2015). Tegelberg et al. (2014), for example, combined content analy-
sis, interviews and web mapping in an analysis of the 2009 and 2011 climate summits
in Canada, Russia and the US. Nevertheless, this poses a number of methodological
challenges. Tegelberg et al. (2014, p. 79) caution: ‘because this type of network analysis
demands a great deal of interpretation, future research on networked climate news must
design more sophisticated methods of mapping, tracking and analyzing online news
coverage.’ There is considerable scope, then, for researching the ties and relationships

between different networks and the transformation of an issue through mapping online
interaction.
Visual Media
As mentioned above, few analyses have examined broadcast media and yet TV news
is widely considered to be the most trusted type of news outlet on climate change
(Anderson 2014a; Schäfer and Schlichting 2014). Indeed, studies have tended to focus
their attention much more on text rather than image, although there are some notable
recent exceptions (e.g., Doyle 2011). However, as Hansen and Machin (2013) observe,
there is an increasing interest in visual communication among scholars. Research that
focuses on how audiences interpret visual material on climate change is comparatively
rare but new work is beginning to fill an important gap in knowledge (e.g., see O’Neill
et al. 2013). Future work could usefully research how visual meanings privilege particular
ideological positions, exploring responses to visual imagery and the extent to which this
empowers or constrains across a range of cultural contexts.
Internationally Comparative Research
Alongside the importance of visual analysis, scholars have increasingly identified the
need for more internationally comparative work on media coverage of climate change.
The number of such studies is growing (e.g., Schäfer et al. 2011) but there is still a ten-
dency to focus on Western societies and neglect developing countries that are most vul-
nerable to climate change (Anderson 2009, 2014a; Schäfer and Schlichting 2014). This
kind of work is of course very challenging, not least because of language barriers. Some
very large-scale studies have been undertaken, but these inevitably sacrifice depth for
breadth. As with the other areas discussed so far, there is also a growing need for greater
methodological sophistication if valid comparisons are to be made. As Olausson and
Berglez argue:
In order to generate more international knowledge about climate communication, the best solu-
tion is perhaps not to restrict investigation to large cross-national quantitative analyses which
squeeze many different countries under the same theoretical and methodological umbrella,
implying in a ‘positivistic’ fashion that it is not problematic to ask similar questions of all coun-
tries in the world, irrespective of their historical background, their level of development, their
position in the Global North or South, and so forth [. . .] there is a need for many more studies,
preferably qualitative ones, which in their very research design formulate a critical theoretical
and normative idea about the selected country/countries that guides the actual media analysis.
(Olausson and Berglez 2014, pp. 257–258)
Given that media within the same country may significantly vary in their framing of
climate change there is a need for more in-depth comparative analysis of climate change
coverage, perhaps involving fewer countries in any one given study but including a
wider selection of news outlets (e.g., Painter 2014). In particular, more account needs
to be taken of particular socio-political, economic, cultural and historical contexts (see
Olausson and Berglez 2014).

News media 327
Breadth and Depth
A related point concerns the need to ensure that macro-scale studies are complemented
by micro-scale work that provides a more in-depth insight into the behind-the-scenes
struggle for power. Longitudinal and case-specific studies can provide important insights
into contextual influences (see Moser 2010). Ethnographic studies that trace the evo-
lution of an issue from production, to representation, to consumption can capture
the complex dynamics of claims-making and counterclaims-making (Anderson 2009;
Hansen 2011). Such an approach recognizes that power is at the heart of communication
processes and cannot simply be read off from the amount of space a news source receives
in media coverage.
Political Elites, Policymakers and Industry Sources
Ethnographic studies of news sources have tended to focus on environmental

non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and scientists and, with some exceptions (e.g.,
Takahashi and Meisner 2014), there has been relatively little work that has examined poli-
ticians or policymakers (see Anderson 2009; Hansen 2011). Also, few studies have focused
on industry as a news source in environmental news reporting (Hansen 2015). However,
there is an emerging body of literature that examines how business and political parties are
seeking to actively shape environmental news (e.g., Beder 2002; Davis 2007; Greenberg et
al. 2011; Schlichting 2013). Clearly there are significant challenges involved in researching
the strategies employed by such news sources including access and tensions around taking
a critical approach and investigating how power relations are reproduced (Lester 2015).
Transdisciplinary Research
Finally, there is scope to more fully integrate the study of communication into interdis-
ciplinary research on climate governance. Media studies scholars have not engaged in
collaborative approaches with other disciplines outside of the social sciences as much
as they could. However, the opportunity to engage in participatory research involving
different stakeholders and multiple academic disciplines, though challenging, offers
significant benefits. As Smith and Lindenfeld (2014, p. 181) observe: ‘Transdisciplinary
collaboration can play a key role in opening up space for climate change communication
researchers to participate in engaged, team-based approaches to problem solving that are
informed by knowledge from a wide range of disciplines and stakeholders.’ This is not
without difficulties, given that different disciplines often come to the problem from very
different starting points and competing epistemologies. However, such an approach is
increasingly favored by funding bodies and helps scholars to reflect on ‘the connections
between our research questions, methodological choices, and consequences of our work
on knowledge production’ (Smith and Lindenfeld 2014, p. 192). It is important for media
scholars to devote more energy to outreach and disseminating the findings of climate
communication research more widely. As Olausson and Berglez (2014, p. 254) note: ‘well
designed interdisciplinary research is vital if media research is to contribute beyond its
own domain, become better recognized by funding bodies and other disciplines, and ulti-
mately make a difference in the handling of climate change.’

The field of climate change communication scholarship stands at an important junc-

ture. Through agenda-setting and framing, a plethora of studies have demonstrated how
the media, alongside other factors, play a critical role in climate governance. Over recent
decades there has been a burgeoning of research on the media politics of climate change
and we have clearly come a long way. However, the challenge for environmental commu-
nication is to move beyond narrow disciplinary focused ways of thinking and develop a
new conceptual and methodological toolbox to be able to adequately capture the scale
and complexity of the issues we face. Once the empirical and disciplinary terrain is
expanded we can expect to gain a fuller, more nuanced, understanding of the ideological
underpinnings of communication processes and how these are affected by socio-political
and cultural factors. This should enable more sophisticated targeting of messages and
campaigns and, alongside work on audience responses, lead to a better understanding of
the complex role of communication in persuasion and behavior change.
CONCLUSION
In summary, a number of important changes in the media landscape have occurred since
the late 1980s that have impacted on the coverage of climate science in the news media.
The division between news and public relations has become more blurred and, as the
issues have become increasingly politicized, a wider range of claims makers has entered
the news arena. Specialist journalism is declining in many parts of the Western world. The
media scene itself has become more complex with increasing multi-platform demands,
tighter deadlines, fragmentation and information overload, together with the rise of
citizen journalism. Scholars are beginning to develop more sophisticated approaches to
examine the production, content and reception of climate change news. Whilst a con-
siderable body of knowledge now exists about the role of elite national newspapers in
communicating climate science in the West, the challenge is to widen the lens beyond this
traditional domain of media research. The time is ripe for more interdisciplinary, com-
parative studies that include online as well as offline media. In particular further research
on the role of elite cues and political polarization around climate change, and how this
is variously reflected across media outlets of different ideological leanings, should enable
us to better understand the central role that socio-cultural factors play in finding ways to
solve what is probably the greatest challenge that we face today.
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29. The city
Vladimir Janković
INTRODUCTION
During the past two decades, cities have become an important battleground of
climate protection, especially since the establishment of ICLEI-Local Governments for
Sustainability in 1990 and the first world congress on cities and adaptation to climate
change in 2010 (Otto-Zimmerman 2012). Perceived as relatively independent entities, and
effective in implementing environmental policies, cities offer dynamism, scale, stronger
linkages and a sense of urgency among residents and local authorities often lacking
at national and transnational levels. These attributes make cities good candidates for
institutional climate action. Local authorities have more traction in translating global
concerns into municipal decisions and cities have expertise to develop creative climate-
oriented policies in infrastructure planning, the mobility sector and energy management
(Bulkeley and Betsill 2003). But cities need climate action for material reasons as well:
they consume massive amounts of energy and generate climate risks in virtue of their
dense morphology, social metabolisms and accelerating growth (Lindley et al. 2006).
In this chapter I introduce the concept of urban climate design—or climate sensitive
urban design (Emmanuel 2005)—to capture a set of approaches developed to counteract
adverse atmospheric effects of urban growth and socio-economic metabolism. By urban
climate design I designate the management of thermo-dynamic qualities of city airs by
urban planning and land use for the benefit of urban population, environment and the
economy. The approach is characteristic in that it tackles climate issues arising from spe-
cific historical and geographic conditions of urban life: local land use, local topography
and local urban development and form. And it draws on the substantial scientific knowl-
edge associated with ‘urban climatology,’ a discipline concerned with the interaction of
urban areas and the atmosphere. While urban climate design cannot replace the need
for addressing global climate risks by urban mitigation programs (Condon et al. 2009),
here I show how it can act as a heuristic for addressing high-impact and long-term global
threats through its ability to tackle chronic, low-impact and medium-term risks such as
air quality, street-level airflow, land use, urban heat and runoff islands, and so on (Blake
et al. 2011).
This chapter starts from the premise that current urban climate policies prioritize high-
intensity but low-frequency events such as heatwaves, flooding, sea-level rise, epidemics
and high-impact weather events (Hebbert and Webb 2012). This framing, despite its sci-
entific justification, tends to conceal the high-frequency, small-scale risks associated with
micro-variations of temperatures, urban hotspots, street-level winds, traffic heat, air con-
ditioning, sky-views, street cover, solar glare: all of which define the day-to-day life of the
urban population. I suggest that past and current examples of successful climatic designs,
however isolated, illustrate that urban planning directed towards the reduction of local
hazards has been (and could be) applied to mitigate vulnerability to environmental stress
332
The city 333
regardless of its drivers, intensity and scale. In what follows, I present these examples as
coeval with the planning of urban space and nested within the municipal mechanisms of
environmental governance, rather than laid on top of it, defying the conventional divide
between materiality and appearance of urban form. The examples of urban climate gov-
ernance discussed here need to be seen as integral to the conceptual design of urban space
as a socio-economic reality, not simply as part of local climate governance (Hyde 2000).
As Bulkeley and Betsill (2003) testify, ‘improving design is seen to be beneficial not only
from an environmental perspective, but also as a means of improving the “ livability” of
urban areas and economic regeneration.’ Thus the chapter subscribes to a broad concep-
tualization of design as synonymous with ‘the very substance of production,’ and one
that extends beyond the esthetics and into the manufacturing of objects, including ‘cities,
landscapes, nations, cultures, bodies, genes, and [. . .] nature itself’ (Latour 2008).
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The literature on urban climate governance is fast growing and is subject to ongoing
reviews (Kern and Alber 2008; Kern and Bulkeley 2009; McCarney et al. 2011). The
publication of two major ‘3C’ (cities and climate change) reports in 2011 epitomizes
the urgency and research capacity around carbon mitigation and adaptation strategies
(Rosenzweig et al. 2011; UN 2011). Cities and climate change are also the subject of
growing scientific research and expert analyses by networks such as the Alexander von
Humboldt Cities and Climate Change Network and the New York-based Urban Climate
Change Research Network. These documents summarize the scientific analyses of
(1) hazards facing the city as a result of global climatic trends, (2) vulnerabilities resulting
from city’s socio-economic and built infrastructures and (3) adaptive capacity of cities to
act using its own resources and local institutions designed to assist adaptation and miti-
gation efforts. These sets of indicators provide information on the likely climate trends,
extremes and risks for urban energy systems, water, transportation, housing and health.
While authorities recognize the necessity for long-term investments in climate action,
they also acknowledge that climate change is but one of the problems facing cities’
futures. Health, crime, development and transport often dominate over environmental
concerns. In addition, the obstacles to advancing climate action might be financial, politi-
cal or social, including a limited degree of freedom in local decision-making, external
top-down financial directives, overlapping horizontal competencies, ill-defined priori-
ties and lack of information on risks. As a result, robust climate policy necessitates that
city authorities gain more political traction in decision-making and improved access to
information used in planning bespoke climate measures (Hansjurgens and Samaniego
2011). This is especially important in light of current emphases on adaptation and resil-
ience strategies that might see faster implementation if developed in relation to economic
growth, air quality, land use or mobility (Bulkeley et al. 2009; Corfee-Morlot et al. 2011).
Adaptation policies, however, cannot be reduced to dealing solely with the risks
associated with global climate change. Cities also create their own climates. Tokyo heat
increases instability in the urban boundary layer that triggers highly localized summer
downpours (Mikami et al. 2005; Shiraki and Shigeta 2013). New York City and Atlanta
decrease the strength of thunderstorms and slow down cold fronts (Shepherd et al. 2002;

Loose and Bornstein 1977). In Hong Kong, Tel Aviv and Rio de Janeiro, sea breezes are
stopped by high-rises, leaving non-coastal residential neighborhoods exposed to stag-
nant, heated and polluted air. In mid-latitude cities, snow melts faster, rainfall decreases
and air pollution concentrations rise with the intensity of heat generated by transporta-
tion, space cooling and surface radiation. The Heat Island Group estimates that the city
of Los Angeles spends about $100 million per year in extra energy costs to offset its heat
island effect by means of air conditioning (Zimmerman 2011).
These and similar changes in local atmospheric behavior have been subject of scien-
tific interest since the eighteenth century (Janković 2013), but urban climatology as a
recognizable sub-discipline came of age with a series of interwar surveys of European,
Russian and American cities and research on turbulence, atmospheric diffusion, smoke
dispersion and ‘the climate near the ground’ (Geiger [1927] 1965; Brezina and Schmidt
1937; Kratzer 1937; Yoshino 1975). Following a series of international congresses
on air quality since the 1950s, urban climatologists became involved in air quality
monitoring programs, chemical and toxicological studies, damage assessments and
meteorological research of pollutant transport, mixing and dispersal rate (Halliday
1961). Their activities were given official status within the World Meteorological
Organization (WMO), but urban meteorologists also kept ties with the International
Federation of Housing and Planning, International Society for Biometeorology,
Conseil International du Bâtiment, World Health Organization (WHO) and United
Nations Environment Programme. At the 1968 WHO/WMO Brussels Symposium,
British geographer Tony Chandler described urban climatology as a science of ‘the
ecology of urbanized man’ (Chandler 1970). Practitioners hoped that the scientific
studies of city weathers would inspire more interaction between climatological and
planning communities, arguing that local governments could capitalize on climate
expertise to improve human comfort, reduce heat islands and control air pollution in
sprawling urban areas (Outcalt 1972).
Practitioners shared the idea that the city climate could be controlled by spatial plan-
ning and physical design. ‘We do not have to accept city climate simply as a fact, but can
influence it,’ wrote Albert Kratzer (1956). In England, Matthew Parry argued that the
city climate was an ‘artificial climate which may be modified by suitable planning’ (Parry
1956). ‘The planning of city’s climate’ (Kuhn 1959) could involve residential develop-
ment upwind from industrial areas, greening of hillsides to enable a cold air flow into
the overheated valley, or letting the sun and weather reign free among modernist build-
ing slabs. ‘Only when industrial and residential areas are brought into proper positional
relationship to prevailing winds, is a true solution reached,’ argued the Bauhaus-trained
Ludwig Hilberseimer (1944). On a more systematic basis, the Swiss architect Ernst Egli
(1951) promoted the features of traditional settlements as evolutionary adaptations to
local topoclimatology. And some of his contemporaries argued for an integration of cli-
matology into architectural design and building processes (Aronin 1953; Fitch 1947; Fry
and Drew 1956; Olgyay and Olgyay 1963; Rudofsky 1964; Rykwert 1967; Knowles 1981;
Bone 2014). But such calls struggled against the predominant post-war international style
of ornament-free, skeletal and corporate structures that severed the modernist esthetic
from the physical and climatological contexts (Spirn 1984; Droege 2002, p. 9).
Several examples of climatologically conscious planning, however, demonstrate that
the approach could be achieved in practice where local concerns met political will,

The city 335
ermissive legal context and research support to create policies designed to streamline cli-
p
matological advice into planning process (Stern 1982; Wachs and Dill 1997; Hebbert and
Janković 2012, p. 1341). Pioneering in this respect was the experience of the German city
of Stuttgart, state capital of Baden-Württemberg, whose valley location, weather pat-
terns and industrial history combined to create a smoke-laden area with high incidence
of respiratory disease. In 1938 the city established the Climatology Department of the
Chemical Investigations Office to provide advice on industrial zoning, building heights,
street alignment and the preservation of green areas (Janković and Hebbert 2012).
Today, the Section of Urban Climatology advises city officials on climatological aspects
of planning and provides comprehensive advice on the benefits of local climate design,
including recommendation on green roofs, preventive forest remodeling, preservation of
green space, green façades, local air exchange and the arrangement and height of build-
ings and street alignments. The Section uses Klimaatlas (urban climate maps) as a unique
translation device to present the city’s climatic regimes to decision-makers. The maps
have become a widely consulted tool and the national standard, currently used in Berlin,
Kassel, Freiburg, Frankfurt and Bochum (Baumueller et al. 2008; Hebbert and Janković
2012) and, internationally, especially in Japan, in Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, Fukuoka,
Okayama and Sakai (Ren et al. 2010).
Elsewhere, the New York City employed urban meteorologists as part a mayoral task
force within the City’s Department of Air Resources and run as part of the New York
Urban Air Pollution Dynamics Research Program (Davidson 1967; Bornstein 1968;
Dewey 2000; Hebbert and Janković 2012). In British Columbia, urban meteorologists
provided expertise for the siting of heavy industry in the district municipality of Kitimat
(Landsberg 1981). And following the devastating earthquake in 1961, the United Nations
based the reconstruction of the Yugoslavian city of Skopje (Galić 1964; Lin 2010) on the
masterplan developed by the metabolist architect Kenzō Tange, whose group ran micro-
modeling studies to determine the optimal relationship between air-flow and the height
of buildings, distances between blocks, green spaces and the width of adjacent streets
(Tange 1964).
Despite precedents, the twentieth-century planning of climatically fit cities remained a
largely academic exercise (Rydell and Schwarz 1968; Page 1968; Oke 1984; Lowry 1988).
The reasons are fourfold. First, knowledge transfer between climatologists to planners
has been thwarted by the lack of common vocabulary (Mills 2008; Ryser and Halseth
2008). Second, urban decision proved to be unresponsive to environmental plight as long
as public opinion did not force them to act (or when triggered by major scares). Third,
using climatology in planning made sense only ‘in cases of major expansion, urban
redevelopment, or most obviously, in new town design’ (Chandler 1970). And fourth,
from around the 1970s, planners rejected any association with practice that smacked of
environmental determinism. The planning became social intervention based on methods
of social science. More recently, however, initiatives have been launched to streamline
climatic planning across spatial, temporal and technological scales, such as those in
Stuttgart, Neve Zin, Singapore, Buenos Aires and Toronto (Rapoport 1977, 1990; Bitan
1983; Givoni 1989, 1998; Hanaki 2008; Downton 2009; Erell et al. 2011; Hebbert and
MacKillop 2013).

CURRENT PRACTICE
During recent decades, urban climatology has been given increasing attention in urban
planning (see Eliasson 2000). Initially stimulated by the energy crisis during the 1970s, the
trend has been increasingly connected to the concerns over the effects of global climate
change and bolstered by internationalism in which ‘municipalities sought new scientific,
technical and cost-effective solution to shared and global problems’ (Ewen and Hebbert
2007). Furthermore, the 1987 Brundtland Report drew attention to cities as vehicles of
sustainable development that included institutional restructuring, traffic management,
architectural design and the development of green technologies (Bulkeley and Betsill
2003). Simultaneously, entrepreneurialism pushed cities into seeking free market solu-
tions to their falling state support, marketing themselves like consumer goods and creat-
ing a market niche for the environmental ‘quality of life’ (Hall 1999; Brand and Thomas
2005). Competing cities often relied on mobilizing environmental expertise to provide
evidence or give advice in fostering local sustainability efforts. But experts were increas-
ingly involved in advising on bespoke solutions to mitigate cities’ hydro-meteorological
hazards or help with the assessments of climate-centered design projects.
In Canada, for example, the project on ‘Urban Form and Climate’ received support
from the Development Department of the City of Toronto and Architecture and
Design Division to provide estimates of the effect of downtown development on the
street level solar access, wind and thermal comfort (Bosselmann and Arens 1995). In
Hong Kong, design guidelines for the creation of city breezeways are based on the study
at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKPD 2008). In Israel, Ben-
Gurion University of the Negev’s masterplan of the Neve-Zin Solar Neighborhood is
developed to maximize the winter solar access while providing a pedestrian shade in
summer months (Erell et al. 2011). In Singapore’s Clarke Quay development project, the
umbrella-like structures on steel frames that cantilever over local stores provide shading
and rain protection while fans underneath create a cooling breeze on the pedestrian level
(Erell et al. 2011). Similarly, a group of Brazilian architects analyzed street-level venti-
lation in a densely populated area of Rio de Janeiro to show that the traditional ‘wind
catch’ (Malkaf) improved indoor comfort by allowing droughts of air (Drach 2009).
Urban climatology has also made more-than tokenistic appearances in recent cities’
ordnances. It is introduced in the new code of the municipality of Vincent Lopez in the
Greater Buenos Aires, where it controls high-rise developments in avenues parallel to
the coast and limits building heights to allow lower-level insolation (Evans and Schiller
1990/1991). Elsewhere, attention is given to protecting solar and wind rights (Kettles
2008). In Tel Aviv, micro-climate modelers, city planners and public advocacy groups
have recently negotiated the benefits and downsides of a proposed business district from
the urban climate perspective. Numerical modeling showed that the development would
interfere with the local cool air supply by westerly sea breezes (Capeluto 2003). Wind
has also become a highly valued asset in providing cities with natural ventilation (Ng
et al. 2011). In Munich’s mixed-use development Messestadt Reim, a landscaped band
400 meters wide was left open to act as a ‘fresh air glade’ (Frischluftschneise) and enable
the central ventilation of the built area, complemented by a secondary orthogonal system
of open spaces running into the housing blocks to allow the seepage of cool nocturnal air
from the south (City of Munich 1995, 2010).

The city 337
Nowhere, however, has the administrative, economic and academic life intertwined
with the climatic reality in a more dramatic way than in Tokyo, the world’s largest city
and one with the world’s highest urban agglomeration gross domestic product (GDP)—
US$1.48 trillion in 2008.
Tokyo’s urban heat island is a formidable entity. The inner-city average temperature
has risen 3°C since 1900, a rise comparable to that of Seoul but double the rate of New
York City. The release of sensible heat generates cloudbursts of rain in business districts
of Ropongi Hills and Marounuchi-Otemachi (Mikami et al. 2005). During summer
months, the urban heat island increases electricity consumption, aggravates human
comfort and health, disrupts sleep and reduces productivity. Economic loss caused
by the urban heat island-related sleep deprivation is currently estimated in excess of
US$30.7 billion annually, while the medical costs of thermal stress alone reached more
than US$7 billion (cumulatively over the past 30 years) (Ihara and Genchi 2009).
Tokyo’s urban heat island is a major economic and political issue. Its recent intensifica-
tion is linked to former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi’s ‘urban renaissance’ tied to a
major real estate boom and relaxation of Tokyo’s building height controls (Languillon-
Aussel 2014). The resulting high-rise development in the Tokyo Bay had the effect of
blocking the diurnal sea-breeze regimes and delayed the arrival of cooler air from the
Tokyo Bay (Kagiya and Ashie 2009). Responding to public pressure, in 2004 an inter-
ministerial group of the Japanese government issued an Outline of the Policy Framework
to Reduce Urban Heat Island Effects that called for a reduction in urban anthropogenic
heat emissions, alterations in the construction of street surfaces, street-tree planting, the
creation of networks of cold-air corridors, and improvements in urban structure (Inter-
Ministry Coordination Committee 2004; Iizumi and Surjan 2011). In 2005, for example,
the Ministry of Environment introduced the Cool Biz (and later Super Cool Biz) carbon
mitigation policy that set air conditioning in government’s buildings to 28°C during the
summer months (Nosowitz 2011). The policy also led to the relaxation of dress codes,
allowing workers to wear short-sleeved shirts, sandals and trousers made from breathable
fabrics. It was estimated that in 2006 the campaign resulted in a 1.14 million-ton reduc-
tion in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (Cool Biz 2006).
Additionally, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) and major developers have
since 2002 proposed to operationalize climate-centered programs through the innova-
tive Wall Greening Guidelines (2005) aimed at reducing the impact of urban climate
anomalies and GHG emissions. These measures have been supported by high-resolution
weather monitoring and mapping of atmospheric profiles in the city. The TMG runs a
network of 120 weather stations and has produced its first 500-meter resolution Heat
Environment Map showing the core ward area in several categories of heat load. The
private sector promptly responded and as part of their development in the central
Otemachi-Marunouchi-Yurakucho (OMY) district, Mitsubishi Estate Company hired
meteorological consultants to run automated weather stations to identify the sea-breeze
circulation profiles. The studies identified a layer of wind gusts at 50–200 meters high that,
due to turbulent mixing, cascade downwards to the pedestrian level. The company seized
on this fact, realizing the comfort potential of the induced turbulence as an asset in their
corporate image and marketed the sea-breeze turbulence as added value with a potential
for income increase through higher rental price based on an ecological ‘image improve-
ment effect’ (Tatsui Hishimoto, interview, July 22, 2011). Designing local turbulence

created a greener property value and complemented the conventional measures such as
grass coverage, sprinkler network, water retentive pavements and the promotion of an
early-morning lifestyle to reduce the impact of rush hours. These and other information
about the benefits of climate design are on permanent display at Mitsubishi’s high-tech
sustainability boutique, Ecozzeria (www.ecozzeria.jp).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In dwelling on the above examples, I wished to emphasize that the rationales and prac-
tices mobilized in Tokyo’s urban heat island programs reflect a multifaceted approach
to urban climate governance that involves high-end research, climate-conscious design,
behavioral changes, legislation and the use of new building and information technologies.
Some of the planning ideas—particularly those on creating new urban airways—have
involved major investments of intellectual-cum-financial capital that are also linked to
existing frameworks of sustainability, competitiveness and global climate change protec-
tion. It is important to keep in mind that initiatives like these address the endogenous
causes of urban climatic stress (such as urban heat islands and street wind regimes) and
complement adaptation and energy efficiency measures as part of global climate agendas
(Schreurs 2008; Cleugh and Grimmond 2011). One of the ‘unintended’ consequences
of mitigation against the summer urban heat island, for example, is the reduction in
greenhouse gas emissions due to reductions in electricity consumption used for air
conditioning.
But while local action can help address global concerns, the opposite is not always
true. For example, mitigation against the urban heat island—a problem without direct
connection to greenhouse gas emissions—cannot be tackled effectively through carbon
mitigation nor existing adaptation plans. The problem represents a ‘cross-cutting issue’
(Rosenzweig et al. 2011), because it includes urban land use, zoning, built environ-
ment, legal and political frameworks, urban planning and fiscal aspects. Management
of these factors has developed relatively independently of concerns regarding climate
change. In most cases, local problems spurred local action. City-specific research inspired
city-specific policies. As a result, cities that facilitated the co-production of knowledge
between urban climatologists and city planners fared better in climate protection than
those that did not (Jasanoff 2006; Corburn 2009). And this co-production has been
premised on a particularist, scale-specific understanding of the city’s socio-physical iden-
tity, in contrast to a generic approach that cannot fully account for the granularity of
climatic and political spaces of the city. In this sense, climate design evolves with the city,
not on the top of it, potentially leasing a new life to existing adaptation strategies and
enriching the possibilities of local responses to environmental threats.
Urban climate action currently has a spectrum of policy options and modes of govern-
ance that include horizontal and vertical partnerships between public, private and aca-
demic sectors. In addition to mitigation and adaptation, cities have a record of creatively
(and effectively) engaging with endogenous problems whose magnitudes and frequencies
overshadow those associated with the city-scale effects of global climatic trends. For that
reason, urban locality matters not only in the relation to political efficiency or emission
metrics but especially (and urgently) in terms of geographically-specific risks that are

The city 339
sometimes independent of creeping exogenous trends associated with the thermodynam-

ics of global climate change.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Results presented in this chapter are based on the UK Economic and Social Research
Council project Climate Science and Urban Design: A Historical and Comparative
Study of Applied Urban Climatology (RES-062-23-2134). I wish to thank Professor
Michael Hebbert for valuable advice.
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PART V
MODES AND TECHNOLOGIES

OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

30. EU emissions trading
Jørgen Wettestad
INTRODUCTION
In 2013 it became evident that European Union (EU) climate policy was at a crossroads,
particularly its ‘cornerstone’ Emissions Trading System (ETS) (Wettestad 2014). The
system had experienced several years with surpluses of allowances and low carbon prices.
When, in April 2013, the European Parliament (hereafter Parliament) rejected even a
temporary tightening of the ETS, the alarm bells rang loud and clear. Established in
2003, the ETS had started up in 2005 but was not functioning very well, so significantly
altered, ‘revolutionary’ rules for the 2013–2020 phase were adopted in 2008, introduc-
ing a much more centralized and market-streamlined system (see, e.g., Wettestad 2005;
Skjærseth and Wettestad 2008, 2010; van Asselt 2010; Wettestad 2013). The system is
so far the largest carbon trading market in the world, accounting for more than three-
quarters of international carbon trading. Current problems with the ETS – which include
not only allowance surpluses and a low carbon price but also a problematic interaction
with renewables and energy efficiency – have their roots in policy design decisions taken
back in 2007 and 2008, with the revision of the ETS for the 2013–2020 phase and the very
setup of the climate and energy package.
Linking up to the discussions about the different faces and roots of ‘policy innovation’
(see Jordan and Huitema 2013, 2014) and the modes of climate governance in focus in
this book, this chapter addresses several question-clusters of relevance. First, seeing the
changes made to the ETS in 2008 as a policy invention, what were the specific design
components of the ETS cap-setting approach adopted in 2008? To what extent and how
did they constitute a marked break with the past? What were the main determinants –
was it a model shaped primarily by EU-internal factors? Or did EU-external factors such
as learning from others play a central role? Second, with the benefit of hindsight, what
conclusions should we as researchers draw about the model – is it a ‘failed innovation’?
Or is the model in itself not to blame at all, only unfortunate circumstances? This ques-
tion has considerable policy implications: emissions trading is spreading around the
globe (Wettestad and Gulbrandsen 2015), and getting the designs right is essential if this
instrument is to contribute to a low-carbon development. Third, concerning emissions
trading as mode of climate governance, what are main promises and problems involved?
How transformative is this policy innovation?
This chapter is structured in the following manner: the next section elaborates the
theoretical and methodological points of departure. Then follows an overview of how
the cap-setting approach adopted in 2008 came about and to what extent it can be seen as
an invention. The next section focuses on the main EU internal and external forces that
shaped the approach, and then main conclusions and reflections on emissions trading as
a mode of governance are presented.
345
POLICY INNOVATION AND MODES OF GOVERNANCE
Against the backdrop of debates framing the EU as a frontrunner in developing inter-

national emissions trading (see Christiansen and Wettestad 2003; Kruger and Pizer
2004), I begin by discussing the changes of the ETS adopted in 2008, with particular
attention to the cap-setting approach, in a policy-innovation perspective. As noted by
Jordan and Huitema, policy innovation can be broadly defined as ‘the process and/or
product of seeking to develop new, widely adopted and impactful policies when existing
ones are p erceived to be under performing’ (Jordan and Huitema 2013, p. 10, emphasis
added). Jordan and Huitema identify three main facets and stages of policy innovation:
the invention of policies; their subsequent entry into use via processes of diffusion; and
their emerging impacts, requiring careful ex post evaluation. My prime focus is on the
invention stage.
When the first ETS Directive was adopted in 2003 there was opposition to adopting
a common, central cap for the EU as a whole. A decentralized approach was chosen
instead, leaving cap-setting to the member states themselves. This contributed to a situa-
tion characterized by carbon price volatility (with a sharp drop in spring 2006), a system
oversupplied with allowances coupled with cumbersome and differing national alloca-
tion processes, which left the impression of a policy that was seriously underperforming
(Wettestad 2009). A significantly different model was adopted in 2008, establishing a
common cap and a linear reduction factor extending beyond 2020. Arguably, the model
adopted in 2008 can be seen as a policy invention.
What are then main sources of policy inventions? We can roughly distinguish between
internal versus external determinants (see, e.g., Berry and Berry 2007). With regard to
internal determinants, Jordan and Huitema point particularly to the activities of ‘policy
entrepreneurs’ – innovative businesses and leader states – and the catalytic role of ‘shock
events’. Many political scientists have argued that entrepreneurship emerges when certain
actors engage more in the process than required by the formal roles they occupy (see
Kingdon [1984] 2011, pp. 179, 181; literature overview in Boasson and Wettestad 2013).
In the case of the ETS, the European Commission (hereafter Commission) has
been identified as a key entrepreneur of the persistent, ‘tortoise’ kind (Wettestad 2005;
Skjærseth and Wettestad 2008; Boasson and Wettestad 2013). The catalytic role of shocks
and crises fits in here. This naturally brings the role of policy entrepreneurs into focus.
Political crises are seldom ‘naturally delimited’; they exist as possibilities and windows of
opportunity to be widened and used for political engineering (see Kingdon [1984] 2011).
The ETS experienced a crisis in the spring of 2006, when it was confirmed that the system
was oversupplied with allowances, and the carbon price quickly plummeted.
Here I distinguish three key EU-internal factors that shaped the 2008 invention. First,
‘law’, referring to the overall climate policy targets adopted by the EU and to which the
design of the ETS must be aligned. Second, ‘politics’, focusing on the importance of
failures of existing policies and related shock events. Third, ‘economics’, focusing on the
modelling conducted in the impact assessments that underpinned the Commission entre-
preneurs’ inventive proposals (see, e.g., Dreger 2014).
As regards EU-external determinants of policy invention, theories about institutional
interaction and policy diffusion are useful. Studies of EU environmental policy have
begun to pay greater attention to how the external environment, the climate regime in

EU emissions trading 347
particular, affects EU policymaking (Dupont and Oberthür this volume; see overview in
Boasson and Wettestad 2013). These studies show that international developments and
EU internal processes are linked.
Three key global factors are the development of the global climate negotiations, the
development of global flexibility mechanisms like the Clean Development Mechanism
(CDM) to which the ETS is formally linked, and the development of the climate policies
of other central global actors such as the USA and China (Bang, Stalley this volume).
The latter factor here shows the relevance of bringing in central diffusion mechanisms
such as learning and competition/adaptation (see, e.g., Elkins and Simmons 2005; Börzel
and Risse 2012). Deciding on the ETS cap-setting model and the ambitiousness in terms
of emissions reduction targets might have been due to learning within the EU system
about the merits of earlier US approaches – for instance, emissions trading of air pol-
lutants, which we know took place in the formative stage of the ETS (see Skjærseth and
Wettestad 2008). Deciding on a level of ambitiousness is linked to the adaptation to the
policies of central global competitors and not wanting to leave the EU ‘too much’ at a
competitive disadvantage.
How can emissions trading be seen as a new mode of governance, relying more on
non-hierarchical steering? As discussed by Bäckstrand et al. (2010, p. 4), a key assump-
tion and ‘promise’ in the debate on such new modes is that ‘broad participation by public
and private actors will bring about both more legitimate and effective policy outcomes’
(see also Spaargarten and Mol 2013). This entails a focus on issues such as transparency,
inclusiveness and legitimacy of instruments. Furthermore, with the broad consensus on
the need for a transformation towards a low-carbon society, it becomes important to
discuss the transformative capacities of policy instruments. What can then be seen as
main promises and problems with emissions trading as a mode of climate governance?
How transformative is this policy innovation? I return to these issues towards the end of
the chapter.
This is a qualitative case study, which bases its main assessments and conclusions on
a broad base of evidence (triangulation). I draw on relevant earlier studies, central EU
documents, and articles from news services such as ENDS Europe and Point Carbon, as
well as semi-structured interviews with central policy actors and observers, mainly in the
Brussels-based ‘ETS community’ (see list of interviews at the end of this chapter). These
interviews were carried out in order to provide background information, with the ano-
nymity of interviewees protected.
THE PROCESS LEADING UP TO THE ETS GOVERNANCE

REVOLUTION AND CAP-SETTING INVENTION IN 2008
The first ETS Directive was adopted in mid-2003 (Directive 2003/87). It established a
three-year pilot phase (the ETS I, 2005–2007) to precede the main commitment period
of the Kyoto Protocol (the ETS II, 2008–2012). We are now in the beginning of phase III
(2013–2020). The ETS was initially established as a system in which member states would
have considerable power and flexibility, generally characterized as a decentralized system.
Key decisions about the amount (the ‘cap’) and allocation of allowances were in the
hands of the member states, who drew up National Allocation Plans (NAPs). The overall

cap on emissions became the aggregate of national caps. The overarching aim was to
achieve reductions of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in accordance with the EU com-
mitment in the Kyoto Protocol in an economically efficient manner. The Commission
was a core actor in establishing the system, but with more of a backseat watchdog role in
the subsequent national allocation processes and first phase of implementation.
Allowances were mainly handed out free of charge,1 and the system was rather narrow
in scope. It targeted first and foremost the power sector and some selected energy-intensive
industries (such as refineries, cement, steel and pulp and paper), with an initial regulatory
focus on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. As to the links between the ETS and global
climate institutions, a specific linking directive was adopted in 2004 (Directive 2004/101/
EC). This directive opened up the possibility of importing credits from third countries
through the Kyoto Protocol’s CDM from 2005, and Joint Implementation (JI) credits
from 2008. The link was initially based on a loose ‘more domestic abatement than external
credits’ rule, but was tightened in 2006. No ‘banking’ (saving) of unused allowances could
take place between phases I and II, but such banking was allowed from phase II onwards.
The EU started discussing the post-Kyoto framework and the ETS phase III already in
2005 (Boasson and Wettestad 2013); the specific ETS revision got underway in 2006. A
special working group under the second European Climate Change Programme (ECCP
II) was set up to prepare recommendations for a revised ETS in close collaboration with
major stakeholders (industry, environmental non-governmental organizations and think
tanks).
By this point, climate change had really started to climb the political agenda of member
states and EU institutions. In 2003, 39 per cent of respondents to a Eurobarometer survey
cited climate change as their main worry, increasing to 45 per cent in 2005. By 2007, this
figure had reached 57 per cent (Commission 2008a). Strongly signalling that the times
were changing with regard to EU climate policy, the Commission proposed a package of
climate and energy policies with three new ‘20 per cent’ targets (Commission 2007). The
20/20/20 targets were adopted by EU leaders in March 2007 (European Council 2007).
Most important for ETS reform was the EU’s overall pledge to cut GHG emissions by
20 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020 – and to 30 per cent if the world followed suit after
the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. Also adopted by the Council were a binding target
of 20 per cent share for renewable energy and a 20 per cent target for improved energy
efficiency by 2020.
With the backdrop of new targets and a new dynamic in EU climate policy, four
stakeholder meetings were held in the working group on ETS reform under the ECCP
II. There was a strong call for greater harmonization, although not necessarily for a
centralized EU cap. Also important were several Impact Assessments (IAs), which were
produced in 2007 and presented together with the proposal in January 2008. These IAs
were based on economic modelling, drawing on various models.
The Commission put forward the ETS reform proposal in January 2008 (Commission
2008e). Significant changes were proposed, not least with regard to the cap-setting
model. First, the Commission proposed to introduce a single, EU-wide cap, with allow-
ances to be allocated on the basis of fully harmonized rules for the period 2013–2020.
Individual NAPs from each member state would simply no longer be needed. The level
of the EU-wide ETS cap would be calculated on the basis of the target of achieving
20 per cent reductions by 2020 in terms of 1990 levels. Instead of the initial model of

similar allocations each year throughout the trading period, a model of linear reductions
was introduced. Allowances would be reduced by 1.74 per cent each year, arriving at a
reduction of ETS emissions of 21 per cent below 2005 emissions.
As the second important change, auctioning was made the main principle for all emis-
sions rights allocation. However, a key differentiation was proposed, between installa-
tions ‘engaged in electricity production’ and ‘industrial installations’. For the former, full
auctioning should be the rule from 2013 onwards, taking into account power producers’
ability to pass on the increased costs of CO2. For energy-intensive industries and other
sectors covered by the ETS, a transitional system was foreseen, with gradual reduction to
zero by 2020.
Furthermore, the links to the CDM and JI were important for the cap-setting model
and the ambitiousness of the EU policy. The Commission proposed that no new such
credits were to enter the ETS (only those banked from the 2008–2012 phase). But if a
‘satisfactory’ new global climate agreement could be agreed and a move to the more
ambitious 30 per cent EU goal actually took place, then additional CDM and JI credits
would be allowed into the ETS. As the respected think tank Carbon Trust commented,
‘the proposals for allocation amount to a revolution in the approach adopted and in
the division of powers between the EU and Member States’ (Carbon Trust 2008, p. 17,
emphasis added). At the key European Council meeting in December 2008, cap-setting
was then adopted, as proposed by the Commission in January. Concerning the method of
allocation, the Commission’s suggested turn towards auctioning was generally accepted.
As regards CDM credits, the final outcome was basically the status quo, somewhat less
strict than proposed by the Commission.
In essence then, the cap-setting model adopted by the EU in 2008 was a central part
of what was called (and as seen by many at the time as being) a ‘governance revolution’.
Compared to the initial approach adopted in 2003, this was certainly a ‘marked break
with the past’. A new model had been invented. It involved, first, significantly new ‘depth’
(with member states ceding powers and agreeing to both significant harmonization and
centralization and more ambitious emission cuts); second, a new breadth/scope of policy,
whereby external credits were continued, but would be phased out. And third, a new time
horizon was introduced, moving from a five-year to an eight-year one, combined with a
linear reduction factor extending beyond phase III. This was meant to ensure a certain
long-term investment horizon. It also put in place a system fairly well-shielded from
changing economic and political circumstances. However, this also meant inflexibility,
particularly as to the supply side.
MAIN INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL SOURCES OF THE ETS

POLICY INVENTION IN 2008
Main Internal Determinants: Law, Politics and the Economy
Turning first to legal matters, and target-setting in particular, an important reference

point is the GHG reduction target for 2020 adopted by EU leaders in March 2007:
20 per cent against a 1990 baseline (Boasson and Wettestad 2013). This was a key refer-
ence point in the subsequent development of the climate and energy package, where a

more specific target for the trading sector was set: 21 per cent reductions by 2020, with a
2005 baseline. However, it should also be noted that a target was set for the non-trading
sector in the effort-sharing agreement (although much lower: 10 per cent). In theory,
then, the overall 20 per cent reduction target could have led to a more stringent ETS cap
than what was actually adopted. But these legal targets did not come out of the blue.
They emanated from various other internal and external factors, to which we now turn.
Moving on to political dynamics the aforementioned policy innovation literature
points to the importance of ‘failures of existing policies’ and related ‘shock events’.
Such a political shock occurred within the ETS in the spring of 2006, when the verified
emissions figures for the first year of the ETS were presented, confirming suspicions of
an over-allocated market. This led to an immediate halving of the carbon price, and a
subsequent price decline in 2007 to near zero (Skjærseth and Wettestad 2008; Wettestad
2009). These events contributed strongly to the growing realization that the initial
ETS design was fundamentally flawed, and that significant changes would need to be
adopted.
With regard to wider political and societal framework conditions, there was a ‘climate
hype’ culminating in these years. The 20/20/20 targets can be seen as the EU leaders’
main response to these sentiments in public opinion. However, key policy entrepreneurs
have indicated that the targets were not strictly scientifically based but were useful politi-
cal focal points: ‘what the traffic could bear’ (Boasson and Wettestad 2013). They were
generally placed within the context of contributing to a long-term low-carbon EU (see
Commission 2007), as specified further in the low-carbon roadmap presented in 2011
(Commission 2011).
The policy innovation literature also draws attention to the role of policy entrepre-
neurs and advocacy coalitions in bringing about policy change. Previous contributions
on the ETS have clearly identified persons/units within the Commission as ‘trading entre-
preneurs’ in the EU (see, e.g., Skjærseth and Wettestad 2008; Dreger 2014). Elsewhere I
have argued that the need for entrepreneurship in this phase of the ETS was less pressing
than in earlier phases (Wettestad 2013). An important underlying force pointing towards
marked changes of the ETS was the increasing disappointment and dissatisfaction
among member states as regards the ETS’ initial performance.
This said, it is also clear that the Commission played a central role this time around
as well; indeed, many of the same key persons in the Commission who had helped
to bring about an EU ETS in the first place were central in developing the markedly
changed ETS design for phase III – Jos Delbeke and Peter Zapfel, to name two of them.
The Commission’s capacity to innovate was bolstered by external consultants: five such
reports were listed in the annex to the impact assessment.
However, there were also forces at play seeking to counter the role of the Commission
and the development towards a much more centralized system. In order to understand
the adoption of a cap-setting model characterized by supply inflexibility, it is important
to bear in mind member states’ interests in retaining as much power as possible and hence
seeking to restrict the Commission’s areas of competence. Furthermore, as discussed in
greater detail elsewhere (Skjærseth and Wettestad 2010; Boasson and Wettestad 2013),
2008 was a busy year for climate policy discussions in the EU. With regard to the ETS
revision, the cap-setting issue seemed to drown amid a myriad of other issues – this goes
for the centralization of the system, the level of the cap, and the linear reduction factor.

Discussions revolved predominantly around the method of allocation, and particularly

the turn to auctioning.
Turning then to factors related to economics and modelling, as regards the specific
ETS Assessment, the cap-setting issue was a central element of section 5, ‘Further
harmonization and increased predictability’, of the IA (Commission 2008b). Section 5
devoted considerable attention to the challenge of finding an approach that could avoid
the competitive distortions experienced in the initial years of the ETS. Rereading these
passages today, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the assessment was more concerned
with economic efficiency than environmental effectiveness. Furthermore, in discussing
objectives in connection with cap-setting, the three main possible factors singled out as
warranting certain flexibility in cap-setting were ‘new information on e.g. actual climate
change, technological developments and actions undertaken elsewhere in the world’
(Commission 2008b, p. 94).
With regard to the length of trading periods, the IA concluded that the option of a
‘long’ trading period, from 2013 to 2030, was ‘too long . . . lacking flexibility to adapt to
new information’ (Commission 2008b, p. 102). A period lasting to 2020 was seen as better,
and the inclusion of a trend-line factor would mean additional long-term predictability.
Such an approach would strike ‘the best balance between predictability and flexibility’
and also be ‘most effective in increasing the EU’s credibility vis-à-vis third countries’
(Commission 2008b, p. 103).
Another IA discussed the ETS revision, the overall GHG target and the renewables
ambitions in combination (Commission 2008c). In the Annex to this IA it was gener-
ally noted that ‘there is a clear interdependency between ,RES and GHG. targets’,
and that putting in place a renewables policy would lower the carbon price necessary to
deliver GHG reduction commitments (Commission 2008d, p. 35). But the possibility of
problematic interaction between renewables growth and ETS dynamics was not discussed
in further detail.
What factors can then help to explain the modelling process? A first thing to note
is that leading figures such as Delbeke and Zapfel were economists; this may have led
them to prefer certain types of knowledge in the groundwork for the revision, over, for
example, expertise in sociology or political science. However, an institutional pathway
explanation should be added. Brussels insiders point out that the specific modelling
work for the ETS revision was a natural extension of the modelling done for the 20/20/20
targets back in 2006 (interviews 2014).
Furthermore, it is essential to recall that the years in focus here (primarily 2006–
2008) were pre-financial crisis years with rather stable growth and related expectations
for the future. This was reflected in the IAs and the reports underpinning them. The
main gross domestic product growth assumptions for the period 2005–2030 in the IAs
amounted to an increase of approximately 43 per cent by 2020 and 71 per cent by 2030
(Hermann and Matthes 2012, p. 27). With the benefit of hindsight, it seems odd that,
given the history of capitalism with the repeated ebb and flow of crises and growth,
the possibility of a financial crisis was not considered. Both the possible detrimental
effects on demand of economic variations and the inflow of CDM credits were disre-
garded, as researchers and analysts have pointed out (e.g., Ecofys 2006; Point Carbon
2007).
Here, interviewed Brussels insiders mention several factors that can shed light on this:

first, it was not seen as politically advisable for the Commission to indicate, in any way, to
the member states that the economic growth could collapse. As one official explained, ‘it
is a system bias to be optimistic’. Furthermore, it was also pointed out that a modelling
exercise with a low economic growth scenario was anticipated to lead to accusations of
‘trying to make ETS compliance look cheap’, and was hence avoided. Third, the recession
proved to be unexpectedly deep, and a significant future allowance surplus had simply
not been on the agenda back in 2007/2008 (interviews 2014).
Central External Determinants: Global Interaction and Policy Diffusion
Generally, EU climate policy in the years 2006 to 2008 was conducted in a global context,
with EU policy and targets meant to inspire and help bring about a positive outcome at
the 2009 Copenhagen summit. But the 20/20/20 targets were not shaped by some sort of
global estimates or modelling, linked to the 2°C target, which the EU embraced back in
1996.
One important factor is that it was written into the revised directive that a satisfactory
deal at the Copenhagen global climate summit in 2009 would mean that the EU would
raise its 2020 reduction target to 30 per cent, and there would be a formal proposal from
the Commission on a reassessment (and tightening) of the ETS cap (Article 28). Hence,
interaction with the global climate negotiations probably had a somewhat ambiguous
effect on the design of EU cap-setting. On the one hand, the need to underpin the EU’s
negotiating position in Copenhagen with an improved EU climate policy bolstered the
case for a more centralized and streamlined future ETS. On the other hand, the prospects
of a further tightening of the ETS in the wake of a successful Copenhagen outcome may
have reduced the drive to establish an ambitious initial ETS cap.
As regards diffusion and learning, initial ETS design discussions had demonstrated
that the Commission favoured a quite centralized cap-setting model, inspired by the
US SO2/NOx model (Skjærseth and Wettestad 2008). Both Delbeke and Zapfel had
studied US emissions trading. In the process leading up to the model adopted in 2008,
Commission ETS entrepreneurs took note of the developing Waxman–Markey climate
bill in the USA. They admired the long-term vision of the Waxman–Markey proposal
and its linear trajectory, which inspired the 1.74 per cent linear reduction factor in the
ETS (interviews 2014).
CONCLUSION
The cap-setting model adopted by the EU in 2008 was a central part of what has been
termed a ‘revolution in EU governance’, responding to a situation where the existing
policy was seen to be underperforming. A new model was invented, one that combined
significantly new depth with new breadth/scope and a new time horizon.
Analysis of the main determinants reveals both internal and external drivers. Internally,
the crisis in the spring of 2006 contributed to a window of opportunity for entrepreneur-
ship and invention. The broader EU climate and policy context shaped both the overall
level of ambition and the time horizon for the ETS phase III. Member states seeking to
restrict the Commission’s room for manoeuvre helped to bring about a cap-setting model

characterized by inflexibility. As to EU-external factors, the level of ambition was also

shaped by the hopes of a breakthrough at the Copenhagen 2009 summit and a global
deal that could pave the way for subsequent ETS tightening. The introduction of a linear
trajectory was inspired by proposed US legislation.
Subsequent events may lead to the conclusion that the model was a failed innova-
tion. A significant surplus of allowances has accumulated, leading to a carbon price
too low to promote a low-carbon transition. However, do the problems really stem
from the model itself – or do they stem from other framework conditions, internal
and external to the EU? In my view, some of the criticisms raised are rather unfair. In
2004 the ETS was hailed as the ‘new grand experiment’, but there was limited experi-
ence to build on. Furthermore, the financial crisis from 2008 onward took everyone
by surprise.
Still, there are some questions related to the model. Several analysts have queried
a model based on inflexible supply of allowances and uncertain demand. Both the
possible detrimental effects of economic variations and the inflow of CDM credits
were pointed out by some actors, but were disregarded. To some extent, this was
because Commission officials did not deem it politically feasible to present gloomy
economic prospects to the member states. In turn, the proposal put forward in January
2014, on establishing a market stability reserve (MSR), can be interpreted as accept-
ance by central EU officials that the model adopted in 2008 had flaws (Wettestad
2014).
Finally, reflecting on emissions trading as a mode of climate governance, what are
main promises and problems involved? Judging from the EU ETS experiences, the
promises include the ability to put climate concerns higher on corporate agendas, even in
periods of low allowance scarcity and a volatile carbon price (Wettestad 2011; Skjærseth
and Eikeland 2013). Further, emissions trading is an instrument welcomed by key target
groups, the power sector in particular. As scarcity will increase gradually over time,
and with it the carbon price, there is a long-term potential for driving the low-carbon
transformation, and hence policy effectiveness. Point Carbon analysts have estimated a
carbon price in the last half of the 2020s at around €30, assuming that the proposed MSR
mechanism is adopted (Point Carbon 2014).
In the meantime, the challenge is to design complementary policies that will not
further erode the very effectiveness and the legitimacy basis of emissions trading. The
proposed MSR mechanism may point the way to a system better equipped to handle
reduced demand brought about by the success of other policies such as renewables
and energy efficiency. How transformative is this policy innovation? On that point, the
jury is still out. Thus far, the transformative contribution of even the EU ETS has been
moderate. However, the long-term potential to drive the low-carbon transformation is
there – and there hardly seems to be a feasible or more effective alternative for common
EU policy.
NOTE
1. In the pilot phase, member states were allowed to sell up to 5 per cent of their allowances. This limit was
increased to 10 per cent in the 2008–2012 period (Christiansen and Wettestad 2003).

LIST OF INTERVIEWS
Delbeke, J., DG Climate, European Commission, Brussels, 27 January 2011.
Egenhofer, C., CEPS, Brussels, 19 November 2012.
Eggert, A., EUROFER, Brussels, 4 June 2014.
Eickhout, B., European Parliament (by telephone), 29 November 2012.
Scott, J., EURELECTRIC, 21 November 2012.
Van Ierland, T., DG Climate (by telephone), 1 July 2014.
Vis, P., DG Climate, 26 January 2011, 4 June 2014.
Wyns, T., CCAP, Brussels, 19 November 2012.
Zapfel, P., DG Climate, 20 November 2012, 5 June 2014.
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Diffusion, paper presented at the ISA Convention, New Orleans, 18–21 February.

31. Low-carbon economies
Heather Lovell
INTRODUCTION
The chapter reflects on how more than two decades of sustained effort at climate change
mitigation has resulted in a variety of new practices, rules and ways of doing things: a
period of active construction of low-carbon economies. Carbon as a commodity is best
known within formal, carefully delineated carbon markets, but in this chapter I introduce
the idea that low-carbon markets and economies have been constructed and operate in
many other sites and arenas—be it housing, infrastructure networks or forests. In this
way, the diversity of contrasting low-carbon markets and economies is celebrated and
brought to the fore. By taking a broader view of what economies and markets are, fol-
lowing the lead of Foucault and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars such
as MacKenzie and Callon, it is possible to see how diverse things, activities, values and
objects constitute low-carbon economies, ranging from outer space observations of the
carbon in tropical forests, to carbon financial reporting and insulating solid masonry
walls. Low-carbon economies are thus much broader and more porous than we might
suppose, and located and embedded within a diversity of sites.
The main aim of the chapter is to explore the sites and spaces of governing low-carbon
markets and economies, examining where they are being experimented with and created,
how and by whom. By ‘sites’ here I mean particular localities or places. ‘Spaces’ denotes
flows and bodies of knowledge, ideas and expertise that are more dispersed and not nec-
essarily geographically-anchored. Ideas from STS in particular usefully draw our atten-
tion to the more unusual arenas where climate change is being integrated into economies
and markets, such as spaces of professional expertise as well as mundane everyday social
and technical sites—the home, district heating centers, energy meters, control panels and
so on. In this way, the intention is to broaden our gaze beyond the more typical arenas
where climate change research on markets and economies has, to date, been located,
namely cities and regions (Bulkeley et al. 2010), particular infrastructures—for example,
electricity, wastewater, transport (Chatzis 1999; Evans et al. 2001)—and corporations
(Gouldson and Bebbington 2007; Okereke 2007).
The chapter is structured conceptually—according to bodies of scholarship—for
each set of ideas usefully points our attention to slightly different locales. First, STS
approaches to the study of markets are outlined, which concentrate our attention on
two issues: first, the micro-scale—the detail of where low-carbon economies and markets
are made; and, second, the materiality of markets and economies—the technologies and
objects that they comprise. Examples of the governing of climate change through markets
and economies within financial accounting and forests are briefly explored. Second,
Foucault’s ideas about the economy are introduced, including the notions of governmen-
tality, discourse and framing. A Foucauldian approach encourages critical analysis of
where and how new low-carbon markets and economies are made and governed. Carbon
356
Low-carbon economies 357
a ccounting and forest carbon markets are explored as examples (see also Stripple and
Bulkeley this volume). In the third and final concluding section of the chapter, the impli-
cations of thinking about the location of governing climate are further explored, and it is
argued that it does indeed matter where low-carbon economies are made.
Before proceeding, some key terms are defined, including ‘market’ and ‘economy.’
Markets sit within economies, and are more discreet. Markets can be defined simply as
‘any context in which the sale and purchase of goods and services take place’ (Pearce
1986, p. 263, cited in Lie 1997), but from a sociological perspective this definition prob-
lematically ignores the social and cultural aspects of markets. Fligstein and Dauter (2007,
p. 105) hence define markets with social issues at their core, as ‘social structures charac-
terized by extensive social relationships between firms, workers, suppliers, customers,
and governments.’ Zelizer (1989, p. 349) similarly defines markets as ‘the interaction of
cultural, structural and economic factors.’ Bringing social issues into the study of markets
thus broadens the concept of markets, and makes the boundary between a market and
an economy fuzzier. An economy in its modern usage is taken to mean ‘the state of a
country or region in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services
and the supply of money’ (Oxford Dictionary 2014), as well as encompassing the careful
management of resources (as in economizing and minimizing waste). Foucault draws our
attention, however, to the way that the meaning of ‘economy’ has changed over time (see
later discussion). He explains how up until the seventeenth century, ‘economy’ was about
the sound management of the household—about caring and providing for the family
unit: ‘this idea of the economy . . . at that time only ever referred to the management
of a small ensemble comprising the family and the household’ (Foucault 2007, p. 103).
So it was not until relatively recently, in historical terms, that a new, broader notion of
economy was introduced into political practice and, crucially, the economy became ‘a
field of intervention for government’ (Foucault 2007, p. 95).
In terms of how to distinguish between a market and an economy, Lie (1997, p. 342)
acknowledges that it is hard to find a comprehensive definition of a market, and its
relationship to wider economies, noting ‘the market, it turns out, is the hollow core at
the heart of economics.’ Lie’s approach is to embrace the ‘blurred boundaries’ between
markets and economies and this is the approach adopted here, acknowledging that there
is a continuum from a discrete market to a broader economy, which makes attempts at
neatly defining markets and economies rather futile. Indeed, the case of climate change
and low-carbon economies and markets provides a good illustration of these blurred
boundaries in practice (Lovell 2015).
STS APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING LOW-CARBON

ECONOMIES AND MARKETS
An STS approach to understanding markets and economies takes seriously both the
detail and the material substance of markets: their technologies, as well as their eve-
ryday, mundane operation. In this way, the diversity and particularity of markets and
economies is paid close attention to, including the practicalities of their operation, their
materiality, emotional qualities, sociality and agency (Callon 1998; Barry and Slater 2002;
MacKenzie 2006; Smith et al. 2006; Hardie and Mackenzie 2007; Pryke 2007; Munro and

Smith 2008). STS scholarship on markets and economies is not limited to one discipline,
but can be found located within sociology, human geography, urban studies and beyond
(see, for example, Smith et al. 2006; MacKenzie 2008; Jones 2014). However, for simplic-
ity in this chapter the broad term ‘STS approaches to markets’ is used to capture all such
scholarship with a shared interest in the heterogeneous, sociotechnical relations that
constitute markets and economies.
The concept of agencement (also variously referred to as assemblage, hybrid/relational
or heterogeneous network approaches) constitutes a core bedrock of this field of schol-
arship, in particular the micro-scale, detailed case studies of particular markets that
populate the field (Callon 2007, 2009; MacKenzie et al. 2007). Callon borrowed the term
agencement from Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 2004) as for him it usefully ‘conveys the
idea of a combination of heterogeneous elements that have been carefully adjusted to one
another’ within markets (Callon 2007, p. 319). Agencements are not just a static arrange-
ment of people, things, materials and their meanings, but they have, collectively, and as
a matter of necessity and routine, the capacity to act. Agencement scholars are united by
a shared interdisciplinary ambition to ‘unpack’ the black box of the market (MacKenzie
et al. 2007; Pryke 2007; Mitchell 2011). The core concern is with the detail of what
those markets consist of and how they are put together; literally with their assemblage.
Empirical research has therefore mostly concentrated on ‘bottom up’ micro-structural
studies of markets. A characteristic of markets highlighted by these micro-structural
accounts is that they have geographies and histories—they are embedded in particular
places and evolve over time (Callon et al. 2007), as Callon clearly states: ‘These [market]
regularities, related to the stabilization of particular forms of organization of market
relations, remain limited in time and space. It is therefore wrong to talk of laws or, worse
still, of the law of the market. There exist only temporary, changing laws associated with
specific markets’ (Callon 1998, p. 47).
Thus, in Callon’s analysis, the location of markets is significant and worth attending to,
because markets are conceived of as ‘limited in time and space,’ and thus subject to geo-
graphically variable laws, practices and ways of doing. We see this, for instance, in studies
of carbon offsetting projects, where, despite all projects producing ostensibly the same
thing—a greenhouse gas emission reduction—there is a wide variety of technologies,
practices and rationales at work (Lohmann 2005; Lovell et al. 2009; Bumpus 2011). Such
diversity is indeed celebrated within the voluntary carbon offset market, but is sought
to be erased in the so-called ‘compliance’ or regulated carbon markets, administered by
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (see Lovell
2010).
Applying the concept of agencement more generally to the governing of climate change
markets and economies, a number of insights are evident. First, that a relatively new
(and big) issue like climate change sits outside of already existing market agencements,
and therefore is at a structural disadvantage: climate change either has to fit within exist-
ing market sociotechnical relations—and in so doing ‘become economic’—or requires a
more fundamental upheaval. This tension between continuity and change is observed, for
example, in the arena of financial accounting, where since 2006 there has been no guid-
ance for financial accountants on how to account for emission allowances (a new type
of commodity brought into being by the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme,
in operation since 2005). Initial guidance was withdrawn after protest, and nothing has

been issued by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) since (Lovell et al.
2013; Lovell 2014a). While some accountants conceive of the issue of emission allowance
accounting as relatively minor, for others it reveals significant problems in the overall
operation of international financial accounting standards, with leading accounting
organizations such as Deloitte warning that:
Given the pervasiveness of the issue [of emission allowance accounting] and the current lack of
guidance in IFRSs [International Financial Reporting Standards] on dealing with such schemes,
there is a considerable risk of divergent practices emerging and of national or regional regula-
tors introducing their own requirements to fill the gap in IFRSs, thus diluting the status of
IFRSs as a comprehensive set of financial reporting standards. (IASB 2011)
Existing relations in the agencement of financial accounting are thereby somewhat under
strain.
Second, taking seriously the notion of market agencements being embedded in par-
ticular places, with particular geographies and histories (Callon et al. 2007) implies that
a diverse array of empirical sites of investigation is required, in order to fully com-
prehend where (and therefore how) new low-carbon economies are being made. Thus,
for instance, as well as researching cities, regions and homes as places of low-carbon
innovation, more unusual sites and spaces such as ecosystems, outer space, agricultural
fields and professional spaces also need to be taken into account. My own research on
carbon markets and low-carbon economies has, for example, taken me into the offices
of carbon offset organizations to conduct a form of corporate participant observation,
as well as to the board room of the IASB, and participation in the technical working
group of a carbon accounting standards organization (see Lovell 2015). Others have
explored weather financial trading desks (Pryke 2007), the labs of photovoltaic sci-
entists (Mawyin et al. 2014), and the air conditioned spaces of Singapore (Hitchings
and Lee 2008). Such geographical diversity in climate change empirical research needs
to be applauded and further encouraged, a point returned to in the conclusion to this
chapter.
Third, notwithstanding the important beginnings laid out by Callon and Muniesa
(2005), the essentially descriptive exercises of the constitution of markets and economies
within agencement scholarship are less good at accounting for what happens (or what does
not happen) when a new, significant policy problem that has the potential to disrupt—
such as climate change—arrives on the scene. In other words, the idea of agencement
has most often been empirically applied to cases of rather static, discrete markets; and
to date less commonly used to consider the way markets and economies might radically
change and innovate over time. Indeed, for Callon ‘lock-in’ is seen as a largely positive
feature of markets—the endpoint of a process of ‘becoming economic’—rather than a
position at the midst of struggle and change (Callon 1998). There is an obvious practical
and conceptual tension here in the role of lock-in within markets, for although there is a
need to have order and stability in markets so that they are workable and understandable
to market actors (Callon’s approach), this then becomes problematic for governments
and others trying to effect innovation and change. Such issues of change—especially the
politics of change—are turned to below in consideration of the work of Michel Foucault
and associated scholars.

FOUCAULDIAN APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING LOW-

CARBON ECONOMIES AND MARKETS
In this section a number of ideas about the economy from the social scientist Michel
Foucault are briefly introduced, as well as consideration of the relevance of his work on
framing and governmentality to understanding the emergence and governance of low-
carbon markets and economies. The aim is to explore how Foucault’s insightful inter-
disciplinary analysis helps us to understand where (and how) new low-carbon markets
and economies are enabled or constrained, through the operation of discourse, frames
and rationalities, that is, different ways of seeing and thinking about problems such as
climate change, and their solutions (Stripple and Bulkeley this volume). Two key points
are made: first, that multiple framings of the economy and climate change exist, and that
these frames may operate in quite a discrete way in time and space, such that they only
rarely overlap; and, second, that Foucault’s notion of governmentality can encompass
technologies as well as discourse, and in this way complements STS approaches to under-
standing markets. Examples of carbon accounting and forest carbon markets are drawn
upon to substantiate the points made, and to show their relevance for climate change gov-
ernance and related research, in particular investigation of the geographies of governing
low-carbon markets and economies (Turnhout et al. this volume).
The Geography of Frames
Foucault wrote about many things and topics, and in truth the economy is not fore-
most among them. For instance, he deliberately avoided the study of capitalism (Lemke
2002). However, Foucault’s scholarship in his later years—lectures and writings from the
1970s—includes analysis of shifts in the role of government in relation to the economy,
from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. It is in Foucault’s 1978 lecture series entitled
Security, Territory, Population (translation 2007) that he charts in detail a broadening
in the meaning of economy and its scale of operation, from the family, to national and
international scale. He explains how up until the seventeenth century ‘economy’ was
about the sound management of the household—about caring and providing for the
family unit. So it was not until relatively recently, in historical terms, that a new, broader
notion of economy was introduced into political practice and, crucially, the economy
became ‘a field of intervention for government’ (Foucault 2007, p. 95), as Foucault
explains:
To govern a state will thus mean the application of economy, the establishment of an economy,
at the level of the state as a whole, that is to say, [exercising] supervision and control over its
inhabitants, wealth, and the conduct of all and each, as attentive as that of a father’s over his
household and goods. (Foucault 2007, p. 95)
These issues Foucault raises speak directly to the contemporary issue of climate mitiga-
tion, because of the overall framing of climate change as an economic problem, and the
complex and highly politicized process of transition of climate change from a scientific
problem to something that is part of the management of the state. In this way Foucault’s
insights about how broad notions of the economy have been merged with the state and
politics in the past provide a platform to enable us to explore the more specific issue of

reframing of existing economies, as well as the making of new economies, in light of

climate change.
Framing is defined as ‘a way of selecting, organizing, interpreting and making sense of
a complex reality to provide guideposts for knowing, analyzing, persuading and acting’
(Rein and Schon 1993, p. 146). Frames are important to observe and recognize because of
their pervasive influence, and yet ironically ‘Because [frames] are part of the natural, taken-
for-granted world, we are often unaware of their role in organizing our preconceptions,
thoughts and actions’ (Rein and Schon 1993, p. 151). Frames can operate at different levels.
For example, what Foucault is analyzing in his writings on the economy is a large-scale
shift in frames. With climate change—because of the diversity of approaches underway to
mitigate the problem—frames operate at multiple scales. Further, these frames can operate
in a discrete way, such that different interpretations, analysis and action on climate change
can coexist reasonably happily. Research on carbon accounting—pivotal to the making
of new low-carbon markets and economies—nicely illustrates these observations. Ascui
and Lovell (2011) analyze five different frames of carbon accounting—physical, politi-
cal, market-enabling, financial and social/environmental—each characterized by relatively
distinct organizations, types of expertise, practices and understandings of climate change
as a problem. Further—and importantly for the analysis here on the spaces and sites of
low-carbon economies—the arenas in which the carbon accounting frames are to be found
similarly have little overlap. Hence, for instance, the physical carbon accounting frame occu-
pies the expert science meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
international universities and research centers. In contrast, the financial carbon accounting
frame is located within the international and national accounting standards organiza-
tions and expert financial accounting interest groups, such as the International Energy
Accounting Forum and European Financial Accounting Advisory Group (International
Energy Accounting Forum 2010; EFRAG 2014). The geographies of these carbon account-
ing frames are different, and this is a key reason why the frames only rarely intersect. This
is important because it is the intersection or collision of frames that facilitates learning and
innovation (Rein and Schon 1993; Hajer 1995; Sharp and Richardson 2001).
Governmentality: the Discourses and Technologies of Low-carbon Markets and

Economies
Foucault’s notion of governmentality encompasses attention to discourse as well as

the technologies or ‘techniques’ of government (Dean 1999; Foucault 2007; Li 2007;
Lovbrand and Stripple 2010; Stripple and Bulkeley, this volume). In this way, the mate-
riality of low-carbon economies and markets is deemed to be of interest, an approach
therefore with synergies to the STS theories of markets explored above. For Foucault, a
key shift in political economy took place when states were able for the first time to gather
and use statistical knowledge about their populations to exert new forms of disciplinary
control, implemented via standards, rules, monitoring and auditing. Indeed, for Foucault
these ‘disciplinary technologies’ were prerequisites for the rise of modern capitalism
(Rabinow 1984; Lemke 2002), as Rabinow explains:
Disciplinary technologies . . . preceded modern capitalism. In Foucault’s argument they are
among its preconditions . . . The growth and spread of disciplinary mechanisms of knowledge

and power preceded the growth of capitalism in both the logical and temporal sense. Although
these technologies did not cause the rise of capitalism, they were the prerequisites for its success.
(Rabinow 1984, p. 18)
The crucial point here, in considering how low-carbon economies are made and where
they are made, is that for Foucault the creation and framing of economic subjects is
an ongoing process achieved not just through discourse but also through technologies.
His twinning together of discourse (‘rationalities’) and instruments, practices and tech-
niques (‘technologies’) is the essence of governmentality (Dean 1999). The implication
for the study of low-carbon markets and economies is that the technical capability to
provide market relevant information on climate mitigation (carbon statistics and data)
is integral to the successful framing and operation of low-carbon economies. But also,
as leading scholars have observed (Lohmann 2009; Lovbrand and Stripple 2010; Boyd
et al. 2011), the ‘measure to manage’ rationality that pervades carbon markets and low-
carbon economies in itself limits climate mitigation action within a relatively narrow
band of things and activities that are cost-effective, and that can be measured and
monitored. An economic framing of climate change thus places boundaries on what is
viewed as credible, acceptable and workable. For example, in the case of forest carbon
markets (REDD1) accurate measurement of forest carbon has become a key element
of attempts to integrate forests more fully into international climate policy through
markets (Grainger 2009; Lovbrand and Stripple 2010; Lovell 2014b; Turnhout et al.
this volume). An immense amount of work has gone into measurement, reporting and
verification (MRV) of the carbon stored in forests; MRV is viewed as the cornerstone of
this type of carbon market; for example, one recent United Nations REDD (Reducing
Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) program publication notes that:
the potential benefits [of REDD1] for non-Annex One parties will be based on results that
must be measured, reported and verified. The precision of these results therefore has a major
impact on potential financial compensation, and the capacity to measure forest carbon stocks is
thus of increasing importance for countries who plan to contribute to mitigating climate change
through their forest activities. (Picard et al. 2012, p. 17, emphasis added)
The thrust of REDD1 policy is hence about making forests governable through markets,
bringing them into the realm of the state and the economy through collecting data,
standardizing and quantifying them. The specific appeal of remote sensing can be better
understood by conceptualizing forest carbon MRV as a type of disciplinary technology
underpinning the construction and operation of forest carbon markets. Of particular
note here in considering the sites and spaces through which such low-carbon markets
manifest and operate, is the expert, professional arenas within which forest carbon MRV
has been most active. Remote sensing and forest ecology are two expert domains that
are both positioning themselves as best equipped to measure forest carbon (UN-REDD
2008; Tollefson 2009; FCPF 2011). But there are also international development non-
governmental organizations (NGOs)—long active in community forestry and poverty
alleviation—that are increasingly involved in REDD1 MRV discussion and policy
debates (see FCPF 2011). Further, it has been noted how several REDD1 organizations
carry with them previous rationalities and technologies—ways of thinking and doing—
based on their historical work in the tropical timber industry (forest ecology, remote

sensing) or community resource management (international development NGOs) – that

continue to have influence (Lovell 2014c).
CONCLUSIONS
In this brief analysis, two areas of scholarship—STS and Foucauldian approaches—have

been reviewed because they usefully draw our attention to the more unusual, hidden and
obscure sites and spaces where low-carbon economies and markets are being constructed
and operate. Applying an STS approach helps us to consider the detail of where and how
low-carbon markets and economies have emerged, as well as directing our critical gaze
at their materiality. Foucault’s scholarship provides a welcome correction and comple-
ment to STS perspectives on markets: first, because of his interest in the operation of
broader economies rather than smaller, more discrete markets, combined with a critical
questioning about what an economy is, and how this has changed over time; and, second,
because of his attention to, and positioning of, technologies or techniques as fundamen-
tal to understanding the politics of change, through his development of the concept of
governmentality.
What unites the different theories of STS approaches to markets and Foucauldian
scholarship is a shared concern with the relations between people and technologies
(broadly defined), and thus a capacity to provide us with a richer understanding of how
in practice climate change is being implemented, made sense of and made ‘real.’ Because
to date climate change has been understood primarily as an economic problem, this is
where our conceptual attention must focus. Climate change provides a valuable empiri-
cal avenue for using these theories to strengthen our understanding of how markets and
economies change in response to a new problem—including the work involved in resisting
low-carbon changes within existing economies, as well as the construction of new, more
discrete low-carbon markets. Climate change can shed light on longstanding—and still
largely unanswered—questions about what provokes change in markets and economies,
when and why. To answer these questions we need to understand how the complex entan-
glements or networks of humans, materials, institutions, politics and technologies that
comprise markets and economies adjust and respond to big new problems. On the one
hand, the perspectives of STS and Foucault’s ideas about political economy all (in dif-
ferent ways) provide the encouraging message that markets and economies are mutable:
their technologies, values and outcomes are all amenable to change. On the other hand,
as some of the brief examples provided here indicate, there is a futility in efforts to effect
radical change without more clearly understanding the complexities of why a particular
market or economy is resistant to change, including close attention to its heterogeneous
relations. It is suggested here that an integral component of markets and economies that
helps to explain their complexity is their spatiality: how they are constituted within—and
they themselves help constitute—particular sites and spaces. We therefore need to care-
fully observe and pay more attention to the obscure arenas that are nonetheless vital to
the making of low-carbon economies and markets, in particular the hidden professional,
technical and expert sites and spaces where new low-carbon markets and economies are
variously forged, governed and resisted.

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32. Carbon accounting
Esther Turnhout, Margaret M. Skutsch and
Jessica de Koning
CARBON ACCOUNTING AND THE WILL TO IMPROVE THE

CLIMATE
Climate governance relies on standardized science-based methodologies to offer evidence
for the existence of global warming, to underscore the need for action, and to develop
options. These methodologies are an important ingredient of what has become known as
carbon accounting. Carbon accounting involves procedures to track emissions and assess
the effectiveness of climate mitigation actions in a standardized way by expressing their
results in terms of a common unit, the ton of carbon dioxide equivalent, which represents
the amount of carbon emissions that were prevented or mitigated. It is used by a wide
variety of actors and organizations that are seeking to make visible, reduce or compen-
sate for the climate impact of their activities. Through carbon accounting, global climate
policies are able to travel to and produce effects in a wide variety of localities ranging
between farms, businesses, government agencies and forests. However, the global does
not enter the local in a seamless and smooth way. Rather, forging global–local connec-
tions involves friction and ‘universal claims do not actually make everything everywhere
the same’ (Tsing 2005, p. 1). Thus, despite the insistence on their standardized character,
methodologies of carbon accounting forge specific global–local connections and the
effects they produce are also specific to those connections.
In this chapter, we use the example of REDD1 and the accounting of forest carbon
to outline the variegated workings and effects of carbon accounting as a technology
of climate governance. REDD stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and
Forest Degradation; the 1 signifies that other processes (forest enhancement, sustainable
management of forests and conservation) may also be considered (Betts and Schroeder
this volume). REDD1 aims to reduce emissions and increase carbon sequestration in
forests by awarding performance-based payments to developing countries. The role of
emissions from deforestation and forest degradation has long been recognized by the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (Melo-Vasquez
et al. 2014). Under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), afforestation and refor-
estation projects were included and also the voluntary carbon sector includes a broad
scope of approaches aimed at reducing or avoiding emissions from forests. Increasingly
such projects are using standardized methodologies that are developed by global
initiatives such as the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) or the Climate, Community
and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA). At the 11th Conference of the Parties in 2005, the
first steps were made towards the establishment of REDD1. Since then, REDD1 has
become one of the most hotly debated topics within the UNFCCC with discussions
focusing on how to finance REDD1 payments, how to distribute these payments, and
366
Carbon accounting 367
how to measure and account for forest carbon (Gupta et al. 2012, 2014; Skutsch et al.
2014).
Forest carbon initiatives, such as those taking place under the auspices of REDD1,
the CCBA and other policies and schemes, all attempt to improve the climate and the
forests by creating incentives that motivate actors to act towards these ends. In Li’s (2007)
words, they illustrate a ‘will to improve.’ ‘Will to’ is used here to scrutinize the effects of
these initiatives in a way that goes beyond a ‘simple’ evaluation of success and failure.
Specifically, we suggest that exploring how improvements of climate and forest are
defined, and by whom, are crucial components of analyzing the effects of improvement
projects. As such, we contend that the evaluation of improvement is not something that
takes place after improvement has been defined but rather, that the act of evaluation itself
shapes the meaning of improvement. In other words, the way in which improvement is
measured and evaluated is constitutive of the meaning of improvement itself (Li 2007).
Seen from this perspective, carbon accounting becomes a potential site of politics where
meanings and objectives, measurement tools and forest carbon stocks and flows are
jointly negotiated and co-produced (Gupta et al. 2012; Lippert forthcoming).
In the next section, we continue our conceptual discussion of carbon accounting as a
technology of climate governance. We then introduce some of the basics of forest carbon
accounting that will serve as a basis for a further exploration of its workings. Using
examples from published literature in political ecology, global governance studies and
science and technology studies, we illustrate both the constitutive role of global carbon
knowledge and the political subjectivities that shape and are shaped by carbon account-
ing. We conclude the chapter by outlining a research agenda for social science research
into environmental knowledge and accounting practices.
CARBON ACCOUNTING AS A TECHNOLOGY OF

GOVERNANCE
In the previous section, we have argued that measuring improvement and defining
improvement are not separate but mutually constitutive. This conceptualization of
counting and measurement draws on multiple perspectives in science and technology
studies and political theory that center on notions of co-production, performativity and
governmentality (Stripple and Bulkeley, Beck, Lovell this volume). We wish to empha-
size here that while the activity of (ac)counting (for) carbon is structured by the policies
and guidelines of the global climate regime, this activity at the same time constitutes an
object of global climate governance. Carbon accounting is then not simply imposed from
above, but neither is it up for grabs to be freely appropriated by individual local actors.
Thus, carbon accounting illustrates what Foucault has called ‘the conduct of conduct’
(Foucault 1991a), an activity that both controls and frees subjects, without presupposing
that control and freedom are mutually exclusive (Rose 1999).
The mutual constitution of control and freedom (or agency and structure to use
common terms in the social sciences) is a central theme in Foucault’s work and particu-
larly in the concepts of power and discipline. As Foucault shows perhaps most clearly in
Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1991b), disciplinary power does control subjects but this
control only exists by virtue of an active subject that ‘chooses’ to subject her/himself to

it. Importantly, we do not assume a consequential logic here: (disciplinary) power—its

meaning or intentions—does not pre-exist but materializes in the practice of subjectiva-
tion. Also, in using the word ‘choosing,’ we do not imply consciousness or intentionality,
but wish to emphasize that subjectivation is an active process, not one of passive imposi-
tion. Thus, climate governance is not simply imposed from outside but translates into
practice: ‘In the dynamics of translation, alignments are forged between the objectives
of authorities wishing to govern and the personal projects of those organizations, groups
and individuals who are the subjects of government’ (Rose 1999, p. 48). These alignments
result in what may be called ‘local atmospheres of consent’ (Dressler 2013, p. 251); spaces
where actors not just comply with but also, and at the same time, interpret, negotiate and
resist policies and programs.
Li (2007) argues that ‘rendering technical’ is an important element of current forms of
governance. Before governance can take place, the problem to be solved has to be ren-
dered technical, opening it up to expertise, knowledge and numbers (Hulme this volume).
In the case of REDD1, the problems of climate mitigation and forest conservation
are rendered technical through the promotion of forest carbon accounting as a means
to represent and enhance the effectiveness of forest management. Thus, forest carbon
accounting operates as a technology of climate governance, which enables global forest
and climate programs and policies to produce effects on the ground. However, in keeping
with what we have argued above, these technologies ‘are never simply a realization of a
program, strategy or intervention: whilst the will to govern traverses them, they are not
simply realizations of any simple will’ (Rose 1999, p. 52).
‘Rendering technical’ is not an end-stage of a process, and the technical can become
political again and vice versa (Li 2007). Thus, carbon accounting is not just an i nstrument
that disciplines subjects and conducts their conduct, but also, and at the same time, a
site of politics and contestation. Importantly, the fact that plans never work according
to plan is not a reason to dismiss them as merely ‘symbolic’ and juxtapose them with
the ‘truth’ of what is going on in the real world. Both the global climate regime and its
systems of carbon accounting, and their messy consequences in practice are real and both
merit analytical attention and critical scrutiny (Li 2007).
Thus, the usefulness of our perspective on carbon accounting as a technology of
governance lies in (1) its ability to highlight the effects that carbon accounting produces
in practice, (2) its recognition of the dialectics between on the one hand global climate
governance, REDD1 and forest carbon accounting systems as outside interventions that
control local subject and on the other the situated agency of these local subjects in the
practice of carbon accounting, and (3) its rejection of problematic and essentialist dual-
isms between the programs and their implementation, between control and freedom, or
between compliance and resistance.
ACCOUNTING FOR FOREST CARBON
In its most basic definition, accounting tracks stocks and flows of certain units on a
balance sheet that scores what has come in and what has gone out. Equivalence is of
key importance; for accounting to work, the stocks and flows must all be made equiva-
lent by expressing them in standardized quantitative units. Commonly, the unit used is

monetary, but accounting can also be done with other units; for example, carbon dioxide
equivalents.
While the practice of accounting is most commonly associated with economics, house-
holds or firms, it is increasingly applied to nature and environment. As environmental
policies and measures compete for scarce resources in the public domain, the idea has
developed that they must be shown to be effective by means of transparent and reli-
able information. Consequently, environmental audits have exploded just like business
and financial audits, demonstrating the ever increasing neoliberal paradigm and its
‘patholo[gy] of excessive checking’ (Power 1997, p. xii). In the case of environmental
accounting, environmental expertise plays a crucial role in designing systems to measure,
report on and verify (MRV) the performance of policies and measures, and the account-
ing of forest carbon is no exception to this. It is a highly technical matter, the basics of
which are explained below.
Forest carbon emissions are considered to be a direct function of change in forest
biomass and associated changes in carbon stocks in soil. They are measured in terms of
area change of forest over time (activity data) and emission factors, which relate to the
loss of carbon per unit area of any given forest. Activity data are generally measured
using time series of satellite images and ground-level forest inventories or models. The
recommended measurement methods are described in various Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) guides and these are embedded in the methods used by VCS
and CCBA. Countries are expected to progress gradually from simple to more advanced
and data demanding methods.
Carbon accounting however, implies much more than the measurement of carbon
stocks and flows—in itself a complicated enough affair—and involves a wide variety of
calculative practices (Lippert 2013), involving the comparison of data over time. While
the Greenhouse Gas Inventories use gross-net accounting, REDD1 uses something
akin to net-net accounting where future rates of change are compared to earlier rates of
change. Net-net accounting requires the establishment of national level baselines (the so-
called RELs: Reference Emission Levels, which cover only emissions, and RLs: Reference
Levels, which also cover removals resulting from ‘forest enhancement’), which project
past tendencies in carbon losses/gains over a given reference period (say 1990–2007) into
the future accounting period (say 2015–2025). If emission rates during the accounting
period drop below the baseline, they may be certified for performance payments. This
enthrones the hallowed notion of additionality: payments are only issued for results that
are above and beyond what would have happened in a ‘business as usual’ scenario.
However, the construction of the REL/RL (the ‘business as usual’ scenario) is not just
a technical matter; it may be adjusted according to national circumstances, which is to
say it is negotiable with the UNFCCC. For example, a country may argue that although
it had a low deforestation rate in the past, it is currently on the cusp of a period in which
deforestation would (without REDD1) have accelerated rapidly, and that a straight line
from the past is therefore unrealistic (e.g., Guyana). This will of course give more room
for earning performance related payments, and thus the credibility of such arguments
will be considered by UNFCCC on a case-by-case basis. In addition, the dates for the
reference period can also be strategically chosen with the aim of maximizing deforesta-
tion in the baseline.
There are many other difficulties in forest carbon accounting. Among these is the

definition of ‘forest.’ For the sake of the Kyoto Protocol, most countries defined forest
as woody vegetation with a canopy cover more than 30 percent, even though their own
national definitions usually used 10 percent. Then there is the question of whether
man-made timber and agricultural plantations (e.g., palm oil, avocado) count as forest;
ecologists generally being solidly against this notion while certain national governments
(e.g., Indonesia, Malaysia) strongly support it. A second difficulty relates to storage. For
example, some of the carbon dioxide in timber from deforested areas will be stored in
timber products and will not be immediately emitted. Although the potential for such
storage is recognized by the UNFCCC and the IPCC, the technical difficulties of measur-
ing these quantities are such that they are currently ignored.
Finally, the centrality of the principle of additionality in forest carbon accounting in
REDD1 leads to a number of problems. One of these is how to account for conserva-
tion. Conservation was included as one of the five elements in REDD1 at the 2007
Conference of the Parties, when India pointed out that as a result of its pro-forest policies
in the past 20 years, it no longer had any deforestation and could therefore not participate
in REDD1 and so would in essence be punished for its earlier policies. The parties recog-
nized the need to reward conservation, but it is still unclear how this would work in prac-
tice. The problem is that conservation is not additional—it does not reduce emissions or
increase sequestration and therefore unlike all the other elements of REDD1, it cannot
be measured in terms of changes in carbon flux, in tons per annum, and it cannot be
credited in those terms. This presents a problem not only as regards carbon performance
payments at the international level but also within country REDD1 programs; not
rewarding those forest owners who have conserved forests in the past and continue to do
so, while rewarding those who earlier deforested and have now improved management, is
likely to be perceived as unjust and may function as a perverse incentive (Balderas Torres
and Skutsch 2012).
Thus, while the principle of carbon accounting in REDD1 is simple enough—pro-
viding evidence for avoided emissions realized through reduced deforestation and forest
degradation—in practice, forest carbon accounting is riddled with technical and other
difficulties. Despite attempts to better represent actual avoided emissions, it has to be
recognized that, in part, uncertainties are unavoidable, among other reasons because
linking improvement objectives to measurable indicators and parameters inevitably
involves an element of interpretation; a ‘creative leap’ that cannot be justified with refer-
ence to reality. In light of this, it becomes important to consider not just how well carbon
accounting represents real avoided emissions but also, and more importantly, what
carbon accounting does and what kinds of effects it produces in practice. This will be the
focus of the next two sections.
THE CONSTITUTIVE ROLE OF CARBON KNOWLEDGE
It has to be recognized that accounting is not a neutral measuring tool; it is highly selec-
tive in terms of what is measured and how. Moreover, this selectivity is informed by the
specific ends to which these measurements are to be used. As Scott (1998) explains, the
point of the legibility projects he describes is not to represent reality, but to foreground
a specific version of reality that is relevant for policy purposes and to recreate reality to

better match with the version that is represented. In other words, accounting knowledge is
performative: it works to create the world after its own image. After all, we see, know and
govern only those qualities and characteristics of the forest that are included in knowl-
edge and accounting systems. Thus, the indicators and parameters used in forest carbon
accounting systems bring a specific version of the forest into being; one that is rendered
technical and legible and thereby amenable to improvement according to the logic of
forest carbon accounting (Gupta et al. 2012). This constitutive role of knowledge is well
documented in a number of studies related to corporate carbon accounting (Lippert
2013, forthcoming), biodiversity databases (Bowker 2000), economics (MacKenzie et
al. 2007) and social science methods (Law 2004). These contributions all point to the
fact that while attempting to represent reality, in our case forest carbon, knowledge in
fact co-constitutes that reality, among others by reifying the categories that are used to
package knowledge, in our case stocks and flows of forest carbon.
The emphasis that is put on accurate carbon accounting methods as a measure of
the success of climate governance, illustrates the presence of what has been called a
‘measurementality logic’ in global climate governance. This logic privileges science-based
techniques to generate reductionist knowledge packaged exclusively in terms that are
considered policy relevant (Turnhout et al. 2014). These globalized, reductionist, techni-
cal and carbonized (Gupta et al. 2012) representations of the forest will likely appeal to
global climate science and governance actors, not least those who have vested interests
in the promulgation of procedures requiring high-level technical and professional skills
(notably remote sensing interpretation and modeling). However, by rendering invisible
other aspects of the forest, and the meanings that these have for people, they also risk
alienating and disenfranchising local actors including forest dependent people. This is
also recognized within the UNFCCC negotiations. Lövbrand and Stripple (2006) show
that while some countries were positive about the potential of REDD1 to generate triple
wins in practice, other countries were more skeptical and addressed issues of owner-
ship, sovereignty, local rights of indigenous communities and control. This even led to
resistance against the dominant framing of forests as a common heritage by Northern
countries. Specifically India and Malaysia questioned the global representation of forests
and forest carbon as they saw it interfering with development intentions and forest man-
agement practices in the Global South (Lövbrand and Stripple 2006). This interference
was also documented by Fogel (2004). She underlined that, in spite of the enthusiasm
at the global level, the CDM and its credit-based global carbon market were disputed.
Globally framed win–win solutions such as tree-planting projects for carbon often met
with feelings of exclusion and resistance among local communities. Fogel (2004) argues
that in part this was due to the way in which forests were represented: as carbon masses
that could be managed at the global level, with the CDM as the technical instrument
to accomplish this. This representation of the forest did not recognize the existence of
local communities, their relationships with the forest, their local knowledge, and the
possible social consequences of the CDM. Mahanty et al. (2012) offer a succinct example
of how global forest carbon programs may alienate local people, in this case in Papua
New Guinea. Here, the REDD1 program and its framing of forest carbon projects
as opportunities for win–win–win outcomes triggered political struggles over land and
forest resources and over who would be able to profit from REDD1. Although Papua
New Guinea has a strong and formally recognized system of devolved community land

and forest tenure, the national government argued that local actors lacked appropri-
ate knowledge about forest carbon and kept full control over carbon accounting at the
central level. As in the previous example, carbon knowledge was viewed as largely tech-
nical, to be controlled at the central level, with no role for local landowners in carbon
accounting (Mahanty et al. 2012).
What this section has shown is that global forest carbon knowledge produces effects
that are unrelated to and go beyond the question of how well this knowledge does its
job of representing reality. First of all, by representing forests and forest carbon at the
global level, it feeds into and strengthens the idea that the management of forest carbon
is a technical matter to be handled using global level instruments. Second, the global rep-
resentations that this approach involves do not directly include people, their livelihoods
and their relations to the forests. There is a risk that the global forest carbon knowledge
system erases them (and their specificity) not just from view but also from climate gov-
ernance itself. Even when local forest actors may know about and believe in the potential
of REDD1 to impact—positively or negatively—on their livelihoods in practice, the
technical framing of the REDD1 carbon accounting systems may serve as a constraint
for their effective involvement.
THE DYNAMICS OF COMPLIANCE AND RESISTANCE AND

THE MAKING OF CARBON SUBJECTIVITIES
As we have argued earlier, carbon accounting procedures are considered crucial for the
credibility and legitimacy of policies. Payments can only be awarded if reductions in
carbon emissions through forest management can be shown by means of accurate data.
However, accounting, like many other measurement systems and particularly those that
are tied to policy, is not just a measuring tool to represent performance, it also intends
to steer this performance in desired directions. This works according to the following
general mechanism: (1) the activity of making performance transparent triggers manag-
ers to reflect on and improve their performance; (2) transparent information is used to
hold managers accountable for their performance or lack thereof (Gupta and Mason this
volume); (3) the possibility of outside scrutiny and accountability acts as a further incen-
tive for managers to improve their performance (Turnhout et al. 2014). This mechanism
demonstrates how carbon accounting operates as a technology of climate governance.
Carbon accounting invites forest managers to behave in a carbon-smart way and shape
their management practices so that they will maximize their reduced carbon emissions.
However, their efforts are co-produced by the specific characteristics of the accounting
systems. Forest managers are invited to maximize performance in a particular way or, put
differently, they will maximize a particular performance; that which is made to count in
the accounting system. They are incentivized to use and optimize the categories and indi-
cators of the accounting systems, which are taken to be representative of performance. It
should be noted that REDD1 intends to focus not just on carbon but also on safeguards
that are supposed to represent the non-carbon benefits or forests related to biodiversity,
cultural values, social equity and so on. However, because of the difficulties of defining
and measuring these often intangible factors, it is unclear how they will be accounted for
and how they will be taken into account in performance payments in REDD1.

However, the power of carbon accounting systems in shaping behavior is not absolute
(no form of power ever is). The practice of working with, around or against programs,
standards or policies opens up space for politics (Li 2007) and there inevitably remains
scope for local actors to exercise forms of situated agency. This is also well-known in the
accounting and public management literature about performance measurements and
audits that documents numerous examples of forms of resistance against or co-optation
of these systems (Power 1997). Ottinger (2010) offers a useful example of citizens using
standardized methods for monitoring local air quality. These standardized methods were
not just a source of constraint but also of empowerment as the citizens were also able
to use them to their own ends in order to challenge official air quality records (Ottinger
2010). In a similar vein, Lippert’s (2013) ethnography of corporate carbon accounting
details the situated agencies and practices of environmental bookkeepers, managers and
strategists, who simultaneously enact compliance of and dissent with norms.
The point is that there will always be aspects of performance or quality that can be
left outside the scope of the indicators and categories that are included in standardized
accounting or measurement systems and that similarly, it is always possible to interpret
indicators and categories in such a way that aspects of performance can be represented
through them. Thus, actors can use their discretion to render specific performances visible
and invisible, while still complying with the system. In other words, instead of overesti-
mating either the disciplinary power exercised by standardized systems of measurement
and accounting or the strategic agency of the actors using them, we suggest that agency
has to be seen as decentered: it does not reside in individual actors but is situated and
exercised in the relation between actors and carbon accounting systems (Arts et al. 2014).
As we explained earlier, this situated agency is exercised in ‘atmospheres of consent’
(Dressler 2013), which involve mixtures of compliance and resistance that cannot be dis-
entangled. In these atmospheres of consent, subjectivities are produced and identities are
articulated, but these identities and subjectivities are not stable. Mathews’ (2011) analysis
of forest policy and management in Mexico illustrates this point well. Going back and
forth between formal bureaucracies and local communities, Mathews (2011) shows how
policies both travelled and failed to travel to distant localities, how they both succeeded
and failed to succeed, and how local actors both consented to and resisted these policies.
For REDD1 and forest carbon accounting, the dimensions of situated agency and the
making of subjectivities are under-researched. There are some indications that this may
be happening in the case of forest carbon as Lahsen (2009) and Mahanty et al. (2012)
have shown that stakeholders and countries developed some form of counter expertise.
However, these accounts do not offer an in-depth analysis of the local negotiations that
take place when forest carbon accounting is ‘implemented’ and of the dynamics between
the technical and the politics and between compliance and resistance involved. Thus,
what we have outlined in this section can be seen as a conceptual framework and an
agenda for research.
One area that research could usefully focus on is community monitoring. Community
monitoring has already been recommended by UNFCCC as a component of national
MRV for REDD1. Given the fact that most national governments in developing coun-
tries are unable to supply data on degradation rates, which unlike deforestation rates,
cannot be estimated with any accuracy using remote sensing, they will be unable to
claim performance related payments for any reductions in degradation. Community

onitoring at ground level may soon be seen as a cost-effective solution to this. In princi-
m
ple this could be a way for local actors to engage in this site of politics and it could offer
them the opportunity to re-enroll themselves in the representations of the forest from
which they have been erased. It has been suggested that formal community monitoring
may help to increase not only the acceptance of REDD1 but also the voice of com-
munities within the globalized system. Raising their level of information about how the
performance-based system works and including their data may result in the opening up
of a greater space for agency in the accounting system (Palmer Fry 2011).
However, this will not be easy for a number of reasons. Communities are likely to be
faced with doubts (from external professionals and policymakers) about their expertise
and with concerns over data reliability (Mahanty et al. 2012). Moreover, communities
will have to comply with standard national protocols for data collection and reporting,
while their main interest is likely to integrate any such monitoring with their own locally
perceived requirements for data within their own management systems (Danielsen et al.
2011).
Thus, also here, standards function as a double-edged sword (Ottinger 2010). While
on one hand, compliance with standardized forest carbon accounting systems offers
communities access and a voice, on the other, in doing so, communities will at least to
some extent be contributing to their own erasure from global representations of the
forest (Fogel 2004). This may end up reducing local knowledge and livelihood diversity.
Ironically, community monitoring may only work for local communities when they start
seeing and enacting the world according to the carbon logic of global climate governance.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, we have outlined a perspective on forest carbon accounting as a technol-

ogy of governance and as a point of connection between global climate governance and
forest management practice. Our perspective has been inspired by a Foucauldian perspec-
tive on power that enabled us to critically examine the dynamics between, on one hand,
the way in which standardized carbon accounting and measurement systems control
actors and structure action and, on the other hand, the ways in which actors work with,
around, or against these systems in practice. Important aspects of our conceptual per-
spective have been (1) to highlight how control and freedom and compliance and resist-
ance are not each other’s opposites but go hand in hand in practice (Rose 1999; Dressler
2013; Mathews 2011) and (2) to focus the attention on the dynamics between the techni-
cal and the political (Li 2007).
We have used examples from the published literature to illustrate the double-edged
nature of global knowledge, standards and representations. First of all, we have shown
how global knowledge presents the world as a mass of carbon, essentially devoid
of people and amenable to global governance, and how such centralized knowledge
threatens to erase local people from view and to alienate them in practice. Second, we
demonstrated the situated agency of actors and the ways they can use accounting and
measurement systems to their own end while still complying with them.
Generally speaking, the chapter has followed Tsing (2005) in arguing that global
governance is never simply ‘implemented’ locally, but operates through provisional


g lobal–local connections that are characterized by frictions. Some aspects undoubtedly

get lost in the many translations that take place when policies and programs travel back
and forth between formal bureaucracies and local forests. Global standardized knowl-
edge can only be generated if it focuses on the categories of interest to global governance,
in our case carbon and, consequently, if it excludes other aspects related to for example
local livelihoods and human–nature relations. However, this lack of recognition does
not make local actors powerless in the face of this knowledge, and the rise of the idea of
‘safeguards’ in REDD1 may be a platform that they can use to promote their own values
and needs. Although this aspect is currently under-researched, it is clear that carbon has
a social and political life and that carbon and safeguard accounting may be used to desta-
bilize as well as institute forest management practices (Mahanty et al. 2012).
Further analyses are necessary for a clearer view of what happens when global–local
connections are forged between global climate governance, REDD1, carbon account-
ing methods and local forest management practices. We suggest that community based
carbon monitoring and accounting offers a particularly fruitful site for research that will
be able to shed light on how exactly the dynamics between control and freedom, between
compliance and resistance and between standardization and diversity play out in practice.
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33. Multi-stakeholder governance
Hannah Betts and Heike Schroeder
INTRODUCTION
Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, conserving and enhanc-
ing forest carbon stocks and sustainably managing forests in developing countries
(REDD1) is a strategy to engage forested developing countries with mitigating climate
change (Corbera and Schroeder 2011; Turnhout et al. this volume). The involvement
of non-state and hybrid actors in governance – for example, civil society, business and
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Pattberg and Stripple 2008; Falkner 2003),
represents a transformation of political rule in countries such as Indonesia (Lövbrand
and Stripple 2012). This chapter examines how the pluralist ideal of multi-stakeholder
governance, born of Western political ideals, has gained resonance in a post-colonial,
post-authoritarian state such as Indonesia. This is done through looking at the imple-
mentation of REDD1 in Indonesia.
Indonesia contains the third largest area of tropical forest in the world (World Bank
2007) and holds the largest number of REDD1 projects worldwide (Cerbu et al. 2011).
The decentralized nature of Indonesia’s forest governance presents complexities sur-
rounding the effective implementation of REDD1 (Indrarto et al. 2012), making it a rich
case study for the landscape of state, non-state and hybrid actors involved in REDD1
governance. This chapter draws upon field research and 21 expert interviews conducted
in 2013 to analyze how REDD1 is acting as a vehicle for multi-stakeholder governance
in Indonesia. It begins with an overview of the state of deforestation, forest governance
and REDD1 in Indonesia. It then examines who is governing REDD1 and what is
shaping or limiting multi-stakeholder governance in Indonesia, and ends with a set of
conclusions.
DEFORESTATION, FOREST GOVERNANCE AND REDD1 IN

INDONESIA
With forests covering 60 percent of the country (UNORCID 2013), Indonesia has one
of the highest deforestation rates in the world (Margono et al. 2014; Murdiyarso et al.
2012). In September 2009, the former Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
announced a voluntary commitment of 26 percent reductions in overall emissions by
2020, extended to 41 percent with international assistance, with forestry sector emissions
to be reduced by 14 percent. This was coupled with a 7 percent economic growth rate
target by 2014 (Resosudarmo and Yusuf 2009). The new president, Joko Widodo, elected
in July 2014, pledged to create a climate agenda linked to national economic develop-
ment. However, Indonesia’s developing economy is highly dependent on the forestry
sector, as well as other sectors that threaten forested areas (Indrarto et al. 2012), making
377
policies contradictory. The decentralized nature of Indonesia’s forest governance creates

three levels of state governance within Indonesia, at national, provincial and district
levels (Irawan et al. 2013). Districts are autonomous; therefore controlling their own
forests (Wollenberg et al. 2006).
Within Indonesia’s national government, responsibility for forests falls to the Ministry
of Forestry (MOF) (Luttrell et al. 2011; Brown and Peskett 2011), which is now
merged with the Ministry of Environment and called the Ministry of Environment and
Forestry (MEF). Responsibility for implementing and governing REDD1 does not fall
directly under its remit, however. Instead, it is controlled and managed by the REDD1
Management Agency (BP REDD1), which was established in 2013.
The national and provincial governments are responsible for allocating forest estate
between land uses, but the right to approve forest permits was decentralized in 2002 to
district governments (Busch et al. 2012), meaning forest monitoring and enforcement is
shared between national and district governments (Brockhaus et al. 2012). Three issues
stand out in Indonesian forest governance: poor coordination among ministries, limited
forest management capacity at multiple levels of government and corruption or rent-
seeking (Mulyani and Jepson 2013).
Although REDD1 has a history of strong presidential backing under President Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono, it is at risk of not reaching its objectives unless there is sufficient
engagement and ownership from key members of parliament, ministries and bureaucracy
(Luttrell et al. 2014). The nature of coalition politics in Indonesia further weakens the
ability to implement reforms (Brockhaus et al. 2012). Hence, major reforms, including
those linked to REDD1, are unlikely to take place without parliamentary and public
support (Butt et al. 2013), accompanied by a strong consensus among the broader public
in Indonesia (Luttrell et al. 2014).
The government, through the MOF (now the MEF), is receiving international support
for improving forest management (Edwards et al. 2012), such as the 2010 bilateral
arrangement and Letter of Intent between Norway and Indonesia (Fisher et al. 2011).
Norway pledged US$1 billion in performance-based payments for emission reductions
(Sloan et al. 2012). In return, Indonesia agreed to create a REDD1 National Strategy
and an independent agency for monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) as well as
to enforce a moratorium on issuing new licenses for forestland concessions (Murdiyarso
et al. 2011). The REDD1 Management Agency (BP REDD1) (formerly the REDD1
Transition Team and the REDD1 Taskforce, SATGAS) was set up as part of the
Norway–Indonesia deal. It is an independent central agency, and is of cabinet level,
directly responsible to the president of Indonesia, and tasked with leading and coordi-
nating the national effort to reduce the country’s carbon emissions (Santosa et al. 2013).
Most recently, however, BP REDD1 has been disbanded and merged with the MEF.
Restrictions on forests will directly impact the 36 million Indonesians dependent upon
forests and resource extraction for their livelihoods (Wollenberg and Springate-Baginski
2010; Indrarto et al. 2012; Dermawan et al. 2011). REDD1 also brings tenure and land
rights into play, specifically those of indigenous people (Corbera et al. 2011; Doherty and
Schroeder 2011). The Constitutional Court of Indonesia acknowledged the land rights of
indigenous peoples in May 2013, making them a stakeholder in climate governance. This
creates a starting point for the inclusion of non-state and hybrid actors within REDD1
governance.

Multi-stakeholder governance 379
MULTI-STAKEHOLDER GOVERNANCE
Emerging theories of governance have made significant progress towards a deeper under-
standing of the role and capacity of non-state actors in addressing climate change and
other environmental problems. We understand governance here to transcend national
boundaries, link different levels of governance and enable traditional and non-traditional
policy actors to play their parts. We emphasize in particular the interrelated and increas-
ingly integrated system of formal and informal rules, rule-making systems and actor net-
works at all levels of governance that are set up to steer societies toward certain outcomes
(Biermann et al. 2010).
Global governance and multilevel governance, which grew out of the study of the
process of ‘Europeanization’ and the subsidiarity principle in the late 1980s and early
1990s, have emerged in opposition to the state-centric ontology of traditional interna-
tional relations theories (Gulbrandsen 2010; Hooghe and Marks 2003). The state is no
longer the sole or even principal source of authority in international systems (Lövbrand
and Stripple 2012). Decentralization has led to states becoming more than just national
states (Eckerberg and Joas 2004), encompassing subnational levels of authority as well
as non-state and hybrid actors (Okereke et al. 2009; McDermott 2013), demonstrating
potential for vertical and horizontal interplay between actors (Cash et al. 2006). Due
to limitations in the reach or effectiveness of the state to tackle global environmental
challenges, non-state actors have entered the governance arena with specific resources
(finance, political influence, cognitive or moral legitimacy) (Dingwerth and Pattberg
2009).
This has led to the creation of actor networks engaged in governing global environ-
mental affairs at different sites and levels of authority (Bulkeley and Schroeder 2011;
Bäckstrand 2008). The ‘network society’ directs attention from rigid top-down, state-
centric, hierarchical forms of government to less formalized modes of governance that
reflect an appreciation of mutually interdependent stakeholders (Andonova 2010; Burch
et al. 2013; Termeer et al. 2010).
The role of stakeholders is increasingly recognized within multilevel and multilateral
environmental processes; for example, in the form of major groups or constituencies.
Stakeholders can be individuals, groups or organizations holding a stake in the outputs,
outcomes and impacts resulting from the process. In other words, they are those who are
recognized by the process as being directly affected by it, while having a limited level of
influence within it. Multi-stakeholder governance (MSG) focuses on the way in which
stakeholders are involved in such processes (Newell et al. 2012; Forsyth 2009), implying
coordination or collaboration among stakeholders to increase their level of recognition
and influence. We apply this focus to Indonesia to see how such Western thinking trans-
lates to a post-colonial, post-authoritarian political system, using the REDD1 mecha-
nism as our case study.
WHO IS GOVERNING REDD1 IN INDONESIA?
The Indonesian government created BP REDD1 and with that placed REDD1 outside
the remit of any single ministry and outside the control of any single actor. This agency

is the pivotal point of Indonesia’s REDD1 MSG design.1 The interlinking nature of
actors involved, from international to district levels, forms a complex REDD1 network.
It includes donors, multilaterals, bilaterals, United Nations (UN) agencies, private sector
actors, academia, international NGOs and local NGOs.
Bilateral linkages and agreements, specifically the Letter of Intent between Norway
and Indonesia, are formulated at the national level, linking external state to domestic
state stakeholders. These linkages bring hybrid actors into play, such as UN agencies,
holding state and non-state characteristics. Non-state actors also play a role at the
national level, in particular large NGOs and companies (Betsill, Okereke this volume).
State influence is strongest at the national level, whereby activities are carried out via
SATGAS. SATGAS was tasked with creating BP REDD1, which will be the overall
authority of REDD1 in Indonesia, and therefore a central stakeholder. BP REDD1
recently appointed deputies for operations, technology systems and monitoring and gov-
ernance and institutional relations, reflecting a holistic attention to governance, monitor-
ing, finance and technology (UN REDD 2014). However, REDD1 in Indonesia has
coordination problems between the ministries and SATGAS prior to the completion of
BP REDD1; in turn slowing the policy process. This point has come to fruition in recent
months, with the merger of the Ministries of Environment and Forestry. BP REDD1
has been absorbed into this ministry as well, along with the National Council on Climate
Change, leaving questions as to its authority and legitimacy as a stakeholder, as well as
part of the Letter of Intent being left in question. There is a need for coordination within
the MEF between all these stakeholders to avoid repeats of the ‘love/hate’ (state actor
comment) relationship between the MOF and the Taskforce.
The MOF has historically been one of the wealthiest and most powerful ministries, but
its capacity to implement REDD1 is limited by decentralization. The emerging multi-
stakeholder process on REDD1 in Indonesia is attempting to combat this difficulty
through its incorporation of non-state and hybrid actors. The country finds itself in a
problematic cycle in terms of governance, with efforts made to exert effective governance
hindered by claims to authority. This is a significant limitation to Indonesia’s capacity
to implement REDD1 (Mulyani and Jepson 2013). This being said, there is a belief on
the ground in Indonesia that momentum is gathering for REDD1, with non-state and
hybrid actors ‘bringing the additional expertise to conduct REDD1 activities’ (provin-
cial level state actor comment).
Wollenberg et al. (2006) highlight the autonomy of districts within Indonesia. As such,
districts are not under obligation to implement REDD1 strategies. This gives power to
district state actors, holding the potential to be a limiting factor in the implementation of
REDD1 (Indrarto et al. 2012). Non-state actors are included at every level of REDD1
in Indonesia, although their role is supportive to the state. They are also prominent at
provincial and district levels of governance, highlighting that they have a greater role
within the implementation phases of REDD1 than they do with regards to policy.
Hybrid actors represent a different approach to REDD1. Their role is very similar to
that of non-state actors, supporting the state and implementing projects at district levels.
However, hybrids are unique in that they can operate at the national level and carry their
projects through to the local level, due to their state linkages. District and village facili-
tators represent an important link between the community and the REDD1 process,
increasing levels of participation within projects and aiding knowledge transfer. The

fluidity of the boundary between stakeholders facilitates inclusiveness by allowing for

the ‘involve[ment] of local people . . . and for them to have a stake in REDD1 activities’
(national level state actor comment).
UN agencies are a key factor to the success of REDD1 in Indonesia, with ‘UN agen-
cies working here [Central Kalimantan] . . . each of them have their own mandates, and
their own way of doing things’ (provincial level non-state actor comment). Hybrids such
as these are helping to ‘increase the transparency of REDD1 in Indonesia’ (district-
level non-state actor comment). Working alongside other hybrid organizations they are
helping to bridge the gaps between national and subnational levels, where there are gaps
of awareness and knowledge regarding REDD1.
There is a key difference between national and district-level governance objectives, and
awareness of this across levels of governance: ‘The national objective is carbon, the local
objective is livelihoods’ (district-level state actor comment). Stakeholders at national and
district levels also see the future of carbon differently: ‘Carbon at the local level is still
important, yes people may not understand what is carbon but it must still be included
and they will learn’ (national level state actor comment) versus ‘carbon . . . can maybe
come very long time away, but for now it is the livelihoods that are important . . . carbon
confuses people’ (district-level hybrid actor comment).
Non-state and hybrid actors have the most visible influence at the district level. ‘The
methodologies, the safeguards . . . the actual implementation on the ground . . . the
Indonesian government can’t do this alone, it’s a massive country’ (national-level hybrid
actor comment). Further to this, ‘collaboration is the principle being put forward, we
have to have a multi-stakeholder approach’ (national-level state actor comment). This
highlights that the state acknowledges its limited capacity in certain areas, specifically
implementation and resources. Collaborating with other actors can fill implementation
gaps, particularly at the district level.
Although they do not have a direct role in the creation of policy, non-state and
hybrid actors serve to implement projects on the ground and create methodologies for
MRV, increasing capacity and coordination of REDD1 projects and strengthening
their governance. They also increase participation by interacting with communities and
providing them with livelihoods that simultaneously reduce emissions, thus exerting
co-benefits.
Summarized by a national-level non-state actor interviewee, ‘you are starting to see a
lot of transferal to civil society actors, especially in the initial period, there’s very strong
civil society actors . . . room for civil society actors to engage here is pretty promis-
ing given the stage of democratic development the country is in.’ The development of
REDD1, specifically in terms of capacity-building, is strengthened by the incorporation
of non-state and hybrid actors.
WHAT IS SHAPING OR LIMITING MULTI-STAKEHOLDER

GOVERNANCE IN INDONESIA?
Below we examine limitations and barriers to multi-stakeholder governance on REDD1

in Indonesia across levels of governance.

National Level
Governance at the national level represents a distinctive boundary between state, non-
state and hybrid stakeholders. With the state as the leading stakeholder, non-state and
hybrids fulfill supportive roles. There is a belief among national non-state actors that ‘the
government should be the one to set policy and if anything non-state actors can support
the policy decisions’ (national-level non-state actor comment).
The state controls REDD1 at the national level, but, in what can be seen as an example
of institutional interplay (Young 2006), coordination problems and divisions between
ministries, as highlighted previously, are holding up the creation of legally binding
policy, creating limitations to the effectiveness of REDD1 policy. The set of presidential
decrees put in place by the former president could be undone or reformulated by the new
administration if desired—as some have been. The unique state/non-state positioning of
hybrids allows them to become better integrated within the state governance system. It
was noted among hybrid actors that non-state actors are sometimes viewed as opposition
to the state, a problem that hybrids tend not to face. However, there is an acknowledge-
ment on the part of state actors that the work of non-state and hybrid actors ‘enriches
our experience.’ These conflicting viewpoints highlight differences in the legitimacy of
different actors and forms of knowledge, as well as the potential for these actors to play
an intermediary role between different arenas, levels and scales.
The Letter of Intent between Norway and Indonesia represents an incentive for the
government to thoroughly integrate REDD1 into policymaking, which could potentially
be explained by the stage of democratic governance Indonesia is in. This being said, as
much as it is the foundation of much of the REDD1 work that has been undertaken
in the country, the success of core elements of the Letter of Intent—the moratorium
and the agency—or lack of, can be interpreted as limiting in their reach. This poses a
key question as to whether, moving forward, Indonesia needs more ownership over its
approach to REDD1, and the ability to govern following its own remit and not one
which has been predefined by Western ideology.
BP REDD1 was viewed as the cornerstone of REDD1 within Indonesia, and has
been praised for its approach. It is still to be seen whether its merger with the MEF can
be interpreted as a limitation at the national level, or indeed whether it will enhance coor-
dination and help to leapfrog levels of bureaucratic politics.
REDD1 finances are channeled through government. Moving forward, Indonesia has
created a Fund for REDD1 in Indonesia (FREDDI), which will be a ‘fund of funds,’
representing a public trust fund for REDD1. Although at an early stage of development,
the financial stability of the FREDDI combined with its incorporated benefit-sharing
mechanism, provides a platform for the effective governance of REDD1 in Indonesia.
Over time, the room for non-state and hybrid actor participation at this level could poten-
tially increase, leading to co-management and greater fluidity within governance, as seen
at the district level.
The clear distinctions in stakeholder governance at this level is not viewed as a
limitation, rather as a positive aspect of REDD1 governance within Indonesia because
‘it’s the government who have been here since the beginning and it’s the government
who will stay when everybody is leaving’ (provincial-level non-state actor comment).
Ultimately this can be seen to strengthen the REDD1 process, increasing accountability

and legitimacy via the clear authority of the state. However, this being said, it does bring
into play issues surrounding coordination, participation and capacity, particularly with
regards to REDD1 implementation at and across different levels.
Provincial Level
Practices of multi-stakeholder governance vary between provinces. ‘Central and East

Kalimantan are the most advanced as far as coming up with REDD1 policy’ (national-
level state actor comment), which can be accredited to the fact that both provinces
applied for pilot province status (SATGAS 2012). Central Kalimantan was chosen as the
pilot province; hence leading to state implementation and policy at the provincial level via
SEKBER, the provincial taskforce body (and now via BP REDD1). Central Kalimantan
works closely with non-state and hybrid actors, in particular UN agencies and NGOs.
Operations are fluid and interchangeable, with non-state and hybrid actors responsible
for the implementation of the SEKBER pilot projects within the area. This allows for
a transfer of knowledge, and strengthens relations between the two actor groupings.
Governance between national and provincial levels is strengthened by the interlinking
nature of SATGAS and SEKBER, allowing for flows of information and policy. This
leaves a platform to build upon moving forwards.
East Kalimantan presents a floor for both non-state and hybrid actors to take a leading
role within REDD1. Although the state is still clearly involved, the boundary between
actor groupings is fluid and transposable, with provincial government working closely
alongside hybrid and non-state actors to reach the end goal of creating effective REDD1
policy, an example of horizontal interplay and linkages. ‘Of course they [the state] have a
role, but it is not decisive, we work together’ (national-level hybrid actor comment).
Hybrid actors within the area also strengthen links to national governments, creating
linkages between the national and provincial levels of governance, again demonstrating
their vertical institutional interplay (Young 2006). The high level of hybrid and non-state
involvement within East Kalimantan can be accredited to the funding they bring to the
area for REDD1. As the area is not a pilot province, these actors are required to fund,
support and implement projects as the state does not hold capacity to do so at present.
This can be seen as a transfer or delegation of power from the state to its non-state and
hybrid counterparts, strengthening the governance of REDD1.
District Level
The district level holds autonomy that enables it to act in its own right, and the district
head able to denote sites for REDD1 projects. This being said, the implementation
and coordination of projects and the participation of local and indigenous peoples is
often left to non-state and hybrid actors with the capacity and capabilities to implement
REDD1. Non-state and hybrid actors often act as facilitators between the state and vil-
lages to ensure the livelihoods of local and indigenous peoples are incorporated within
the governance system of REDD1. ‘We act for the facilitation capabilities between the
villages and the district and then we communicate with the peoples about the REDD1
and how it is a bonus for the sustainable forestry . . . people depend on the forest . . . we
communicate this’ (provincial-level non-state actor comment). The process of project

creation and implementation works on the ground. The process can be slow, which is seen
as an incredibly limiting factor. When REDD1 projects can take potentially years to see
the benefits on the ground, it can be difficult to secure the long-term uptake of schemes,
and the ownership of local people in REDD1 projects is necessary for their sustainabil-
ity moving forwards.
CONCLUSIONS
This chapter has examined if the pluralist ideal of multi- stakeholder governance,
born of Western political ideals, has gained resonance, or not, in post-colonialist,
post-authoritarian Indonesia. It has demonstrated the extent to which state, non-state
and hybrid actors are included in the governance of REDD1 and the implications
of this upon the governance of REDD1 in Indonesia. The chapter finds that the
state acts to facilitate and coordinate stakeholders within REDD1, with a state led
system of multi-stakeholder governance extending to non-state and hybrid actors and
thus creating a network of stakeholders. Further to this, the Indonesian state can
be seen as the most powerful actor within the governance system, allowing for clear
accountability.
There is an increasing role for civil society actors within Indonesia’s governance
system, with the capability to cross levels both vertically and horizontally, enabling multi-
stakeholder governance. The involvement of non-state and hybrid stakeholders has been
seen to increase when moving to lower levels of governance, implying the presence of
a fluid changing boundary between all three stakeholders. Relationships between these
stakeholders differ across levels, for example non-state and hybrid actors have a role at
the national level, but are largely supportive to the state. This can be contrasted with the
leadership roles that hybrid and non-state actors are assuming at lower governance levels.
The potential for hybrid and non-state actors to provide leadership and potentially facili-
tate co-management moving forward is demonstrated by their increasing importance
when moving vertically down governance levels, through the provincial and to the district
level, whereby non-state and hybrid actors play important roles in the implementation
of REDD1 through enhancing coordination and capacity. Further to this they act to
increase communication, hence increasing participation of local actors with a stake in
REDD1 implementation on the ground due to their role as facilitators between the state
and villages.
The Taskforce as an institution has paved the way for changing relationships between
actors, driving this change through increased levels of inclusiveness and transpar-
ency (Gupta and Mason this volume). Fluidity of actors between and within levels of
governance is further aiding this interaction, with the blurring of boundaries enhanc-
ing inclusiveness and demonstrating complex institutional interplay. By creating BP
REDD1, it was hoped that REDD1 could be a transparent process. This being said,
its merger with the MEF has cast a degree of uncertainty as to the future and remit of
REDD1 in Indonesia moving forward. If the new positioning of the agency does not
detract from its ability to act as an autonomous actor, its merger could be viewed as a
positive, with all environment and climate related ministries and agencies now falling
under one remit. It is too soon to decide if this move enhances or detracts from the

functionality of multi-stakeholder governance within Indonesia, and this is an area in

which more research will be need to be carried out. A solid legal framework is required
to strengthen the multilevel governance already in place, and further aid strides already
taken by the government. Failure to do so could result in the mechanism and its network
being dismantled and its core pillar collapsed, which would be detrimental to REDD1 in
Indonesia and hence climate governance.
Districts cannot be forgotten in REDD1. Although they can be autonomous to the
extent that they can control their own forests, it needs to be remembered that they can
also be necessary and important stakeholders, and cases should be adapted on an indi-
vidual basis. There cannot simply be a ‘one size fits all’ policy, implemented from the
UNFCCC down.
Moving forward, the country needs to protect its REDD1 program with strong laws
and address power dynamics to ensure effective climate governance for the future. It also
needs to be considered if carbon at a local level is truly important, as gaps between theory
and practice threaten the success of the mechanism. REDD1 in Indonesia represents
a changing landscape, and one that needs to be taken note of by the wider world when
negotiating future REDD1 policy.
Having evolved from Western political ideas, the REDD1 in Indonesia case study
provides an example of multi-stakeholder governance, with examples of interplay and
co-management; showing how it can be seen to have a positive impact in Indonesia, with
the country demonstrating a REDD1 program in the second phase of implementation,
moving towards the third. However, the way in which multi-stakeholder governance has
been implemented in Indonesia has been rather top-down and volatile, with changes
to governance structures and implementing bodies holding potential to alter the direc-
tion of REDD1, although the state has remained as a key actor. This finding resonates
with other work on multi-stakeholder governance whereby nation-states retain power,
despite the emergence of new actors and governance processes; thus demonstrating the
importance of considering interplay in multi-stakeholder governance systems. However
this being said, Indonesia has succeeded in incorporating stakeholders at all levels, with
an increasing role for civil society actors, allowing REDD1 to develop with a sense of
ownership and an identity on the ground, which will develop and evolve over time within
this governance structure. The case supports and aids multi-stakeholder governance
literature, highlighting a clear example of vertical and horizontal dynamics in practice, as
well as the important role hybrids can play, both at present and moving forward.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We would like to acknowledge the financial support from the Swedish Research Council,
under grant award No. 421-2011-1862, and Formas, under grant award No. 2011-779.
NOTE
1. Research was conducted in May–June 2013, prior to the 2014 election. Due to this, data references the
Taskforce, not BP REDD1, as it was implemented in the latter half of 2013. The Taskforce has since

been devolved and BP REDD1 created in its place. Since then, the Ministry of Forestry and Ministry
of Environment have been merged. The data collected reflects both as separate entities, and not as a joint
ministry. BP REDD1 has since been merged into the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.
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34. Climate policy integration
Harro van Asselt, Tim Rayner and Åsa Persson
INTRODUCTION
As a ‘wicked problem par excellence’ (Jordan et al. 2010, p. 4), climate change cuts
across almost all sectors of society. This holds true for mitigation, with greenhouse
gases being emitted or captured by sectors as diverse as energy production, industry,
housing, transport, agriculture and forestry, as well as adaptation, with climate impacts
affecting water resources, food production, infrastructure and health, among others.
Yet while the problem of climate change can be defined broadly, policy responses at
multiple levels are usually defined narrowly, crafting distinct issue areas. This can be
observed particularly in the creation of specific laws, policies, and strategies (e.g. the
Climate Change Act in the UK) or institutions (e.g. the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change at the international level; the Directorate-General for
Climate Action (DG CLIMA) at the EU level). However, the biophysical and socio-
economic interrelationships between climate change with ‘other’ issue areas such as
‘energy,’ ‘agriculture’ and ‘water’ necessitate thinking about the interlinkages between
policies in these areas to ensure policy coherence, that is, to realize synergies and avoid
contradictions.
An increasing acknowledgement that climate policy cannot be confined to a single
institution has led to calls for, and activities aimed at, climate policy integration (CPI).
Yet despite being the subject of an emerging body of literature, it is still not entirely clear
what is meant by CPI (Adelle and Russel 2013). Some tend to view it as a rational process
in which decision-makers take into account climate projections, climate impacts and/or
mitigation options, through the development of new procedures or tools. Others view
CPI as an inherently political project in which important explicit and implicit tradeoffs
between climate policy objectives and other (social, economic and environmental) objec-
tives are made (Mickwitz et al. 2009).
This discussion will sound familiar to scholars and practitioners engaged with the
debate on environmental policy integration (EPI) in the 1990s and 2000s. Building
on insights gained from EPI theory and practice, this chapter aims to offer insights
into the different faces of CPI. To this end, we first briefly recapitulate the debate on
EPI. We then engage more specifically with the different ways in which CPI has been
approached so far, highlighting in particular how CPI can be approached differently
in the context of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Next, we discuss the
challenges for CPI, focusing particularly on the European Union (EU) context. The
chapter ends with some concluding thoughts, including an identification of areas for
further enquiry.
388
Climate policy integration 389
THE LEGACY OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY INTEGRATION
EPI became a familiar term in the aftermath of the 1992 United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development (Lafferty and Hovden 2003; Lenschow 2002; Persson
2007). The sustainable development agenda, as outlined in the 1987 Brundtland report
(WCED 1987), proposed that proactive integration of environmental objectives in
economic and sectoral policies should replace a discredited ‘end-of-pipe’ approach.
Environmental objectives needed to be integrated into the formulation of economic and
sectoral policies to reduce policy inconsistencies and maximize win–win o pportunities.
Lenschow (2002, p. 6) suggests that EPI is a ‘first-order principle to implement and
institutionalize the idea of sustainable development.’ Given its intuitive, commonsensi-
cal appeal and the concrete, practice-oriented tools associated with it, EPI also fits well
with another overarching discourse of the 1990s, ecological modernization (Hajer 1995;
Persson 2007).
Early scholarly work on EPI established a key dividing line with regard to the meaning
of the concept; whether ‘principled priority’ needed to be given to environmental policy
objectives over economic and social ones, or whether all objectives simply needed explicit
consideration, often referred to as ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ versions respectively (Lafferty
and Hovden 2003). ‘Strong’ EPI came to be seen as too politically rigid and analytically
demanding, both by policy actors and academics. Instead of evaluating policy outputs
and outcomes (as the result of integration actions) against certain predefined environ-
mental standards, the focus of much research and practical EPI policy guidance shifted
to the process of integration (Jordan and Lenschow 2010). This involved understanding
the processes at the micro-level, in particular the use of various practical tools (see, e.g.
EEA 2005; Jordan and Lenschow 2008; OECD 2002), but also as a longer-term process
of policy learning (Nilsson and Eckerberg 2007).
Analyses of EPI commonly identify three important strategic approaches, or pillars
(Lafferty and Hovden 2003; Persson 2007):
● Procedural tools and instruments, to raise awareness and institutionalize considera-

tion of environmental impacts of sectoral policy decisions (e.g. checklists, manda-
tory environmental policy appraisal).
● Administrative coordination and organizational change, to change incentive structures
and organizational culture by internalizing environmental objectives (e.g. expanded
mandates of government agencies), improve coordination (e.g. inter-ministerial
committees) and introducing audit functions (e.g. parliamentary environmental
audit committees).
● Expressions of high-level political will and communicative instruments, to set out
visions and objectives (e.g. high-level environmental objectives, national sustain-
able development strategies).
From the mid-1990s, EPI caught on particularly in European countries, as well as the
EU institutions (EEA 2005; Jordan and Lenschow 2008). Work programs identified key
points in the policy process where integration should be taking place and various sectoral
agencies were given responsibility for implementation. EPI also gradually spread to local
levels of government as well as some international institutions (Nilsson et al. 2009).

Notwithstanding the insights gained on the process of EPI, ‘amazingly little’ is still
known about how effective these pillars and associated tools have been in terms of policy
outcomes ‘on the ground’ (Jordan and Lenschow 2010, p. 156). Three critical challenges
have typically faced EPI in its implementation. The first is to create the right incentive
structure. When integration is superimposed without the requisite expansion of man-
dates or budgets, internalization into mainstream sectoral policymaking is likely to be
perceived as overly burdensome. On the other hand, when EPI comes with expanded
budgets or even new budget lines, it may lead to perverse incentives to ‘relabel’ existing
activities as EPI.
Second, it is sometimes unclear what is to be integrated, especially considering that ‘envi-
ronmental’ policy may involve conflicting goals (e.g. protecting biodiversity versus climate
mitigation potential of large-scale biofuels cultivation). Typically, little political guidance is
provided on which environmental objectives should be prioritized (Persson 2007).
The third and related challenge arises when there is no clear political guidance for
handling goal conflicts involving economic and social objectives. Whereas certain types
of conflicts may be perceived as less controversial and can be solved through technical,
‘rational’ decisions by bureaucrats, some involve fundamental value tradeoffs and/or a
significant redistribution of resources. This raises the question of who should make such
EPI decisions: elected politicians or bureaucrats? This question points to the ultimate
trade-off associated with EPI, ‘that between existing democratic norms and procedures
on the one hand, and the goals and operational necessities of sustainable development on
the other’ (Lafferty and Hovden 2003, p. 10; Fischer this volume). For example, Swedish
environmental bureaucrats have highlighted the lack of political guidance for address-
ing goal conflicts that go well beyond their mandates (SEPA 2009). This suggests that
EPI is, at least sometimes, a political project rather than the ‘commonsensical’ and ‘no-
regrets’ technical procedure sometimes portrayed. What is still lacking from the literature,
however, is some kind of analytical framework for determining when and under what
circumstances EPI can be considered to be an issue of ‘low’ or ‘high’ politics.
CLIMATE POLICY INTEGRATION IN THEORY
Before returning to these challenges in the context of CPI, we will first review CPI in
theory and in practice. CPI is sometimes suggested to be a subset of EPI (e.g. Dupont
2013). As such, most scholars start with adapting Lafferty and Hovden’s (2003) ‘strong’
EPI definition, replacing the word ‘environmental’ with ‘climate’ (e.g. Ahmad 2009;
Mickwitz et al. 2009; Dupont 2013). This leads, for instance, to this two-pronged defini-
tion by Mickwitz et al., who define CPI as
the incorporation of the aims of climate change mitigation and adaptation into all stages of
policy-making in other policy sectors (non-environmental as well as environmental) [. . .] com-
plemented by an attempt to aggregate expected consequences for climate change mitigation and
adaptation into an overall evaluation of policy, and a commitment to minimize contradictions
between climate policies and other policies. (Mickwitz et al. 2009, p. 19)
Like EPI more broadly, CPI can be pursued through specific practical tools and proce-
dures (e.g. checklists for development aid projects; strategic environmental assessments);

administrative coordination and organizational change (e.g. an increased budget for

a sector to cope with climate impacts; the appointment of climate experts in sectoral
ministries; inter-ministerial climate change committees); and expressions of high-level
political will and communicative instruments (e.g. cross-governmental climate change
strategy documents).
The existing literature offers various explanations for the extent to which CPI is
pursued in practice, as well as its (perceived) success. Dupont (2013) suggests that CPI
in policy processes and outputs is a function of four variables: (1) the functional rela-
tionship between long-term climate policy objectives and the objectives of the specific
policy sector; (2) the level of political commitment to, first, combating climate change
and, second, integrating climate objectives in sectoral policy; (3) the institutional and
policy context; and (4) the level of engagement of climate policy advocates, and the level
of procedural safeguards for CPI in the policy process. The latter two variables can be
elaborated further. For instance, Brouwer et al. (2013) propose two specific institutional
factors: a capacity to regulate, and a balance of power and resources between the regula-
tors of two sectors. Another, more process-related explanation suggested by Brouwer et
al. (2013) is that ‘hard’ incentives’ (e.g. a legal requirement to incorporate climate con-
siderations) work better than ‘soft’ ones. A further process-related explanation is cogni-
tive, suggesting that higher levels of climate change knowledge in the ‘target’ sector will
enhance the chances of success (Larsen and Kørnøv 2009).
The focus of the literature on CPI in practice thus far has largely been on climate
change mitigation, although several contributions highlight its relevance to adaptation
to climate impacts (Dilling this volume). In the area of mitigation, the energy–climate
nexus has received particular attention (Dupont 2013; Dupont and Oberthür 2012;
Rietig 2013). Although mitigation policy need not conflict fundamentally with the main-
stream energy policy objective of a secure supply of energy, CPI would require that this
supply is generated by low-carbon sources. However, the objectives sometimes also clash,
for instance when sustainability requires increased prices, affecting competitiveness and
short-term affordability. The tradeoffs in integrating climate and energy policy are not
easy to resolve. The objectives of affordable, sustainable and secure energy supply are all
of high importance, meaning that it will be difficult to assign ‘principled priority’ to any
one of them. Given the intimate links with national security and distributional issues, the
typical actor constellation (i.e. few and centrally placed actors) and level of state involve-
ment in the sector, it is unlikely that CPI in the energy context can be achieved simply
through more rational decision-making. Instead, it is likely that CPI in this case involves
high political stakes, making the democratic accountability of integration outcomes par-
ticularly important.
With respect to adaptation, the emphasis has mainly been on water management
(Massey et al. 2010; Brouwer et al. 2013) and development assistance (Persson and Klein
2010; van Asselt and Gupta 2010; Ayers et al. 2014), but other focal areas are emerging,
such as the EU’s Structural Funds (Medarova-Bergstrom et al. 2011a; Hanger et al. 2013),
agriculture, and nature conservation (Urwin and Jordan 2008). In the adaptation context,
policy integration is often referred to as climate ‘mainstreaming’ or ‘climate proofing.’ It
can be argued that adaptation to climate change is a subsidiary objective, contributing to
the overarching objectives of poverty reduction (in the case of development assistance),
safeguarding water quality and quantity (in the water sector) and ensuring food security

(in agriculture). Hence, while political tradeoffs may still exist in this area, they may be
less visible and the functional relationship between objectives less conflicting.
The broadening of the empirical picture is important for enhancing our understanding
of CPI, as adaptation and mitigation present different problem structures. For instance,
whereas mitigation benefits primarily (although not exclusively) materialize at the global
level, adaptation results mostly in regional to local benefits. Moreover, the costs and
benefits of mitigation are more easily expressed in comparable units (e.g. tons of CO2
emissions reduced; US$ saved), whereas the costs and benefits of adaptation depend on
the specific context in which adaptation takes place (Klein et al. 2007). Given the local
benefits it generates, adaptation is more likely to be driven by self-interest, and conflicts
with traditional growth and welfare objectives are likely to be less severe. However, this
may not always be the case, and the multilevel nature of adaptation may also raise new
challenges for CPI.
CLIMATE POLICY INTEGRATION IN PRACTICE
Having outlined how CPI could work in theory, this section returns to the three general
challenges outlined above with respect to EPI—related to incentive structures, principled
priority and democratic accountability—and examines the extent to which these apply
also for experiences to date with CPI. The focus will be primarily on the EU and its
member states, which have been among the most active players (Dupont and Oberthür
this volume).
Incentive Structures
Commitments to CPI have been made by various governments and their agencies in the
past decade. For instance, European Commission guidance now recommends that policy-
level impact assessment considers the implications of new legislative proposals for both
mitigation and adaptation objectives. In terms of organizational reforms, a designated
department tasked with mainstreaming adaptation and low-carbon technology was part
of the new DG CLIMA, set up in 2010. The Commission has also developed practical
guidance for integrating climate change into environmental impact assessments (for pro-
jects) and strategic environmental assessments (for plans and programs) to promote CPI
in member state activities (European Commission 2013a). This introduction of CPI at
the EU level has not been smooth, however. For example, the suggestion by DG CLIMA
that climate impact assessment should be made a condition for both public and private
investment—which could have embedded the goal of climate resilience in day-to-day
planning practice—did not win over the rest of the Commission, which eventually settled
for non-mandatory guidelines (Acclimatise and COWI 2012). Concerns over resource
implications of such a policy (for funding, time, human capacity) appear to have acted
as a powerful disincentive, particularly when the benefits, in terms of improved future
climate resilience, are less obvious.
Increasing financial resources for CPI, even where it is agreed to, may come with its
own challenges, as is notable in the case of mainstreaming climate change in development
assistance. Increased understanding of the important linkages between development

and climate change adaptation and mitigation has led to mounting calls for integrating
climate considerations in official development assistance (ODA) policies and practices.
Such mainstreaming activities have taken various forms, ranging from individual climate-
related projects, via the screening of countries’ development portfolios for climate risks
to comprehensive ‘climate proofing’ (van Asselt and Gupta 2010). These practices are
increasingly accompanied by political and policy guidance. For instance, in 2006 devel-
opment cooperation and environmental ministers of the Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development (OECD) adopted the Declaration on Integrating Climate
Change Adaptation into Development Co-operation (OECD 2006), which was followed
by a policy guidance document three years later (OECD 2009).
Yet mainstreaming climate change in ODA raised a new set of questions. Should
climate change mitigation and adaptation be financed via existing ODA budgets, or
should separate programs and budgets be established? And if a project serves both
climate and development purposes, how much of its budget should be recorded as
‘climate finance’? On the one hand, separate climate budgets will help to show that
developed countries are serious in raising public finance to address climate change, a key
concern in the international climate change negotiations. At the same time, critics fear
that financial resources may be diverted from other development goals (e.g. food, health,
sanitation) to climate aid (Yamin 2005; Michaelowa and Michaelowa 2007). They have
also shown that projects and programs may be relabeled as ‘climate finance’ (Michaelowa
and Michaelowa 2011). This points to one of the risks of enhancing the profile of climate
change in sectoral policies: that other sectoral objectives may receive lower priority as
a result. A further risk is that development agencies, which over time had to take into
account gender, environment, human rights and other considerations, will begin to suffer
from ‘mainstreaming fatigue’ (Persson 2009, p. 413).
The importance of incentives to CPI has also been evident in the EU’s budget reforms.
In the context of the EU’s new Multi-Annual Financial Framework (for 2014–2020),
the Commission proposed that the financing of climate change and environmental
protection would be delivered largely by their ‘mainstreaming’ across the existing funds
(European Commission 2010, 2011). The Commission proposed, for the first time, to
‘earmark’ at least 20 percent of the budget (approximately €200 billion) for climate-
related activities, with an emphasis on mitigation. Under the previous institutional frame-
work (2007–2013), the lack of transparency in definitions of expenditure categories and
what is covered by them made it difficult to establish what was actually spent on climate-
related objectives. Addressing the past failure to report expenditure in a transparent and
accountable manner, the Commission has proposed that progress should be tracked by a
modified version of the OECD’s ‘Rio markers,’ which help to track spending on climate
change (adaptation as well as mitigation), biodiversity and desertification.
While representing significant progress, serious implementation challenges undoubt-
edly lie ahead for EU budget mainstreaming. Whether the 20 percent ambition can be
reached is a moot point. Setting an earmarking target runs the risk of encouraging re-
labeling certain expenditures out of convenience (Medarova-Bergstrom et al. 2011b). If
this is not to be the result, significant improvements will be required in the capacity of
managing authorities to ‘absorb’ the funds, that is to find suitable activities to finance.
Arguably equally worrying, while Commission proposals for the European Regional
Development Fund, for example, put forward quantified earmarking for energy efficiency

and renewable energy, no such commitment is made for climate change adaptation. This
could create a certain competition among different climate objectives (Hjerp et al. 2012).
In other words, a requirement of CPI, combined with an increase in resources, can lead
to certain perverse incentives, not all of which will be foreseen by those advocating CPI.
Finally, it remains to be seen how far authorities in member states will take seriously calls
to divert spending from carbon-intensive or maladaptive investments, employing the
procedural tools that are becoming available to assist with this, when powerful interests
continue to lobby for business as usual in many areas and the Commission’s willingness
to withhold funding in such cases remains to be proven.
What is to be Integrated?
Just as the ‘environment’ in EPI is incredibly diverse, so too is the ‘climate’ in CPI. There
is no reason to assume that Jordan and Lenschow’s (2010, p. 156) observation on EPI
does not equally hold for CPI, in that it ‘seems to take on a “positive” meaning that is
situational, i.e. different across jurisdictions, sectors and points in time.’ Dilemmas over
what, if anything, should receive ‘principled priority’ thus remain acute when climate
considerations are included in policy integration efforts.
There is, first of all, a need to distinguish between ‘adaptation’ CPI and ‘mitigation’
CPI. Pursuing the goals of mitigation and adaptation may entail adjustments in sectoral
policy, which are not mutually compatible (Moser 2012; Swart and Raes 2007). In the
forestry sector, for example, mitigation interests would encourage bioenergy strategies
that promote the use of wood (and other forms of renewable energy) to substitute for
fossil fuels, whereas adaptation interests are more likely to emphasize the benefits of envi-
ronmental features like biodiversity for future forest resilience, entailing different forest
management strategies (Ellison 2010).
In addition to potentially conflicting mitigation and adaptation goals, CPI may also
involve conflict with non-climate environmental goals (Rietig 2013; Trouwborst 2009).
This may be because relevant environmental targets—for example, on water quality or
biodiversity—prove unreachable in the face of either climate impacts or ambitious miti-
gation efforts. Many believe that global temperature increases beyond 2°C will require a
more radical, ongoing, and ‘transformational’ consideration of existing policy objectives
(O’Brien 2012). But it may also be because decision-makers choose to adapt to climate
change by incremental ‘climate proofing’ of business as usual, in such a way that tradi-
tional economic assets are preserved, using hard infrastructure at the expense of other
‘valued attributes’ such as particular habitats (e.g. Secretariat of the Convention on
Biological Diversity 2009). Advocates of biodiversity conservation have responded to
the potential threat from mitigation (e.g. promotion of biofuels) and adaptation main-
streaming agendas (whereby loosening currently strict protection for specific designated
sites could occur) by promoting ‘ecosystem-based adaptation and mitigation strategies’
(Naumann et al. 2011) and ‘green infrastructure’ (European Commission 2013b). How
far these concepts will allow tradeoffs to be avoided remains debatable. Such conflicts
highlight how, in addition to intra-sectoral climate mainstreaming (e.g. mainstreaming
adaptation into agricultural policy), there may be a need for broader, inter-sectoral policy
coordination to ensure a coherent overall effort (e.g. mainstreaming adaptation into agri-
cultural policy, while taking into account the impacts on water management). Otherwise,

the result may be piecemeal approaches at best and, at worst, incoherent, conflicting
strategies (Pittock 2011; Flörke et al. 2011).
Further types of CPI may need to be distinguished, possibly depending on the sectors
at hand (cf. Runhaar et al. 2014). For instance, while CPI into other environmental issue
areas (e.g. biodiversity protection) is likely to result in potential synergies, in other sectors
(e.g. energy) it may involve clearer political tradeoffs, which should not be masked for the
sake of ‘integration.’
Democratic Accountability of CPI
That ‘climate policy’ is not a unified whole in itself is evident from the experience in Spain
where, in order to maintain water quality standards in the face of climate change, hydro-
power may need to be scaled back, at the expense of renewable energy targets (Brouwer
et al. 2013). An EU guidance document on river basin management in a changing climate
(European Commission 2009) largely fails to address such inconsistencies and set priori-
ties, and this is one issue where many local policymakers desire a more active EU role.
However, this apparent desire could raise concerns that local policymakers prefer simply
to hide behind EU politics, rather than taking independent initiatives and decisions.
This leads us to the third general policy integration challenge: the ultimate ‘democratic’
tradeoff and who is to make decisions on CPI when they are politically contentious. The
literature notes that high-level policymakers often consciously leave the task of ironing
out inconsistencies and dilemmas in policies to local-level actors, thought to be better
placed to identify and resolve inconsistencies. While this may indeed by the case, leaving
everything to be resolved at the local level may not be effective either (Urwin and Jordan
2008). This points to the multilevel dimension of CPI in the EU, where decisions on CPI
at the EU level may trickle down to lower levels. For instance, Urwin and Jordan (2008)
note that mitigation objectives set at the EU level may impede adaptive actions at a more
local level.
Leaving decisions to lower levels of governance may be more than a matter of expe-
diency; arguably, such decision-making should be left to national/regional/local actors,
in accordance with the (EU’s) principle of subsidiarity, rather than being decided ‘top-
down’ (Urwin and Jordan 2008). However, subsidiarity can also become an impedi-
ment to CPI. Dupont (2013), for example, notes how the principle has been invoked by
member states that were reluctant to include climate change considerations in the EU law
and policy on the energy performance of buildings.
What is clear from this short review is that, in the EU context, at the very least the
implications of shared competences across levels of governance for CPI should be
considered.
CONCLUSION
To return to our main question of whether CPI is commonsensical or a political exercise

of making tradeoffs between policy objectives, our answer is: it is both, depending on
which climate policy objective is being considered, the specific issue area with which
integration is sought, the jurisdiction in which this takes place, and the point in time at

which this occurs. This highlights the importance of a contextual understanding of CPI:
at times it could indeed be seen as a simple application of procedural tools to ensure that
climate change considerations are taken up (e.g. in the case of climate proofing develop-
ment assistance); in other cases, the political conflicts between climate policy and other
objectives will need to be addressed head-on to avoid the ultimate ‘democratic’ tradeoff
(Lafferty and Hovden 2003).
The chapter points to several areas for further research. First, future enquiries could
further elaborate hypotheses that could explain the extent of CPI with reference to
the specific problem structures of adaptation and mitigation. While the more general
hypotheses and explanations put forward in the literature have their merits, the specific
context of CPI may be at least as important. Second, the challenge of creating the right
incentive structures for effective CPI needs to be addressed, drawing on evidence from
public administration more generally. Third, the chapter suggests that more insights are
needed regarding who makes the political trade-offs in the case of CPI, and the implica-
tions for democratic accountability. Decisions regarding principled priority are at times
masked in technocratic language and presented as commonsensical. This puts the legiti-
macy of such decisions (and the outcomes of CPI) into question. This problem becomes
more pronounced in a multilevel context such as the EU, where national decision-makers
could hide behind technocratic language emanating from Brussels. Finally, this chapter—
like many other contributions on EPI and CPI—has focused on the EU and its member
states. While such a focus can perhaps be explained (e.g. with reference to the goal of
policy integration in the EU), it is clearly limited in its focus. Not only would it be useful
to compare European policies and practices related to CPI to those of other countries, it
will also be useful to examine how policy integration processes across different levels of
governance affect each other. Such analyses could link up to the emerging literature on
institutional fragmentation (Zelli and van Asselt 2013, this volume); institutional inter-
actions and interplay management (Oberthür and Stokke 2011) and regime complexity
(Keohane and Victor 2011) and examine the applicability of concepts of policy integra-
tion at different levels.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Harro van Asselt would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Norden
Top-level Research Initiative sub-program Effect Studies and Adaptation to Climate
Change through the Nordic Centre of Excellence for Strategic Adaptation Research
(NORD-STAR). Tim Rayner would like to acknowledge the financial support of the
European Commission FP7 RESPONSES project, Grant Agreement number 244092.
Åsa Persson would like to acknowledge the financial support from Formas, project no.
211-2012-1842.
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35. Climate policy instruments
Simon Matti
INTRODUCTION
Calls for more involvement of individuals in climate change mitigation require that
policymakers create institutions and implement policies that effectively address needs
for large-scale collective action. A range of policy instruments have therefore been pro-
posed, developed and implemented in the attempts to find routes towards individual-level
behavioral change. Evaluating the merits of different climate policy designs is, however,
a complex task, and over time governments have based their evaluations on a rather dif-
ferentiated set of criteria (Konidari and Mavrakis 2007). Effects on the climate must be
considered in combination with the cost of monitoring and enforcing policy compliance;
the fit within the current political-institutional system; as well as the possible side-effects
of implementation (IPCC 2014). However, the extent to which a policy instrument suc-
ceeds in effectively and efficiently targeting climate change is not only dependent on tech-
nical or political administrative factors. Especially when policy instruments aspire to alter
social choice mechanisms and governance towards collective action, they are also highly
sensitive to the reactions of their target audience. The extent to which a policy instrument
enjoys broad public support has been shown to impact its performance significantly, as
support affects public compliance and, subsequently, the extent to which systems for
monitoring and enforcement is necessary (Matti 2010; Stern 2008). Furthermore, imple-
mentation of weakly supported policy instruments also has broader consequences for
governing, as governments who routinely ignore public attitudes risk undermining their
own legitimacy and thereby jeopardize future performance or reelection (Burstein 2003).
While many countries have pledged to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the
choice of national climate policy instruments demonstrates a widespread variation.
Although system of government, path-dependency and economic entanglements can
explain a certain amount of variation in policy choice (Harrison and Sundstrom 2010;
Lachapelle and Paterson 2013), previous research also points specifically towards the
highly politicized nature of climate policy instruments and their sensitivity to public
support as explanatory factors for cross-national differences. Take the global use of
carbon taxation as one example. Widely regarded as one of the most cost-effective means
of limiting emissions and changing public behavior, carbon dioxide (CO2) taxes are not
nearly as prevalent as might be expected, implemented only in a handful of major juris-
dictions around the world (Sumner et al. 2011). Whereas public support for CO2 taxes
are relatively strong in the pioneering Scandinavian countries (Jagers and Hammar 2009),
proposed CO2 taxes have been either rejected, delayed, circumscribed or even abolished
due to lacking support in several high-profile cases, for example France, Australia, India,
Canada and the US. In others, lacking public opinion support for CO2 taxes has led gov-
ernments to introduce emissions trading schemes instead or, as Rabe and Borick (2012)
demonstrate, rhetorically frame carbon pricing mechanisms as being anything but a CO2
400
Climate policy instruments 401
tax. It thus seems reasonable to conclude that also when it comes to climate change,
public attitudes matter for policy choice (Tjernström and Tietenberg 2008).
Previous studies have demonstrated that country-specific contextual factors determine
both general preferences for environmental protection and public preferences for types of
policy instruments. Whereas the former commonly is attributed to levels of environmen-
tal concern, triggered by economic affluence (Franzen and Vogl 2013) or post-material
values (Dunlap and York 2008), the latter is based in a slightly different set of hypotheses.
First, a country’s prevailing political culture is expected to have significant consequences
for the prospects of gaining public support for different policy instruments (Cherry et al.
2014) and might thus be a key to the viability of introducing, for example, CO2 taxes.
Second, recent studies have linked a country’s quality of government both to policy
choice and to the public’s attitudes toward these choices; Svallfors (2013) demonstrates
how people living in countries with high levels of institutional quality are generally more
supportive of taxes, and Harring (2014a) shows that corruption drives public support for
stricter use of regulations.
However, although cross-national studies help explain why countries choose to imple-
ment different types of climate policy measures, they reveal less about the mechanisms
driving policy support on the individual level and thus in what way context is translated
into policy attitudes. Nor are context-based studies able to account for within-country
differences in policy support. To fully grasp variations in public acceptance of climate
policy tools, a better understanding of the individual-internal drivers behind positive
policy attitudes—and how these are linked to context—is therefore also needed. Going
beyond traditional socio-economic explanations to public opinion, this chapter will
therefore attempt to bring together the main findings from previous research attempt-
ing to explain variation in the policy attitudes of individuals. More specifically, it will
propose an empirically founded model of public support for climate policy instruments
that combines traditional factors related to individual motivation with more specific
perceptions both of the policy instrument itself and of key actors’ ambition and ability
to act. Although a number of studies have addressed one or several of these elements,
the efforts to combine them into a single, coherent model are both few and far between.
Focusing on individual-internal mechanisms behind policy support, the empirical
studies upon which this chapter is based have been conducted in many different countries
and across political-cultural contexts. The resulting model should therefore be seen as a
generalized framework for better grasping why individual-level support for policy instru-
ments varies both within and across different countries.
INDIVIDUAL MOTIVATION: VALUES, BELIEFS AND NORMS
A common approach for explaining cross-national differences in policy choice is to focus

on the correlation between general environmental concern and support for environmen-
tal protection (Kim and Wolinsky-Nahmias 2014). To further nuance this connection,
a number of studies explore the mechanisms behind environmental sentiments and
how they subsequently translate into policy attitudes on the individual level, equating
policy support with other forms of low-cost pro-environmental behaviors (Stern 2000).
Although concern for the environment might be founded in self-interest, a growing body

of evidence indicates that for issues closely related to collective interests, moral-normative
concerns play an even more significant role in guiding attitude-formation (Berglund
and Matti 2006). By this account, one of the most comprehensive and widely applied
individual-level models, the value-belief-norm (VBN) theory of environmentalism (e.g.,
Stern et al. 1995), take its point of departure in Schwartz’s (1977) norm-activation model.
The VBN theory asserts that individuals’ behavior is the result of a causal chain of value
priorities, environmental beliefs and personal norms, thus providing a basis for concep-
tualizing the range of moral-normative factors driving support for the introduction of
climate policy instruments on the individual level.
Also when studied independently, the facets of the VBN model are confirmed
as drivers of pro-environmental policy support. Personal value priorities are estab-
lished factors determining both political preference- formation in general and pro-
environmentalism specifically (Jagers et al. 2014). Specific beliefs on environmental
risk (e.g., Lubell et al. 2007) and personal efficacy (e.g. Finkel et al. 1989) are the
point of departure for several studies exploring policy support for collective action to
protect the environment. Also the more general environmental beliefs captured by the
New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale (e.g., Dunlap et al. 2000) hold high validity for
making predictions of environmental policy support. Milbrath (1986), for example,
proposes that the NEP scale captures an ideological tension between preferences for
different political solutions. Whereas a strong environmental concern drives requests for
comprehensive social change and openness for new and radical political solutions, low
levels of environmental concern rather imply a resistance towards structural changes,
trust in expert-driven politics, and preferences for the mechanisms of market-driven
socio-economic systems.
Throughout the literature, the VBN model has proved a good predictor for a range of
pro-environmental behaviors and an important means for elucidating the mechanisms
by which behavioral predispositions arises. In particular, moral- normative concerns
contribute significantly to explaining low-cost behaviors such as policy support (Steg
and Vlek 2009). The strong evidence on its validity thus makes the VBN model a key
starting point both when attempting to explain variances among individuals’ support
for climate policy instruments, and when scaling up studies to the country-comparative
level. However, empirical applications of the VBN also demonstrate that the explanatory
strength of moral-normative models varies across specific policy features. For example,
pull-instruments increasing the attractiveness of pro-environmental behavior are gener-
ally granted more support than push-instruments aimed at exacerbating the negative
impact of a behavioral choice and thus reduce its prevalence (Jagers and Matti 2010; Steg
et al. 2005). Now, if motivational factors would explain all variation in public attitudes
towards climate policy instruments we would expect to find similar levels of support
both among those subscribing to the same environmental values and beliefs, as well
as for different types of policy instruments. The observed variation in this regard also
suggests that features tied to the specific policy instrument proposed affects the level of
support it subsequently receives. To better understand why some types of instruments
are more readily preferred than others, accounting for general environmental attitudes is
not sufficient.

POLICY-SPECIFIC BELIEFS AS MEDIATORS OF POLICY

SUPPORT
Previous research on political preference formation suggests that attitudes towards a

policy measure—for example, support for the introduction of CO2 taxes rather than
carbon trading schemes (Wettestad this volume) or increased emission regulations—are
linked to the instrument’s perceived characteristics. Thus, to account for the possibility
that the attributes of a policy instrument mediate the effect of individual motivation,
a model of climate policy support should include beliefs about the consequences of its
implementation. For example, Rienstra and colleagues (1999) focus on the perceived
effectiveness of a policy instrument, Jakobsson and colleagues (2000) incorporate per-
ceptions of the policy measures effect on fairness and personal freedom, and Schade and
Schlag (2003) add to these frameworks by opening up for personal outcome expecta-
tions as a possible factor. Other studies (e.g., Eriksson et al. 2006; Kallbekken and Sælen
2011; Kallbekken et al. 2013) propose more comprehensive models where policy-specific
beliefs are combined with factors from the VBN-model. From these, at least four facets
of a policy instrument can be hypothesized to affect the individual’s response towards it:
effectiveness, freedom, fairness and personal outcome expectancy.
Personal Outcome Expectancy
Personal outcome expectancy refers to the extent to which an implementation of a

policy instrument is expected to imply consequences in terms of higher costs for the indi-
vidual, either for not changing behavior despite the policy or for committing to behav-
ioral change (Schuitema et al. 2010). It is the main element behind both the Theory of
Planned Behavior (Ajzen 1991) as well as the collective interest model of collective action
(Lubell et al. 2007), predicting that decisions to engage in collective action are preceded
by a calculation of the expected value and cost of cooperation. Indeed, although pro-
environmental behavior is usually governed by a value-based sense of collective benefits,
an individual’s decision not to support the introduction of a specific policy instrument
tends to be motivated by consequences for personal utility and a lack of alternative behav-
ioral options (Frey 1997; Guagnano et al. 1995). Costs and benefits are, however, not only
calculated in material or convenience terms. In social dilemma research, the restraints
on behavior arising from descriptive or prescriptive social norms are well researched
(Cialdini et al. 1990). In short, social norms determine what is socially approved within
the specific context or collective, and can thereby both hinder and promote expressions
of support for political initiatives in a manner similar to other resource-related costs.
Given that social norms operate both on macro (i.e., national) and micro (i.e., group)
levels, we can furthermore expect them to be one of the culprits behind both cross-and
within-country differences in policy support.
Consequences for Fairness and Freedom
In addition to the rational calculation on personal costs and benefits, two further percep-
tions of how a policy instrument affect those subject to it have been demonstrated as
drivers for an individual’s inclination to support it. First, attitudes towards new policy

measures are based on their perceived distributional effects. More precisely, the extent to
which the consequences of a policy instrument are perceived as fair is highly significant
for the degree of support it receives (Bamberg and Rölle 2003; Jakobsson et al. 2000;
Fujii et al. 2004; Schuitema et al. 2011; Johansson-Stenman and Konow 2010). However,
perceptions of fairness are not always tied to the type of policy instrument (e.g., a tax),
but rather to the design of a specific scheme. For example, both in Sweden and elsewhere,
studies on the introduction of CO2 taxes concludes that their perceived distributional
effects, and therefore whether the individual lends her support, are clearly dependent on
how the revenues from the tax are used (e.g., Bento et al. 2009; Jagers and Hammar 2009).
Whereas an increased CO2 tax might be perceived as highly unfair to those with limited
options for alternative modes of transportation and a constrained personal economy,
using the revenues to expand public transport could significantly reduce this perception
as it lessens the negative effects of making one mode of private transportation more
expensive.
Second, the extent to which a policy instrument is perceived to impact the individual’s
freedom of choice, and thus whether its implementation necessitates a change in behav-
ior, seems to affect acceptability both directly as coercive push-measures are generally
less supported (Jagers and Matti 2010; Rienstra et al. 1999) and indirectly as significant
infringements on personal freedom of choice also are understood as being less fair (e.g.,
Eriksson et al. 2006). However, it is important to stress that we should expect policy-
specific beliefs to vary significantly between both individuals and contexts. For instance,
it seems reasonable that the distributive principle used for evaluating a policy instrument
and judge its degree of fairness is based in value-priorities. Similarly, the extent to which
infringements of personal freedom affects the level of support for a policy instrument
depends on the importance of personal autonomy as a core value, as well as on the
individual’s willingness or possibilities to personally comply with the mandated behavior
change.
Effectiveness
Perceptions of the effectiveness, or the extent to which a policy instrument is expected

to reach its aims, affect the individual’s policy support in several ways. First, without
further developing the underpinning mechanisms, some studies note the negative
correlation between perceptions of ineffectiveness and support for a policy measure
(Schuitema et al. 2010; Jaensirisak et al. 2005; Kallbekken and Sælen 2011; Jagers
and Hammar 2009). Second, there is ample evidence that for more coercive measures,
perceived effectiveness is linked to perceived fairness. Confidence in the policy meas-
ure’s ability to contribute to a common good is positively linked to a perception of its
consequences as fair (Bamberg and Rölle 2003; Eriksson et al. 2006). Most basically,
perceptions of effectiveness are causally linked to general problem awareness, thus
further verifying the connection between policy-specific beliefs and the VBN model
(Rienstra et al. 1999). Furthermore, specific views on the nature of the problem—
including its basic causes, severity, negative impacts and possible solutions—can also
be hypothesized to affect the perception of a policy instrument as more or less effective.
In p
articular, understanding the climate problem to be highly pressing and requir-
ing immediate large-scale changes in public behavior, or considering a slow moving

evelopment of personal values and norms as sufficient, opens up for different views of
d
what an effective policy entails.
But not only the individuals’ values and beliefs influence evaluations of policy effec-
tiveness. As the outcomes of most climate policy instruments are dependent on both
community and elite efforts, there are good reasons to anticipate that perceptions of
cooperative success depend on the level of trust in the intentions and capacity of these
actors to perform the necessary tasks and that individuals will refrain from cooperative
behavior unless they perceive a reasonable chance of collective efficacy; that is, whether
the relevant collective will be able to perform a given task or not (Finkel et al. 1989;
Lubell et al. 2007).
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TRUST
Recently, studies aimed at better grasping the nature of collective action problems
have done so focusing on the concept of trust. High levels of trust, both in other peo-
ple’s voluntarily compliance with policy initiatives (i.e., interpersonal trust) and in the
political-administrative system responsible for implementing and enforcing policy (i.e.,
institutional trust), is suggested to benefit the stability and effectiveness of a number
of societal processes, including the support of and compliance with political decisions
(Hetherington 1998). However, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Jakobsson et al. 2000;
Hammar and Jagers 2006; Dietz et al. 2007; Kallbekken et al. 2013; Harring 2014b), most
models of environmental policy support have, to date, neglected this collective action
aspect of the individual’s decision-making processes and therefore either overestimated
the significance of values and beliefs as governing behavioral choice or failed to demon-
strate the mediating effect of trust in a model of individual motivation.
Interpersonal Trust
Similar to the way social norms serve as a compass indicating how we ought to behave,
beliefs about others’ intentions to comply also affect personal attitudes toward political
decisions and policy instruments (Biel and Thøgersen 2007). Of particular interest is the
conclusion by Ostrom (2005) and Torgler (2003) that many individuals are ‘conditional
cooperators,’ ready to engage in collective action only to the extent they perceive others
are willing to do the same: in small-scale settings, characterized by regular interaction
and face-to-face communication, previous experiences and reputation guide expectations
of reciprocity. In contrast, in large-scale situations the extent to which other people are
believed to cooperate is instead based on estimated trustworthiness, where high levels
of interpersonal trust increase personal willingness to cooperate (Sønderskov 2011). In
guiding public support for policy instruments more specifically, interpersonal trust works
in several different ways. On the one hand, distrust in others’ predisposition for voluntary
behavioral change can be expected to drive general support for the introduction of policy
measures mandating change or compensating for defective behavior, in particular if the
policy problem is perceived as highly pressing. On the other, low levels of interpersonal
trust also affect evaluations of a policy instrument’s effectiveness and fairness negatively,
and can therefore reduce support for a particular measure if perceived as too easy for

free-riders to evade (Hammar et al. 2009; Harring and Jagers 2013). In fact, using cross-
national data, Harring (2014b) finds that low levels of interpersonal trust increase the
support for stricter regulation and policy instruments that punish non-cooperation,
whereas high interpersonal trust rather drives preferences for policy measures that reward
cooperation.
Institutional Trust
As the successful implementation of a policy instrument is clearly dependent on both

the ambition and ability of political institutions to monitor and enforce compliance; to
create incentives for behavioral change; and to present viable alternatives to the public,
also institutional trust becomes decisive for policy support (Devos et al. 2002; Lubell
et al. 2007). Thus, unless people trust the competence of either politicians or political
institutions to understand the problem at hand and know what is required for amend-
ing it, they will neither be prone to support policy measures nor to comply with them.
As proposed by Dietz and colleagues (2007) as well as Kellstedt and colleagues (2008),
there are also good reasons to expect the effect of institutional trust to be particularly
tangible for shaping attitudes in complex and contested issues such as climate change, as
the public has to rely more heavily on political elites to accurately evaluate the need for
different policies. Furthermore, the effect of institutional trust on policy attitudes is most
pronounced for redistributive policies and those implying personal sacrifices, which the
implementation of for example a CO2 tax indeed does (Hetherington 1998; Rudolph and
Evans 2005).
Furthermore, institutional trust reflects views on the ability of political government
to handle demands for reciprocity. The possibility for regulative measures to increase
predictability of human interaction and thereby eradicate the free-rider problem is inti-
mately connected to a trust in political institutions’ ability to simultaneous implement an
effective system for monitoring and rule-violation, so as to increase both the effectiveness
and fairness of these measures (Jagers and Hammar 2009; Harring 2014a). A related
approach focuses on the effects of institutional trust on public support for taxes more
specifically. As market-based policy instruments in general and taxes in particular are the
measures of choice in most countries’ climate policy, this is a highly significant strand
of research that also further substantiates the connection between institutional trust
and policy-specific beliefs. For example, a range of studies (Tyler 1990; Sandmo 2005;
Hammar and Jagers 2006; Dresner et al. 2006; Kallbekken and Sælen 2011; Harring and
Jagers 2013; Kallbekken et al. 2013) find that a lack of trust in government—and in par-
ticular in the government’s use of the revenues generated from the tax—is a key explana-
tory factor for low levels of public support. They further suggest that the significance of
institutional trust might explain why earmarking of revenues, ensuring a fair and proper
recycling of public funds, has been found to increase the support for new taxes.
To conclude, there are good reasons to assume that both institutional and interper-
sonal trust play an important part in promoting or hindering public support for climate
policy instruments and ultimately political legitimacy. It potentially affects support
directly by shaping the way in which individuals perceive and understand the need for
policy instruments in general, as responses to climate change problems as well as for
compensating non-cooperative behavior of others. Trust also has several indirect effects

INDIVIDUAL MOTIVATION POLICY-SPECIFIC BELIEFS BEHAVIORS TRUST
Personal Personal outcome Institutional trust

Values Beliefs Support for
norm expectancy
policy
instruments
Fairness Interpersonal trust
Freedom
Effectiveness
Figure 35.1 An empirically founded, general model of policy support
on policy support channeled through policy-specific beliefs; it contributes to shaping

evaluations of policy effectiveness and the distributional effects of a specific instrument.
Despite the fact that several studies include trust as a possible explanatory factor driving
public policy support, very few studies systematically analyze the mechanisms by which
it impacts support by accounting for both versions of trust alongside individual moral-
normative motivations and policy-specific beliefs. It thus seems reasonable to suggest
that any attempt to comprehensively explore and explain variations in public support for
climate policy instruments on the individual level should open up for the effects of trust.
A suggestion for such a model is illustrated in Figure 35.1. Moreover, since an individual’s
level of interpersonal and institutional trust is not readily connected to the specific issue
of climate change, we should also expect the effect of trust on support for climate policy
instruments to be independent of, rather than stemming from, the facets of the VBN
model.
CONCLUSION
To counteract climate change, a wide range of different policy instruments are currently
employed by governments all around the globe. Although a certain amount of cross-
national variances in the political acceptance of a policy instrument and the outcomes
of policy implementation can be explained by accounting for cultural, economic and
political-administrative differences, a range of studies also suggest that the level of
support a policy instrument (potentially) enjoys among the public is of outmost impor-
tance both for policy choice and policy effectiveness. This chapter’s brief synthesis of
research on individual-level factors driving policy support focuses on two findings. First,
in order to fully grasp the conditions under which a policy instrument receives public
support, a closer look at the individual-level mechanisms driving policy attitudes is nec-
essary. Without these, we can neither fully explain why or in what way contextual factors
such as political culture or quality of government determine individuals’ preference for
one type of measure over another, and consequently why public opinion in some coun-
tries seems to prefer trading schemes over taxes, or regulations rather than market-based
tools. Starting from an individually based model, however, allows us to better connect the

dots between the individuals and their context, and thus to elucidate how these two levels
of explanations work in concert. Nor can we account for the very real within-country
differences in climate policy support. Second, by combining a traditional focus on indi-
vidual moral-normative motivation with two additional facets, which in previous research
have been shown as highly decisive for the level of policy support an individual displays,
policy-specific beliefs as well as interpersonal and institutional trust, we are able to better
grasp the importance of design and political promotion of the specific policy instrument
in order for it to be viewed as an attractive alternative for the mass public.
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36. Climate engineering
Anders Hansson, Steve Rayner and Victoria Wibeck
INTRODUCTION
Climate engineering, or geoengineering, defined by Britain’s Royal Society as ‘the delib-
erate large-scale manipulation of the planet’s environment to counteract climate change’
(Royal Society 2009, p. 1) is receiving growing attention from both scientists and policy-
makers concerned with the slow progress of international negotiations to reduce emis-
sions of greenhouse gases. However, scientists and climate activists seem sharply divided
over the wisdom and practicality of climate engineering (O’Connor and Green 2009).
Climate engineering proposals to modify the climate specifically to counteract the
greenhouse effect date from at least 1960s; however, this idea did not gain wider accept-
ance in the scientific communities—anthropogenic climate warming was not considered
to be a pressing issue and was not prioritized on the political agendas (e.g., Ryaboshapko
2010). Some scientists maintain that research into climate engineering was restricted
or even taboo, because of these options’ low feasibility and the environmental risks
they posed, as well as concerns about ‘moral hazard’—the idea that even considering
additional policies will result in diminished efforts at conventional mitigation. Since
the Cancún United Nations (UN) climate summit in 2010 there seems to have been
a more open environment for debate. Nonetheless, climate engineering is still highly
controversial, and the decision to include assessment of climate engineering proposals in
the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
surprised or even provoked several observers (Stilgoe et al. 2013). The summary for poli-
cymakers of the WGI (Working Group 1) Assessment Report in 2013 briefly discussed
climate engineering, and this even in the report’s final paragraph—possibly a sign of its
increased prominence (Stilgoe et al. 2013). The Guardian reported: ‘Geoengineering was
taboo – too seductive, too dangerous and too uncertain. It is now moving towards the
mainstream of climate science’ (Stilgoe et al. 2013).
The concept of climate engineering includes a wide range of different options, dif-
ferencing with regards to technical feasibility and effectiveness, environmental risks,
cost estimates, moral implications and governance challenges. The methods are usually
divided into two broad categories: (1) techniques that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from
the atmosphere (carbon dioxide removal, CDR) and (2) techniques that reflect the sun’s
light and heat back into space (solar radiation management, SRM). CDR proposals
include, for example, enhanced land carbon sinks, sequestration of biomass, capture of
CO2 from ambient air, the enhancement of oceanic uptake of CO2 by fertilization of the
oceans; while SRM proposals include increasing the surface reflectivity, enhancement of
cloud reflectivity, sulfate aerosol injection (SAI) into the stratosphere or placing shields
or deflectors in space (Royal Society 2009). The CDR/SRM distinction is based entirely
on the target mechanism of the technologies: extracting carbon or reflecting sunlight.
However, the Royal Society mentions in passing another distinction that cuts across this
411
divide, specifically whether either method seeks to modify processes taking place in the
ambient environment (releasing iron into the oceans, aerosols in the stratosphere or scat-
tering minerals on the land) or to construct more traditional ‘black-box’ machines such
as space mirrors or carbon-sucking machines (Royal Society 2009). This second distinc-
tion may be particularly relevant to social judgments about the acceptability of any of
the technologies under consideration. An analysis of Wikipedia entries (Markusson et al.
2013) revealed yet a different distinction between the technologies. Links connected dis-
cussions of land-based sequestration technologies, strongly related to the discourses of
adaptation and mitigation leaving another set of technologies, including solar radiation
management, ocean iron fertilization and weather modification relatively disconnected
from the broader climate discourses.
While various technical components already exist (aircraft, ships, chemicals, etc.) there
are, as yet, no socio-technical systems capable of implementation even on a trial basis.
Despite this, several of the latest IPCC scenarios and the UK Department of Energy
and Climate Change’s carbon calculator already assume the capacity to extract carbon
from the atmosphere, although this is not made very explicit and the technologies to do
this remain unproven, particularly at large scale. It is often claimed for SRM technolo-
gies, particularly stratospheric aerosols, that they are potentially a fast-acting and cheap
technology with the capability to ameliorate climate change quickly and cost-efficiently;
although such claims consider only the project implementation costs and not the wider
social and environmental costs should something go wrong. All of the options face major
challenges; not only concerning lack of understanding or inability to control the negative
side-effects but also most ethical and governance issues are still unresolved.
This chapter will discuss governance challenges for climate engineering, and propose
some high-level principles for the governance of the field of climate engineering. Further,
the chapter outlines recurrent ways in which climate engineering has been framed in
public and scientific discourse and discusses how such framings may influence the future
of climate engineering. The chapter ends in a discussion about which direction climate
engineering will take future climate politics and governance in.
KEY CHALLENGES FOR CLIMATE ENGINEERING

GOVERNANCE
The Technology Control Dilemma
A key challenge of climate engineering governance is articulated by the British sociolo-

gist David Collingridge (1980) as the ‘technology control dilemma.’ Briefly, the dilemma
consists of the fact that it would be ideal to be able to put appropriate governance
arrangements in place upstream of the development of a technology to ensure that all of
the stages from research and development through to demonstration and full deployment
are all appropriately organized and adequately regulated to safeguard against unwanted
health, environmental and social consequences. However, experience repeatedly teaches
us that it is all but impossible, in the early stages of development of a technology, to
know how it will turn out in its final form. Mature technologies rarely, if ever, bear close
resemblance to the initial ideas of their originators. Once widely deployed, it is often too

Climate engineering 413
late to build in desirable characteristics without major disruptions. The control dilemma
has led to calls for a moratorium on certain emerging technologies and, in some cases,
on field experiments with climate engineering. This would make it almost impossible to
accumulate the information necessary to make informed judgments about the feasibility
or desirability of the proposed technology.
However, Collingridge did not intend identification of the control dilemma to be a
counsel of despair. He and his successors in the field identify various characteristics of
technologies that contribute to inflexibility and irreversibility and that are therefore to
be avoided where more flexible alternatives are available. These undesirable character-
istics include high levels of capital intensity, hubristic claims about performance and
long lead times from conception to realization, to which Britain’s Royal Commission on
Environmental Pollution recently added, in the context of nanoparticles, ‘uncontrolled
release into the environment’ (RCEP 2008).
International Agreement and Coordination
Another key challenge for climate engineering governance lies in the varying degrees of
international agreement and coordination that would seem to be required for the dif-
ferent technologies involved. At least upon first examination, carbon air capture with
geological sequestration would not seem to require much in the way of international
agreement, except where the geological formations chosen for storage crossed national
boundaries and possibly where facilities were located close to national borders, or where
sequestration is to occur offshore. National planning regulations, rules governing envi-
ronmental impact assessment, and health and safety laws would seem to provide, at least
in principle, an adequate framework for ensuring the responsible management of the
technology where there is little prospect of trans-border damage occurring to people
or the environment. Existing national legislation for the governance of carbon dioxide
capture and storage from fixed point sources (e.g., coal-fired power plants), without an
overarching global governance framework, underscores this point.
However, the situation seems to be very different with CDR involving iron fertiliza-
tion because it involves modification of natural processes that cannot be territorially
contained. Similarly, any kind of SRM, whether involving space mirrors (black-box engi-
neering), cloud whitening or sulfate aerosols (modification of natural processes), would
seem to require international agreement even for field trials, let alone deployment.
Potentially lengthy negotiations would seem to be necessary before sulfate aerosols
could be deployed by any country or other agent within an agreed international govern-
ance framework; without such framework such activities would likely attract the con-
demnation of the international community. Overall, the international legal framework
within which climate engineering would be conducted remains as underspecified as
the technologies themselves. Furthermore, the control dilemma means that it is almost
impossible to determine governance requirements until the shape of any of the technolo-
gies under consideration is better known. This dilemma led the Royal Society to recom-
mend establishing an international scientific collaboration to ‘develop a code of practice
for geoengineering research and provide recommendations to the international scientific
community for a voluntary research governance framework’ (Royal Society 2009, p. 61).
There are also democratic challenges related to climate engineering governance

because of distributional issues: the benefits and risks will be unevenly distributed both
intra-and inter-generationally (Fischer this volume; Virgoe 2009). This has raised con-
cerns that states may act unilaterally. Some authors (e.g., Victor 2008) have suggested that
the low project costs of SAI pose the danger that ‘rogue’ states or even individuals could
be tempted to implement the technology in the absence of a comprehensive international
agreement. However, most commentators agree that it is unlikely that a small actor could
sustain such a program in the face of opposition from the major powers.
Regulatory Frameworks
A few studies have reviewed the existing regulatory framework and principles that could
potentially govern or guide research, development, demonstration and deployment of
climate engineering. There are important demarcations in the literature whether the
existing frameworks are considered to be sufficient if incrementally adjusted, or if new
frameworks or even organizations are needed, which would constitute a more radical
change.
The Royal Society (2009), Bodansky (2013) and Winter (2011) suggest that many
issues of international coordination and control could be resolved through the appli-
cation, modification and extension of existing treaties and institutions governing the
atmosphere, the ocean, space and national territories, rather than by the creation of
specific new international institutions. According to Bodansky (2013, p. 542), four
types of existing frameworks are of potential relevance for climate engineering gov-
ernance: (1) general principles, such as the precautionary principle, or the principle of
inter-generational equity; (2) treaty norms, such as the Environmental Modification
(ENMOD) Convention, or the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC); (3) decisions by international institutions, such as the parties to the
London Convention and the Convention on Biological Diversity; (4) rules developed by
non-governmental actors, such as the Oxford Principles (Rayner et al. 2013).
All climate engineering methods would seem to fall under provisions of the 1992
UNFCCC and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which impose a general obligation to ‘employ
appropriate methods, for example environmental impact assessment . . . with a view to
minimizing adverse effects . . . on the quality of the environment, of projects or measures
undertaken to mitigate or adapt to climate change’ (UNFCCC, Article 4). Additionally,
there are several customary law and general principles that would apply to such activi-
ties. The duty not to cause significant transboundary harm is recognized in many treaty
instruments and at customary international law. As the Royal Society observes: ‘States
are not permitted to conduct or permit activities within their territory, or in common
spaces such as the high seas or outer space, without regard to the interests of other states
or for the protection of the global environment’ (Royal Society 2009, p. 40).
The use of sulfate aerosols for SRM may fall under the jurisdiction of the Montreal
Protocol for Protection of the Ozone Layer as they may have ozone depleting properties.
Ocean fertilization has already caught the attention of the London Dumping Convention
and London Protocol, which has adopted a cautious approach to permitting carefully
controlled scientific research through a 2008 resolution agreeing that the technology is
governed by the treaty but exempting legitimate scientific research from its definition of
dumping. The Convention on Biological Diversity has also sought to intervene to prevent

ocean fertilization experiments except for small-scale experiments in coastal waters (Gosh
and Blackstock 2011).
The Oxford Principles
Following publication of the Royal Society report in 2009, the UK House of Commons
Select Committee on Science and Technology initiated an inquiry on the topic of how
climate engineering should be governed. An ad hoc group of academics submitted a list
of five high-level principles (Rayner et al. 2013) for research, development and deploy-
ment of climate engineering technologies:
The ‘Oxford Principles’, as they are known, hold that geoengineering should be regulated
as a public good, in that, since people cannot opt out, the whole proceeding has to be in a
well-defined public interest; that decisions defining the extent of that interest should be made
with public participation; that all attempts at geoengineering research should be made public
and their results disseminated openly; that there should be an independent assessment of the
impacts of any geoengineering research proposal; and that governing arrangements be made
clear prior to the use of any actual use of the technologies. (The Economist 2010)
The idea behind these principles is that they should provide assurance that the entire
process from initial research through development, field trials and eventual deployment
are conducted openly and in the public interest of all affected countries, while also allow-
ing for the development of more flexible technology-specific protocols for the governance
of individual climate engineering approaches as their technical contours and socio-
economic implications become clearer through the research and development process.
The Final Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee welcomed the principles,
saying: ‘While some aspects of the suggested five key principles need further develop-
ment, they provide a sound foundation for developing future regulation. We endorse the
five key principles to guide geoengineering research’ (House of Commons 2010, p. 35).
The Economist (2010) reported that the principles were ‘generally endorsed’ by partici-
pants in the 2010 Asilomar Conference convened to explore the governance issue facing
climate engineering researchers, and were used as the basis for a similar set of recommen-
dations in the conference final report.
It is immediately obvious that the Oxford Principles are high-level and abstract. They
should be regarded as akin to principles in the legal sense: as laying down the basic
parameters for decision-making. Like legal principles—for example, the principle of
due process in both international and domestic law—they do not make concrete rec-
ommendations but must be interpreted to fit a particular case. The absence of specific
action-guiding prescriptions in the Oxford Principles has been criticized. However, in this
instance, abstraction is not a disadvantage. Given the heterogeneity of proposed climate
engineering methods and their varying degrees of development, it is undesirable, if not
impossible, for the Oxford Principles to be anything but high-level. A ‘one-size fits all’
approach is certainly not appropriate. The authors intended them to be interpreted and
implemented in different ways, appropriate to the technology under consideration and
the stage of its development, as well as the wider social context of the research. What
matters is that at each stage of research, researchers should be able to give a coherent
account of how they interpreted and followed the Oxford Principles in their particular

research project. As such, the Principles suggest how those engaged with climate engi-
neering might be called to account within any kind of governance system, international
or national, mandatory or voluntary.
FRAMING CLIMATE ENGINEERING
When discussing climate engineering governance, one needs to bear in mind that in
addition to the heterogeneity of technical practices bundled together under the umbrella
of climate engineering, technology assessment is also confounded by the fact that the
various proposals remain technological ‘imaginaries’ (Jasanoff and Kim 2009; Neimanis
et al. this volume). Hence, how climate engineering is framed has a crucial impact on gov-
ernance discussions, as frames provide signposts for knowing, analyzing, persuading and
acting.1 When a situation contains current or future uncertainty, frames may promote
some aspects of an argument, while minimizing, obscuring or excluding others (Bellamy
et al. 2012). In the following section we will discuss how climate engineering has been
framed in various contexts and finally how such framing may influence climate engineer-
ing governance and future climate politics.
The literature suggests that multiple ways of framing climate engineering coexist. This
may be interpreted as a signal that the debate on climate engineering is opening up rather
than closing down with respect to diversity and balance in perspectives included in the
debate. Until 2013, the arguments for more climate engineering research dominated the
mass media debate, but in 2014 a shift towards more conditional support and also deeper
skepticism has gained wider influence (Anshelm and Hansson 2014b). Such opening up
might, according to Scholte et al. (2013), facilitate critical societal reflection on climate
engineering technologies.
Multiple ways of framing climate engineering have also been found in studies of
how experts perceive climate engineering. Between December 2012 and February 2013,
Cairns (2013) interviewed 35 participants from a variety of disciplinary and institutional
backgrounds in the UK, US, Canada and Japan who undertook a ‘Q sort’ of 48 opinion
statements. Four distinctive framings emerged: ‘At the very least we need more research’;
‘We are the planetary maintenance engineers’; ‘Geoengineering is a political project’; and
‘Let’s focus on carbon.’ Results indicate a strong polarity around divergently construed
pros and cons of climate engineering as a whole—underscoring the political salience
of this term. But additional axes of difference suggested a more nuanced picture than
straightforward pro/anti positioning as the term offers interpretive flexibility for articu-
lating diverse interests within and across contending framings (Bellamy et al. 2012).
Despite emerging scientific and media debate, climate engineering remains largely
unfamiliar to the lay public, as demonstrated by studies in the UK, the USA, Canada
and Sweden (Mercer et al. 2011; Pidgeon et al. 2012; Carr et al. 2013; Wibeck et al.
2015). Thus, how climate engineering will be framed in future media and policy debates
is likely to have a large influence on how the public will understand and assess these
technologies. For instance, Corner et al. (2013) argue that a climate emergency framing,
and the framing of particular climate engineering technologies as analogous to ‘natural’
processes (e.g., describing chemical vents for carbon dioxide capture from the air as
‘artificial trees’ or stratospheric aerosol injection as mimicking volcano eruptions) could

have a strong impact on the formation of lay representations in a more climate engineer-
ing supportive direction. In the following, we will discuss some of the more common
frames of climate engineering that have been salient in scientific, political and public
discourse, and that each highlight different aspects of climate engineering, thus enabling
different types of responses to proposals for large-scale technical manipulations of the
global climate.
Climate Emergency and Failed Politics
A common proposition is that climate engineering, or SAI, may prevent climate emer-
gency due to the risks that several tipping points in the climatic systems may be reached
in the very near future and cause escalating and non-linear climate change (Lenton 2013).
Anshelm and Hansson (2014a, 2014b) found that in the international media debate,
this viewpoint is often accompanied by descriptions of politics as impeding efficient
climate change management. In particular, the UN processes are described as impo-
tent and society has no time to lose in implementing an effective solution (Harris this
volume). This emergency frame includes a preference for solutions that do not restrict
the contemporary industrial rationality, and a firm belief in the impossibility of chang-
ing industrial society’s uncompromising aspirations for economic growth and unwilling-
ness for self-sacrifice, which means that there may be no other choice than deploying
climate engineering (at least as a complement to mitigation and adaptation), even though
such technologies might have environmentally devastating consequences and worsen an
already catastrophic situation (Anshelm and Hansson 2014b). In addition, ‘emergency-
deployment’ framing of climate engineering to avoid or reverse climate tipping points
have been criticized in practical terms—who would establish that an emergency exists?—
and for their implications for democracy as states of emergency invariably suspend
normal rights and processes (Heyward 2013).
While it has been claimed that research is needed in order to understand under what—
if any—circumstances, climate engineering could actually work to avoid a climate emer-
gency or tipping points and to reverse one that had been passed, Lenton (2013) argues
that it is not at all clear that introducing these options into the policy mix will actually
help trigger effective action to avoid dangerous climate change. However, recent analyses
suggest that the ‘emergency-deployment’ frame does not dominate the public debate
anymore, but now there seems to coexist a variety of framings (Anshelm and Hansson
2014b; Heyward, 2013).
Balancing Stakes
Humphreys (2011) has demonstrated that the discussion of benefits and risks associated
with climate engineering is closely intertwined with the governance challenges since they
also raise issues of norms, regulation and policy development. The interpretative flex-
ibility in the scientific literature and the public debate is also evident regarding whether
climate engineering is the ‘last resort,’ the lesser of two evils or even a valid mitigation
option. In Huttunen and Hildén’s (2014) analysis of 68 scientific papers, a risk–benefit
frame, weighing risks against benefits of climate engineering, dominated over other
frames. However, analyzing a larger corpus of 291 scientific abstracts on climate

engineering, Linnér and Wibeck (2015) found that the scientific literature primarily
framed climate engineering technologies as ‘dual high-stake technologies’ (i.e., risk–risk
tradeoff). In this frame, potential dangers of conducting research, development, dem-
onstration and/or deployment of climate engineering technologies are weighed against
the consequences of abstaining from pursuing different steps in this innovation chain.
In other words, for dual high-stake technologies ‘the major argument in their favour is
that not considering them as options may have disastrous consequences, while the major
argument against them is that considering them as options may also have disastrous con-
sequences. In both cases, profoundly negative, even catastrophic, effects are anticipated
for our planet’ (Linnér and Wibeck 2015, p. 264).
Nonetheless, although Linnér and Wibeck (2015) found that the dual high- stake
framing dominated the peer-reviewed climate engineering literature as a whole, the
framing of particular climate engineering technologies varied. Thus, Linnér and Wibeck
(2015) conclude that for climate engineering governance it is important to distinguish
between technologies, rather than treating climate engineering as a single, coherent gov-
ernance entity. Different governance goals might be relevant for different technologies,
based on whether they are characterized by single or dual high-stake concerns.
Also across several focus group studies with laypeople, participants voiced their con-
cerns that climate engineering will bring about new environmental risks and unforeseen
side-effects (Macnaghten and Szerszynski 2013; Pidgeon et al. 2013; Wibeck et al. 2015).
To borrow an expression from Corner et al. (2013), in these studies, climate engineering
was seen as a way of ‘messing with nature.’ For instance, a focus group study among
Swedish laypeople found that although these focus group participants expressed deep
concern about climate change, much in line with the climate emergency framing, when
discussing climate engineering they still tended to primarily highlight risks of climate
engineering over the risks of climate change. In particular they were concerned that
climate engineering would negatively affect ecosystem balance and bring about unpre-
dictable negative side-effects (Wibeck et al. 2015). Similarly, in a UK deliberative work-
shop on a particular example of solar radiation management—the test-bed proposal
of the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Geoengineering (SPICE) project on
stratospheric aerosol injection—one of the main concerns of the participants was related
to the safety and unintended environmental impacts of the test-bed (Pidgeon et al. 2013).
Uncertainty and the Case for More Research
Many central risks and problems of climate engineering were already anticipated several
years ago and presented openly in the public debates in mass media, even by actors advo-
cating research or deployment of these technologies. In mass media, climate engineering
proponents are depicted as reluctantly favoring research and deployment, well aware of
and seriously considering all of the attendant risks (Anderson this volume). A common
position among critics of climate engineering is that sufficient knowledge of its full-scale
consequences is constrained by inherent knowledge gaps unless the technologies are
implemented at large scale (e.g., Anshelm and Hansson 2014a), but major and even deep
uncertainties are also acknowledged in the scientific literature.
To explore framings of climate engineering in the scientific literature, Hansson (2014)
reviewed papers conducting cost assessments and valuations of SAI. It is often claimed

that this technology has the greatest potential to rapidly ameliorate temperature rise at
low cost (e.g., Barrett 2009). However, it also poses major global risks. Cost-effectiveness
has a central role in informing policy responses and the governance of technologies, and
how climate engineering is framed in research will have a large impact on policy discus-
sions. However, it is a challenge to perform modeling research on climate engineering
since the uncertainties concerning technical aspects and also climate change dynamics are
significant (e.g., Lawrence and Crutzen 2013). The Royal Society found that ‘Establishing
accurate cost estimates for climate engineering technologies is however an inherently diffi-
cult process, and only extremely tentative estimates are available for most of the methods
considered’ (Royal Society 2009, p. 44). Some skeptics (e.g., Heyen 2012) even claim that
the effects of SRM and SAI are so uncertain that cost estimates are more likely to distort
rather than inform decision making. An extreme version of this is that of Winter (2011)
who claims that research on SAI measures is in vain because these options’ effects can
never be understood—a situation that can be called ‘conscious ignorance,’ which implies
that it is beforehand possible to know that sufficient knowledge cannot be gained.
It is, therefore, unsurprising that a recurring, and seemingly rather modest, recommen-
dation is to call for more research to reduce the uncertainties and understand what, if any,
level of SAI is optimal. There seems to be ambivalence concerning the view of science’s
ability to reduce these scientific uncertainties—on one hand refined modeling and cau-
tious experimentation may provide more accurate results (Keith 2013), but on the other
hand it has been argued that complexity and uncertainties are so massive that even if
they were understood they cannot properly be reduced in order to suit the model (Hulme
2014a). Hansson (2014) claims that the inclusion of more complexity into the models
does not necessarily increase their accuracy. Furthermore, including more complexity
may make models more difficult to interpret, especially by policymakers (Bellamy et al.
2012). So how to manage this dilemma of generating and communicating complex and
uncertain scientific knowledge of relevance for governance?
Scientific uncertainty provides an argument for funding more research. The Royal
Society argues that small experiments gradually and cautiously scaled up over time
offer a pathway to deliver knowledge robust enough to inform decisions regarding full-
scale implementation (Royal Society 2009). However, others fear a ‘slippery slope’ (e.g.,
Hulme 2014a), by which humanity would slip into full implementation of the technology
without proper consideration of its full environmental and social implications.
Also, in the international mass-media debate, the discourse critical of climate engi-
neering maintains that the proposed field experiments will never provide the answers
needed in order to evaluate the future side-effects of full-scale deployment (Anshelm and
Hansson 2014a; Hulme 2014a). According to this view, confidence in climate engineering
can never be based on scientific proof but is inevitably based on belief. For some critics,
the most horrifying risks of climate engineering are not directly related to its deployment,
but to its reinforcement of unsustainable social and economic structures. Climate engi-
neering can be viewed as an extension of the hubris that has brought climate change upon
humanity in the first place. It is just another step along a disastrous path. Grandiose tech-
nologies such as climate engineering are seen as part of the problem, not of the solution.
In sum, the lack of consensus between the actors criticizing and advocating climate engi-
neering is related mainly to underlying assumptions of social change, knowledge limits
and humanity’s ability to control nature (Anshelm and Hansson 2014a; Hamilton 2013).

CONCLUSIONS
As illustrated, estimating the costs and assessing the risks of climate engineering are
major challenges. Possibly there is even an unbridgeable gap between the knowledge
needed for informed decision-making on one hand and the scientific community’s ability
to provide knowledge considered robust enough on the other. Some critical voices claim
that some climate engineering options can never be understood (e.g., Winter 2011; see
also Royal Society 2009), while others maintain that small-scale experiments and gradual
implementation can provide valuable insights (e.g., Keith 2013). Hence, the present lack
of knowledge may either constitute an argument for an early rejection of climate engi-
neering, or an argument for more research. If the latter alternative gains influence, it is of
crucial importance to at an early stage discuss the development of climate engineering in
the context of climate change governance.
Consideration of the technology control dilemma (Collingridge 1980) suggests that it
would be sensible to favor technologies that are encapsulated rather than involving dis-
persal of materials into the ambient environment and options that are more flexible and
cause weaker lock-in effects, that is, have lower capital intensity and shorter lead times.
Grand scale global climate engineering illustrates the core of this dilemma, not only
because of inherent major uncertainties, but also because of its scale, long lead times,
long-term commitments and irreversibility. Possibly, responsible governance of grand
scale global climate engineering is an overwhelming challenge for the present regulatory
regimes and deliberative ideals (Stevenson this volume).
However, the climate engineering umbrella is inclusive and calls have been made, even
among some actors deeply skeptical towards climate engineering, or towards particular
technologies such as SAI, that any step forward in climate engineering governance should
differentiate the various options and separate the more feasible and controllable ones
from the others (e.g., Hulme 2014b). Some of the climate engineering options already
have or may have the potential to, at least at a limited scale, fulfill the requirements for
responsible and reversible research, development and deployment. As already mentioned,
there are, for example, several land-based sequestration technologies that seem to be more
strongly related to the discourses of adaptation and mitigation than to the discourses of
climate engineering (Markusson et al. 2013), and as already discussed these may fall
within existing regulatory frameworks and if not grand scale deployed they will only
have minor impacts on future climate politics. Scott (2012) maintains that the framing
of scientific topics in democracies valuing public participation should promote dialogue
and learning and also be open about both scientific consensus and disagreement. Which
specific options may fulfill the requirements, and of course which requirements, should
be a matter of broader and more inclusive scientific and public debates.
However, an open debate is favored if the discussion continues to be less colored by
emergency framings and claims of failed politics since they do not encourage open delib-
erations, instead they emphasize unavoidable major risks that call for technical fixes and
leave climate engineering as an inevitable option if climate change has to be managed,
and might even overtrump democracy. Instead we have argued that climate engineering
research should be guided by a number of high-level principles. These principles are
designed to assure that the entire process up to and until a potential deployment is con-
ducted openly and in the public interest of all affected countries while also flexible for

technology-specific protocols and implications that become clearer through the research
and development processes.
NOTE
1. The framing concept here refers to ‘a central organizing idea or storyline that provides meaning to an
unfolding strip of events, weaving a connection among them. The frame suggests what the controversy is
about, the essence of the issue’ (Gamson and Modigliani 1987, p. 143).
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PART VI
NORMATIVE IDEALS OF
CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

37. Regime effectiveness
Steinar Andresen
INTRODUCTION
The issue of climate change reached the international political agenda in 1988 through
the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere in Toronto. Behind the confer-
ence was a forceful combination of high-level activists of various kinds: scientists,
policymakers and environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In a period
when the public was very concerned about the environment, the conference attracted
considerable attention. However, lack of understanding of the complexity of the issue
was demonstrated by the fact that the conference adopted the wildly unrealistic target
of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from industrialized counties by 20 percent
by 2005. Nevertheless, the conference was very important in that it determined the
approach to dealing the problem as well as who was responsible for the problem. A top-
down target, with timetable, was adopted; and as the developed countries were essen-
tially responsible for creating the problem, they would have to take the lead in solving
it. This approach continued as the main guideline for the negotiations process over the
next 20 years (Andresen et al. 2014).
In 1989 it was decided that negotiations on an international climate treaty were to
be conducted under the auspices of the United Nations (UN). The UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted at the Rio Summit in 1992,
the first Conference of the Parties (COP) was arranged in Berlin in 1995 and the Kyoto
Protocol was adopted in 1997. Thus, initially the process yielded significant results in a
short time. Since then, however, the process of negotiations has been painstakingly slow.
It took 20 years of continued negotiations within the UN system to agree that a new
climate treaty was to be adopted in Paris at the 21st COP in 2015 (Dimitrov this volume).
For a long time, the UN negotiations were the ‘only game in town,’ but in the past decade
various other initiatives and institutions at various governance levels have emerged, not
least because of the slow pace of the UN regime. A ‘climate regime complex’ has emerged
(Keohane and Victor 2011; Zelli and van Asselt this volume).
The core purpose of the UN regime, and all other such initiatives, is to reduce green-
house gas (GHG) emissions in order to counter dangerous climate change. However,
irrespective of this significant multifaceted effort, emissions have continued to rise. This
indicates that the UN regime as well as the rest of the ‘regime complex’ has earned a
very low score as regards problem-solving effectiveness (Andresen 2014b). In contrast
to the sterile blame-game of the UN climate regime, the alternative and supplementary
initiatives or clubs at various governance levels are often vibrant and creative; they have
therefore received considerable scholarly attention (see Abbott 2013; Andresen 2014a).
However, there has been little focus on their actual ability to reduce emissions, and a
major weakness of these initiatives is their Northern dominance: the South will have to
be brought on board (Gupta this volume).
425
The UN climate regime is in focus in this chapter, as this is where by far most time and
energy have been invested. Why has it not been possible to turn the trend of increasing
emissions? Obviously, the main factor is the lack of will and/or ability among key actors
to change their behavior towards a low-carbon future, but the institutional design of the
UN climate regime is also relevant. The main UN climate instruments (the UNFCCC
and the Kyoto Protocol) are informed by the Toronto Conference in terms of approach:
top-down and the responsibility of the developed countries. However, in terms of actual
and predicted emission trajectories the world is a very different place in 2015 compared
to the 1990s, with emissions from developed countries decreasing, but with a sharp
increase in emissions from the developing countries. Will it be possible to design a more
dynamic treaty that better reflects these profoundly changed circumstances? That is the
main challenge for the negotiators at the 2015 climate conference in Paris. First of all,
how do we evaluate the effectiveness of the climate regime complex, and how can perfor-
mance so far be explained?
THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ENVIRONMENTAL INSTITUTIONS
The effectiveness of international environmental institutions has been extensively studied

over the past two decades (Miles et al. 2002). Below follows a brief simplified presen-
tation. Most emphasis has been on problem-solving effectiveness, with less attention
paid to issues such as equity and fairness (Young 2014). Regarding problem-solving
effectiveness a consensus has emerged in the research community that effectiveness
can be measured in terms of output, outcome and impact (Underdal 2002). Output is
essentially potential effectiveness, as it concerns the rules and regulations emanating
from the regime, for example, the Kyoto Protocol. Stricter and more ambitious rules
generally lead to higher effectiveness, but there is no guarantee that such rules will be fol-
lowed. Therefore, the outcome indicator must focus on actual achievements made on the
ground. It is necessary to establish a causal link between the institution in question and
the behavior of key target groups. Through meticulous process tracing we need to estab-
lish that, for instance, the oil industry is reducing its emissions as a result of rules and
regulations laid down in the climate regime. The impact indicator is the most important
one, as it seeks to establish the extent to which the problem has been solved by the regime
in question. For example, has the climate regime been able to stabilize GHG concentra-
tions in the atmosphere at a level that could prevent further dangerous anthropogenic
interference with the climate system? Unfortunately, due to the influence of a host of
intervening variables, this approach is fraught with severe methodological challenges and
is therefore exceedingly difficult to use. In seeking to measure the achievements of ‘softer’
or more immature institutions, less rigorous criteria have been applied, such as learning,
innovation and diffusion (Andresen 2007).
As to explaining effectiveness, many different approaches have been proposed (see
Mitchell 2010). However, there is agreement that the institution as such, as well as non-
regime attributes like the characteristics of the issue area, can make a difference for what
is achieved. We can distinguish between the nature of the issue area, and the problem-
solving ability of the regime (Miles et al. 2002). Issues like climate change are ‘malign’ due
to intellectual uncertainty and deep-seated underlying political conflicts. Such issues are

Regime effectiveness 427
therefore exceedingly difficult to solve. Much more can usually be achieved when prob-
lems are ‘benign,’ as has been the case with the ozone regime.
The basic nature and characteristics of an issue tend to be rather stable and therefore
hard to manipulate or change. More interesting from an analytical as well as a policymak-
ing perspective is therefore the extent to which the problem-solving ability of the institu-
tion makes a difference. The problem-solving ability can be seen as a function of power,
leadership and institutional design (Underdal 2002). To simplify: if powerful actors are
pushers and leaders, the higher will be the chance of an effective regime—and vice versa.
In terms of whether strong and creative institutions can make a difference or not, this
brings up the question of the significance of institutional design. Can the way an institu-
tion is designed be of significance for its effectiveness? Some analysts claim that this is
the case, whereas others argue that if a conflict is strong and deep, it cannot be resolved
by clever institutional design (Najam 2003). How does this affect climate change archi-
tecture? Is it possible to conclude, from empirical evidence, whether the design of the
UNFCCC makes a difference for its effectiveness? Or is it the malignancy of the problem
that is decisive for the lack of overall progress, irrespective of approach?
THE UN CLIMATE REGIME: FROM RAPID START TO

IDEOLOGICAL SLOWDOWN
Judged by the key components of the climate regime at the time they were created, the
regime should score fairly high on problem-solving effectiveness. The UNFCCC is a
typical framework convention; it was negotiated rather quickly, and has been seen as the
necessary starting point for building a knowledge basis for subsequent action. However,
it has also been heavily criticized for its soft non-binding emission target for developed
countries (Andresen at al. 2014). Whether having a legally binding target would have
made a difference for the steep rise in emissions we will never know. As regards fairness,
the convention deserves a high score for emphasizing the responsibility of the devel-
oped countries to take the lead as they had main responsibility for creating the problem
through their historic GHG emissions, while developing countries were exempted from
emission commitments.
The Kyoto Protocol represented an important step forward by introducing specific
and legally binding commitments for developed (Annex I) countries. The Protocol’s three
flexible mechanisms were also innovative. For various reasons, the Joint Implementation
mechanism has not been applied much, whereas the Clean Development Mechanism
(CDM) has been extensively used. The quota trading system of the Protocol has never
been directly applied. However, this approach—of creating incentives for emission
reductions—has contributed significantly to diffusion by spurring trading schemes in
many regions.
Thus, in terms of output, the Kyoto Protocol represented a significant step forward
compared to the convention. The Protocol also scores fairly high on softer indicators
such as innovation and diffusion. Turning to the outcome indicator, the picture is less
rosy. There is hardly any doubt that emissions would have been higher in the absence
of the UN climate regime as most Annex I countries have reduced their emissions.
However, the most significant reductions have taken place in the economies in transition

(EITs): this has not been the result of proactive climate policies, but has been due to eco-
nomic recession—which should remind us of the importance of investigating causality.
Moreover, the Kyoto Protocol’s flexibility mechanisms have not proven very effective in
reducing emissions. One comprehensive study of the effects of the CDM (Lund 2013)
concludes that it has actually led to an increase in emissions and yielding very moderate
results in terms of promoting sustainable development.
The main weakness of the climate regime in terms of problem-solving effectiveness,
however, is not lack of ambitions in the Protocol or weak mechanisms, but its limited
scope: commitments apply only to (developed) Annex I countries. Since the creation
of the regime in 1992, global CO2 emissions have increased by more than 50 percent;
moreover, emissions grew twice as fast in the decade after the adoption of the Kyoto
Protocol in 1997, clearly indicating its inability to deal effectively with the problem. Also,
whereas Annex I countries in 2011 had reduced their emissions by 6 percent compared
to the 1990 level, emissions from the developing world had increased by 160 percent in
the same period (Aldy 2014). In other words, and somewhat paradoxically, the Protocol
appears to be quite effective within its limited scope, but utterly ineffective in an overall
problem-solving perspective. This weakness is further amplified through the adoption of
the Kyoto Protocol for a second commitment period, where participation is even more
limited than with the 1997 Protocol and as yet there are no international obligations on
the countries that emit some 85 percent of total global emissions. Thus, the score on the
outcome indicator is very low. As regards impact, solving the problem is a more distant
dream today than when the regime was established, as the challenge of climate change is
far more serious today than back in 1992.
EXPLAINING THE MODEST PROGRESS
Turning first to the problem structure, we should note that climate change is an exceed-
ingly malign problem, due to a combination of several factors (see Cherry et al. 2014).
Climate mitigation is a global public good: no country can be excluded from sharing
the benefits of climate mitigation actions, irrespective of whether it contributes to the
efforts made. This implies that most of the benefits of a country’s own mitigation efforts
go to other countries. Governments primarily concerned with the welfare of their own
citizens have therefore little incentive for action. While the costs of reducing emissions are
incurred immediately, the benefits cannot be reaped until sometime in the future, in all
likelihood only after several decades. Policymakers tend to have short time-horizons and
therefore prefer measures that can bring immediate benefits, with delayed costs—so they
will generally give priority to more immediate social and welfare challenges. Furthermore,
reductions on the scale necessary to have a real impact are very costly, because almost
all economic activities produce GHG emissions. Domestic political factors also work
against forceful mitigation action: the benefits accruing from unilateral action are small,
long-term and diverse, while costs are high and concentrated (see Bang, Viola and
Hochstetler this volume). Finally, deep international asymmetries contribute further to
the malignancy of the problem, as countries vary significantly in terms of their (historic)
contributions to climate change as well as their vulnerability and ability to deal with it.
The problem structure goes a long way in explaining the lack of progress. Considering

how difficult the issue is, we cannot necessarily conclude that the climate negotiators
have done a bad job. Being able to move a difficult problem even slightly forward may be
a greater achievement than solving a very easy problem. We have also noted significant
skill and imagination in establishing novel mechanisms. The problem is that these mecha-
nisms have not been designed to target the main new sources of emissions in developing
countries. In order to explain this, let us turn briefly to the problem-solving perspective.
In the period leading up to the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, the main actors were
the United States and the European Union (EU). They both agreed on the top-down
legally binding approach, but disagreed initially on the level of ambition as well as on the
flexibility mechanisms. The result was a true compromise: the EU got a fairly ambitious
protocol, the US got its flexibility mechanisms and the developing countries avoided com-
mitments (Andresen et al. 2014). Thus it was the power, leadership and joint effort of the
EU–US dynamics that brought about the Protocol (Parker and Karlsson this volume).
When the US withdrew, the EU alone was not strong enough to push the process forward
and no other actors followed its leadership by example. The EU was the only major actor
arguing for the adoption of a new and stronger version of the top-down legally binding
protocol (Dupont and Oberthür this volume). The US, as well as an increasingly vocal
South, were strongly opposed, for a long time refusing even to discuss legally binding
commitments. Although disagreement between the EU and the US remained strong,
the negotiations gradually turned into a traditional North–South conflict. The South
criticized the North for not providing financial assistance and for lack of leadership and
ambition (Gupta this volume). For a long while, the USA was alone in demanding that
the emerging economies—China in particular—should take more responsibility. Indeed,
the fact that emerging economies were exempt from commitments was a main reason
why the USA rejected the Kyoto Protocol (Bang this volume).
This explains why virtually nothing of lasting significance took place in UN nego-
tiations from the time when the Protocol was adopted in 1997 to the 2009 COP in
Copenhagen. It took four years to agree on the specific meaning of the Protocol and
another four years passed before it came into force, but also that failed to speed up the
pace of negotiations.
COP 15 in Copenhagen was scheduled to be a ‘milestone’ summit for realizing the 2007
Bali Action Plan. However, according to most observers, it was a failure. The result was a
2.5-page document void of legal significance, hammered out behind closed doors by the
US and the ‘BASIC’ countries (Brazil, India, China and South Africa) while the EU was
sidelined, reflecting the increasing power of the emerging economies (Ciplet et al. this
volume). While the USA had long been seen as the main laggard, now that role shifted
to China, which had contributed to stripping the document of all numerical targets apart
from the 2°C one (Stalley this volume). Although COP 15 did not prove to be a milestone
event in terms of ambition, it became a milestone in terms of approach, as it signaled a
change from the top-down approach to a bottom-up approach. This approach has since
been codified by the subsequent development and will represent the cornerstone in the
post-2020 regime. This gives rise to two questions: why did the approach change? What
are the merits and shortcomings of the bottom-up approach?
The first question can be answered rather easily. Apart from the brief period up to the
adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, the USA has been a strong proponent of the bottom-up
approach. The developing countries have favored a top-down approach for the developed

countries, but would never accept one for a regime where all states were to be included.
The only strong player to favor the top-down approach was the EU; this was adopted in
the Kyoto Protocol for a second commitment period but was never seriously considered
for the post-2020 regime. Although still playing the role as the most ambitious leader by
example, the EU appears to have become more cautious since the Copenhagen meeting,
reflecting the fact that no major players follow the EU example, as well as the increased
internal tensions (Fischer and Geden 2015). Thus, the EU has followed a course pursued
by other key developed countries like the USA and Japan in trying to tear down the
‘firewall’ between the North and South as regards commitments, through a bottom-up
approach for the new regime. Will the firewall be demolished then as a result of the
bottom-up regime? And will it help to enhance the effectiveness of the regime?
THE BOTTOM-UP APPROACH AND REGIME EFFECTIVENESS
The bottom-up approach is by no means new: it was proposed by analysts and policy-
makers back in the late 1980s. Its key feature is that countries are to decide on their own
climate policies according to what they regard as politically and economically feasible. It
is not guided by scientific advice and problem-solving, as with the top-down approach
(Hovi et al. 2014). Policies may include targets and timetables, or be limited simply to
spelling out envisioned actions. This is a pragmatic and practical approach—but it has
also been described as a more ‘clumsy’ procedure compared to the more elegant and
coherent top-down approach (Rayner 2010). Basically, the argument behind the pure
bottom-up approach is that climate change policies should be designed and implemented
at the lowest feasible level of organization. That makes the local level highly relevant,
as well as the city, regional and national levels (Janković this volume). The past decade
has seen several vibrant bottom-up initiatives springing up at various subnational levels.
While their strength lies in simplicity and pragmatism, the downside is easily identified as
well. As shown in connection with the problem structure, most effective climate change
measures incur considerable costs—so, without international pressure or incentives, a
bottom-up approach is not likely to result in strong domestic proactive climate measures
(Andresen 2015).
Here we should note that in practice there are few ‘pure’ versions of the two approaches:
climate governance initiatives usually have elements of both (Greene et al. 2014). This is
also the case for the present ‘pledge and review’ approach negotiated in a new UN climate
agreement, where the pledges represent the bottom-up approach and the review the top-
down approach. In fact a very similar approach was proposed already in 1991 by Japan,
but this was firmly rejected by both the EU as well as the ‘green’ community as being
a very weak approach. We cannot say whether progress would have been swifter if this
more pragmatic option had been chosen earlier on. It may have made negotiations more
difficult that the top-down approach by the large majority was seen as the most ambi-
tious and appropriate design feature, whereas the bottom-up approach was associated
with being a ‘laggard’ (Andresen 2015). Be this as it may: will employing a bottom-up
approach help to tear down the firewall between the two groups of states?
We have seen that while emissions are going down in the developed countries, they
have been rising sharply in the developing countries. The following facts can illustrate

the arbitrary division between Annex I and non-Annex I members. Recent data from
the World Bank show that 69 non-Annex I nations are richer than Ukraine, the poorest
Annex I state. Similarly, Qatar, Kuwait, Singapore and South Korea are among the
richest countries in the world, but are defined as developing countries. In terms of emis-
sions per capita, seven of the ten countries with highest per capita emissions are non-
Annex I countries (Kallbekken 2014). China alone is responsible for 28 percent of the
emissions—twice as high as the figure for the USA; and China’s per capita emissions are
now higher than those of the EU (Carafa 2015).
In short, the world today is a very different place from what it was in 1992 as regards
the North–South divide. While the South in 1992 was right in underlining the importance
of considering historic emissions, it does not make much sense to stop history at 1992, as
the South seems to be inclined to do (Kallbekken 2014). Although it is obviously reason-
able for the truly poor countries to be exempt from any hard commitments, many of the
emerging economies with high and increasing emissions today should join forces with the
North.
Against this background, what then are the chances of improving the workings of this
regime? The most obvious way to start is by reinterpreting the common but differenti-
ated responsibilities (CBDR) approach. The approach must be more dynamic regarding
responsibilities and capabilities. Failing to reflect present (and future) reality, this prin-
ciple stalls negotiations, limits the scope of compromise and ignores multiple relevant
dimensions (Kallbekken 2014). Other analysts have gone even further. According to Aldy
and Stavins (2012), this anachronistic bifurcation of mitigation efforts has inhibited pro-
gress in tackling climate change for two decades.
Although these critical views may make sense from a North’s point of view, the South
sees this very differently—as shown by recent development in the climate negotiations as
well as in other relevant forums. The South was able to cement the CBRD approach at the
Rio120 Summit, where a senior Indian negotiator stated that CBDR would remain his
country’s principal negotiating weapon: ‘We can use this to fend off almost any demand
from the West’ (quoted in Kallbekken 2014, p. 6). At COP 20 in Lima 2014, the South
argued for continued differentiation between the two groups of countries, and explicitly
warned against disrupting the Convention-based bifurcation and thus ‘effectively dis-
mantling the wall between Annex I and non-Annex I parties’ (Earth Negotiation Bulletin
2014, p. 43).
The precise nature of this new bottom-up approach is therefore still highly contested.
Most developing countries argue that the developed countries focus too much on mitiga-
tion, at the expense of financing and adaptation. Also, there are still deep-seated differ-
ences between the North and the South concerning the specific nature of the pledges, as
well as the basis for differentiation. There is still a long way to go before agreement can
be reached on the crucial issue of comparability of pledges, which is central for creating
incentives for emissions reductions. Progress has been even more limited on the issue of
review of pledges, with most developing countries dragging their feet: ‘This translates
into an absence of any kind of ex ante review of individual contributions in 2015’ (Earth
Negotiation Bulletin 2014, p. 43).
In short, the top-down approach may be dead, but the nature of the current bottom-up
alternative has remained unclear a few months before the Paris climate conference. That
makes it highly uncertain how important the UN regime will be as an instrument for

guiding and comparing domestic emission trajectories, and also shows the limitations of
institutional design when conflicts are intractable. Nevertheless, if the developing coun-
tries are to be engaged more—a necessity in a problem-solving perspective—some version
of this approach seems to be the only feasible option. This more pragmatic approach may
also contribute in forging important bilateral agreements, like the one between the US
and China from 2014. This agreement spurred widespread optimism prior to the climate
conference in Lima, but was not reflected in the outcome of the Lima negotiations. In the
longer run, the agreement may still prove to be a game-changer in terms of politics—but
‘[i]f policy is taken as a benchmark the US–China bilateral deal does not change the game
much’ (Carafa 2015, p. 19).
With the expected weak bottom-up approach emanating from the Paris 2015 conference,
we can expect that future climate policies will be decided primarily on the basis of domes-
tic interests and priorities. According to the Earth Negotiation Bulletin (2014, p. 44):
‘Some disenchanted observers . . . suggested that the major factors driving the level of
ambition of national contributions are in any event external to the UNFCCC process.’
In a bottom-up perspective, what level of ambition and actual climate policies can be
expected from some of the most important actors? This question was posed in a recent
book analyzing the climate policies of Brazil, China, the EU, India, Japan, Russia and
the United States (Bang et al. 2015). Together these seven actors emit some 70 percent of
total global emissions. One striking finding, although with variations, was the generally
weak public demand for strong domestic climate policies in all these countries, reflecting
the malign nature of the issue described earlier. Without strong public demand, policy-
makers cannot be expected to take forceful action. In Russia, public demand for domestic
climate policy is virtually non-existent. It is very low in India as well, reflecting the more
important imperatives of development and economic growth. In China there is grave
public concern about local pollution, and some climate-related co-benefits accrue from
this—but climate change as such ranks low among the public, and civil society is gener-
ally weak. The only partial exemption among the developing countries is Brazil: here we
have seen a proactive climate policy in relation to deforestation, but the effect of this is
expected to be reduced over time. In Japan, climate policies are mainly driven by joint
ministerial and business interests, whereas civil society is very weak. The Japanese public
has mobilized against nuclear power but not against climate change. In the USA, the
public is deeply divided on the issue; there is a vocal civil society but with limited influ-
ence on federal policies; on the whole, having low petrol prices seems more important for
members of the general public than climate policy measures. In the only true progressive
climate actor, the EU, public demand for forceful climate policies has varied significantly,
but it is high in several Northern EU countries (Dupont and Oberthür this volume).
That said, it may be that the strong role of the supranational institutions, particularly the
Commission, less sensitive to elections and public demand, goes a long way in explaining
why the EU is so different from the other key actors. And the prospects of transferring
the rather successful EU climate policy model to other parts of the world seem bleak
indeed.
In short, experiences from these crucial actors would seem to indicate that for the
public at large, economic growth, welfare and jobs are more important than the threat
of climate change. This is particularly pronounced in developing countries: and their
actions (or inaction) will be far more decisive for future GHG trajectories than those

of the developed countries. If a main reason for the insufficient measures taken is
lack of public demand this may also help to explain why the UN climate negotiations
have shown so little progress. Without firm and persistent public pressure, negotiators
cannot be expected to take forceful action. The positions taken in the climate nego-
tiations are not what determines policymakers’ popularity or fate in future elections.
Thus, it may be too simplistic to put all the blame for slow progress on the climate
diplomats.
CONCLUSIONS: THE PARIS TREATY—A MODEL FOR FUTURE

GLOBAL AGREEMENTS?
Initially the UN climate regime was fairly dynamic in terms of institution-building, and
the Kyoto Protocol was the result of joint and creative efforts primarily on the part of
the EU and the USA. At the time, both the UNFCCC and the Protocol gave a necessary
start to the process, targeting emissions from the rich countries. In this sense, the climate
regime can be said to be quite effective. However, this approach has grown increasingly
obsolete in the face of the sharply increasing emissions from the emerging economies.
From a problem-solving perspective, the effectiveness of the regime in reducing emissions
must be said to be exceedingly low. The main explanation, as noted, lies in the malign
nature of the problem itself. However, the institutional design of the regime also makes a
difference, as the Protocol was not designed to deal with some of the root causes of the
problem. This development has necessitated a change, from a top-down to a bottom-up
approach. At first glance, this rather unruly and clumsy approach may appear to be a
step back from the more elegant top-down approach. Given the unprecedented complex-
ity of the issue and the urgent need to engage the emerging economies, however, it is
probably the only way forward. Further, considering the present status of the negotia-
tions, the expected Paris climate deal is likely to be more of a new type of framework
agreement, rather than the detailed and comprehensive protocol that is needed to secure
accountability, comparability and incentives for emissions reductions. Particularly the
review mechanisms will need to be far more elaborate than they can be expected to be
after the Paris climate conference.
The Paris conference marks the end stop on a long journey—but it can also mark
the beginning of a new type of truly global treaty. This has a bearing upon the sensitive
issue of UN reform. In rational terms, the current composition of the UN Security
Council makes little sense, given the fundamental geopolitical changes that have
taken place since 1945—but no reform has been made. The same goes for the division
between the North and the South that has also existed in the UN system for some
50 years. The problem of climate change illustrates the random nature of this division.
Over time, the agreement adopted in Paris may gradually help to make this ‘firewall’
more nuanced, although this will be a difficult journey. Still, unless public demand
for strong climate policies increases considerably, any new agreement, irrespective of
approach, will eventually prove insufficient to solve the complex problem of dealing
with climate change.

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38. Environmental democracy
Frank Fischer
Climate crisis is the challenge of this century, threatening to throw the world as we know
it into social and political turmoil. Countless studies regularly predict massive hunger
around the world, destructive storms and flooding, lack of drinkable water, new pat-
terns of diseases, waves of desperate people migrating in search of livable conditions,
growing levels of social turbulence, violent protests and more (Dyer 2010; Raskin et al.
2002).
These issues raise critical questions for contemporary political systems, democratic
political systems in particular. The question is especially poignant given that a good
deal of the literature on environmental political theory assumes that more democracy
must be part of the solution. Leggewie and Welzer (2009, p. 41), for example, assert that
citizen participation must be an essential component of a future climate policy. Hayward
(2013, p. 3) writes that ‘real democracy is for grown-ups who think and act responsibly
together in the interest of all [and that] the serious threats that climate change brings
need a grown-up response.’ Gould (2013, p. 2) maintains that given the ‘urgency of the
present environmental crisis . . . [citizen] participation in democratic decision making is
more required than ever.’
As a normative appeal, it is difficult to find fault with this proposition, but there are
other more real-world considerations that caution against accepting this prescription
at face value. In addition to a growing number of prominent writers who question
the role of democracy in climate change, some writers go so far as to argue that we
need to reconsider its role altogether (Shearman and Smith 2007). In fact, for various
theorists it is the failure of democratic governments to respond to global warming
that is leading to this crisis. This chapter thus looks more critically at the future of
democracy under the challenging conditions that climate crisis will impose upon us
and suggests the ways that the ecovillage movement can help to preserve the basic ele-
ments of participatory forms of democracy. The discussion here takes the position that
time is a missing element in the calls for more democracy, namely that the time needed
to head off genuine crisis is fast running out. Insofar as we need to respond sooner
than later, it is thus less than clear that under the circumstances more democracy will
to be the dominant response. Given that democracy is often put on hold during crises,
as in the case of world wars, it starts to make as much sense to ask how we might
defend and preserve both the values and practices of democratic governance, rather
than to assume its future. As there is never a guarantee that countries will return to
democratic practices after such an emergency, it is essential to look this reality more
squarely in the face. Instead of simply positing the need for more democracy, we
should look for precautionary strategies to keep both our democratic hopes and pros-
pects alive.
435
CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE CHALLENGE TO DEMOCRACY:

TECHNOCRATIC GUARDIANSHIP
Long associated with environmental politics have been writers calling for a more techno-
authoritarian approach to environmental politics and ecological crisis. For such thinkers
the problem we face is the result of the failure of democracy to respond (Ophuls 1977;
Ophuls and Boyan 1992; Heilbroner 1974). In view of the resulting disappointments,
many of these eco-authoritarians see technological innovation as the best hope of sus-
tainably redressing the problems ahead (Humphrey 2007). Not only do they call for new
technologies, especially for a transition to a low-carbon energy future, technological inno-
vation is seen by more than a few as a way to bypass the failures of democratic politics.
Many among them who otherwise support the values of democracy simply argue that
we are now short on time. In the view of the renowned British scientist James Lovelock,
humankind is not smart enough to come to grips with climate change. As he has put it, ‘I
don’t think we are yet evolved enough to the point where we’re clever enough to handle
a situation as complex as climate change.’ The present day ‘inertia of humans is so huge
that you can’t really do anything meaningful.’ For this reason, he argues that government
by the people will have to be set aside. ‘Even the best democracies,’ he points out, ‘agree
that when a major war approaches, democracies must be put on hold for the time being.
I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as war’ (quoted in Hickman
2010). It will most likely ‘be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.’
This technocentric perspective calls for the enlightened rule of scientific technocrats.
Giddens (2009), for example, makes a plea for removing climate change policy from poli-
tics and placing it in the hands of a more expert-oriented centralized planning process
geared to achieving specific ecological goals. For him the environmental movement repre-
sents more a problem than a solution. Social and ethical questions about how we should
live together sustainably need to be replaced by pragmatic strategies from the top down.
Unabashedly, he sees the solution to climate change to be a ‘technological fix.’ The solu-
tion for these writers is to be found in a centralized system that can direct a technological
revolution as vast as the Manhattan Project and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) space endeavors.
Does democracy have a chance against such opposition? It is unlikely that a scattering
of citizens’ groups, liberal academics and social movements will be able to win a struggle
with the powerful corporate, governmental and military forces that will surely align them-
selves with this solution. Furthermore, as much as many would prefer not to admit it,
democracy today is already troubled. This is widely reflected in terms such as ‘democratic
deficit,’ ‘the crisis of representative democracy’ and ‘post-democracy’ (Crouch 2004). The
concern focuses on the fact that Western democratic systems have increasing problems
when it comes to solving the pressing problems that confront them, from financial crisis
and economic recession to social problems such as education, crime, migration, drug
addiction and, not least, environmental destruction. More than a few of these writers
point to the failure of democratic systems to adequately address global warming.
The advocates of environmental or ecological democracy are quick to argue that
they are talking about a different kind of democracy, a more authentic mode (Gould
2013; Hayward 2013). By this they refer to a form of democracy that is free of political
manipulation by elites and parties and distorted modes of communication, in particular

Environmental democracy 437
the modern media. It would be a democratic form in which everyone could have a chance
to participate in the decisions that affect their own lives. But this too easily slurs over the
fact that it is highly unlikely, given our experience to date, that we will get such demo-
cratic authenticity in the next 50 years. It is thus easy for critics to question the prospect
of democracy emerging as the solution first under the new conditions of environmental
distress that will characterize a future state of emergency and, second, in the short period
of time for its political development. Achieving an authentic participatory democracy is
difficult enough under current circumstances, raising the question as to how it could be
better under the new conditions (Pateman 2012). It is a worry further underscored by a
review of the theoretical work on environmental democracy and its underlying concept
of ecological citizenship.
ENVIRONMENTAL DEMOCRACY: CITIZENSHIP AND

DELIBERATION
Any academic conference on political theory makes clear that democracy, even partici-
patory democracy, is a thriving intellectual concern. But there is something of an irony
associated with this theoretical engagement. There almost seems to be a direct relation-
ship between enthusiasm in the academic realm for participatory democracy and its
decline in the political realm. Although participatory democracy is difficult to find these
days, the dominant focus on deliberative democracy in political theory would scarcely
reveal that (Bluehdorn 2007). In reality, deliberative democracy represents only a few
experimental projects, such as citizen juries or participatory budgeting.
To be sure, the interest in democratic participation is in significant part motivated by
a ‘democratic deficit’ in the realm of real-world politics. But it mainly involves normative
appeals rather than reflections of realities. Typically, they are significantly removed from
the world of existing political arrangements. The point here is not to say that the theory
or the projects are unimportant, but rather that they are very marginal to real-world prac-
tices with few obvious political openings for realizing them. While they help us to think
about the possibilities, which are not to be denigrated, there is far too little focus on the
struggles related to how to move from theory to practice.
More specifically, the same can be said of the political-theoretic environmental variant,
environmental or ecological democracy, the latter of which is the more radical conception
(Smith 2003). These theories are generally grounded in the concept of ecological citizen-
ship, about which there is a substantial literature. For Dobson (2003, p. 206), perhaps the
leading writer on the subject, ecological citizenship is ‘the exercise of ecologically related
responsibilities, nationally, internationally, and inter-generationally, rooted in justice in
both the public and private spheres.’ The concept, as such, can be understood as a hori-
zontal relationship between citizens rather than a vertical link between citizens and the
nation-state (Dobson 2003). This way of thinking about the citizen clearly involves a more
global understanding of the problem. As van Steenbergen (1994) puts it, we move from
the national citizen to the ‘earth citizen.’ Without in any way unplaying the desirability of
earth citizenship, it is a normative ideal at best, far removed from contemporary realities.
Neither environmental nor ecological democracy is theoretically easy to delineate.
Definitions are complicated by the fact that there are various meanings attached to them,

which range across quite a broad spectrum of arrangements (Mitchell 2006). Some type
of deliberation is common to many of them. Baber and Bartlett (2005) have written
that environmental politics involves ‘some form of deliberation, some form of collective
agreement about how to manage our social relations.’ But what form of deliberation
remains a subject of much theoretical debate. In their view, as well as many others, it
should take the form of deliberative environmental democracy. Stevenson (this volume)
and Stevenson and Dryzek (2014) extend the approach to global climate governance.
Theories of deliberative democracy have, to be sure, not been without their critics.
These range from issues about scale (how far deliberative democracy can be extended),
questions related to social quality among the deliberative participants in a pluralist
society, the role of interest groups in deliberative processes, questions of complexity and
the role of expertise, the compatibility between citizen participation in deliberative pro-
jects and representative democracy, and more (Elstub and McLaverty 2014).
This list of concerns reflects a heavy theoretical agenda. While the point here is not to
answer these questions, we can say that deliberative democracy must be considered a nor-
mative project rather than a readily usable alternative. Against practical criteria, some—
if not many—of its critics would describe it as a utopian project. But this is not entirely
the case. It is important to note that some of these issues that confront the theory have
been addressed in empirical fashion through a range of deliberative experiments such
as citizens’ juries and consensus conferences, especially as they relate to environmental
issues (Stevenson this volume). Indeed, some have argued that such deliberative experi-
ments offer a working theory of deliberative democracy. These projects can be taken as
practical experiments that can test different contentions of deliberative democracy theory
(Chambers 2003). While these are very important projects, one has to again acknowledge
that they represent isolated experiments here and there around the world. There are no
political systems that rely on them for decision-making. And when they are employed,
they are mostly advisory.
A stronger, perhaps more hopeful, possibility is found in the theory and practice of
participatory environmental or ecological governance. As the most democratic strand of
the governance literature, participatory governance is a practice reflected in some very
important projects in different parts of the world, which show that ordinary people,
given the opportunity, are capable of engaging democratically in the decisions that affect
their lives, including environmental decisions (Fischer 2003, 2009). These activities are
demonstrated in practices such as participatory budgeting in Brazil and other places in
the world, People’s Planning in India or the community forest movement in Nepal. They
pose promising models that offer realistic decision processes for reviving and sustaining
democratic participation (Pateman 2012). But like deliberative democracy and citizens’
juries they still remain relatively isolated projects. And, as such, it would be fairly easy
for techno-authoritarian leaders to push them aside in the face of climate change and a
state of emergency.
There is, however, another form of participatory governance centrally relevant to
climate change and the ecological crisis that does not depend on politics from above,
namely the ecovillage movement (Litfin 2014). Although ecovillages and the global eco
village movement have largely been ignored by most social scientists, or dismissed as inap-
plicable to the global crisis, there are important reasons for reconsidering this assessment.
Indeed, ecovillages are genuine examples of people—global ‘earth citizens’—acting

locally in the face of global crisis. Independent of top-level political support, many are
genuine examples of participatory democracy in action, involving ecological citizens who
dedicate themselves to practicing what they preach. Before turning directly to the prac-
tices of ecovillages, it is important to set them in the context of larger eco-political issues.
THE GLOBAL ECOVILLAGE MOVEMENT IN THEORETICAL

PERSPECTIVE
Despite the general neglect in the social sciences, the ecovillage and the global ecovillage
movement are important for several reasons. Perhaps the most obvious reason is that they
are dealing with the problem at hand, attempting to shrink their ecological footprint and
to develop sustainable practices for a post-carbon society (Litfin 2014, pp. 34–35). Few
other groups are doing this in such a fundamental way, and certainly not as seriously and
systematically.
Equally important for the present discussion, there is nothing all that novel environ-
mentally about the ecovillage movement. Indeed, it is anchored fundamentally to an
important strand of environmental political thought. In the early stages of the environ-
mentalism the focus was on the local. Radical ecologists such as Bookchin (1990, 1991),
Bahro (1987) and Sale (1980) advanced full-blown theories of local environmentalism,
emphasizing decentralized governance, participatory democracy and bioregionalism.
Sustainable development was understood as a way of life that brought us back in contact
with the essential processes that sustain life—nature and agriculture—but also less
oppressed by social hierarchy and domination.
What happened to this line of thought? It did not disappear altogether, but it did get
largely marginalized. The reasons for this are several. One has to do with the professional-
ization of the environmental movement. From the late 1970s and early 1980s onward, as
environmental issues became more and more matters for technical deliberation, the focus
shifted from the streets to the corridors of government, as environmental organizations
hired ecologists, economists and lawyers to engage the corporate world in the courtroom,
if not the boardroom. This professionalization led to the centralization of environmen-
tal protection struggles from local places to the centers of power, such as Washington,
London and Berlin. It was from these centers that regulatory rules were established to
cover the countries in general, local as well as regional.
A second reason has had to do with the rise of globalization, especially the focus on
transnational capitalism. As it became clear that ecological degradation was a global
phenomenon, environmental theorists shifted their own debates to the global level.
None of this was wrong per se, but it pushed to the side the earlier emphasis on the
local level, often replacing it with attention to global epistemic communities such as
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Beck this volume). Turning
away for the nation-state as well, many saw global environmental governance—guided
for some by scientific indicators of sustainability—to be the solution for ecological
destruction more generally.
Over the past 20 years, which coincide with the debates on globalization, we can
now perhaps better see a number of things about environmental politics. One is that
the global sphere is not the arena for solutions that it appeared to be (Esty 2014). It is

clear that the global climate agreements are inadequate to solve or mitigate the climate
crisis (Andresen, Dimitrov this volume). For the most part, world climate environmental
summits from Stockholm to Copenhagen have largely been disappointing spectacles that
have mainly produced symbolic outcomes (Death 2010).
In more recent years there has been a growing recognition of this problem. Some
scholars have begun to focus on the theoretical relationships between the global and the
local (Kütting and Lipschutz 2009). Although only slowly at the outset, urban planners,
among others, have nonetheless managed to recognize that big cities are the places where
global environmental problems tend to impact most heavily (Janković this volume). Not
only are big cities and their agglomerations of citizens the sources of many pollution
problems, they offer in turn important sites for ameliorating environmental problems.
However, much of this work, especially in the political and policy sciences, seeks to fit the
local into the global rather than the other way around. In the process, the local tends to
become part of a system of global governance rather than a site unto itself.
Yet another reason probably has something to do with the challenging nature of the
more fundamental question concerning the modern way of life. From the outset, envi-
ronmentalism has raised questions about the sustainability of our capitalist consumer
lifestyles. Thinking about the limits of growth in modern urban-industrial society and
the need to revert to more frugal lifestyles is an uncomfortable question for which there
is no easy answer. Many scholars and politicians have proceeded with the hope that we
can reform our way out of this situation, as this sidesteps the more difficult question of
radical change. Under conditions of ‘survivalism’ we thus need to rethink this neglect
(Dryzek 2005, pp. 27–50). And this is all the more the case when we examine the fate of
ecological democracy and participatory governance. Moreover, just here at the local level
we find an established, promising community structure that we should embrace and build
upon, namely the ecovillage.
ECOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP: THE ECOVILLAGE AS

PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY IN PRACTICE
The ecovillage movement is both an ecologically conscious and practical response to

the material and ideational crisis of our time (Litfin 2009). In response to a materialist
understanding of economic and social progress and the primacy of possessive individu-
alism, environmentalism has always urged a more holistic reorganization of human life
on the planet that links together the biotic and human communities (Litfin 2014). Such
thought is scarcely new to environmentalism, radical environmentalism in any case, but
there is little in the contemporary world that embodies this connection. Here, however,
we encounter the ecovillage as a very important exception. What is more, we find virtu-
ally thousands of ecovillage communities, taking different forms and spread all over the
world. In fact, they have established a global ecovillage network (referred to as GEN) that
shares information and experiences through a wide variety of conferences and meetings
of various sorts. What first seems to be a group of isolated rural dwellers turns out to be
part of a global movement. Indeed, the United Nations has granted GEN consultative
status.
People living in ecovillages are individuals who have decided to practice what they

preach (Kunze 2008). As such, they have dedicated themselves to innovating and experi-
menting with new and more harmonious ways of living together sustainably, both eco-
logically and democratically. Representing a remarkable array of ecosystems and diverse
cultures, these people join for different reasons. But it is the commitment of the members
to environmental sustainability that binds them together. A closer look reveals that these
understandings translate into practices that social scientists would readily refer to as
participatory governance.
While ecovillages have their origins in various philosophical traditions, Dawson (2006)
points to an emphasis on self-sufficiency, collective living and sustainable agriculture.
Some, but not all, emphasize a form of spiritual renewal that has long been common
to ashrams and monasteries, as well as ideas and principles found in movements based
on the thinking of Gandhi. One discovers also strong influences from environmental,
feminist and peace movements, as well as the appropriate technology movement of
E.F. Schmacher (1989). Typically underlying these principles is a return to the land move-
ment, emphasizing biotic harmony. This often involves ideas from permaculture and
Gaia philosophy about working with as opposed to against nature.
ECOVILLAGE GOVERNANCE AND CONSENSUAL

DECISION-MAKING
Even more important for the present discussion is the form of radical ecological democ-
racy basic to the ecovillage movement. In the typical ecovillage, all of these activities are
organized and carried out through a mode of participatory democracy that one scarcely
finds elsewhere. As Litfin (2014, p. 117) explains, they are ‘experimenting with small-scale
postmodern models of governance’ that are devoted to high degrees of consensus and
legitimacy. Although there are variations, consensus is the basic form of decision-making.
Two conditions for the practice of eco-democracy stand out in the ecovillage, both of
which have long been foundations of genuine democracy. These are the egalitarian nature
of ecovillage life and the face-to-face nature of member interactions. Strong democracy
has its best chances in egalitarian settings, which the ecovillage offers. It is also facilitated
by face-to-face relationships, an essential feature of such communal life. Beyond these
promising conditions, however, there is nothing simple or easy about participatory envi-
ronmental governance and the people in such communities will be the first to say that.
Democracy has always been and remains hard work. For this reason, these communities
typically devote a substantial amount of time to education and training in democratic
consensus-based decision-making, including the role and practices of deliberation and
the social and emotional aspects that come into play in such engagement, especially as
they pertain to conflicts among the members. Some, for this reason, devote a great deal
of attention to the procedures of conflict management (Christian 2003).
The importance and intensity of these participatory practices has led to numerous
ideas about what works best under different conditions and, not altogether surpris-
ingly, has given rise to a number of ‘theorists’ on the topic (see Christian 2003; Buck
and Villnes 2007; Bressen 2012). For example, Christian (2003), a resident of Earthaven
Ecovillage in North Carolina, has written on the ‘built-in tensions’ that arise as people
with different concerns—regarding raising food, bringing up children, building homes

or running an educational center, for example—encounter each other in the course of

getting on. Indeed, basic to her discussion is a distinction between two different types of
people, which she calls relational (process-oriented members) and strategic (goal-oriented
members).
Moreover, what is especially interesting is that many of these communities have discov-
ered and grappled themselves with basic problems that have long plagued participatory
democratic theory. At Sieben Linden, for one, the degree of participation involved tends
to fall off, sometimes to surprising degrees, which has led to long debates in search of the
reasons. It comes as no surprise, at least on second reflection, that some members start to
say that they are too busy for so many meetings and the long-winded discussions to which
they give rise. Others say that there is no need to participate when they are happy with
the way things are moving along. Such realities have led to the innovation of new rules
about quorums and voting procedures, in some cases accepting a two-thirds majority at
the basis for decisions.
Consensual decision-making, of course, is anything but easy. By all measures, it is
time-consuming compared to other methods, especially when the approach is formal
rather than informal. The argument for it, as ecovillage members regularly assert, is that
it leads to better rounded decisions that, after being made, are more easily and effectively
implemented. By giving all members the opportunity to think through and voice their
concerns, it brings issues to the surface and takes care in advance of issues that can later
come up and be problematic.
Where voting processes create winners and losers, and thus can often lead to polariza-
tion, consensus decision-making involves taking the necessary time to find unity before
making and implementing a decision. The process is described as building and extend-
ing the connections between the members in ways that enhance community life. At the
same time, it is said to combine the knowledge and wisdom—‘co-intelligence’—of a
larger number of people into the deliberation process and thus forge smarter decisions.
Moreover, when the considerations of all are included, they are more likely to under-
stand and participate in the implementation of the decision, increasing the chances of
its success.
Typically, as noted, ecovillages offer their members—old and new—training in
consensus-building. This involves learning how to listen carefully to the others, engage
in open authentic discussion and to exercise a fair amount of patience. Toward this end,
members learn how to use ‘gentile’ candor, air their concerns and interests out in the
open, faithfully attend and participate in group discussions and to be flexible and com-
promising whenever possible.
Although these concerns are not altogether new to theorists of participatory
democracy—having received considerable attention in earlier years in the social move-
ments literature, especially that of the feminist movement—these micro- level issues
and practices hardly make it onto the agenda of modern-day political theory, despite
the emphasis on deliberative democracy. One of the first things to notice when explor-
ing this in the literature on ecovillages or talking to their members, is that this is a very
serious, disciplined process to which a great deal of thought is given. Indeed, there are
formal principles involved, analyses of different types of decisions and how they should
be treated, discussions of how the rules can be applied in different contexts, proposals for
streamlining the process, as well as proposals for dealing with serious conflicts. In more

recent years, a growing number of ecovillages have borrowed or adopted other models
designed for harmonious, but effective community decision-making, in particular the
theory and practices of ‘sociocracy’ (Buck and Villnes 2007). Such activities would con-
stitute a rich source of experience for deliberative political theorists.
IN SEARCH OF VIABLE ALTERNATIVES: ECOVILLAGES AND

THE IMPERATIVES OF SURVIVAL
It is often the return to the land that leads people to find ecovillages problematic. Many
argue that while this might be nice, it is irrelevant to modern life. But one can argue this
quite differently in the context at hand. As we move toward a serious confrontation with
the implications of climate change, the concerns of survivalism will become more crucial.
Under these conditions, large numbers of people will probably be forced to flee back to
the land (Holmgren 2009). Whereas this was once considered unlikely, it may suddenly
no longer be a matter of choice but rather a hard necessity. Desperate people will be on
a search for ways to get by, if not survive. Already we can see signs of this dynamic in
European countries such as Greece, which has been facing extremely severe financial
hardships and high levels of unemployment. Significant numbers have left the cities to
return to the land where they can grow their own food, often communally with other
family members. Most urban dwellers know little or nothing about living on the land,
including how to grow their own produce to be able to eat. But hungry people will learn,
even if not overnight. And this is just where the ecovillage concept can be significant, as
their members have already been experimenting with ways to do this. They have devel-
oped a substantial wealth of knowledge—both local and transformational—much of
which is easily transferrable. Members of ecovillages are fully aware of this and discuss
it quite often. At Sieben Linden, for example, people wonder how they will manage
when throngs of people arrive at their door looking for help, as they will not be able to
accommodate many of them.
It is significant to note, in this regard, that government of Senegal has turned to
the ecovillage model for just such help. Given the country’s high level of rural poverty,
Senegal has asked the GEN to help transform its many rural villages into thriving ecovil-
lages to fight both environmental degradation and poverty. In fact, there are some 350
of these ecovillages in the country, some more developed than others. To facilitate this
development, the government has even set up a public agency to assist with this, called
National Agency for Ecovillages (Adigbli 2012).
CONCLUSIONS
We can assume that states of emergency will become much more common as climate
change intensifies, even perhaps a permanent state of affairs. Given what we know about
the politics associated with such emergencies, we can also assume that democratic prac-
tices will meet resistance, even in many cases strong resistance. We can expect at minimum
a turn to various sorts of centralized planning of economic activities, in particular
resource allocations, as Giddens and others already call for. There will inevitably be forms

of rationing, whether for food, petroleum or both. The chances that these allocation deci-
sions will be made democratically are small. It is not unlikely that future generations will
increasingly confront more authoritarian forms of governance.
While these concerns will strike some as strangely unusual, even overly speculative,
they will be anything but academic if global efforts to reign in global warming continue to
fail. As the crisis emerges, people will be looking for options for survival, in one form or
another, and many will retreat back to the land, making local-level governance even more
important. Here ecovillages have paved the way, both in terms of ecology and democracy,
and have a good deal of practical knowledge to make available to such people. People in
ecovillages are aware of this and, in part, understand their own experimentation in these
terms.
For this reason, we should start to pose another question: what might we do to help
facilitate ecovillage life? There are a number of things that both environmental theorists
and activists might want to think about in this regard. On a practical level, they might
push for public policies that would support the ecovillage movement, both legally and
politically. As they do not conform to many existing governmental rules and regulations,
there are numerous legal and administrative issues that make things difficult for ecovil-
lages, one being incorporation laws and another taxes rules (especially for groups of
people with a shared common income). This might be promoted through a government
office concerned with ecovillage affairs, as in the case of Senegal. On the theoretical level,
scholars should rethink their neglect of the localist tradition associated earlier with the
environmental movement. This does not mean they should forget about global environ-
mental politics, climate change policy in particular, but rather that they need to focus on
both as parallel tracks on their own terms, rather than just integrating the local into a
global model. At the same time, those involved in the environmental movement should
rediscover the virtues of decentralized governance and offer strong political support for
those engaged in such initiatives. It should be a central issue in their political agenda.
While the ecovillage movement will certainly not be the solution to climate crisis, it
should be part of it. Already having sought, often successfully, to pioneer many of the
features of sustainable development, which we have otherwise failed to realize, it is time
to give the ecovillage model more attention in both environmental political theory and
the practice of sustainable development. It needs to be included in the mix of available
alternatives. This is especially the case for those worried about ecology and the future of
democratic governance.
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39. Transparency
Aarti Gupta and Michael Mason
INTRODUCTION
Transparency is currently one of the most bandied-about words in both multilateral
negotiations on climate change and private climate governance arrangements. In the
multilateral context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC), interventions by country delegates, international organizations, civil society
groups and corporate actors invariably reiterate the need for (various types of) transpar-
ency to fulfill myriad climate governance ends. These include building trust between
developed (Annex I) and developing (non-Annex I) countries, enhancing accountability,
assessing performance, and/or assessing the environmental effectiveness and adequacy
of current climate engagements. Corporate actors involved in private initiatives such
as the Carbon Disclosure Project are also embracing transparency, through voluntarily
disclosing their carbon emissions or other climate mitigation actions, in an ostensible bid
to (comparatively) assess, be held accountable for and/or improve their environmental
performance, as well as facilitate the functioning of carbon markets (see Dingwerth and
Green this volume).
Yet does transparency further such varied, and often highly politically contested,
objectives? As a growing body of social science research reveals, transparency does not
always deliver on its transformative promise, and the presumed links between transpar-
ency and greater accountability, and more democratic and effective decision-making,
remain tenuous in practice (Etzioni 2010; Fung et al. 2007; Graham 2002; Hood and
Heald 2006; Lord 2006). Although the concept of transparency can be understood in
multiple ways, ranging from a general openness to increased flows of information, we
focus in this chapter on a specific manifestation of transparency in global environmental
governance—the targeted disclosure of information intended to evaluate and/or steer the
behavior of specific actors. We term this phenomenon ‘governance by disclosure’ (Gupta
2008, see also the extended discussion in Gupta and Mason 2014a), and explore its uptake
and institutionalization in the global climate realm. Transparency’s transformative effects
in global climate governance remain particularly important to consider, given the increas-
ingly heterogeneous and fragmented nature of such governance—encompassing treaties,
transnational municipal networks, subnational actors, bilateral agreements and voluntary
corporate initiatives (Biermann et al. 2010; Pattberg and Okechukwu 2009; Zelli and van
Asselt this volume). In such contexts, the demand and supply of transparency is multidi-
rectional, rather than flowing only from governments to interested publics.
In assessing the transformative potential of transparency in the climate realm, we
focus, first, on contentious debates within the UNFCCC around measuring, reporting
and verification (MRV) systems that seek to make transparent who is doing what, how
and to what end in combating climate change. Second, we focus on private carbon dis-
closure initiatives and transparency arrangements that underpin voluntary carbon offset
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markets. Our core argument is that the transformative potential of transparency is being
compromised by an increasing privatization and marketization of disclosure initiatives in
the climate realm. In the next section, we locate the theoretical grounds for our claims in
what we label a ‘critical transparency studies’ approach.
THEORIZING TRANSPARENCY: TOWARDS A CRITICAL

TRANSPARENCY STUDIES LENS
There is a diverse scholarly literature addressing the embrace of transparency in domes-
tic and global environmental governance. National-level legal and economic analyses
of environmental policy were among the first to draw attention to what Florini (1998)
labeled ‘regulation by revelation’ in specific developed country contexts (Fung et al. 2007;
Gouldson 2004). Within the fields of comparative politics and international relations,
most academic work on transparency and information disclosure in global environmen-
tal governance has followed either an institutionalist or critical theoretical perspective.
Institutionalist perspectives view information disclosure as central to more effective
and accountable (global) governance. The basic premise is that institutions—organized
clusters of rule-making and collective behavior—can increase cooperation among states
by correcting for information asymmetries and rationalizing decision-making (Keohane
2006; Mitchell 1998).
Two strands of institutionalism—liberal institutionalism and rational institutionalism—
have generated significant work on the importance of information disclosure in global
environmental governance. Liberal institutionalism posits that transparency in interna-
tional environmental rule making promotes inter-state cooperation by publicizing shared
interests and actor commitments (Mitchell 1998). The institutionalization of information
disclosure in international environmental regimes ranges from multilateral obligations
on notification and prior-informed consent in governing transfers of hazardous sub-
stances, to the transnational diffusion of voluntary sustainability reporting standards.
In analyzing such cases of transparency in international politics, liberal institutionalists
are apt to attribute the lack of effective disclosure-based governance to shortfalls of
design or capacity, and concurrent failure to embed transparency within the decision
contexts of both disclosers and recipients (Bauhr and Nasiritousi 2012; Florini 2007;
Fung et al. 2007).
As a set of distinct but related perspectives, rational institutionalists view institutions
as sets of incentives presenting actors with strategic, interest-based calculations. In this
economistic approach, the structured disclosure of environmental information assures
relevant actors that free-riding polluters are easier to identify and thereby sanction. The
nature and scope of institutionalized disclosure is argued to affect the payoff functions
of polluters, whether these are firms (Garcia et al. 2009; Peck and Sinding 2003) or
states (Barrett 2003; Bosetti et al. 2013). Dysfunctionalities in transparency arise or are
explainable by actor preferences being distorted or skewed by the disclosure of incom-
plete or unreliable data, or the lack of comparability, comprehensibility or accessibility
of environmental information. Climate governance research informed by this approach
has focused on international climate negotiations, deploying varieties of game theory to
model the means by which greater information flows (on actor incentives, bargaining

power and the properties of governance structures) can facilitate effective cooperation
(Di Canio and Fremstad 2013; Madini 2013).
In contrast to institutionalism, a critical theoretical perspective on transparency empha-
sizes that its uptake, institutionalization and effects need to be analyzed within broader,
often contested, political-economic and normative contexts within which disclosure is
being deployed. Such a lens, which we label a ‘critical transparency studies’ perspective
(Gupta and Mason 2014a, pp. 8–12; see also Lord 2006), emphasizes the historicity and
socio-political conditioning of transparency and disclosure practices; and acknowledges
the unavoidable normativity (value-laden structure) of transparency. It draws on impor-
tant strands of transparency-relevant research advanced by constructivism and critical
political economy scholarly traditions. Constructivist analyses of science, knowledge, and
information dwell on the social forces framing global environmental problems, identify-
ing deep-seated normative and scientific uncertainties over what is valid knowledge and
whose information counts (Jasanoff this volume). If so, agreeing on what is ‘more and
better’ information, that is, on the scope and quality of transparency, is inevitably subject
to the dynamics of power (Forsyth 2003; Jasanoff 2004). Related scholarship on climate
change has focused more on the social construction of climate change knowledge—and
the role of expertise therein—than on the governance implications of general or targeted
disclosure of climate information (e.g., Demeritt 2001; Pettenger 2007). Nevertheless, its
critical stance suggests an analytical interest in laying bare whose information counts and
is accorded political primacy, in contrast to the functionalist preoccupation with reducing
information asymmetries as a means to rationalize decision-making.
A critical transparency studies lens also draws on the insights of international politi-
cal economy scholarship (e.g., Clapp and Helleiner 2012; Levy and Newell 2005; Stevis
and Assetto 2001). This strand of scholarship emphasizes the current political hegemony
of what Steven Bernstein (2001) labels ‘liberal environmentalism’—an authoritative
complex of norms framing environmental governance challenges according to market
liberal rights and values. For Newell and Paterson (2010), global responses to climate
change are heavily conditioned by neoliberalism, prioritizing the creation and expansion
of carbon markets over mandatory restrictions on fossil fuel use (see also Bond 2011).
From such a perspective, transparency in climate governance is structured by a global
political economy in which private actors have a pivotal role in deploying, shaping and
potentially limiting public modes of information disclosure. Transparency, in this view, is
likely to have minimal market-restricting effects, and may even serve to reinforce socially
and ecologically harmful concentrations of public and private power.
The above discussion allows us to distill a set of (potentially competing) drivers of
transparency’s uptake in governance, with consequences for its transformative effects.
First, as much of the current scholarship noted above documents, a growing embrace of
transparency in global politics is partly stimulated by a rights-based democratic push for
individual liberty, choice and participation (Graham 2002; Mason 2008). We label this a
democratization driver of transparency’s uptake in governance, one that also underpins
the spread of ‘right to know’ and freedom of information laws across the globe over
the last quarter century (Florini 2007). Such a democratization driver of transparency
is also assumed to foster greater accountability of governance, insofar as disclosure of
relevant information is seen as a necessary step in holding actors to account for their (in-)
actions, according to set environmental standards. Insofar as information is disclosed by

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Transparency
those responsible for decisions that significantly affect the interests of others, such dis-
closure should facilitate individual and institutional answerability and redress, according
to expected standards of behavior (Biermann and Gupta 2011; Keohane 2006; Mason
2005; see also Fox 2007). In climate governance, however, such interlinkages are likely to
be unevenly conceptualized and institutionalized, given political conflicts over the nature
and direction of accountability, deriving from broader contested debates about historical
responsibility for climate change.
Tensions arise, furthermore, from the fact that a democratization and accountability
imperative for disclosure may clash with another dominant driver of transparency’s
uptake in environmental governance—a neoliberal privileging of market-based solutions
to global sustainability challenges (Gupta and Mason 2014b; Mason 2008). Such a mar-
ketization driver of transparency’s uptake in global environmental and climate govern-
ance is reflected, we claim, in the growing embrace of voluntary transparency as a default
governance option to avoid more stringent or costly action pathways (Haufler 2010). A
marketization imperative for transparency also stems from the need for specific types of
information to create new markets in environmental goods and services, such as those for
carbon or genetic resources. Transparency is thus increasingly essential to the payment
for ecosystem services (PES) trend in global environmental governance. If so, the uptake
of transparency may well be actively promoted by powerful actors, such as corporations
and policy elites, in order to create and facilitate markets.
Taken as a whole, the discussion above suggests a climate-related critical transparency
studies research agenda that calls for assessing how the imperatives of democratization
and marketization shape uptake and effects of governance by disclosure in this realm,
and the extent to which these drivers work in complementary or conflicting ways. In
assessing these dynamics, another important question becomes the extent to which
governance by disclosure decenters state-led regulation and opens up political space for
new actors (Gupta and Mason 2014a, p. 17; see also Mol 2014). A critical transparency
studies perspective posits that private actors and civil society are crucial agents in insti-
tutionalizing disclosure-based governance, particularly in neoliberal political-economic
contexts (e.g., Langley 2001). Institutionalized disclosure may thus decenter state-based
regulation if it facilitates the generation and dissemination of information beyond the
legal and epistemic control of governments, as may be the case with private climate
disclosure initiatives. However, it may also qualify existing state sovereign authority by
means of differentiated regulatory impacts on different categories of states, as we note
below in the case of transparency requirements in the UNFCCC.
We turn next to evaluating the drivers of transparency’s uptake and its institutionaliza-
tion in global climate governance, focusing on multilaterally negotiated disclosure in the
UNFCCC, as well as private disclosure initiatives.
EVALUATING TRANSPARENCY IN STATE-LED CLIMATE

GOVERNANCE
Transparency has been a recurring theme within the UNFCCC negotiations since at
least the 2007 Bali climate conference, where the general (and for developing countries,
voluntary) reporting and review obligations in the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol

were recast as a need for all future climate-related ‘commitments, actions and support’
to be ‘measurable, reportable, and verifiable’ (MRV) (UNFCCC 2007, p. 3). The focus
on MRV is, in our view, aligned with the growing uptake of transparency in global
environmental governance. Such systems are also often implicated in the ascendency of
neoliberal environmental governance, which emphasizes creation of new markets and
performance-based compensation as key to securing environmental aims (Duffy and
Moore 2010).
The multiple aims of MRV in the UNFCCC context are to assess that all countries are
complying with and can be held accountable for their climate mitigation commitments
or actions. MRV is also a precondition to compensate non-Annex I climate mitigation
actions or offset Annex I country emissions.
However, the modalities of MRV, that is, what has to be measured, reported and veri-
fied, how and by whom, remain subject to extensive negotiation and political conflict,
given that such systems can impinge upon national sovereignty and/or recast governance
authority away from (some) states to ‘international experts’ or other non-state actors.
These dynamics have been evident in UNFCCC debates over ‘international consultation
and analysis’ of voluntary developing country mitigation actions, and MRV relating to
REDD1 (reducing emissions from forest-related activities), both of which we briefly
consider below.1
Transparency of Voluntary Non-Annex I Actions: International Consultation and

Analysis
Negotiations over MRV for both Annex I and non-Annex I actions came to a head in the
2009 Copenhagen climate conference, with the much publicized standoff between the US
and China over the US demand for international verification of domestic (voluntarily
undertaken) mitigation actions of non-Annex I countries. China strongly opposed this
demand, viewing it as an infringement of sovereignty (Niederberger and Kimble 2011).
The resulting Copenhagen Accord contained compromise language on MRV, which
was subsequently included within the 2010 Cancún conference decisions. These included
International Assessment and Review (IAR) of climate mitigation actions for Annex
I countries, to be undertaken by UNFCCC designated international experts; and
International Consultation and Analysis (ICA) to ‘increase transparency of mitigation
actions and their effects’ of non-Annex I countries (UNFCCC 2010, Articles 44 and 63).
Both are intended to facilitate transparency of mitigation actions, but the ICA process is
the first to make this mandatory for the voluntarily assumed mitigation actions of non-
Annex I countries.
As a result, extensive debates have turned since 2010 on the modalities of ICA, includ-
ing the imperative for it to be ‘non-intrusive, non-punitive and respectful of national
sovereignty’ while also being cost-effective and within reach of all non-Annex I countries
(UNFCCC 2010, para 63). Beyond issues of capacity and resources, a fundamental ques-
tion is whether accepting international (i.e., third party) ‘consultation and analysis’ relat-
ing to voluntary actions by non-Annex I countries constitutes an irrevocable first step
towards dismantling the current ‘firewall’ between Annex I and non-Annex I countries
regarding binding climate mitigation obligations. This is the position taken, for example,
by Sunita Narain of the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), India, who argues

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that the ICA will result in ‘a de facto binding regime [for all], as countries’ domestic
targets would be verified and progress reported internationally’ (CSE 2010, emphasis
added). This suggests that transparency may well force more broad-based accountability
in global climate governance efforts, yet the legitimacy of doing so remains contested,
and the burdens of doing so are likely to be unevenly distributed.
Transparency of Supported Non-Annex I Actions: MRV for REDD1
Similar debates are discernible in relation to the UNFCCC REDD1 mechanism,

wherein forests are conceptualized as providing the ecosystem service of carbon sinks,
with a carbon mitigation potential that can be measured, valorized, compensated and/
or marketed. Such valorization is to occur at national level, with states centrally involved
with REDD1 MRV systems, and with varying degrees of national flexibility permitted
with regard to divergence in scope, techniques, and data sources (Herold and Skutsch
2011; Romijn et al. 2012). Furthermore, whether REDD1 compensation will be organ-
ized through markets or international fund transfers from Annex I countries remains
undecided in global policy. As an experiment in payment for ecosystem services, REDD1
thus unfolds in an unequal geopolitical context, whereby distribution of, and control
over, the ecosystem service of carbon sinks varies, as does the capacity to valorize and be
compensated for it. REDD1 MRV systems are thus closely implicated in these exigencies
of politics, insofar as they determine what is made transparent, by whom and with what
consequences for compensation (Gupta et al. 2014; Turnhout et al. this volume).
Following Copenhagen in 2009, where REDD1 was seen as one of the few points
of general agreement, the 2010 Cancún agreements developed further guidance about
REDD1 MRV systems, noting that these should be ‘available and suitable for review
as agreed by the conference of the parties’ (UNFCCC 2010). However, an ‘independent
review’ of REDD1 MRV outcomes remains a high-level political conflict over potential
infringements of national sovereignty (Herold and Skutsch 2011, p. 2).
Such concerns resulted in the collapse of REDD1 negotiations in 2012 Doha climate
conference, given unresolvable disagreements between Annex I (led by Norway) and
non-Annex I countries (led by Brazil) over the need for ‘robust’ international verifica-
tion of forest emission reductions as a basis for REDD1 performance-based payments
(Conservation International 2013). The political significance of REDD1 MRV systems
is underscored by this outcome, notwithstanding the framing of such matters as ‘techni-
cal’ within the UNFCCC context. The disagreement highlighted that some states, includ-
ing China, India and Brazil, can contest or block perceived infringements on national
sovereignty by determining the scope of their own REDD1 MRV systems or contesting
the need for international verification, yet others will be less able to do so. One outcome
can be exclusion from participating in REDD1. As McAlpine et al. (2010, p. 339) argue,
international MRV standards can lead to a ‘disproportionate representation of some
countries [in the REDD1 mechanism] at the expense of others.’ In sum, REDD1 and its
MRV systems constitute a still unstable climate governance project, with the jury out on
how such systems will develop, and how they might enhance accountability or environ-
mental integrity in global climate governance. As such, they merit further scrutiny, also in
light of the neoliberal and technocratic thrust to global climate governance within which
they are being developed, as we discuss further below.

EVALUATING TRANSPARENCY IN PRIVATE CLIMATE

GOVERNANCE
A neoliberal thrust to transparency’s uptake in climate governance is clearly discern-

ible within regulated carbon markets associated with the CDM and beyond. Voluntary
markets in carbon offsets exist parallel to the compliance markets, but without the state-
centered, hierarchical structure of the former: alongside lack of centralized mechanisms
for issuing credits, there are competing quality standards and disparate, individual-
ized contracts (Bumpus and Liverman 2008, pp. 137–139; Newell and Paterson 2010,
pp. 118–125). As Newell and Paterson (2010, p. 125) note, in voluntary carbon markets,
there is a lack of transparency and access to information about project designs, meth-
odologies and carbon pricing. A contradiction arises here, because the case for business
investment in voluntary carbon offsets is that they reduce climate-related financial risks
(e.g., regulatory and reputational risks) caused by existing information deficits as to
the potential costs of climate change to corporations (Harmes 2011, pp. 110–111). The
contradiction reveals the growing opportunity to extract economic value from selective
climate information—e.g. proprietary intelligence on carbon price trends or climate-
related cost vulnerabilities of business competitors—at the same time as general trans-
parency on mitigation (and adaptation) actions is supported in the UNFCCC.
To be sure, there are major private interests and civil society organizations construct-
ing corporate carbon disclosure as a public good, whether this is information on the
purchase of voluntary emissions reductions or on greenhouse gas emissions from corpo-
rations. Founded in 2007, the Offset Quality Initiative (OQI), comprising six non-profit
member organizations, has as one of its primary objectives to serve as a credible source
of information on greenhouse gas offsets, leveraging the knowledge and experience of
OQI members (Offset Quality Initiative n.d.). The self-representation of OQI as a public
information resource for policymakers and other stakeholders responds to concerns,
across both regulatory and voluntary offset markets, about the environmental and busi-
ness integrity of what OQI labels the offset commoditization chain. Reliable information
about carbon markets addresses persistent, if divergent, demands for legitimation from
civil society and finance capital interests.
The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), the most prominent voluntary mechanism
promoting disclosure of corporate greenhouse gas emissions, has similarly emerged as
a non-profit organization facilitating public dissemination of climate information, in
order to incentivize their climate change mitigation efforts (Kolk et al. 2008; MacLoed
and Park 2011; Knox-Hayes and Levy 2014). Set up in 2001, the CDP represents a con-
sortium of institutional investors holding, by 2013, $87 trillion of assets (CDP 2013).
The CDP’s core disclosure-based climate governance strategy revolves around an annual
questionnaire submitted to the world’s largest companies requesting information on
climate-related risks and opportunities, as well as their carbon management strategies.
There is now a substantial level of reporting: according to the CDP, more than 3,000
companies responded to the 2011 questionnaire, including 81 percent of the Global 500
(CDP 2013). Aggregate scores for disclosure and performance are released annually on
the CDP website, while CDP signatory investors and disclosing companies can access
private comparative analysis of reported data.
For both the voluntary carbon markets and the CDP, the initial impetus for public

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transparency of emissions trading and greenhouse gas emissions came from environ-
mentalist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and investor networks, who viewed
carbon finance as an effective means to realize climate mitigation goals. Yet this demo-
cratic take on emissions-related information has been overtaken by a marketization
imperative, skewing the institutionalization of disclosure. For the voluntary carbon
markets this reflects, since 2005, private enterprises overtaking non-profit organizations
as the main source of investment (Marcello 2011, p. 155), and the growing role of carbon
market businesses in controlling the transparency agenda, such as the International
Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance, which promotes self-regulation of the voluntary
carbon markets. For Paterson (2009, p. 249), the displacement of NGO-led carbon certi-
fication standards by industry-led schemes suggests a ‘corporate capture of the verifica-
tion process.’ There is also a trend to commodify disclosed information under the CDP:
the generation of extensive paywalls behind which enhanced interpretive products are
available weakens its claims to public transparency.
It may be argued that these private and voluntary mechanisms carry little governance
weight compared to the UNFCCC regime and its compliance carbon markets: despite
their rapid recent growth, by 2012 voluntary carbon markets were worth only 0.03 percent
($576 million) of the compliance markets (Ecosystem Marketplace and Bloomberg New
Energy Finance 2012). However, their transparency norms and practices significantly
shape the role of private authority in tackling climate change, and bleed into the state-
centered governance architecture. Voluntary carbon markets are parasitic on mandatory
schemes to the extent, for example, that their opportunities to monetize emissions reduc-
tions often derive from pre-registered and even rejected CDM projects. The opacity of
the voluntary markets has created a high level of fraud risk that, some commentators
claim, has contributed to the recent decline in the value of emission reductions (both
voluntary and certified) by exposing threats to their credibility (Martin and Walters
2013, p. 38). According to Interpol, the lower scrutiny and lack of transparency of the
voluntary carbon markets invites illegal activity, including the fraudulent manipulation
of information and misleading claims (Interpol 2013, pp. 10–11; see also Transparency
International 2011). Furthermore, the voluntary carbon markets have been the testing
ground of forest carbon credits not yet part of the compliance carbon markets, and
there is already ample evidence that the information deficits and hypothetical emission
baselines associated with forest carbon calculations are prone to fraud (Jacobs 2013).
This highlights as well the challenges facing establishment of credible MRV systems for
supported UNFCCC REDD1 actions.
In a quest to increase trust through transparency, the CDM Executive Board launched
a voluntary questionnaire in a meeting in April 2014 on the sustainable development
benefits of projects, claiming that this would enhance transparency of credits for certified
emissions reductions. The desire to reassure participants in compliance carbon markets
characterized by weak demand and low prices points to problems of trust impacting the
entire offset sector: it is fair to say that disclosure-based governance of voluntary carbon
offsets has exacerbated the concerns of states and civil society actors over the credibility
of carbon markets. Similarly, the CDP’s voluntary corporate disclosure of emissions has
been criticized for the lack of usability of this publicly disclosed information, in par-
ticular, to make meaningful comparisons between firms and thereby raise accountability
claims against particular companies (Knox Hayes and Levy 2014). Such questioning of

private climate governance disrupts the wider legitimacy of market-based responses to

climate change.
CONCLUSION
Transparency, as information disclosure, is becoming a widely accepted norm and set

of practices in global climate governance. Disclosure of climate-related information is
mainly seen as a way to monitor and/or reward various actors’ climate mitigation actions,
thereby contributing, at least in principle, to the accountability both of private disclosers
for their (non-)performance, and also of public policymakers for the reach and effective-
ness of governance outcomes. Across both public and private global climate governance
arrangements, the call for transparency about mitigation actions derive largely from
a democratization impetus; that is, a call for inclusive communication on governance
responses to climate change, which transcends the territorial scope of liberal democratic
states. While in a private context, such an impetus issues from environmental NGOs and
sympathetic investor networks, a democratization imperative for disclosure within the
UNFCCC becomes implicated in broader contested narratives about historical respon-
sibility for climate change. As such, rendering climate governance actions transparent
is inextricably linked to political and normative disagreements about whose actions
should be made transparent, by whom and to what end, ensuring that transparency itself
becomes a site of political conflict.
As our analysis has also shown, the institutionalization of disclosure in climate govern-
ance partially corroborates the proposition advanced earlier in this chapter that govern-
ance by disclosure may decenter and qualify state regulation, and open up political space
for non-state actors (see also Dingwerth and Green this volume). The ‘qualification’ of
sovereignty of those states that join the multilateral UNFCCC regime stems from permit-
ting verification (or ‘analysis’) of disclosed information about climate mitigation actions
that goes over and above mere self-reporting, with a growing mandatory role for third
parties (ranging from international technical experts to accountancy firms) in climate-
related MRV, and with varying implications across non-Annex I countries.
Furthermore, the growing role of private actors in delivering global climate govern-
ance, whether interacting with the multilateral regime (e.g., compliance carbon markets)
or through fostering voluntary disclosure mechanisms, also strengthens the claim that
state-based climate regulation is being decentered—and arguably diluted—by the multi-
plicity of non-mandatory governance practices. Indeed, the disorganized and sometimes
misleading disclosure of information on carbon emissions and stocks (e.g., forest carbon)
in voluntary carbon markets has unsettled the legitimacy of the UN climate change
regime.
In sum, our analysis suggests that the institutionalization of transparency in global
climate governance underpins a neoliberal privileging of market-based solutions to
climate change. The growing governance role of carbon markets—within and beyond
the UNFCCC—is predicated on the disclosure of information necessary to create a fun-
gible commodity from intangible physical processes. Given that these are manufactured
markets, information credibility is essential to their daily functioning, although con-
tinuing information deficits and asymmetries elicit gaming by state and private actors.

455
Transparency
Carbon markets are thus also central to the marketization of climate transparency, with
this institutional driver also manifesting itself in other climate disclosure mechanisms,
such as the CDP.
The skewed character of market-based climate transparency compromises its trans-
formative potential, particularly as a mechanism for enhancing public accountability of
those states and private enterprises generating substantial or otherwise disproportionate
greenhouse gas emissions. The more privatized climate information becomes, the less
likely it is that inclusive communication by affected parties can take place on the desira-
bility or direction of climate governance choices, even as there is little sign that voluntary
carbon disclosure systems are shifting production and investment strategies of corpora-
tions in a low-carbon direction.
As we have also shown, the prospects for greater transparency to enhance account-
ability of those needing to take the most urgent mitigation actions remains limited, given
that such disclosure is inextricably tied up with persisting geopolitical and normative
disagreements over equity and reciprocity of actions to mitigate climate change.
NOTE
1. Transparency is also key to the Kyoto (market-based) Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), hence we
briefly discuss its disclosure provisions vis-à-vis voluntary offset markets in the subsequent subsection on
private governance.
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40. Security
Angela Oels
INTRODUCTION
The year 2007 was a watershed for the construction of climate change as a security issue.
In 2007, the UK placed climate change on the agenda of the United Nations Security
Council (UNSC) for the first time ever and hosted a debate open to non-members as well
(UNSC 2007a, 2007b). However, no agreement on a joint statement was reached. Also
in 2007, former US vice-president Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Moreover, a number of
US think tanks, such as the Center for Naval Analysis Corporation (CNA), published
their reports on climate change as a security threat (CNA 2007; on the US security dis-
course see Floyd 2010). Also in 2007, under the German presidency, the Council of the
European Union (2007) requested a report on climate change and international security.
The report, which was published in March 2008, clearly identifies climate change as a
security issue (Council of the European Union 2008, p. 2). In 2009, the United Nations
General Assembly (UNGA) requested a report from the United Nations Secretary
General on Climate Change and its Possible Security Implications, which was released
in September 2009 (UNGA 2009). In addition, the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP 2007), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP 2007),
the World Bank (2010) and the Asian Development Bank (2012) have published reports
on climate change.
On 20 July 2011, the authorized members of the UNSC officially recognized the pos-
sible security implications of climate change in a vague presidential statement, against the
fierce opposition of the majority of developing countries present (UNSC 2011a, 2011b).
In 2013, the UNSC discussed the security implications of climate change once more in
an informal session on February 15. However, Pakistan and the UK were prevented from
turning this into a formal session by the veto power of China and Russia. This shows
that the construction of climate change as a security issue and the political arena suit-
able to this issue are still subject to contestation. Moreover, regarding science, the Fifth
Assessment Report of the IPCC was published in 2014 (Beck this volume). In this report,
Working Group 2 dedicated an entire chapter to the human security implications of
climate change, with minor attention to the issue of violent conflict and mass migration.
What does it entail to recast climate change as a security issue? Does it change the
way in which climate change is governed? Will climate security discourse facilitate
climate mitigation policy? These questions imply a research interest in social construc-
tions and their policy implications. The theoretical schools most appropriate for such
an analysis are from critical security studies (Wæver 2012). The most popular approach
is the Copenhagen School (Wæver 1995), which asks whether extraordinary measures
are legitimized as a result of security speech acts by elites. A second approach analyzes
security discourses by referent objects (Detraz and Betsill 2009), distinguishing human
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Security 459
security, national security, international security and ecological security discourses, each
of which is linked, a priori, to certain policy implications. The research question of
such approaches is: which discourse was dominant at a particular point in time? And
have there been changes over time? Third, a governmentality analysis asks how chang-
ing constructions of danger evoke different modes of securing (Stripple and Bulkeley
this volume; Oels 2013). The research question is: how is climate change rendered
governable as a security issue? And have there been changes over time? These three
theoretical approaches will be complemented by post-political work on climate change
(Swyngedouw 2010). Such an approach asks if security discourse is in fact a populist
endeavor, externalizing the problem of climate change and thereby leaving the capitalist
system of production unchanged. These four theoretical perspectives will in the following
be applied to make sense of the climate security discourse.
In the remainder of the chapter, the analytical premises and the empirical findings
of each of the four approaches are presented. The concluding section compares the
expected policy outcomes by the four theoretical approaches and their fit with the empiri-
cal observation of weak mitigation policies. I will show that Foucauldians and discourse
analysts seem to deliver the most convincing explanations for the link between climate
security discourses and the lack of mitigation action in international climate policy.
COPENHAGEN SCHOOL: CLIMATE CHANGE AS A CASE OF

‘ALL DRESSED UP AND NOWHERE TO GO’
Most social science work on climate security discourse draws on the securitization frame-
work of the Copenhagen School (Brauch 2009; Trombetta 2008; Corry 2012; McDonald
2012; Oels 2012). According to the Copenhagen School, the climate security discourse
could elevate climate change to the level of ‘high politics’ and thereby enable drastic
emission cuts and a systematic de-carbonization of industrialized economies.
The Copenhagen School investigates if the social construction of an issue as a security
issue has enabled politicians to legitimize extraordinary measures and undemocratic
procedures on its behalf (Buzan et al. 1998; Wæver 1995). Security is redefined by the
Copenhagen School as a speech act that does something by speaking the word: ‘By utter-
ing “security”, a state-representative moves a particular development into a specific area,
and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it’ (Wæver
1995, p. 55). To study whether an issue has been successfully securitized, the researcher
must investigate two relevant factors: First, it must be determined whether the speech acts
of political elites define an issue as an ‘existential threat to a designated referent object’
and if they ‘justif[y] the use of extraordinary measures to handle’ it (Buzan et al. 1998,
p. 21), and, second, a relevant audience has to be identified that accepts these speech
acts as truth. The Copenhagen School clarifies that, for an issue to count as securitized,
there must be ‘signs of such acceptance’ in the relevant audience, it is not required that
emergency measures are actually adopted (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 25). For the traditional
Copenhagen School, the successful securitization of an issue is a negative development:
‘Ideally, politics should be able to unfold according to routine procedures without this
extraordinary elevation of specific threats’ (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 29). The Copenhagen
School demands de-securitization and a return to normal democratic politics.

A first important issue to clarify at this point is whether the speech acts made in the
name of climate security actually were in line with the Copenhagen criteria and if they
were accepted by the relevant audiences. Brauch (2009) and Oels (2012) cite numerous
examples of speech acts, which from their point of view match the Copenhagen criteria,
especially those by former US vice-president Al Gore and those by representatives of
the small island states. Brauch (2009) claims that climate change had been successfully
securitized in 2007–2008, in the sense that extraordinary measures appeared possible.
Moreover, the successful securitization of climate change would ‘legitimate extraordi-
nary and costly measures that require a progressive increase in energy efficiency and a
de-carbonization of the energy system by increasing renewable energy sources’ and that
it would mobilize ‘significant public funds’ (Brauch 2009, p. 71). Corry (2012, p. 251)
argues that those speech acts on climate security cited by Brauch and Oels do ‘not
conform neatly to the grammar of securitization,’ and that the lack of an external enemy
is one of the main reasons why securitizing moves in the climate change sector do not
conform with the Copenhagen criteria, thereby failing to legitimate policy measures (of
any sort). The majority of authors agree that the speech acts are in fact in line with the
Copenhagen criteria and can therefore be labeled securitizing moves (McDonald 2012;
Oels 2012). Ole Wæver argues that climate change is ‘a case of all dressed up and nowhere
to go’ (Wæver cited in McDonald 2012, p. 582).
All authors agree that the securitizing speech acts are not followed by extraordinary
measures. How can this finding be interpreted? Oels argues that the securitizing moves
failed to gain sufficient audience acceptance at the international level. She shows that the
strong security rhetoric employed by some Western and some small island delegations
in the UNSC sessions were not accepted by the majority of the (relevant) audience. In
fact, the UNSC failed to pass any statement at its first session in 2007 and agreed on an
extremely vague presidential statement in 2011. Oels (2012) moreover highlighted that
hardly any of the speakers demanded extraordinary measures. Instead, most speak-
ers recommended to continue the negotiations under the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol with renewed
vigor. Clearly, methodology needs to be advanced and common standards need to be
agreed upon how to define the ‘grammar of securitization’ and how to measure audience
acceptance.
Another explanation for the observable lack of extraordinary measures has been
raised by Matt McDonald, who argues that an economic security discourse might have
been overriding climate security discourse (McDonald 2012, p. 590). The Copenhagen
School is well aware of this possibility: the environmental sector is said to reveal a
particularly striking gap between ‘dramatic securitizing moves but with comparatively
little successful securitization effects (i.e., those that lead to extraordinary measures)’
(Buzan et al. 1998, p. 74). The securitizing moves are said to lack resonance because
of the marginalized status of the environmental discourse within public debate.
In most cases, political responses to securitizing moves are developed in ‘ordinary
policy debates’ (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 83) and take the form of international conven-
tions and protocols. The findings of those who have used the Copenhagen School
framework to study the climate security discourse echo this. More research is needed
on the question if an economic security discourse is in fact overriding the climate
security discourse.

Security 461
Does the absence of extraordinary measures mean that the securitizing speech acts
had no policy implications? Trombetta (2011) argues that the conceptual lens needs to be
widened in order to include policy implications below the level of exceptionality. In fact,
routine policymaking may be driven by security discourse. Trombetta suggests expand-
ing the Copenhagen framework to include all ‘measures and policies that probably would
not otherwise have been undertaken’ (Trombetta 2011, p. 136). Trombetta asserts that
the politicization of environmental issues has in many cases been achieved through their
securitization. Trombetta extends the Copenhagen framework and shows for the case of
the European Union (EU) that the overlap of the climate security discourse and energy
security discourses facilitated ‘normal’ policymaking in the EU, namely liberalized energy
markets and stricter climate policies. Corry (2012) argues that the technocratic manage-
ment of climate change that can be observed empirically can be best explained as a result
of riskification, a security logic that Corry opposes to securitization. Ole Wæver, one of
the founders of the Copenhagen School, is, however, strongly opposed to widening his
theory in such a way as suggested by Trombetta.
ANALYZING REFERENT OBJECTS: HUMAN SECURITY

DISCOURSE IS EXPECTED TO FACILITATE MITIGATION
ACTION
One of the main shortcomings of the Copenhagen School is its assumption that there is
only one relevant policy implication of the security discourse worth studying: extraor-
dinary measures and a political state of exception. A constructivist discourse analysis
opens up the meaning of security and recognizes four different referent objects of secu-
rity discourse. The research question asked is: which security discourse is dominant?
The four commonly identified referent objects of climate security are the ‘nation-state’
in discourses of national security, the ‘people’ in discourses of human security, the ‘inter-
national order’ in discourses of international security and the ‘biosphere’ or ecological
balance in discourses of ecological security. The idea behind this discourse analytical
approach is that ‘different understandings [of security] encourage and legitimize different
sets of practices with potentially radically different implications for climate change policy
and practice’ (McDonald 2013, p. 49). Depending on the threat construction, different
policy measures are proposed. The national security discourse is articulated by national
defense ministries and military think tanks like the CNA (2007) as well as by small island
states such as Tuvalu. The discourse of national security advocates adaptation and disas-
ter risk reduction as policy priorities over mitigation (Dilling this volume). National secu-
rity institutions are called upon to preserve national sovereignty and territorial integrity
in the face of climate-induced mass migration and violent conflict. Nation states emerge
as legitimate providers of security. Floyd (2007, p. 342) argues that national security
‘(such as military environmental security and the environmental conflict thesis) must, for
the most part, be seen as negative.’
Floyd (2010, p. 184) has claimed that the human security discourse ‘seeks to address
the root causes of environmental change through (global) cooperative measures with the
ultimate aim of establishing a healthy and functioning environment for us all.’ The human
security discourse has been introduced by the UNDP in its 1994 Human Development

Report in order to channel resources from military budgets to development budgets after
the end of the Cold War. In the field of climate change, the discourse is promoted by the
UNDP and by a group of scientists who collaborate through the Norwegian government-
funded Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project based in
Oslo. The human security discourse fosters ‘mitigation and the redistribution of material
resources’ (McDonald 2013, p. 46) over adaptation. The international security discourse
promotes international cooperation and features the role of international organiza-
tions in both mitigation and adaptation equally (or to different extents). Finally, the
ecological security discourse is said to foster a ‘fundamental reorientation of societal
patterns and behaviour’ that cause climate change in the first place (McDonald 2013,
p. 49). Recommended measures aim at a change in ecological consciousness and feature
community-led initiatives to preserve ecological balance (McDonald 2013, p. 48). The
ecological security discourse is advocated by very few academics and some environmen-
tal non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Friends of the Earth (Spratt and
Sutton 2008).
The link between referent object and advocated policy measures is, however, weak.
Brzoska (2009) has analyzed four flagship publications—that are representative of three
climate security discourses—in more detail. He analyzes the WBGU report (2008) and
the study by International Alert (Smith and Vivekananda 2007) as examples of human
security discourse and—in line with McDonald—asserts that these tend to foster ‘miti-
gation and development instruments for adaptation’ and ‘the strengthening of “social
resilience” and institutions of conflict resolution’ (Brzoska 2009, p. 144). Contrary to
McDonald, Brzoska claims that the study by the CNA (2007), which all analysts classify
as national security discourse, and the study by the Centre for a New American Century
(Campbell et al. 2007), which is analyzed as exemplary of global security, both feature
mitigation (Brzoska 2009, p. 144). This highlights that McDonald’s classification is sim-
plified. However, for the purposes of this chapter, it offers a good overview of the ways in
which different security discourses can matter.
Which discourses have been found to be dominant in the climate security discourse?
Detraz and Betsill (2009) ask in an early discourse analysis whether climate security
marks a discursive turn or a discursive continuity. They contrast two accounts of climate
security, namely the environmental conflict discourse and the environmental security dis-
course. They argue that the environmental conflict discourse is linked to the notion of
national security and leads to militarization. The environmental security discourse, on
the other hand, is linked to the concept of human security, which they view as conducive
to the mitigation of climate change. Their empirical analysis of international climate
negotiations and G8 meetings until 2008 concludes that climate security is couched in
the environmental security framing and that no discursive shift can be traced over time.
According to their normative assessment, there is nothing to be worried about because
the dominant discourse effectively supports the mitigation of climate change. The recent
publication of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report seems to support the argument that
the human security discourse is dominant. Working Group 2 has dedicated a full chapter
to the human security implications of climate change (Chapter 12). However, this claim
is at odds with the empirical observation that there is slow progress on mitigation action
in international climate diplomacy.
A plausible explanation for the lack of mitigation action at the international level

Security 463
is offered by McDonald, who concludes that the discourses of national security and
international security are dominant at the international level while the human security
discourse has only a weak presence. Accordingly, the dominant discourses of national
and international security are not able to ‘inform an effective global response to global
climate change’ (2013, p. 49). This is because the national security and international secu-
rity discourses ‘both orient around the preservation of some notion of the status-quo’
(McDonald 2013, p. 49), empowering actors and institutions which caused the climate
change crisis in the first place. McDonald warns that the discourse of national security
may enable ‘perverse political responses,’ for example ‘to close borders to those displaced
by climate change’ (McDonald 2013, p. 49).
I conclude that the lack of progress in international mitigation action stems from the
dominance of the national and international security discourses in climate security dis-
course. It is, however, remarkable that different analysts disagree which of the security
discourses are dominant at the international level. This makes such analysis vulnerable to
critiques that they are very subjective and that it is impossible to determine the dominant
discourse in a more objective way. Here, a discussion about quality criteria for empirical
discourse analysis of climate security is needed in order to assess which findings are the
most convincing.
GOVERNMENTALITY STUDIES: RESILIENCE AS DOMINANT

MODE OF SECURING
A third approach studies security as governmentality (Oels 2013). According to Foucault,

governmentality is a rationality (and mentality) of government. Governmentality studies
ask how something is rendered governable—in our case how it is rendered governable as
a security issue (Stripple and Bulkeley this volume). It distinguishes between the regime
of knowledge incited, the visibilities and subject positions created and the practices
enabled by the climate security discourse. A governmentality analysis of the climate
security discourse enables us to distinguish between four modes of securing. First, a
sovereign economy of power justifies any means considered necessary for the defense
of the national and/or international order. The sovereign logic is much in line with the
Copenhagen School’s political state of exception. Second, disciplinary power uses sur-
veillance in order to monitor global circulation and to identify dangerous developments.
Satellite monitoring of the climate system is a good example of this. Third, Foucault
has introduced liberal biopower to highlight that it is about securing the biological life
of a population as measured by demographic variables rather than a territory. Liberal
biopower secures the population by traditional risk management—it identifies at risk
groups (for example populations vulnerable to climate change) and targets interven-
tions on them. Moreover, it calculates ‘safe’ emission pathways for the case of climate
change. Traditional risk management draws heavily on science to calculate and manage
risks. Fourth, advanced liberal government begins where science ends. In the face of
unpredictable, but potentially highly disruptive, climate change impacts, securing takes
the form of resilience. Resilience means the ability of a social or ecological system to
absorb shocks and still persist in its basic functions (Adler et al. this volume). Which of
these four modes of securing is incited by and productive of climate security discourse?

De Goede and Randalls (2009) claim that the climate security discourse is mobilizing a
new mode of securing beyond traditional ‘risk’ management. What distinguishes this new
mode of securing from ‘riskification’ (Corry 2012) is its new relationship with science. De
Goede and Randalls call this new mode of securing ‘precaution/preemption.’ According
to Ewald (2002, pp. 283–284) the precautionary principle deals with dangers, which are
perceived as scientifically highly uncertain and potentially catastrophic. The detection of
these dangers is said to escape normal science and traditional modes of risk calculation
and management because of their irresolvable uncertainty (Oels 2013). However, this is
not the end of knowledge but the beginning of new modes of knowledge production.
Precaution/preemption is characterized by an ‘insatiable quest for knowledge’ (Aradau
and van Munster 2007, p. 91), for example in the form of surveillance. Moreover, pre-
caution/preemption draws on scenario modeling and worst-case scenarios to imagine
possible futures which escape prediction. On the basis of these new speculative forms of
knowledge, political action in the present is justified (De Goede and Randalls 2009, p.
867).
In the face of ‘environmental terror’ (Duffield 2011), enhancing resilience to shocks
emerged as the dominant mode of securing (Methmann and Oels 2015). As the human–
environment interface is re-conceptualized as a non-linear complex adaptive system,
contingency is accepted as inherent and unavoidable. Governing through contingency
emerges as a new mode of surfing the contingencies of life (Oels 2013). Discourses and
practices of resilience draw on advanced liberal government, in particular on govern-
ing through contingency (Methmann and Oels 2015). Those under threat of danger-
ous climate change impacts are asked to accept this level of impacts as inevitable and
to prepare themselves for the coming disasters. In the flagship publication of the UK
Government Office for Science (Foresight 2011), migration is presented as a rational
strategy of adaptation that will enhance resilience. Migration is no longer discussed as
forced migration but as a ‘free choice to stay or to move’ (Care International 2012). This
dominant discourse argues that in the long run, migration may enhance the resilience of
those who stay behind through the receipt of remittances from those who have emigrated
(Scheffran et al. 2012).
De Goede and Randalls (2009, p. 874) argue that the construction of climate change
as uncertain and catastrophic contributes to its de-politicization as ‘[t]he terms of the
debate can become constrained,’ such that there are no longer ‘legitimate grounds to
even question the overpowering assumptions delivering up these apocalyptic scenarios
that must be managed globally through all-seeing means.’ De Goede and Randalls
(2009) propose that such apocalyptic climate discourse fails to mobilize meaningful
political action among the public. Instead, technocratic government is legitimized, which
Anderson and Adey (2012) have called governing through affect. Fundamental questions
about our social relations with nature and how we want to live with nature in the future
get lost (Swyngedouw 2010).
The climate security discourse presents dangerous levels of climate change as
unchangeable matter of fact, thereby denying the possibility that some climate change
impacts could still be prevented by effective mitigation policy (Methmann and Oels
2015). The climate security discourse is in fact a struggle about different geopolitical
futures (McNamara and Gibson 2009). The climate security discourse imagines danger-
ous levels of climate change as endemic and small island states as disappeared from the

Security 465
map (Bettini 2013). Ambassadors of small island states have resisted such futures and
argued ‘We don’t want to leave our land’ (McNamara and Gibson 2009). Moreover, the
climate security discourse is disempowering for affected populations (Methmann and
Oels 2015). It avoids the language of human rights, thereby disabling claims for com-
pensation by affected populations. In addition, it renders at risk populations responsible
for preparing themselves and for becoming resilient to climate change impacts (Forsyth,
Gupta this volume). Thereby, the industrialized countries are not only relieved of their
responsibility to ‘save’ affected populations, they are also no longer the main sponsor of
policy measures.
Even worse, De Goede and Randalls (2009, p. 872) argue that the apocalyptic climate
discourse might be a case of ‘performative’ government or self-fulfilling prophecy, where
‘governments not only are anticipating the worst, but also, in trying to prevent that
nightmare, act in ways that increase the possibility of its occurrence.’ With regards to the
2°C climate stabilization target, they argue that ‘it seems decidedly odd to embark on a
policy to get the world to just below the “danger point”’ (De Goede and Randalls 2009, p.
873), given the many remaining uncertainties about climate sensitivity and other factors.
Moreover, technologies of geoengineering (Hansson et al. this volume), developed as
emergency responses to dangerous levels of climate change, might themselves destabilize
the climate in unforeseen ways (De Goede and Randalls 2009, p. 873).
In sum, governmentality studies argue that the climate security discourse is enabling
advanced liberal modes of securing. By presupposing dangerous levels of climate change
as a matter of fact, the climate security discourse shifts the focus from mitigation action
to adaptation and resilience. From the perspective of governmentality studies, we would
not even expect mitigation action as a result of climate security discourse. By contrast,
governmentality studies illustrate how adaptation measures and resilience are fostered
by the climate security discourse. A particular strength of governmentality studies is
their ability to offer a profound critique of the diverse policy implications of the climate
security discourse.
POPULISM, APOCALYPTIC CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE

TECHNOLOGICAL FIX
A fourth approach to the climate security discourse is neo-Marxist in orientation and

draws on discourse theory by Laclau and Mouffe. The main hypothesis of discourse
theorists is that climate security discourse is a populist discourse that serves to secure the
status quo, in this case capitalist modes of production based on fossil fuels. Therefore,
discourse theorists expect inaction regarding climate mitigation as a result of the climate
security discourse.
In contrast to Corry (2012), who argues that the source of danger was internally
located, Methmann and Rothe (2012) claim that climate security discourse constitutes
climate change as an external enemy to humanity. In their empirical analysis, they show
that the climate security discourse constructs an ‘antagonistic frontier between human-
ity and dangerous climate change’ (Methmann and Rothe 2012, p. 336). According to
their analysis, climate change is constructed as a ‘war of all against nothing’ (Methmann
and Rothe 2012, p. 336). They reviewed publications of paradigmatic international

rganizations (such as the UNEP and UNDP), NGOs (such as Greenpeace) and 72
o
nation-state speeches in the UNSC debates published between 2004 and 2010 for the
three policy areas of mitigation, adaptation and security. They show that the climate
security discourse ‘constructs a universal threat on a planetary scale, invokes humanity as
a collective victim, anticipates the end of time and draws on religious fantasmatic images’
(Methmann and Rothe 2012, p. 324). They conclude that it is the construction of climate
change as apocalyptic that disables extraordinary action by policymakers and leaves the
issue to be resolved by technological innovation (Linnér and Rayner this volume).
Even more radically, Swyngedouw (2010, p. 222) argues that ‘CO2 stands here as the
classic example of a fetishized and externalized foe that requires dealing with if sus-
tainable climate futures are to be attained. Problems therefore are not the result of the
“system” [. . .] but are blamed on an outsider.’ In the construction of one ‘humanity,’
conflicts of interest and social differences disappear. Capitalism remains unquestioned,
but a ‘socio-ecological fix’ (Swyngedouw 2010, pp. 221–222) is needed in order to prevent
climate change from getting in the way of capital accumulation. A stable climate is in
the interest of capitalism, so for capitalism to continue, the externalized problem needs
to be fixed. Swyngedouw (2010, p. 223) argues that climate security discourse (which he
calls ‘environmental populism’) is in essence ‘reactionary.’ The climate security discourse
‘does not invite a transformation of the existing socio-ecological order but calls on the
elites to undertake action such that nothing really has to change’ (Swyngedouw 2010,
p. 223).
I conclude that discourse theorists demonstrate how the climate security discourse
constructs climate change as an external enemy on which all problems can be blamed.
By externalizing the problems of the system, the fossil-oriented mode of capitalist
production remains unquestioned. Those responsible for causing climate change in the
first place are now charged with ‘managing’ the problem in ways that ensure the status
quo. The discourse theorists give a compelling interpretation of the weak mitigation
measures.
CONCLUSIONS
Does the climate security discourse facilitate climate mitigation policy? The above analy-
sis has shown that only a successful securitization of climate change (according to the
Copenhagen School) or the dominance of the human security discourse (according to
constructivist discourse analysis) consider this as a possibility. The Copenhagen School
argues that the speech acts of climate security were not accepted by the relevant audience.
This would explain why drastic securitizing moves were not followed by extraordinary
policy measures. However, an alternative interpretation for this finding cannot be ruled
out: the climate security discourse may have been overridden by economic security dis-
course, thereby explaining inaction on climate change concerns. In terms of theoretical
framework, the Copenhagen School is not capable of distinguishing between different
modes of securing a threatened referent object. While it acknowledges that security
threats and the referent objects deserving protection are constructed, the state response
is confined to ‘exceptionality,’ despite the fact that other responses are possible (process-
type responses, routine forms of risk management). The Copenhagen School is therefore

Security 467
‘constructivist in regard to social relations, but more objectivist with regard to security’
(Stripple 2002, p. 110).
This theoretical impasse has been resolved by constructivist discourse analysis.
Constructivist discourse analysis widens the scope of analysis and distinguishes between
four discourses of climate security: national, human, international and ecological secu-
rity discourses. However, there is wide disagreement about which of these four discourses
is predominant in the climate security discourse and even some contestation about the
policy implications of each of the discourses. According to McDonald, the dominance
of national and international security discourses has paved the way for the slow progress
of mitigation action.
Foucauldians and discourse theorists on the other hand demonstrate how the climate
security discourse facilitates inaction regarding mitigation policy. Foucauldian govern-
mentality approaches demonstrate how the climate security discourse is productive of
advanced liberal modes of securing, in particular of resilience. Foucauldians show that
the climate security discourse constructs dangerous levels of climate change as inevita-
ble, thereby shifting the focus of attention from mitigation to adaptation. In the face of
‘environmental terror,’ at risk populations are rendered responsible to become resilient
to shocks of various kinds. Finally, discourse theorists show that the climate security
discourse is a populist discourse, which externalizes the problem of climate change dis-
cursively and confines policymaking to variations of the status quo. Foucauldian and
neo-Marxist analyses argue that climate mitigation action requires a different discursive
framing of the problem of climate change. As long as dangerous levels of climate change
are presupposed as inevitable and endemic, the policy focus will be on adaptation and
resilience.
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41. Adaptation
Lisa Dilling
INTRODUCTION
While much of the policy effort to date has been devoted to mitigation policy, adaptation
policy is quickly becoming an important part of the climate governance discussion, at
the international, national and even local scales. Because it was at best seen as a ‘morally
inferior’ choice, and at worst seen as admitting defeat on mitigation, adaptation was for
many years a ‘taboo’ subject among many climate policy actors and scholars (Pielke
et al. 2007). However, it gradually became clear that no matter how aggressive or suc-
cessful climate mitigation policies might become in reducing emissions, in the short term,
the world was committed to some level of climate change, and adaptation would be a
prudent strategy to consider.
The past 15 years have seen a veritable explosion of scholarship on adaptation, and its
cousins vulnerability (Forsyth this volume) and resilience (Adler et al. this volume). Smit
and Wandel (2006) trace the history of the use of the term ‘adaptation’ within global
change studies and suggest it has emerged both from biology, where it is a classic element
of evolutionary theory, and elements of cultural anthropology that focus on what enables
cultures to succeed in the face of environmental (or other) change. Smit and Wandel
contrast four different approaches to adaptation research: comparing how adaptation
can offset climate impacts; characterizing adaptation measures themselves; starting with
and ranking the vulnerability of societies to climate change; and ‘practical studies’ that
focus on community-based, ‘bottom-up’ research designed to assist specific communities
but that are not necessarily able to be scaled up to enable comparison and generalization.
Smit et al. (2000) provide a concise typology of questions to ask in studying and char-
acterizing adaptation for analytical purposes: what is adaptation? Who or what adapts?
How does adaptation occur? How good is the adaptation? In addition, adaptation can be
categorized as autonomous, or proactive, where actions are taken in anticipation of even-
tual change. The bulk of adaptation scholarship has focused on defining and refining the
theoretical underpinnings of the concept, with fewer studies focused on empirically based
case studies of adaptation, and very few studies so far that can draw broader generaliza-
tions, simply because of the newness of the issue and the context-specific nature of most
adaptation studies. In the meantime, some cities, states and nations have moved forward
with adaptation planning and in rare cases, implementation of proactive adaptation
measures in anticipation of climate change.
As adaptation becomes more commonplace in international and local discussions of
climate policy, it is timely to revisit how the concept has been theorized, and how concepts
such as adaptive capacity and adaptive governance have evolved. This chapter begins
with a review of how adaptation itself has been theorized, goes on to consider various
ways of conceptualizing governance for adaptation, and examines additional work on
adaptive governance as a collective action problem. It concludes with an exploration
470
Adaptation 471
of fundamental disagreements on the way forward for adaptive responses, and whether
adaptation itself can be seen as an imperative or normative ideal, subject to competing
foundations for its legitimacy.
HOW IS ADAPTATION THEORIZED?
Adaptation as Climate Response
Adger et al. (2005, p. 77) define adaptation as ‘adjustment in ecological, social or eco-
nomic systems in response to observed or expected changes in climatic stimuli and their
effects and impacts in order to alleviate adverse impacts of change or take advantage of
new opportunities.’ In this theoretical framing, the main function of climate adaptation
efforts is to respond to changes in expected or actual climate impacts, and the stimulus is
placed on the climate signals themselves, while the response is linked to the changes that
are expected or experienced. The other important element is that the efforts in the end
should reduce harm or even produce a net gain to society. There are no single metrics or
easy answers for judging when adaptation has been successful in this view, only that out-
comes must be judged with full awareness of the context of communities across spatial
and temporal scales, and with attention to equity, legitimacy and economic efficiency
(Adger et al. 2005). Empirical study of the limited experiments and evaluations of adap-
tation efforts have led experts to conclude that thus far, there are ‘no easy scientific or
political answers’ to what is successful adaptation (Moser and Boykoff 2013, p. 1). The
implication of this framing of adaptation is that the most preferred end state is one in
which society has adjusted in a way that can better accommodate any new states that may
come with climate change.
Adaptation as Additional
In the early 2000s, when the funding of adaptation began to be discussed in the interna-
tional policy scene, there was a specific effort to draw a distinction between funds raised
that would support adaptation to climate change and funds that might be already being
used to fund work on reducing vulnerability to climate variability, in order to show the
‘global benefit’ of such adaptation measures and to explicitly call out the new meas-
ures required for climate change (Huq and Burton 2003). Some have objected to this
framing of adaptation funding for climate change as needing to be additional, pointing
out the illogicality of paying for only a part of a seawall, or a fraction of a heatwave
mitigation strategy, given that many of the actions needed for climate change are more
generally needed for building adaptive capacity across the board or addressing the adap-
tation ‘deficit’ (e.g., Burton 2009; Huq and Burton 2003; Pielke et al. 2007; Smit and
Wandel 2006).
Adaptation as Development
Many scholars have built upon the deficit argument to suggest that in fact ‘adaptation
is development,’ meaning that the best way for societies to be prepared and adapt to

climate change is to develop their fundamental capacities to cope with adversity, such
as by improving healthcare, education and literacy, providing access to microfinance
programs and strengthening local institutions (Eakin and Patt 2011; Huq and Burton
2003). Others have argued that developing countries that are understandably focused
on poverty alleviation, economic growth, food security and so on must include climate
change considerations into their planning in order for any development efforts to be
sustainable and successful (Kok et al. 2008). While conversations regarding the logic of
compensation for adaptation costs are evolving, it is still fair to say that there is some
wariness of the thought of fully combining climate change and development agendas
(Ayers and Huq 2009).
Just Adaptation
The threads of adaptation research touch on the theme of winners and losers, although
whether winners and losers are assumed to emerge as a natural result of environmental
and social systems or to be produced deliberately by inequitable social and political pro-
cesses affects how these are studied and conceptualized (O’Brien and Leichenko 2003).
Some have argued that adaptation is fundamentally an issue of social justice, involving
both distributive and procedural aspects (Page this volume; Paavola and Adger 2006).
Questions of who is responsible, both for causing the environmental change and for
paying for the consequences, and who will bear the burden of having to adapt (perhaps
with little responsibility for the problem) speak to the importance of the fairness and
legitimacy of adaptation processes. Paavola and Adger (2006, p. 602) suggest four prin-
ciples that should underpin adaptation efforts: ‘avoiding dangerous climate change,
forward-looking responsibility, putting the most vulnerable first, and equal participation
for all.’ Unfortunately, some policies designed to relieve vulnerability such as providing
technology or knowledge can exacerbate inequities due to unequal ability to access the
improvements (Eakin and Patt 2011; Lemos and Dilling 2007).
The Barriers to Adaptation
Barriers to adaptation are theorized to be stumbling blocks or challenges, which, with

the right circumstances, can be overcome. While planning has been a common adapta-
tion response, several assessments have reported limited progress on the implementation
of adaptation in practice (e.g., Berrang-Ford et al. 2011; Bulkeley 2010). Moser and
Ekstrom (2010) have theorized that barriers to adaptation can occur at any point in the
decision process such as during the information gathering, problem definition, develop-
ing options, implementing and evaluating aspects of the process. These barriers can arise
from many of the same issues that plague other types of policy change processes: lack
of leadership, inadequate attention to cross-system connections, mismatches in organiza-
tional missions and jurisdictions, and lack of adequate preparation for ‘policy windows’
that might occur to allow for a change in direction toward adaptive decisions. While
some have assumed that developed countries will have higher adaptive capacity and thus
undertake adaptation policy more easily, in fact, barriers to adaptation can occur in
both developed and the developing world, and barriers in the implementation stage are
particularly pervasive (Biesbroek et al. 2011; Dupuis and Knoepfel 2013).

Adaptation 473
The Limits to Adaptation
While barriers can potentially be overcome, the notion of limits implies a hard thresh-
old beyond which adaptation is not possible (Adger et al. 2009). While a climate science
framing of adaptation might suggest that uncertainty in climate predictions is a limit
to adaptation (Dessai et al. 2009), Adger et al. (2009) instead suggest that adaptation
limits may be reached as a result of both individual and social factors, as well as subjec-
tive values and place attachments that may be difficult to anticipate from a researcher’s
outside perspective. Attitudes, perceptions and tolerance for risk are important deter-
minants of adaptation limits. For example, Grothmann and Patt (2005) found that how
communities perceived their own capacity to adapt to flood risk affected whether or not
they actually possessed adaptive capacity and felt empowered to make changes to adjust
to environmental risks. Similarly, Wolf et al. (2009, p. 190) found that elderly people often
felt helpless in the face of heatwave risk, stating, ‘there’s nothing you can do’—a percep-
tion with serious implications for vulnerability. Dow et al. (2013) propose an actor-centric
definition of adaptation limits. They point out that actors, whether individuals, corpo-
rations or governments, have different perceptions and experiences with risk, and these
will influence the way they categorize risks with respect to climate change and the need
to adapt. Intolerable risks (threats to a valued outcome) combined with lack of adapta-
tion alternatives become defined as an adaptation limit. Dow et al. (2013) further suggest
that attitudes toward risk for valued objectives can be categorized as acceptable, tolerable
and intolerable, and propose that adaptation limits are reached when an individual or
community can no longer achieve valued outcomes in the face of intolerable risk even
with any available adaptive action. A closely related concept is that of the adaptation
‘frontier,’ which Preston et al. (2013) describe as the ‘domain between a socio-ecological
system’s safe operating space and its unsafe operating space’ where it is still possible for
adaptation decisions to affect how the system evolves, whether toward safety or danger.
Moreover, the physical system has been characterized as having ‘tipping points’ (Lenton
et al. 2008) where key climate system or ecosystem values irreversibly shift from one state
to another, potentially leading to the need for societal transformation rather than simply
incremental adaptation (Kates et al. 2012). While not explicitly linked to the literature on
adaptation limits, the recent development of the concept of ‘planetary boundaries’ and a
‘safe operating space for humanity’ would imply as well that there are sets of conditions
under which humanity will no longer thrive, and that our governance mechanisms should
strive to keep the earth within these boundaries (Rockström et al. 2009).
HOW MIGHT THESE DIFFERENT WAYS OF THEORIZING

ADAPTATION AFFECT GOVERNANCE?
Adapting Lemos and Agrawal’s (2006, p. 298) definition of environmental governance,

we might say that governance for adaptation is ‘the set of regulatory processes, mecha-
nisms and organizations through which political actors influence [adaptation] actions
and outcomes. Governance is not the same as government. It includes the actions of the
state and, in addition, encompasses actors such as communities, businesses, and NGOs.’
As much of this volume has stated, governance relevant to climate more generally is

occurring through a wide variety of actors at different levels and in many different types
of venues (Lederer, Dingwerth and Green this volume). The same is true for adaptation
specifically (Adger et al. 2005).
While the importance of the nation-state and international policy processes has been
acknowledged in moving forward action on climate adaptation (Adger 2001; Lemos
and Agrawal 2006; Liverman and Billett 2010), it is clear that many of the actions
and actors involved in accomplishing adaptive actions are situated at the subnational
scale (Adger et al. 2005; Urwin and Jordan 2008). Theory and practice in adaptation
governance have focused on two main scales thus far: the nation-state (in the context
of National Adaptation Programmes of Action, participation in the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol) and the local,
whether in an urban or rural setting. Actors and decisions at these two disparate
scales are often connected in the case of adaptation—while ‘adaptation is necessarily
local’ (Corfee-Morlot et al. 2010, p. 170), laws, funding, mandates and actors beyond
the local level can greatly influence whether or not adaptation actions can be imple-
mented (Urwin and Jordan 2008). However, a survey of cities currently undertaking
adaptive actions for climate change found that most cities that are pursing adaptation
do so for internal reasons, and not as a result of a higher directive or requirement
(Anguelovski and Carmin 2011). Motivations for climate adaptation include percep-
tion of a threat, desire to achieve internal agendas, or a desire to show leadership or
enhance the reputation of the city (Janković this volume; Anguelovski and Carmin
2011).
It is not known whether completely new institutions or forms of governance are neces-
sary to achieve adaptation, but Huntjens et al. (2012) have suggested that successful gov-
ernance of adaptation depends on institutions that embody certain characteristics such
as flexibility, reflection, learning and innovation in order to deal with the uncertainty,
complexity and surprise that climate change will bring. The fact that many of the institu-
tions and organizational structures currently in place to manage fluctuations in existing
environmental resources and hazards have often been found to be rigid or unable to
incorporate new information (e.g., many in the water supply arena, flood management,
etc.) or reach different outcomes suggests that new forms of governance or at least new
institutions might indeed be warranted. Non-governmental actors have been essential
to the process of climate policy development and governance for both mitigation and
adaptation, especially at the local scale (Bulkeley 2010). Learning and support can come
from the formation and activation of informal or even formal networks such as ICLEI (in
the case of climate mitigation and adaptation) and often serve to link actors across scales
(Bulkeley 2010; Birkmann et al. 2010).
HOW HAVE EFFECTIVE RESPONSES FOR CLIMATE

ADAPTATION BEEN THEORIZED?
In the context of adaptation, much has been theorized about adaptive capacity, or the
potential or ability of societies to adapt to the effects or impacts of climate change (Smit
et al. 2001). Adaptive capacity is seen as a key determinant of vulnerability (vulnerability
in turn defined as susceptibility to harm, in other words the condition that signals the

Adaptation 475
need for adaptation), and ‘societies which are able to respond to or cope with change
quickly and easily are considered to have high “adaptability” or “capacity” to adapt’
(Smit and Wandel 2006, p. 283). Yohe and Tol (2002) suggest that there are several
determinants to adaptive capacity, including the range of technological options, the
distribution and availability of resources, the structure of institutions, the allocation of
authority for making decisions, human capital, social capital, access to risk-spreading
processes, ability to manage and decipher the credibility of information, the credibility
of decision-makers and public perceptions of local impacts.
Governance and institutional mechanisms are thought to be especially critical ele-
ments of adaptive capacity, although empirical evidence supporting this supposition
is rare (Engle and Lemos 2010). In the water sector, a set of design principles for the
governance of climate adaptation has been put forward by Huntjens et al. (2012). These
principles include clearly defined boundaries of who is involved and entitled to use the
resource, equal and fair distribution of risks, costs and benefits, mechanisms to enhance
participation in collective choice decisions, conflict resolution and prevention mecha-
nisms, polycentric governance, robust and flexible processes and policy learning. In
an empirically based case study in Brazil, Engle and Lemos found that there are likely
tradeoffs among desirable governance characteristics, and that some elements might be
maximized at the expense of others but still lead to higher adaptive capacity overall.
Pahl-Wostl (2009) has emphasized the importance of social learning, flexible mechanisms
and contextually specific solutions developed with all affected parties as necessary to
effectively design and deploy adaptation governance mechanisms in the face of the reality
of complex situations on the ground. She states, however, ‘it is still an open question how
to overcome the state of single loop learning [incremental improvement of established
routines] that seem to characterize many attempts to adapt to climate change’ (Pahl-
Wostl 2009, p. 354).
THE NEED FOR ADAPTATION: IRRECONCILABLE

DIFFERENCES?
Does climate change pose an imperative for adaptive action to reduce the likelihood of
harm to humans and non-human species? Or is adaptation a normative ideal that exists
as a theoretical construct but a difficult concept to reconcile with the reality of a diverse
population with divergent values and experiences of risk? Looking to analogs of how civ-
ilizations have adapted to changing climates over the centuries, one would expect a range
of answers to this question. The most challenging aspect of adaptation in the face of
intolerable risk in particular, is how much society is able to take on as anticipatory action,
versus simply engaging with adaptive or transformative adaptation as they emerge in
reaction to climate events and underlying trends in mean climate. Even if p opulations
accept the risk as understood by technical experts, some will take the view that no action
is necessary in advance.
While many approaches to analyzing and informing adaptation theory and practice
recognize the diversity of participants and perspectives within each context, the challenge
this poses to collective action for adaptation cannot be understated. As Mike Hulme
eloquently asserts in his book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change:

from different vantage points [. . .] the idea of climate change carries quite different meanings
and seems to imply quite different courses of action [. . .]. If we are to understand climate
change and if we are to use climate change constructively in our politics, we must first hear and
understand these discordant voices, these multifarious human beliefs, values, attitudes, aspira-
tions and behaviors. (Hulme 2009, p. xxvi)
These underlying differences are not necessarily reconcilable or resolvable by providing

more science or information, and are fundamental to our makeup as people. By inference,
adaptation to climate change may well take on very different forms and shapes depending
on the location, and success may look very different in different places. Attitudes toward
particular solutions may differ as well among populations, and make convergence to
any single solution extremely unlikely (Verweij et al. 2006; Hulme 2009). Kahan and col-
leagues (2012) have demonstrated that opposing worldviews rather than scientific literacy
explain differences in perception of the risk that climate change poses. They suggest as
long as climate change is inextricably linked with cultural meanings (Hulme this volume),
it will be challenging to reach collective solutions that address the risks posed by climate
change and therefore secure the common interest.
How are actions then to be reconciled across such a diverse set of views about nature,
climate and humans’ role in adaptation? While diverse values may place limits on adap-
tation options (Adger et al. 2009), O’Brien (2009) identifies the importance of values
in determining which adaptation options or stances might be preferred, and notes how
widely value stances can diverge as well as change over time. She suggests that ‘the chal-
lenge then is to identify adaptation strategies that acknowledge and address a spectrum
of values. If this is not feasible, it is important to identify value conflicts and consider
whose values count’ (O’Brien 2009, p. 177). While that latter conclusion is not necessarily
unique to adaptation, to satisfy other criteria for both effective and equitable adapta-
tion it may be a new imperative to make those conversations about ‘whose values count’
explicit and transparent.
The core dilemmas for adaptation governance are nicely described by Nicholson-Cole
and O’Riordan (2009, p. 368) for the case of communities located on the eastern coast
of the United Kingdom, where the central government’s former policy to engineer the
coast with structures to defend against coastal erosion has shifted in recent years to
one of maintaining a ‘more naturally functioning coastline.’ This policy shift pitted
national interests in becoming more adaptive to environmental changes against local
communities who preferred the status quo, left the affected coastal communities with
few alternatives and resulted in near universal local rejection of the policy, accompanied
by a feeling of distrust in the process, powerlessness and increasingly combative public
dialogue.
Consideration of tradeoffs between alternatives is a natural component of policy
analysis, but rarely are the full extent of tradeoffs between efficiency, equity and long-
term ecological integrity discussed explicitly in policy development (Eakin et al. 2009).
The lessons from experience in developing adaptive strategies on the ground in the UK
(Nicholson-Cole and O’Riordan 2009), Pacific Island states (Barnett et al. 2013) and the
Netherlands (Roth and Warner 2007), to name a few, suggest that outcomes for various
groups in society are not equal.

Adaptation 477
CONCLUSION
This short review of the state of adaptation theory and practice suggests that the govern-
ance challenge for adaptation is neither straightforward nor easy, nor will it be neces-
sarily ‘no regrets.’ It has been suggested that climate change is not a ‘solvable’ problem,
but rather one that we live with, engage with, learn from, and apply clumsy solutions to
(Verweij et al. 2006; Hulme 2009). Clumsy solutions are those that manage to triangulate
among the various value sets and preferences to emerge with a decision that may not be
elegant, but may allow some movement toward a less vulnerable society. Clumsy solutions
also imply another critical element of public decision-making and communication—the
need to shift to a more transparent and interactive form of interaction between decision-
makers and members of the public about conceptions of risk, preferences for various
tradeoffs and the real state of knowledge about future conditions and our ability to
estimate consequences of current decisions. Rather than confidently choosing courses of
action that are labeled ‘no regrets,’ can we envision a governance environment of experi-
mental trial and error, being able to revisit decisions and attempting adaptive manage-
ment? How would communication change in such an environment? Would decisions still
seek to be ‘robust’ or would we move to a language infused with concepts of flexibility
and adjustment? Decisions would still need to thread a delicate path between account-
ability and flexibility, effectiveness and fairness, inclusiveness and context-specificity. But
a transparent, flexible, learning-by-doing approach by decision-makers attempting to
govern for adaptation to climate change may be the only practical way forward in the face
of deep uncertainty and fundamentally irreconcilable value differences.
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42. Post-humanist imaginaries
Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Åsberg and Suzi Hayes
It is now well understood that anthropogenic climate change is as much a political, social and
cultural event, as it is a scientific one.
(Yusoff and Gabrys 2011, p. 517)
On a riverbank in the American southwest, a middle-aged woman wades into the gentle
current. In her hands is a small sculpture—a book, in fact, carved from ice and studded
with seedpods. As the river’s fingers turn the pages of this tome, the seeds are released
to nourish the indigenous riparian flora that are part of this watershed. Community
members gather round to participate in this gift to the river—a reseeding to address the
receding glaciers that have become emblematic of our planet’s warming climate (Irland
2012).
US-based artist Basia Irland’s ice books are probably not what come to mind when
one thinks about climate governance. Yet if we consider the specific components of her
project—education and activation of publics, communal effort, use of scientific knowl-
edge, promotion of replicable actions to curb localized effects of climate change (Irland
2012)—a link to the notion of governance seems less strange. In fact, Irland’s work seems
to respond precisely to Jagers and Stripple’s definition of climate governance as ‘all the
purposeful mechanisms and measures aimed at steering social systems toward prevent-
ing, mitigating, or adapting to the risks posed by climate change’ (Jagers and Stripple
2003, p. 388) and ‘diffused among several “governors”’ (Jagers and Stripple 2003, p. 385).
Yet, what separates Irland’s work from what might usually count as climate governance
is its creative cultivation of environmental curiosity—or, what we might call a climate
imaginary. Within contemporary cultural research, imagination—or an imaginary—
refers to that social domain of seeing, experiencing, thinking, fantasizing, discussing
and enacting aspects of the material world. Imaginaries shape how we see ourselves in
relation to certain phenomena, and our relations to others in the context of those phe-
nomena. In doing so, they help create the reality we live out (Gregory 1994; Franklin
2000; Åsberg 2014). As linked to governance, an imaginary creates ‘the conditions for
material interventions in, and political sensibilities of the world’ (Yusoff and Gabrys
2011, p. 516). Might then Basia Irland’s ice books—as well as other creative responses
to climate change—be understood as connected to climate governance, insofar as they
too are ‘purposeful measures,’ hoping to steer publics toward new and diverse responses
to climate change (Hulme this volume)?
In this chapter, we affirm the need to explore climate imaginaries as a vital part of
governance. Our point of departure is scholarship on imaginaries within contemporary
cultural research, and its feminist and post-humanist forms in particular. Here, empirical
research on human engagement with phenomena such as climate change is necessarily
complemented by normative and speculative visions for alternatives to the status quo—
visions that nonetheless can have real effects. The empirical model of ‘this is’ expands to
480
Post-humanist imaginaries 481
include a model of research that asks ‘what if ?,’ where such curiosity influences the kinds
of worlds we then build together. But climate imaginaries, as we further elaborate below,
are neither individual fantasies, nor irrelevant elitist daydreams (Appadurai 1996, p. 31).
They are communal sites of negotiation and contest. Imaginaries ‘provide a shared sense
of meaning, coherence and orientation around highly complex issues’ (Levy and Spicer
2013, p. 660) and, as Appadurai reminds us, are intimately linked to politics. Governance,
in other words, also cultivates and is cultivated by certain imaginaries; these sites of
belonging are inextricably bound to the business of those ‘purposeful mechanisms and
measures’ that orient and are oriented by values and behaviors (Lederer this volume).
Imaginaries are moreover closely connected to ‘value regimes,’ which as Levy and Spicer
(2013, p. 673) remind us, ‘operate as a mechanism of governance’ insofar as governance
‘extends to the ideological and cultural forces that structure imaginaries’ (Gill, cited in
Levy and Spicer 2013, p. 673). As such, just as governance is contested in a battle over
value regimes, so too are imaginaries, as they sustain and are sustained by these regimes.
To consider climate governance is thus also to consider which imaginaries become domi-
nant in our orientations toward climate change, and to what effect. This chapter argues
that in the particular context of the Anthropocene (this era of ‘man-made’ climate that
experts are hailing from all corners—see, e.g., Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Zalasiewicz
et al. 2010), we need to address what kinds of orientations an Anthropocene climate
imaginary evokes. We also ask what sort of alter-Anthropocene imaginaries we might
seek to ‘reseed’ and grow, as engines of possibility for climate governance and beyond.
Following an account of imaginaries in relation to climate governance, we suggest some
emerging elements of what we consider to be an Anthropocene climate imaginary. Even
as we advocate the cultivation of imaginaries that are responsive to the problems of the
Anthropocene, we also suggest a cautious and critical attitude toward the presumptions
and generalizations of an Anthropocenic turn (e.g., Crist 2013; Malm and Hornborg
2014). To present an alternative, we use illustrations taken from climate art, supported
by theoretical concepts from feminist theory and the critical post- humanities—an
interdisciplinary area of thought concerned with, among other things, challenging the
humanist Enlightenment ideal of (Western, white, European) man as the measure of all
things.1 Feminist post-humanism is not typically connected to work on climate govern-
ance. However, we aver that its attention to the power of imaginaries to shape actions, as
well as its focus on creative responses to worldly problems that are ‘more-than-human’
in nature, present an important opportunity to address difficult-to-measure dimensions
of climate governance: namely, the ability to reimagine ways of getting on in a world
where humans are not the only bodies that matter, and where both humans and non-
human bodies (including other species, elements and geophysical forces) are entangled
in the exigencies of climate change. Such imaginaries should demand responsibility and
accountability for dangerous pressures we humans have put upon a ‘safe operating space
for humanity’ (Rockström et al. 2009), particularly as certain populations (human and
non-human) continue to bear the brunt of climate change’s adverse effects. Yet, such
imaginaries would also acknowledge that humans are not masters of the climate—as the
word Anthropocene itself (as the ‘age of man’) seems to bluntly suggest. Identifying and
further seeding alter-Anthropocene imaginaries, we argue, can thus deepen possibilities
for climate governance, as it makes space to imagine differently. As Donna Haraway
(2004, p. 126) has noted, ‘We must find another relationship to nature besides reification,

possession, appropriation, and nostalgia.’ This imperative includes climate governance,

where new imaginaries might orient these ‘purposeful measures’ in ways that also lead to
new relationships, new strategies, and new ethics.
GOVERNING CLIMATE IMAGINARIES IN THE

ANTHROPOCENE
Occasionally mentioned, yet often un-theorized, the ‘imagination’ and ‘the social imagi-
nary’ are becoming increasingly salient concepts in social sciences literature. From social
and political thought (e.g., Anderson 1991; Appadurai 1996), to feminist studies (e.g.,
Gatens 1996; Åsberg 2014), to social movement analyses (Fisher and Galli this volume;
Haiven and Khasnabish 2014), these terms have proven particularly important for under-
standing the formation of communities, subjects and relations of power of all kinds.
Although focus varies considerably both within and between fields of inquiry, the imagi-
nary is nonetheless generally understood as the explorative, yet somewhat restricted,
sense-making field wherein humans cultivate and negotiate relations with the material
world, both emotionally and rationally, while also creating identities for themselves (e.g.,
Appadurai 1996; van Dijck 1998). Since imaginaries are created through engagement
with our world, we could say that imaginaries are not what we have, but what we do
(Haiven and Khasnabish 2014).
Environmental or ecological imaginaries function in the same way. While this notion
already circulates widely within eco-criticism (e.g., Heise 2008; Buell 1995), the ‘imagi-
nary’ is also gaining traction in debates on environmental politics, citizenship and related
socio-institutional practice. In some literature, this term denotes how one’s physical envi-
rons shape one’s sense of social belonging and values (e.g., Davis and Burket 2011), but
it can also refer to the imaginative space wherein we formulate—and enact—our values
and attitudes towards ‘nature.’ In this sense, environmental imaginaries are ‘a way of
imagining nature, including those forms of social and individual practice which are ethi-
cally proper and morally right with regard to nature’ (Peet and Watts 1996, p. 263). Like
social imaginaries (and overlapping with them), environmental imaginaries are sites of
negotiation that can orient material action and interaction (Loewen Walker 2013).
Environmental imaginaries thus very significantly impact how we deal with environ-
mental crisis. Clearly, environmental science alone is not sufficient to engage publics and
initiate change on environmental issues, as environmental problems are not just technical
problems requiring efficient solutions. Rather, how we understand this phenomenon we
call ‘nature,’ and its corollary, ‘the environment,’ has important implications for laws,
policies and individual actions. Imaginaries are thus crucial to environmental govern-
ance at various levels. Jennifer Spiegel (2014), drawing on Peet and Watts, reminds us
that different stakeholders (e.g., scientists, policymakers, corporate publicists) ‘render the
world sensible according to particular practices, particular systems of signs, particular
logics’ (Spiegel 2014, p. 93)—each of which may inaugurate a different kind of ‘environ-
ment imaginary’ which ‘emerges as a primary site of contestation’ (Spiegel 2014, p. 93).
Hence, any policy or action aimed at ameliorating environmental problems must take
into account human desire, motivation, and values. Yet, as Spiegel reminds us, the ‘major
achievement’ of social movements—or of any stakeholder group, we would add—‘is, of

course, not in the realm of the “imaginary” as such,’ but in the ability of that imaginary
to intervene in ‘the social and political networks that affect policymaking and ultimately
orient material futures’ (Spiegel 2014, p. 93). Now, more than ever, the imagination is
called upon to conjure up futures, both figuratively and literally, in which alternatives are
concurrently conceivable and accessible.
The notion of an ecological or environmental imaginary is intrinsically linked to the
‘emergent climate change imaginary’ (Cohen 2012, p. 34) or imaginaries (Levy and Spicer
2013) that call our attention to human and non-human orientations toward weather and
the climate (see also Yusoff and Gabrys 2011; Neimanis and Walker 2014). These imagi-
naries ‘form a key part of the struggle over responses to climate change’ and require our
attention if we wish to better understand ‘the lack of effective organizational response
from firms and governments’ (Levy and Spicer 2013, p. 660). The rigorous consideration
of these imaginaries thus issues a challenge to those interested in climate governance. At
the same time, we contend that the proclaimed advent of the Anthropocene offers a vital
moment for contemplation of how climate imaginaries are consolidating and/or shift-
ing. Given the high economic, political and environmental stakes of climate change at
personal, institutional and societal levels, it is no surprise that climate change imaginaries
are not uniform.2 Yet, among various ways of imagining climate change and our human
relation to it, we suggest that something we call a dominant Anthropocene climate imagi-
nary is congealing. Our position is that while the implications of the Anthropocene must
be a key concern for climate governance, such regimes of governance should also attend
to the risks and challenges that a dominant Anthropocene imaginary presents.
Importantly, while we might point to instances where the Anthropocene climate
imaginary surfaces—spreading across various domains and publics, from the claims
of climate science to the theatres of Hollywood blockbusters—its existence will not be
proven through scientific data. Its instantiation may not be measurable, per se. Rather, in
the tradition of feminist post-humanities and their connections to the normative impera-
tive of continental philosophy, we diagnose it as a motif that belies a particular relation
to nature and environmental questions. Following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, we
offer it more as ‘concept’ than empirical fact (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). It is a figura-
tion that arises from a problem in the world—namely the anthropogenic elements of
climate change, and the fear and uncertainty this evokes—as a way of trying to grapple
with that problem. We find hints of the Anthropocene motif all around us and, by giving
it this name, we intend to call out and concretize the problems it implies.
What, then, is this imaginary? We suggest this motif has four traits. The first of these
is the bifurcation of nature and culture. ‘Nature’ (i.e., ‘freak weather,’ temperature shifts,
climate-related ecosystem changes) in the Anthropocene imaginary is fundamentally
separate from humans. Climate changes are something humans rally against. We might
influence the climate, and it might influence us back, but in the Anthropocene imaginary
humans and weather belong to fundamentally different ontological spheres. This char-
acteristic is connected to well-documented and longstanding Enlightenment worldviews
that are grounded upon ontological bifurcation: nature/culture; body/mind; woman/man;
savage/civilized and so on, and which condition the dominant environmental imaginary
in the West (Plumwood 1993; Gaard 2001; Neimanis 2014).
The second key trait of an Anthropocene climate imaginary also follows from this
bifurcation: namely, human agency as glorified, while nature’s own agency is denied.

Humans are the ‘masters’ with the power to continue sinking this ship, or saving them-
selves. The reliance of climate on factors far beyond human control (e.g., in so-called
‘tipping point’ scenarios or, most basically, the sun’s effect on the Earth) is downplayed.
Even where we do recognize agency of the material world in the form of violent storms or
flash floods, we just as quickly deny this agency by attributing such events to overwhelm-
ing anthropogenic influence; humans are here again the prime movers. This characteristic
is strongly foregrounded in the language of climate science where mastery comes in the
form of calculability and predictability. To be sure: we vehemently reject that the alterna-
tive to this certainty must be climate denialism, but are concerned that an ‘Anthropocenic’
hubris and certainty are figured as the sole alternative to denial.
The third trait indicative of an Anthropocene climate imaginary is a leveling of differ-
ence. Here, in the context of changing climates, humans are all lumped together. We are
figured either as culpable, or doomed, or with nothing to worry about—but together, all
the same. Lesley Head refers to this as the ‘species error’: ‘we have conceptualized the
Anthropocene with an undifferentiated human, again contrary to the abundant evidence
of spatial and temporal differences in influences below the species level’ (Head 2014, p. 2;
see also Malm and Hornborg 2014). The issue is, of course, not only one of influence,
but one of vulnerability, where we are certainly not all in this together, in the same way
(Alaimo 2009; Macgregor 2014; Neimanis and Walker 2014).
Finally, we point to the impetus to inertia, or the ‘absence of urgency’ in responses to
climate change. This is linked in part to the abstraction and scale of climate data (see, e.g.,
Duxbury 2010)—too vast for us to really feel. Such disconnections perpetuate a certain
kind of climate change doxa (for example, I can’t see it so it’s not real), but they also
pave the way for easy consumption of apocalyptic doom (if it’s all going to end anyway,
why bother). Feminist philosopher Claire Colebrook (2011, p. 53), for instance, traces
this apathy to a growing cinematic imaginary of the world’s end, where ‘there is neither
panic nor any apparent affective comportment that would indicate that anyone really
feels or fears [this threat]’—what she calls our ‘hyper-hypo-affective disorder’ (Colebrook
2011, p. 45). While doomsday scenarios may still have some useful power of persuasion
(Yusoff and Gabrys 2011, p. 521), in Colebrook’s assessment they too generate affect
without ‘intensity’ or thoughtful engagement. Apocalyptic apathy hence becomes the
double of denialism. This inertia—counterintuitively rising from both a frenzied hype as
well as an affectless abstract science—is what we underline as the Anthropocene climate
imaginary’s fourth trait.
Alter-Anthropocene Imaginaries
Should we want to inhabit a future that contests the various disconnections that an
Anthropocene imaginary offers, we need to ‘imagine otherwise’ (Neimanis and Walker
2014; Loewen Walker 2013). As noted above, imaginaries determine our orientations
toward climate change and in a very real and political sense, produce the world we seek to
live in. While imagination will not change the data issuing forth from scientific measure-
ment, it will determine what we measure and how, what benchmarks we set, what policies
and behaviors we adopt and what values come to orient all of the above. In this spirit,
we offer a counter-concept to the Anthropocene motif—what we call alter-Anthropocene
imaginaries.

In proposing alter-Anthropocene imaginaries, we do not suggest one ideal way of living

with climate change. Rather, we highlight openings for creatively orienting our social
practices—including climate governance—differently. The importance of art in gestating
new imaginaries (Deleuze and Guattari 1994)—and of climate art for generating new
climate imaginaries, specifically—has been well-theorized elsewhere (e.g., Duxbury 2010;
Yusoff and Gabrys 2011). Such practices ‘may open up new scales of sensation, new
forms of representation, both ethical and political, and expanded publics for engaging
with this critical issue’ (Yusoff and Gabrys 2011, pp. 516–517). Indeed, many contempo-
rary artists, filmmakers, architects, playwrights, poets and other creative makers globally
working at the crossroads of science, art and climate change are facilitating this critical
imagination of possible futures. Climate art will always participate in the cultivation of
an environmental imaginary of some kind—some even strengthening elements of the
Anthropocene climate imaginary we outline above.3 Below, however, we draw on two
specific artworks to underline how alter-Anthropocene imaginaries can be forged, in part
through the power of art as a catalyst for new kinds of engagements. Basia Irland’s ice
books, described briefly above, are one example of how to creatively reimagine healthy
watershed communities in the context of global warming. Karolina Sobecka’s project
‘Thinking like a Cloud’ (2014) is another artwork that invites new relationships to the
climate. Sobecka’s Cloud Collector contraption, attached to a weather balloon, con-
denses clouds whose microbiomes are then ingested by volunteers, so that participants
can experience an interspecies mixing in ‘becoming cloud.’ To help clarify how some art-
works challenge these positions in their indication of an alter-Anthropocene imaginary,
we draw on critical concepts emerging from our own fields of research-practice—namely
the feminist post-humanities.
The first element we attribute to an alter-Anthropocene imaginary is a breaking down
of the enduring Western post-Enlightenment view of nature as beyond or outside of
human culture. Artworks such as Sobecka’s ‘Thinking like a Cloud’ reject an understand-
ing of humans as subjects and the climate as their ontologically distinct object, a nature
‘out there’ to be conquered or managed, while Irland’s crafting of a book—that quintes-
sential human cultural artifact—out of frozen water to be ‘read’ by a river, is also an
explicit blurring of divisions and hierarchies between nature and culture. Such performa-
tive acts of material empathy provoke a rethinking of the presumed distance between
our human embodied selves and meteorological phenomena. These works enact what
Donna Haraway (after Bruno Latour) calls ‘naturecultures,’ whereby ‘there is no border
[. . .] where culture rules and nature submits, or vice versa’ (2004, p. 2). As such, humans
are always of the world and its ‘nature’—not as some return to an innocent garden, but as
accountable to and implicated in the naturecultures in whose emergence we are complicit.
In the most basic sense, we are climate change, and it is us.
Sobecka’s cloud project and Irland’s ice books remind us that all bodies make this
world together—humans do not fully control an exteriorized nature, but nor are our
actions inconsequential. Irland’s community-based artworks cultivate a sense that rivers,
humans and other river species reciprocally make each other in their articulation of a
riparian community: human actions (careless water stewardship or a gift of seeds) can
‘make’ nature, but the seeds and river are also making us (as reliant on the river and
enriched through communal actions). In Sobecka’s participatory installation, we are
reminded that we are made of the stuff of the clouds, just as much as we (in carbon

emissions and deforestation, for example) are always making the weather. Feminist theo-
rist and physicist Karen Barad (2007) calls this intra-action. Importantly, intra-action
is not interaction, which we might understand as a meeting between distinct entities.
‘Intra-action’ posits fundamental entanglement, whereby individual entities do not exist
as a priori things-in-themselves. In explicit reference to climate change intra-actions,
Neimanis and Walker (2014) draw on Barad’s concept of intra-action to offer the idea of
‘weathering’—as a way of naming and enacting the sustainability of life amid a chang-
ing climate (Neimanis and Walker 2014). The concept of ‘weathering’ asks us to consider
how humans and non-human natures both co-create the climate, and the many changes
it undergoes. Here, we might consider the ways in which the sun’s proximity to the Earth,
the Earth’s tilt, meteorological currents, terraforming watercourses, and the shifting of
continents to create both mountains and oceans have all intra-acted with human forces
in making the climate. Relations are primary; they make the world as we experience it.
Climate art like Irland’s and Sobecka’s underline these ‘weatherings.’
Yet, despite the intertwining of different bodies in the production of climate change,
alter-Anthropocene imaginaries do not suggest that humans and non-human natures
are the ‘same,’ or undifferentiated. Alter-Anthropocene imaginaries promote an index
of belonging, rather than a reduction to sameness. This is particularly relevant in the
context of a dominant climate change imaginary where, as noted above, ‘humans’ are
set against ‘nature’ with little consideration of differences that mark bodies. As noted
above, ‘the species is a category mistake in conceptualization of the Anthropocene’ (Head
2014, p. 4). In terms of the human, the species-view cannot account for the huge differ-
entials that sustain this species, both in historical terms and across contemporary scenes
of changing climates. Human vulnerabilities to and responsibilities for changing climates
are not equally distributed across human populations (e.g., Alaimo 2009; Cuomo 2011).
A history of colonization, global capitalism, and regional geophysical determinants direct
flows of power and maintain important differences between communities, while differ-
ences of age, gender, race and ability/mobility, are similarly salient. Irland’s work, par-
ticularly in its collaboration with indigenous communities, is attentive to such differences.
Her ice books are never simply ‘parachuted in,’ but embedded in a local context and
emerge out of dialogue with local communities. A project along the Nisqually River in
Washington state, for example, included ‘Nisqually Tribal Members, salmon restoration
specialists, musicians, fifth graders attending WaHeLut Indian School, students and
professors from Evergreen State College, forest rangers,’ while along the Rio Grande in
New Mexico, the community included ‘artists, farmers, acequia majordomos, hydrolo-
gists, Pueblo members, and hundreds of interested watershed citizens’ (Irland 2012).
Each group is differently affected by climate change, and each brings different resources
and knowledge. Irland’s water libraries thus cultivate climate imaginaries in which these
differences are important in terms of both vulnerability and resilience. Differences can be
enabling forces for articulating creative responses to climate change.
Climate change-related disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina or Typhoon Haiyan are
particularly notable in terms of their differentiated effects (see, e.g., Tuana 2008). Yet
imaginaries that perpetuate images of the Third World or the racialized poor as ‘innocent
victims’ may be no better than imaginaries of a homogenous human species. Instead,
alter-Anthropocene imaginaries need to articulate how local specificities and planetary
flows of systemic and institutionalized power are entangled. Again, we might note how

Irland’s ice books show up how very local flows are impacted by larger and sometimes
more abstract processes of colonization, industrialization and capitalism. Scales of expe-
rience and knowledge expand and contract. Additionally, the slow-melting books draw
participants’ attention to timescales that often exceed our own—for example, the speed
and slowness of environmental pollution, species decline, climate change, river restora-
tion or the life of a seedpod. Alter-Anthropocene imaginaries support robust visions of
climate justice that highlight what Rob Nixon (2011) has called ‘slow violence’ as much
as they provide critical readings of spectacular catastrophes. Moreover, on an alter-
Anthropocene view, differences among species are just as salient as intra-species differ-
ence. Sobecka’s Cloud Contraption invites a kind of interspecies curiosity and care, as the
micro-species of our own guts mingle with those of the weather—again different scales of
time and space converse but do not collapse. This logic of connection-and-difference can
be interpreted through a feminist genealogy of situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) and
politics of location (Rich 1984) whereby specific histories of subjects and communities
are taken as primary, rather than incidental. Nuanced understanding of difference must
be a key component of alternative climate imaginaries, not only for assessing climate
change’s disaggregated effects, but for developing solutions that are attentive to difference
as a positive force.
Finally, alter-Anthropocene imaginaries seek to desist from mastery and total control.
As feminist epistemologist Lorraine Code (2006, p. 32) puts it, we need to cultivate ‘eco-
logical thinking’ where ‘anthropocentric projects of mastery’ are superseded by ones in
which ‘knowers are repositioned as self-consciously part of nature.’ Figuring ourselves
as ‘isolated units on an indifferent landscape’ is part-and-parcel of this ‘reductive imagi-
nary’ (Code 2006, p. 10). Concerns over misguided myths of mastery are echoed by Stacy
Alaimo (2010, p. 21), who, drawing on sociologist Ulrich Beck’s work on risk societies,
suggests that a world of interconnected material agencies ‘can be neither adequately
predicted nor safely mastered.’ Nonetheless, she writes, ‘we must somehow make politi-
cal, regulatory, and even personal decisions within an ever-changing landscape of con-
tinuous interplay, intra-action and risk’ (Alaimo, 2010, p. 21). Alaimo supports scientific
approaches, but insists that ‘our scientific understanding of unpredictable material agen-
cies will never be sufficient to protect us from unforeseeable harms’ (Alaimo, 2010, p. 22).
While Alaimo’s concern is the transit of toxins through bodies, the same unknowability
applies to climate science. This rejection of sureness is admittedly dangerous, as it runs
the risk of supporting a climate change skepticism or denial, where unknowability might
translate too easily into ‘let’s just wait till we have all the facts before we do anything.’ The
alternative—human mastery—however, does not respect the incalculability Alaimo notes
above. This is also relevant in order to counter the ‘blame game’ of an Anthropocene dis-
course. For alter-Anthropocene imaginaries, the salient question cannot be ‘do humans
cause climate change or not?’ Such a view of causality jars against an understanding that
humans and climate are co-makers of climate phenomena (Neimanis and Walker 2014).
Instead, we should ask: how are different bodies situated within the co-weathering of
the planet? How do we make decisions that must be accountable and responsible for the
effects in which we are imbricated, yet also relinquish a claim to absolute control? Such
knowledge is neither ‘relative’ nor ‘incomplete’ (in the sense that our knowledge tools
might not be up to the task). The point is rather that our epistemologies must be adequate
to a world that is ontologically opposed to definitive capture. We must determine what

we do know and what we must know as best we can, without succumbing to an exces-
sive hubris. As Haraway reminds us, ‘staying with [this] trouble’ is an ethical response to
epistemological uncertainty.
Epistemologically, then, an alter-Anthropocene imaginary insists on knowledge as a
collaborative and ongoing project. Climate art such as Irland and Sobecka’s encourages
unknowability that fosters engagement rather than skepticism. Humans know with water,
seeds, fish, pollution, sediment and politics; bodies know with clouds and the worlds
they carry with them. Such approaches can also curb the experience of isolation and
abstraction, frequently experienced by non-scientists in the face of scientific facts, and
provoke affective responses which can in turn ‘promote behavioral and cognitive change’
(Duxbury 2010, p. 294) in the face of changing climates.
An alter-Anthropocene imaginary presents us, then, with an imaginary of humans as
intimately part of climate naturecultures—yet these naturecultures are formed of incal-
culable human and non-human entanglements. Importantly, this does not annul climate
science, nor does it relinquish the project of knowing. On the contrary, it demands new
ways of knowing that can reject mastery and respect limits. In conclusion, we wish to
reinforce that such relations also promote a certain kind of ethics. Here, ethics is no
longer a question of ‘right action’ (even if it admittedly suggests a ‘right orientation’).
Instead, alter-Anthropocene imaginaries seek to articulate an ethics within the context of
uncertainty, but in which attention to justice, accountability, vulnerability and difference
can still be foregrounded.
In alter-Anthropocene imaginaries, non-humans (climates, microbiota, rivers) are not
of concern as merely instruments of theory or as variables for governance, but because
our lives also affect them. Ethics in this respect is quite simply an attempt to recognize the
other. In this we have the seed for what an alter-Anthropocene ethic might generate within
climate governance studies and practice: what attempts at meeting well with others, and
even extending care to them, might these endeavors engender—while acknowledging that
we may not know the other and what the best kind of care would be? Such responses are
always contingent on situation in time and space, and always responsive to the difference
of bodies that are entangled within such encounters.
In an alter-Anthropocene imaginary, we are invited to consider the limits to earth
systems surveillance and ponder the hubris inherent in Anthropocenic omniscience and
panopticism. Alter-Anthropocene imaginaries might destabilize current orientations in
climate governance, but might also open to a broader field of possibilities—recognizing
entanglement, difference, and humility. But just as seedpods studded in a book of ice
set adrift in a river may fail to find fertile ground, we must bear in mind, as Haraway
(2007, p. 15) reminds us, even better imaginaries require careful tending, and may even
fail: ‘[O]utcomes are not guaranteed. There is no teleological warrant here, no assured
happy or unhappy ending, sociologically, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the
chance of getting on together with some grace.’
NOTES
1. Feminist post-
humanities alludes to feminist post-
humanism—a theoretical orientation anchored
in Donna Haraway’s radical critique of both (transhumanist) technophilia and (bio-
conservative)

t echnophobia as impossible standpoints. For post-human feminism, the human is always already ‘embod-
ied and embedded in the world’ (Braidotti 2002); there is no human ‘in general.’ It is concerned, among
other things, with the ethics at play in rejecting a division between nature and culture. Post-human feminism
aligns in various ways with the anti-humanism of key twentieth-century thinkers such as Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, but foregrounds the longstanding feminist critique of androcentrism
as an unacknowledged foundation of the humanist project.
2. For example, Levy and Spicer (2013, p. 660) suggest our contemporary and competing imaginaries of
climate change, which they call ‘fossil fuels forever,’ ‘climate apocalypse,’ ‘techno-market’ and ‘sustainable
lifestyles.’ This literature is connected to scholarship on climate discourses and governmentalities (e.g.,
Stevenson and Dryzek 2014).
3. For example, projects like Chris Jordan’s photography series ‘Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American
Mass Consumption’ and Random International’s ‘Rain Room’ project that was installed at London’s
Barbican in 2012 and New York’s MoMA in 2013 are very successful on their own terms (i.e., in raising
public engagement with climate change and exploring affective relations to weather), yet in some ways
also reduce human actors to a homogenous sameness (as consumers of plastic or generators of waste) or
suggest that humans are masters of a passive climate-nature (in highlighting human capacities to control
climate or the environment). We do not to dismiss such projects, but focus on specific elements of other
ones, and what those can accomplish.
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43. Resilience
Carolina E. Adler, Paulina Aldunce, Katherine Indvik,
Denís Alegría, Roxana Borquez and Victor Galaz
INTRODUCTION
‘Resilience’ as a concept has gained increasing attention within climate change policy
and research circles. The term is used by multiple and diverse disciplines, which conse-
quently has resulted in numerous meanings and uses of the term. However, these diverse
understandings and uses of the term have the potential to affect conceptual clarity and
might restrict researchers and practitioners in applying resilience as a response to climate
change. In this chapter we therefore explore how useful the term is in enabling normative
aspirations to reduce net losses to climate change impacts. This is particularly relevant in
light of more recent conceptualizations towards transformation. In this chapter, we high-
light recent studies that review trends in conceptualizations and uses of resilience, and
offer a grounded elaboration on broader normative aspects that are relevant for climate
policy and governance.
First, we summarize conceptualizations of resilience based on the origins and evolu-
tion of the term, followed by a brief overview of its specific use in climate-related disaster
research and a synopsis of the current debate on shortcomings in its application. We then
take stock of the term’s seemingly rapid rise by presenting analyses from two studies on
existing understandings of climate resilience in academic discourse and public policy.
We conclude with a general discussion and suggestions to enhance normative orienta-
tions and therefore support practical applications of resilience in climate research and
governance.
Conceptualizing Resilience: Origins and Evolution
Resilience can be traced to several academic disciplines (e.g., see detailed reviews in
Aldunce 2013; Bodin and Wiman 2004; Moser 2008). Some suggest that resilience was
first developed within mathematics and physics (Bodin and Wiman 2004), whereas
Waller (2001) attributes resilience to psychology and psychiatry in the 1940s. Within
ecology, resilience appeared in the 1960s and 1970s in the study of ecological and social-
ecological systems (Holling 1961; Lewontin 1969; May 1972; Rosenzweig 1971). As with
diverse disciplinary origins, meanings of resilience are also diverse. In mathematics and
physics, the term refers to the ability of a material or system to resist or bend without
breaking, and to the speed of return or ‘bounce back’ to equilibrium after displacement
(Aldunce 2013; Bodin and Wiman 2004; Gordon 1978; Norris et al. 2009). In psychol-
ogy and psychiatry, resilience is a trait at individual, community or large societal scales
(Aldunce 2013; Norris et al. 2008), with further applications within the social sciences
including studies in communities and societies (Adger 2000). Within the latter, resilience
491
describes the process, outcome or capacity of individuals and communities to resist,

recover and return to baseline functioning after a misfortune, stress or external shock
(Aldunce 2013; Norris et al. 2008; Pfefferbaum et al. 2005). Egeland et al. (1993) describe
resilience as involving adaptation; whereas Chenoweth and Stehlik (2001) qualify this
as a ‘strengthening’ of community bonds. Others describe resilient communities as
possessing ‘adaptive capacities’ through networked resources such as economic and/or
social capital, information and communication, and competences following an impact
(Aldunce 2013; Norris et al. 2008).
Holling (1973) introduces ‘resilience thinking,’ which is linked to the concept of
coupled ‘social-ecological systems’ (SES), that is, diverse components of people and
nature interacting with feedbacks and interdependencies, and ‘complex adaptive systems’
where several connections between people and nature occur at the same time on different
levels (Adger et al. 2005; Gunderson and Folke 2005). SES resilience originally focused
on a SES’s ability to absorb disturbance and persist without altering its fundamental
structure (Holling 1973). This understanding of resilience has evolved to include a capac-
ity to adapt, self-organize, learn, renew and develop (Adger et al. 2005; Aldunce 2013;
Gunderson and Folke 2005; Liu et al. 2007; Resilience Alliance 2012), and it is often used
in the context of climate change.
Resilience in Climate-related Disasters
Over the course of the past decade, the concept of resilience has received growing atten-
tion within the disaster risk management (DRM) field (Aldunce 2013; Moser 2008),
particularly following the adoption of the ‘Hyogo framework for action 2005–2015:
building resilience of nations and communities to disasters’ (UN/ISDR 2007). Studies of
disaster resilience within the field of DRM have been undertaken from various discipli-
nary perspectives, consequently resulting in various applications and generating multiple
definitions within DRM (Table 43.1).
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on Managing
the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (IPCC
2012), represents one of the biggest efforts to date to bring climate change and DRM
scientists together, where attention was paid by the working groups to the relevance of
resilience in these fields. Decision-makers have consequently started to include resilience
in various documents, policies and programs at national and subnational levels (see
Aldunce et al. 2014a). Interestingly, this tendency has occurred before rigorous theoreti-
cal and empirical grounding in social sciences has occurred (Brown 2011).
Shortcomings in Uses of Resilience
Despite its popularity, resilience has been often criticized (Aldunce 2013; Brown 2011;
Moser 2008; Walker and Cooper 2011). A recurring critique targets its abstract nature,
where resilience can be seen as ambiguous and lacking attention to issues of power and
agency (Nelson et al. 2007; Walker and Cooper 2011). Davoudi et al. (2012) further
elaborate on these critiques and categorize them within four general themes. First is lack
of reference to human agency, where the role of individuals through to state authori-
ties and other actors in the social system are vaguely addressed in terms of how they

Resilience 493
Table 43.1 Definitions of resilience in disaster risk management
Author Definition
Timmerman (1981) The capacity of a system to absorb and recover from the occurrence of a
hazardous event.
Wildavsky (1991) Resilience is the capacity to cope with unanticipated dangers after they
have become manifest, learning to bounce back.
Miletti (1999) Local resilience with regard to disasters means that a locale is able to
withstand an extreme natural event without suffering devastating
losses, damage, diminished productivity, or quality of life without a
large amount of assistance from outside the community.
Comfort (1999) The capacity to adapt existing resources and skills to new systems and
operating conditions.
Paton et al. (2000) Resilience describes an active process of self-righting, learned
resourcefulness and growth – the ability to function psychologically at
a level far greater than expected given the individual’s capabilities and
previous experiences.
Klein et al. (2003) Facilitates and contributes to the process of recovery . . . describes
specific system attributes concerning (i) the amount of disturbance a
system can absorb and still remain within the same state or domain
of attraction and (ii) the degree to which the system is capable of
self-organization.
Bruneau et al. (2003) The ability of social units (e.g. organizations, communities) to mitigate
hazards, contain the effects of disasters when they occur, and carry
out recovery activities in ways that minimize social disruption and
mitigate the effects of future earthquakes.
Pelling (2003) The ability of an actor to cope with or adapt to hazard stress.
Longstaff (2005) The ability by an individual, group, or organization to continue its
existence (or remain more or less stable) in the face of some sort of
surprise . . .
Resilience is found in systems that are highly adaptable (not locked into
specific strategies) and have diverse resources.
Paton (2006) The measure of how well people and societies can adapt to a changed
reality and capitalize on the new possibilities offered.
UN/ISDR (2007) The capacity of a system, community or society potentially exposed
to hazards to adapt, by resisting or changing in order to reach and
maintain an acceptable level of functioning and structure. This is
determined by the degree to which the social system is capable of
organizing itself, to increase this capacity for learning from past
disasters for better future protection and to improve risk reduction
measures.
IPCC (2012) The ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb,
accommodate, or recover from the effects of a hazardous event
in a timely and efficient manner, including through ensuring the
reservation, restoration, or improvement of its essential basic
structures and functions.
Source: Aldunce et al. 2014b.

iminish, sustain or enhance resilience. For example Prior and Hagmann (2013), citing
d
Lund Petersen (2012), point at evidence from risk and resilience research that highlights
the importance of making explicit the roles and responsibilities of the state, the economy,
civil society and even individuals on implementing resilience policies to avoid certain
actors assuming a ‘task supervisor’ role and thus divulging responsibility for implement-
ing to other actors. Second is a lack of structure to define goals, where ambiguity (see
also Prior and Hagmann 2013) exists on what resilience means in more normative terms,
given that in social systems defining what is desirable is always tied to normative judg-
ments. Third are system boundaries, where choices on defining a SES inevitably place
focus on some aspects of the system while excluding or discounting others. This selective
and bounded approach can, for instance, exclude certain relevant actors from providing
input on what counts as a system component. Fourth, is the issue of de-politicization
and power, given that in social systems we cannot consider resilience without paying
attention to procedural justice and fairness and the distribution of gains and losses. Yet,
in the context of resilience, who gets to make decisions on these matters, and for whom,
often remain unaddressed (Bailey and Revell this volume). However, as Olsson et al.
(2014) discuss, the concept of power is gaining attention among scholars, for instance
by focusing on articulating the type and mechanism of power relation being discussed
in context (e.g., ‘power to’ or ‘power over’) and in turn how they influence dynamics of
social-ecological change.
In order to facilitate the application of the term in a climate adaptation context
(Dilling this volume)—i.e., the resilience of what, to what, for what, and for whom?—a
policy process needs to first focus on the goals of the participants, rather than their risks,
vulnerabilities or resilience in silos (Lynch et al. 2008). A process that frames its starting
point from a values-based approach (O’Brien and Wolf 2010)—i.e. defining what the
human system ‘values’—does not deny the need for analysis of resilience (Lynch et al.
2008), yet we appear to lack the means to pragmatically use the term in helping to define
normative goals.
‘RESILIENCE’ IN CLIMATE CHANGE: EXAMPLES OF TRENDS

IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE AND PUBLIC POLICY
Rationale
As Davoudi et al. (2012) note, a simple frequency count of the use of resilience over
time depicts the term as the trending buzzword of the moment. However, this trend
warrants a closer look, particularly if we are to make sense of how best to incorporate
a contested term that is ‘here to stay’ (Norris et al. 2008). In order to move forward
and advance the debate, we need to take stock and clarify on where and how the term
has evolved. To this end, we rely on two studies that were carried out in parallel to
systematically review patterns and trends in the conceptualization of resilience in the
academic literature (Aldunce et al. 2014b; Indvik 2014), as well as in public policies
(Alegría 2014).

Resilience 495
Sample of reviewed literature

450
400 Search Results. Documents Returned (n = 1805)
Number of documents (n)
350 Revision 1 (n = 701)

300 Revision 2 (n = 151) - Final Sample
250
200
150
100
50
0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Year
Source: Aldunce et al. 2014b; Indivk 2014.
Figure 43.1 Summary of search results, document selection and final inclusion
‘Climate Resilience’ in Academic Discourse and Public Policies
Indvik (2014) and Aldunce et al. (2014b) show how climate change resilience literature
has increased over time (Figure 43.1), based on peer-reviewed literature searched in the
Scopus database for the search terms ‘resilien*’ AND ‘climat* chang*,’ within document
title, abstract and/or keywords.
Additional data was collected for the final sample of 151 articles to account for
authors, institutions and countries, allowing for a spatial (i.e., geographic) analysis of
academic output and identify countries based on with greater (and lesser) productivity,
principal investigators and associated institutions. Indvik (2014) found that resilience is
diversely conceptualized and framed within climate change-related publications across
fields and disciplines. Definitions of resilience can be categorized as social, ecological,
social-ecological and structural/physical resilience. Social- ecological resilience is the
most frequently defined within reviewed literature (54 percent); 41 percent of definitions
describing social resilience, and 35 percent define ecological resilience. Significant overlap
exists between resilience ‘types,’ with the greatest overlap between social- ecological
resilience and social resilience.
Alegría (2014) reviewed peer-reviewed climate change policy literature published in
English, Spanish and Portuguese from 2000 to 2013 in SciVerse Scopus© and SciELO
databases, with a focus on the country in which the study or research was conducted and
reported in the paper. A separate search was conducted for public policies at national
level from 2000 to 2012 for each of the countries identified in the peer-reviewed studies.
Countries that are represented in the ‘top ten’1 and ‘bottom ten’2 for total peer-reviewed
publications were selected (n 5 20) and their public policies reviewed to determine the
extent and context in which the term ‘resilience’ appears in the text. Overall, 134 climate
change-focused policies produced between 2000 and 2012 were identified, of which
42 percent made reference to resilience, with an increase in the number of these policies
over time most notably since 2006 (Figure 43.2).

60
50
N° of public policies
40
30
20
10
0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
N° PP of CC 3 3 4 4 4 2 14 39 42 43 53 39 43
PP RESILIENCE 0 0 1 0 1 1 3 9 11 20 32 26 27
Source: Alegría 2014.
Figure 43.2 Number of public policies (pp) on climate change (cc) and resilience, by
year of publication
Figure 43.3 shows the number of climate change policies by country and the relative
proportion of policies that contain the term ‘resilience.’ Despite some nations classified
within the ten countries with least or no references to ‘resilience’ in their policy texts,
the relative proportion of policies with resilience with respect to total public policies on
climate change is quite high (e.g., French Polynesia). This suggests a potential emphasis
on resilience there as a response to addressing climate change, and may warrant closer
examination of conditions under which these policy processes prominently incorporate
resilience as part of those policies.
Based on the methodology described in Osuna and Márquez (2000), seven catego-
ries that generally depict stages of the policy formulation process were used to classify
climate policies identified in Alegría’s research: (1) diagnosis; (2) objective; (3) internal
strategy; (4) diagnosis and objective; (5) diagnosis and internal strategy; (6) objective
and internal strategy; and (7) throughout the document (diagnosis, objective, internal
strategy). In all cases, resilience appears mostly associated with strategic formula-
tion rather than in setting concrete and/or measurable objectives. Overall, policies
broadly encapsulate the term ‘resilience’ in their aims and objectives, but not in the
actual implementation, assessment or evaluation of policies. Furthermore, it is also
difficult to discern how resilience is framed and represented in each context, where
we would expect diverse meanings of the term. Therefore, the extent to which ‘climate
resilience’ can be said to be enshrined at the core of climate policies is questionable,
in line with much of the theoretical critique directed at the applicability of the term
in action.
Other inferences from analyses in these studies indicate that of the ten most aca-
demically productive countries in the academic field of resilience, eight correspond to
countries of the northern hemisphere and account for 84 percent of the total number
of reviewed publications. Finally, countries with greater scientific production on resil-
ience tend to include climate change resilience within their political agenda; however,

Resilience 497
No. of public policies on cimate change and resilience per country

60
No. of public policy documents
50
on climate change
40
30
20
10
0
SA
SP A
A EX N
R O
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G N
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TU A
PH N L
PI A
A S
H R E
LA EY
BE DS
A SI KO E
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IA
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Proportion of policies addressing ‘resillience’
Source: Alegría 2014.
Figure 43.3 Number of climate change policies per country, with proportion of policies
with reference to resilience
the concept of resilience is rarely incorporated beyond goals and objectives, and lacks
implementation and/or evaluation frameworks to monitor and assess progress in achiev-
ing climate resilience.
Despite the potential wealth of relevant information in non-academic ‘grey’ literature
such as reports, peer-reviewed journals represent a more readily accepted source of
information for a standardized review of current knowledge on a given topic (Ford et al.
2011). Nevertheless, it is important to consider limitations of bibliographic searches and
analyses limited to material in English and primarily produced within developed coun-
tries, where alternative conceptualizations in other languages may not be captured, or
other channels of communication not captured in scientific databases (Ríos Gómez and
Herrero Solana 2011).
DISCUSSION AND MOVING FORWARD
The increasing recognition and use of resilience as an integral part of responding to

climate change calls for more reviews of the concept. We relate resilience to other rel-
evant concepts often used in climate change, such as vulnerability (Forsyth this volume),
adaptation and adaptive capacity (Dilling this volume), and transformation, with a view
towards situating resilience within this broader scope of applicable concepts.

Although vulnerability is sometimes considered the ‘flip side’ or opposite of resilience

(see, e.g., Bravo 2009; Olwig 2012; Walker et al. 2011), the relationship between vulner-
ability and resilience is not necessarily one of a simple inverse nature (Frommer 2011;
Klein et al. 2003; Marshall 2010). The enhancement of resilience and capacity-building
is often considered a prerequisite for the management of climate change risks and for
the reduction of vulnerability to these risks (O’Brien et al. 2006; Robledo et al. 2004).
Additionally, resilience deals with ‘systems’ as interconnected components of the whole,
while vulnerability tends to focus on more specific single factors (social groups, crops,
species, etc.). As a result, resilience represents a systems-oriented and complementary
lens in which these specific factors that hinder progress on reducing net losses to climate
impacts can be examined, allowing for a focus on opportunity (Miller et al. 2010).
Adaptation is a process of change associated with adaptive capacity, which in turn is
understood as the potential to facilitate conditions that enable individuals or groups to
respond to climate change (Adger et al. 2011; Beermann 2011; O’Brien et al. 2006). In
this context, adaptation and adaptive capacity are considered important determinants of
resilience (Klein et al. 2003; Myers et al. 2012; Tompkins and Adger 2004).
Transformability and adaptability have come to be recognized as concepts illustrating
different types of resilience (Folke et al. 2010). Olsson et al. (2014) illustrate this distinc-
tion, stating: ‘Transformability refers to the social-ecological capacities that enable shifts
from one regime to another and adaptability refers to the capacities to deal with change
and stay within a regime.’ However, despite efforts to provide general conceptual clarity, a
‘regime shift’ in the context of climate governance is not often explicitly elaborated in the
literature, for instance the role that certain policies at national level might have in reshap-
ing or even shifting politics and governance at other scales such as global. Nevertheless,
capacities to enable shift in a ‘transformative’ sense entail identifying desired end goals
implies a values-based and normative judgment that inevitably deals with subjectivity and
diverse world views, where options are negotiated and decisions are made by and between
those who are selected to be a part of the ‘system’ or regime. Therefore, to enable greater
utility of resilience in terms of implementation, a concerted and necessarily political
dialogue should take place in not only defining the system but also the conditions to
participate in clarifying goals in the common interest, that is, resilience of what, to what,
for whom and how within safe and just operating spaces (see, e.g., Dearing et al. 2014;
Raworth 2012).
To address climate change, the main normative goal or aspiration can be broadly
defined as seeking to reduce net losses to the impacts of climate change of what is valued
in a given context (Brunner 2014; Brunner and Lynch 2010). This entails the ‘valued’ as
being anywhere from securing tangible assets such as infrastructure along coastal areas
from sea level rise to less tangible and intrinsic assets like preserving cultural norms and
identity (Lynch et al. 2012). Therefore, the focus should be on how best to respond to
this goal orientation, given the increasing number of references to resilience in both aca-
demia and public policies that appear deficient in application on an evidentiary basis. In
the academic discourse, there are continuing tensions between normative and analytical
stances on resilience, propagating in policy discourses and lack of evidence in local level
actions on resilience (see also Brown 2014).
In the most recent IPCC assessment report (AR5), it is suggested that strategies and
actions that move us towards climate-resilient pathways for sustainable development

Resilience 499
are transformative, or in the resilience context, evolutionary resilience where ‘resilience

is not conceived of as a return to normality, but rather as the ability of complex socio-
ecological systems to change, adapt, and, crucially, transform in response to stresses and
strains’ (Davoudi et al. 2012, p. 302). This entails clarifying visions and approaches for
transformations that achieve sustainable development in accordance with local circum-
stances and priorities, highlighting the need for specifying normative goals that serve the
common interest. Defining these goals places a focus on target knowledge production,
employing transdisciplinary principles (see, e.g., Hirsch Hadorn et al. 2008; Lasswell and
McDougal 1992; Lasswell 1971; Pohl and Hirsch Hadorn 2007), which in turn require
institutional architectures and processes that allow for such deliberations and nego-
tiations to take place, starting with how knowledge on climate change is selected and
assessed (Adler and Hirsch Hadorn 2014; Beck et al. 2014).
Much work remains to be done on issues pertaining to institutional architecture and
global governance processes (Lederer this volume), and ways to facilitate the integration
of diverse knowledge and perspectives in the application of the concept. For instance,
one attempt to bring more functionality to interpretations and use of resilience is through
the ‘resilience wheel’ (Aldunce et al. 2014b), developed as a result of the synthesis work
that grounded a better understanding of the origins and use of the term and status of its
application in public policies. The inclusion of determinants, attributes, and supporting
theoretical assumptions for resilience-building within a functional framework lends these
concepts the importance they deserve. A flexible tool for situating the term in terms of
distinct realities and contexts allows for the explicit incorporation of resilience theory—
emerging from multiple disciplinary perspectives—to applications within different cases
(Aldunce et al. 2014b). Incorporating diverse stakeholder perspectives on resilience rep-
resents challenges for policymakers and decision-makers when the term is framed as a
goal in itself, rather than as a means to identify what is valued and the acceptable means
to reduce net losses in the longer term. Additional challenges in the implementation of
resilience involves the need for the devolution of power to communities and other social
actors beyond government agencies in order to enable self-organization, diversity of
actors and citizen participation, thus implementing resilience beyond a pure theoretical
interpretation (Betts and Schroeder this volume).
NOTES
1. Top ten countries: USA, Australia, UK, Canada, France, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Singapore, Netherlands.
2. Bottom ten countries: Mexico, Indonesia, Portugal, Panama, Philippines, Turkey, Belize, Hong Kong,
Trinidad and Tobago, French Polynesia.
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PART VII
THE FUTURE OF CLIMATE

GOVERNANCE: THEORY AND
PRACTICE

44. Multilateralism in crisis?
Robyn Eckersley
INTRODUCTION
Those who argue that multilateralism is in crisis typically single out the international
climate negotiations as Exhibit A. It is widely lamented that the negotiations have moved
at a glacial pace since the Copenhagen meeting in 2009, that they are plagued by mistrust
and entrenched divisions among hardened negotiating blocs, and that they seem destined
not to achieve their basic purpose of preventing dangerous climate change.
Yet conflict, slow progress, stalemate and underachievement are standard fare in the
history of multilateral negotiations. Failure to reach agreement in a particular round
of negotiations does not necessarily produce a crisis in the relevant negotiations or the
regime. Under what circumstances, then, would slow progress or stalemate in the climate
negotiations, or withdrawal by parties from the regime, produce a crisis for climate mul-
tilateralism? And how would a crisis of climate multilateralism relate to the multiple
social, economic and ecological crises that are expected to unfold if global average surface
temperatures exceed 2°C, which has served as the political threshold for ‘dangerous
warming’?
As Ian Clark observers, ‘we are most likely to ask questions about the legitimacy of a
system only when things appear to be going wrong’ (2003, p. 75). This chapter approaches
the question of crisis as a grave problem of legitimacy, understood from a constructiv-
ist sociological perspective. Legitimacy and power are intimately related insofar as the
erosion of legitimacy of a regime means the erosion in the power of the regime to enlist
sufficient recognition, support and compliance to achieve its ends. A crisis of climate
multilateralism is therefore understood as a critical turning point or juncture in the life of
the climate regime whereby significant corrective action is required to prevent the disem-
powerment of any or all of the components of the regime (Reus-Smit 2007).1 Such a crisis
may be acute or chronic, depending on the duration of the turning point.
The focus of this chapter will be confined to the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 1992, the Kyoto Protocol along with deci-
sions and agreements made, or negotiations launched, by the parties (Dimitrov this
volume). Although this particular assemblage includes two treaties, with overlapping
but increasingly diverging membership, for ease of reference I refer to it as the ‘climate
regime’ and ‘climate multilateralism’ interchangeably. A crisis of legitimacy may arise in
relation to the entire assemblage, to one or other of the treaties, or to particular set of
negotiations under either treaty.
A crisis of climate multilateralism and a real-world climate crisis must be treated
as analytically distinct, since the former may not necessarily give rise to the latter. For
example, the legitimacy of the climate regime could erode to the point where it loses
authority but a longer-term climate crisis is averted due to states undertaking alternative
initiatives outside the regime that are able to ward off a climate crisis. Conversely, it is
505
possible to predict an unfolding climate crisis of major proportions even though most, if
not all, parties remained committed to the climate regime on the basis of very weak com-
mitments. Between these two opposite poles, there is a continuum of possible scenarios,
including the situation where an uncorrected crisis of legitimacy in the regime would
increase the risk of a real-world climate crisis.
However, this introductory account begs several important questions regarding what
might give rise to a legitimacy crisis. First, what confers legitimacy and what factors
might prompt the withdrawal of support for a treaty or negotiating mandate? Second,
how much support is enough and whose support is critical to the maintenance of the
authority of the climate regime? Third, if a crisis emerges, what kind of corrective action
is required to recover legitimacy? This chapter addresses these three questions in turn.
LEGITIMACY AND SOCIAL RECOGNITION
From a constructivist sociological perspective, an institution, rule or decision is legiti-

mate if the relevant community to which it applies believes it ought to be obeyed (Hurd
1999, p. 381). This differs from normative accounts of legitimacy, based on democratic
or deliberative values (Stevenson this volume). On the sociological understanding, legiti-
macy is a form of socialized power grounded in social recognition by the relevant com-
munity of the rightfulness or authority of the institution, rule or decision and therefore
does not depend on coercion or bribery to ensure compliance. In the case of multilateral
regimes, the core of these communities are states, since they are the actors who negoti-
ate, sign, ratify and implement multilateral agreements. The social recognition of regimes
by non-state actors such as observers, experts, non-government organizations (NGOs)
and transnational civil society is also important insofar as their judgments may directly
or indirectly influence the judgments of states or their ability to achieve compliance in
implementing the regime (Betsill, Beck this volume). Many of these non-state actors also
participate in national delegations.
International regimes depend on state consent and have few other means of extracting
support and compliance unless there are one or more very powerful states promoting
and sponsoring the regime that are prepared to take it upon themselves to apply force or
material inducements to produce agreement and secure compliance. Hegemonic power is
partially socialized power since it includes a mixture of consent and coercion. However,
a predominant reliance on material levers would signal a loss rather than recovery of
legitimacy (and hegemony). Multilateral negotiations between three or more states are
shaped and constrained by the deeper constitutional structure and norms of interna-
tional society on the one hand, and the identities and interests of states involved in the
rule-making process on the other. According to Ruggie’s classic definition, multilateral-
ism is a generic institutional form in the modern state system ‘which coordinates relations
among three or more states on the basis of “generalized” principles of conduct’ (1992,
p. 571). For Ruggie, these principles go beyond ‘particularistic interests and situational
exigencies’ and exhibit expectations of ‘diffuse reciprocity,’ or a ‘rough equivalence of
benefits in the aggregate over time’ (1992, pp. 594, 571). These features also explain why
multilateralism is a highly demanding institutional form and why ‘its historical incidence
. . . is likely to be less frequent than that of its alternatives’ (Ruggie 1992, p. 572). States

Multilateralism in crisis? 507
are often reluctant to withstand short-term relative losses in return for general abso-
lute gains over the longer term. They are not obliged to enter into multilateral regimes
(whether as formal treaties or informal agreements) and they are free to withdraw from
any agreements made. Moreover, many multilateral regimes that do emerge often fall far
short of their stated goals and do not deliver a rough equivalence of benefits over time.
Yet this does not necessarily signal a legitimacy crisis.
Legitimacy problems only arise when there is a decline in social recognition and
support for the regime, or a negotiating track, by the regime constituency. In the case
of the core constituency of states, withdrawal of support from a regime or a negotiation
track can occur for a wide range of different self-regarding or other-regarding reasons,
but the key point is that the withdrawing parties consider that the situation has gone well
beyond the usual conflict, aggravation and frustration that is often experienced in regime
negotiations.
Reasons for withdrawal might include disillusionment with regime performance.
Regime scholars sometimes draw a distinction between legitimacy and effectiveness but
this separation only makes sense if effectiveness is understood as an independent stand-
ard applied by experts or scientists to determine progress compared to a counterfactual
of no regime, or distance from a collective optimum (Andresen this volume). From a
sociological perspective, it is the subjective judgments of performance that feed into judg-
ments about legitimacy, which means that technical, scientific or environmental NGOs’
evaluations are only sociologically relevant insofar as they influence parties’ judgments
about regime performance.
The analytical distinction originally coined by Scharpf (1999) between ‘input legiti-
macy’ (procedural fairness) and ‘output legitimacy’ (effectiveness) incorporates social
judgments about regime performance but it is not comprehensive enough to capture
the range of factors that influence social judgments about legitimacy. For example, if
input legitimacy is reduced to social judgments about procedural fairness, which are
assumed to expand or contract in line with the degree of procedural fairness, then it
cannot encompass social judgments about the efficacy (effectiveness and timeliness) of
decision-making, which typically stands in tension with procedural fairness (as I discuss
below). Likewise, if output legitimacy is reduced to subjective social judgments about
effectiveness or problem-solving capacity (i.e., whether the regime ‘output’ has the ability
to achieve the regime’s ultimate goals, including cost-effectiveness and compliance), then
it cannot include social judgments about the substantive fairness of regime principles,
nor the fairness of the distributive outcomes (as distinct from output) that are likely to
flow from implementing the regime. Nor do any of these categories acknowledge calcula-
tions by the parties about the political feasibility of implementing commitments at the
domestic level.
Building on the work of Bodansky (1999), Eckersley (2007), Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen
and Vihma (2009) and Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and McGee (2013) these problems can
be resolved by adopting a tripartite analytical distinction between input, output and
outcome legitimacy, and incorporating social judgments about fairness, effectiveness
and feasibility under each of these categories. Input legitimacy would encompass social
judgments about the acceptability of the procedures and processes by which decisions
and agreements are made, and include matters such as the epistemic quality of informa-
tion provided to the negotiators, the inclusiveness of the negotiations, transparency and

the efficacy of the negotiation and decision-making process. Output legitimacy would
encompass social judgments about the acceptability of the regime output, including the
principles, substantive obligations and policy instruments. Outcome legitimacy would
encompass social judgments about the acceptability of the actual or expected outcomes
flowing from the implementation of agreements, decisions and policy instruments.
In practice, judgments about output and outcome legitimacy are closely intertwined.
For example, the second Bush administration repudiated the Kyoto Protocol in 2001
because it was seen to lack output legitimacy (in terms of what the Bush administration
judged to be fair) in not requiring developing countries to undertake commitments in the
same commitment period. The Protocol was also considered to lack outcome legitimacy
on the grounds that it would harm the US economy (an assessment of distributional
consequences) and that it would be ineffective because it excluded major developing
countries (an assessment of effectiveness). These considerations also dovetailed with the
Bush administration’s calculations about the likelihood of implementing the Protocol,
given the US Senate’s unanimous Byrd–Hagel resolution of 1997 that it would not ratify
the Kyoto Protocol for all of the above reasons (an assessment of feasibility) (Bang this
volume).
In short, decisions by states whether to support or repudiate a regime are practical, sit-
uated judgments based on ‘all things considered,’ including a negotiation of many of the
tensions between input, output and outcome legitimacy identified above. This raises an
evidentiary challenge for scholars of sociological legitimacy. While it is a relatively easy
matter to determine whether any particular party rejects a treaty or set of negotiations
simply by examining their statements and actions it is a much less straightforward matter
to determine how much withdrawal of recognition by parties or the broader constituency
of observers and stakeholders is enough to give rise to a legitimacy crisis.
WHAT GIVES RISE TO A CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY?
Determining whether there is a legitimacy crisis requires determining whether social

recognition and support have reached a sufficiently low level to require the parties to take
corrective action to re-establish legitimacy or resign themselves to the disempowerment
of the regime (or relevant negotiations, as the case may be) (Reus-Smit 2007, p. 172). The
nature of this corrective action is discussed in more detail in the next section. Here we are
concerned with the question of how much withdrawal of recognition is necessary, and by
whom, to trigger a crisis. Determining where this threshold might lie is not an easy task,
since it depends on the nature of the regime, and situational contexts and contingencies.
Therefore, only two broad generalizations can be offered.
First, while state recognition is essential, it is not necessary that all or even most states
must recognize and support a multilateral regime for it to be legitimate. How much
support is required depends on the problem that is addressed. For example, a regime
that provides ‘club goods’ to its members, with no or minimal consequences for other
states, might enjoy legitimacy with only a small number of members, since effectiveness
of output and outcomes does not depend on wide participation. In contrast, regimes
that provide public goods typically require high levels of participation to provide the
necessary mutual assurance and avoid free-rider problems, so that low participation

would signal weak legitimacy based on social judgments about likely outcomes. However,
much depends on the nature of the collective action problem. In some cases, including
the climate regime, the level of participation is less important than whether certain states
with the relevant attributes or capabilities are participating such as to produce the neces-
sary ‘critical mass’ of states required to address the problem. The success of the climate
regime will turn on, among other things, whether it can draw in a ‘critical mass’ of major
emitters (McGee this volume). This layering of a collective action problem with the
requirements of critical mass means that there is a variety of possible combinations and
permutations that might ensure the regime continues to maintain its authority.
For example, a majority of the world’s states are responsible for less than 1 percent
of emissions but only two states are responsible for around 40 percent of emissions (the
US and China), only five states are responsible for more than 50 percent of emissions
(the US, China, Russia, Brazil and India) while only 20 states are responsible for around
80 percent of emissions (an ‘E20’). It is not surprising, therefore, that many have argued
that the world’s top 20 emitters make up the necessary critical mass (e.g., Naim 2009;
Carin and Mehlenbacher 2010). The problem, however, is that most of the disagreement
is concentrated among these players. Yet other—more productive—permutations are
possible, such as a smaller number of major emitters and a larger number of medium,
small and negligible emitters (including the most vulnerable states). From the standpoint
of developing countries, the participation of states with significant financial and techno-
logical resources to assist developing countries in mitigation and adaptation (irrespective
of their historical, per capita or aggregate emissions) must also form part of this ‘critical
mass.’
Second, it is clear from the history of the Kyoto Protocol that the withdrawal of one
major emitter (i.e., the US) is not necessarily fatal but this also depends on the stage of
the negotiations. As we shall see, the parties have given increasing attention to the issue
of critical mass since around 2009. We can therefore expect that the withdrawal of all or
most of the major emitters would be increasingly likely to trigger a legitimacy crisis as the
window of opportunity for an effective agreement increasingly closes.
The Kyoto Protocol: Anatomy of a Legitimacy Crisis
The Kyoto Protocol survived the defection of the US in 2001 (supported by Australia
from 2001 to 2007), at a time when it was the world’s biggest aggregate emitter. Indeed, in
the immediate aftermath of the US’s defection, it was arguably the US and not the Kyoto
Protocol that suffered the greatest erosion of legitimacy given the widespread interna-
tional censure of the US by the parties and the broader regime constituency (Eckersley
2007).
However, the US’s continuing objection to the Protocol has certainly contributed to
the gradual erosion of support for this treaty. This problem was acknowledged with the
launch of the Bali Action Plan in 2007 to negotiate a new agreement on long-term coop-
erative action to include all major emitters, including the US. By the time of the Durban
meeting in 2011, the negotiations entered a period of acute crisis, since failure to reach
agreement on a second commitment period would have led to the termination of the
Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012. Corrective action was taken at the seventeenth Conference
of the Parties (COP17) at Durban, and formalized at COP18 at the Doha meeting in

2012. The parties agreed to an amendment to the Protocol whereby Annex I Parties
would commit to reducing their emissions by at least 18 percent below 1990 levels over
the period 2013–2020 (UNFCCC 2012). The Protocol was thus rescued from disempow-
erment after 2012.
However, the longer term future of the Kyoto Protocol remains uncertain. The treaty
covers less than 15 percent of global emissions, and the number of parties committed to
the second commitment period has shrunk. During the first commitment period, only
one party (the US) maintained its defection, although Canada later abandoned the treaty
once it had become clear that it would overshoot its target. Since 2012, more states have
stepped away. Canada, Japan, Russia and New Zealand have joined the US in refusing
to agree to a second commitment period, while the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus
have threatened to withdraw following the decision at Doha to limit their sale of surplus
emissions allowances (Allan and Kruppa 2012). While the 28 states of the EU remains
committed, along with Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Australia (although its position
is uncertain following the election of the conservative coalition government in 2013), the
EU’s commitments are unambitious and merely reflect its Copenhagen pledge made in
2009. According to Bert Metz, ‘the KP second commitment period will add very little to
what would have happened anyway, except for preserving the KP machinery in a “moth-
ball state”’ (2013, p. 154).
Yet it was not just the persistence of the US’s critique of the ‘rigid binary’ between
industrialized and developing countries in the Protocol that has encouraged this erosion
of legitimacy. Rather, it has been the continued and rapid growth in emissions of the
major developing economies that has turned the tide. Nonetheless, at the Durban con-
ference in 2011 it was the EU’s commitment to a second commitment period under the
Kyoto Protocol that was crucial to winning the support of the major developing coun-
tries, most notably China and India, to the launch of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the
Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) to negotiate a new agreement. The crucial
question going forward is whether these negotiations, or the larger regime, are at risk of
crisis if no agreement—or only a weak one—is reached in Paris 2015. To assess this risk,
it is helpful to take note of some salutary lessons from the history of managing negotia-
tion impasses and recovering legitimacy.
RECOVERING LEGITIMACY
The recovery of legitimacy is a communicative process that requires the renegotiation

and recalibration of the goals, principles, rules and/or decision- making procedures
of the regime in ways that can maintain the continuing support of states (Reus-Smit
2007, p. 172). In our case, that means maintaining support above a critical threshold, as
intersubjectively determined by the parties. This, of course, is especially challenging in
circumstances when there is a very large number of participants, a large, complex and
highly technical negotiating agenda and deep disagreement among hardened negotiation
blocs, which is concentrated among the major emitters. Successive COP presidents have
sought to produce a consensus on a ‘fair and balanced package’ across all of the complex
agenda items in order to provide the widest scope for a facilitating issue linkage and a
balanced set of tradeoffs for all parties. In practice, however, this often produces deadlock

as progress on some items and tracks become stalled pending the resolution of conflicts
on other items and negotiating tracks.
Under difficult circumstances such as these, the parties have found a variety of ways of
managing complexity and disagreement. Here I focus on efforts to recalibrate decision-
making procedures or lower expectations of regime output and outcomes.
Procedural Recalibration: Efficacy versus Fairness
Attempts to reform the procedures and processes of negotiation by parties and observers
to strengthen input legitimacy can pull in different directions (Biermann this volume).
On the one hand, there are those who criticize consensus decision-making as a recipe
for grindingly slow negotiations and stalemate that creates the risk that parties may walk
away from the negotiations. This has generated a call for majority voting. For example,
in 2011, Mexico and Papua New Guinea submitted a proposal to amend the UNFCCC
to allow majority voting (by three-quarters of the parties present) if all efforts to reach
agreement by consensus fail, in order to avoid the problem of a small number of parties
blocking progress in reaching agreement (UNFCCC 2011). However, the proposal has
received little support, since few states (and especially great powers) are prepared to
be bound by decisions to which they have not consented. Most states, and especially
the most vulnerable states, have defended the virtues of inclusive multilateralism based
on consensus as the best path to reaching a legitimate agreement. Inclusive, rule-based
multilateralism is widely understood to empower weaker states and place constraints on
powerful states.
On the other hand, there are those who highlight the privileges enjoyed by great powers
in negotiations and the disadvantages suffered by the smaller and most vulnerable states.
For example, great powers enjoy the advantages of larger delegations, greater resources
and expertise and therefore a stronger communicative platform. They also have greater
capacity to resort to unilateralism or bilateralism and are therefore able to exert much
more influence over the negotiations than weaker states through the threat of exit. To
counterbalance these advantages, critics have argued for greater inclusivity, transparency
and equity in representation and decision-making, such as capping the size of delegations
to create a more level negotiation playing field (e.g., Schroeder et al. 2012). However,
while these reforms would introduce greater procedural fairness, they are unlikely to
resolve the deep disagreements among the major emitters.
There are, of course, various other ways in which parties might salvage negotiations
during a crisis arising from deep disagreement. For example, they might decide to break
the negotiations down into smaller, more manageable elements and move forward on
those issues where agreement is more likely (e.g., Falkner et al. 2010), or they might go
further by reducing the domain of governance covered by the regime and outsourc-
ing some of the issues to other institutions. The most extreme response, short of total
disempowerment of the regime, would be a suspension of negotiations and a shift
to other negotiating forums (such as the G20) and action under other regimes in the
broader climate regime complex (Zelli and van Asselt this volume). However, the favored
response, to which we now turn, is recalibration of the goals, principles and commitments
of the regime, and/or the negotiating mandate.

Recalibration of Goals, Principles and Commitments: Lowering Expectations
The favored method by the parties for managing disagreement has been to lower expecta-
tions, weaken previous agreements and commitments and opt for more rather than less
flexibility and creative ambiguity in COP decisions. As Abbott and Snidal (2000) have
shown, the ‘softening’ of international law occurs once weakening occurs along any or all
of the elements of obligation, precision and delegation. That is, weakening occurs when
a softer aspiration replaces a binding legal norm, when vague principles replace clear and
determinate rules, and when informal diplomacy and negotiation are relied upon in lieu
of the delegation of authority to impartial entities such as courts or committees to rule
on disputes and enforce compliance. Or the parties many decide to avoid legal entangle-
ment altogether by opting for a political agreement (Bodansky 2013).
For example, the international expectation (or at least the hope) in the lead up to the
Copenhagen conference in 2009 was for a new treaty containing legally binding but
differentiated commitments from all the major emitters, in line with the UNFCCC’s
principles of developed country leadership and equity and common but differentiated
responsibilities and capabilities (CBDR&C). However, the negotiations reached a state
of crisis in the closing days of the meeting due to deep disagreement among the major
emitters over the allocation of responsibility. Recalibration began with the now famous
informal minilateral meeting between the US and the BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India
and China) group, which produced the outlines of what eventually became known as the
nonbinding Copenhagen Accord. This ‘corrective action’ managed to avert a complete
disempowerment of the negotiations with a promise of nonbinding pledges to reduce
emissions by industrialized and developing countries and significant new commitments
on the important subject of climate finance. Yet many parties and observers complained
that the negotiations were chaotic, confusing and lacking in procedural legitimacy, aided
in no small measure by the mismanagement of the COP by the Danish presidency, which
had generated two separate negotiating texts (Meilstrup 2010).
The practice of weakening previous commitments and increasing flexibility and crea-
tive ambiguity in decisions to keep the key parties around the table has continued since
Copenhagen. For example, between 1995 and 2011, COP decisions have explicitly reaf-
firmed the principles of equity and CBDR&C. However, the ADP negotiating mandate
was notable for the absence of any mention of these principles, to placate the US and like-
minded parties (Pickering et al. 2012, p. 423). Yet the reference to ‘under the Convention’
ensured the continued support of developing countries, which have interpreted this to
mean that the principles of equity and CBDR&C have been carried forward implicitly
(and these principles were reintroduced in the final decision reached at the Lima summit
in 2014, albeit subject to ‘different national circumstances’). Moreover, the Durban
mandate had called for ‘a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with
legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties.’ It is not entirely clear what
might constitute ‘an agreed outcome with legal force,’ but India has argued that it could
include an outcome that derives legal force from national rather than international law
(UNFCCC 2013, para. 5.24, p. 5). Or it might take the form of a general treaty that deter-
mines that certain COP decisions made under the treaty are to have legally binding force.
By the end of the Warsaw climate summit in 2013, the promise of international commit-
ments had been downgraded into ‘intended nationally determined contributions, without

prejudice to the legal nature of the contributions’ (UNFCCC 2014, para. 2(b), p. 4).
Moreover, the review mechanisms for these nationally determined contributions have not
been settled, although it is clear from COP20 in Lima in 2014 that no formal review will
take place prior to COP21 in Paris in 2015. Various proposals have been put forward for
an ‘equity reference framework’ but there are few signs that the parties are likely to agree
on common principles of equity, as distinct from perhaps a long shopping list of equity
indicators from which they can pick and choose to justify their ‘contribution.’
While the form and design elements of the agreement remain unclear what is clear
is that most of the major emitters (with the exception of the EU, whose emissions are
declining relative to the US, China and India) are not prepared to commit to the Kyoto
model of legally binding targets and timetables, or to collectively determined and appor-
tioned targets derived from a scientific carbon budget. Nor are there any signs of agree-
ment on general burden-sharing principles or promises of any significant increase in
collective mitigation ambition, although the joint announcement by the US and China
of their post-2020 targets prior to the G20 in 2014 was a promising sign. In short, the
ongoing effort to recalibrate expectations to avert a crisis in the negotiations and main-
tain wide participation has been purchased at the cost of depth of commitment, and a
gradual weakening of obligation, precision and delegation.
CONCLUSION
The foregoing analysis is sobering, since it points to a significant chasm between the
insights generated by a sociological framework of legitimacy that focuses on the judg-
ments of the parties and what we might expect from a critical and normative standard
of legitimacy that integrates the requirements of procedural fairness, climate justice and
robust climate protection. In short, at the time of writing, from a sociological perspec-
tive there is not sufficient evidence to support the claim that there is a crisis of climate
multilateralism. However, from a critical and normative perspective it could be argued
that there is at least a major legitimacy deficit in the regime and ADP negotiations in
terms of input, output and outcomes that threatens to evolve into a full blown crisis if
the 2015 agreement is too weak to prevent dangerous climate change. Elsewhere, I have
explored ways of managing the unavoidable tensions between input and output/outcome
legitimacy from a critical theory perspective. In particular, I have argued that the inclusive
multilateralism of the UNFCCC is likely to produce a fairer and more effective treaty
than proposals for an exclusive, minilateral agreement among the E20 but that an inclu-
sive minilateral agreement reached among the most responsible, the most capable and
the most vulnerable states might be an improvement on the status quo (Eckersley 2012).
However, this chapter has focused on the real rather than ideal world and it is clear
from the foregoing analysis that the parties have found even Ruggie’s kind of traditional
multilateralism too demanding. The negotiations have drifted away from any generaliz-
able principles of conduct (based on equity and CBDR&C) and towards the protection
of particularistic interests and situational exigencies. Indeed, a cynical reading of the
negotiations since Copenhagen might be that the drift towards a softer legal agreement
based on weak and nebulous goals and commitments, and hyper-flexibility, is merely
stalemate under the guise of multilateralism, since there is no longer any real convergence

of expectations to uphold the existing regime or constitute a new regime. The desire of
most major emitters not to be bound appears to outweigh any desire on their part to bind
others in order to address the collective problem (Bodansky 2013, p. 2). Crises in negotia-
tions have been averted at various points, but in ways that have maintained or increased
rather than narrowed the distance between many of the key parties. For realists, this
reflects key shifts in the balance of power and the emergence of new, multipolar world
(Vogler this volume). On this pessimist view, the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol, both of
which once held great promise, have degenerated into faux regimes and a climate crisis by
the end of this century is now inevitable given the narrow window of time (around half
a decade) remaining for effective action. Yet, contra realists, the problem is not multi-
polarity per se but rather the fact that the rising powers have emerged outside the West
and that struggles over relative gains are wrapped up in different conceptions of distribu-
tive justice (e.g., Hurrell and Sengupta 2012).
However, defenders of climate multilateralism would reply that this response is
too pessimistic and certainly premature (Biermann this volume). The breadth of
participation in the UNFCCC (195 countries plus the European Union), and in the
ADP negotiations, is an achievement. Global emissions are lower than they would have
otherwise been in the absence of the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol, and these treaties
have produced a wide range of other benefits, from the development and refinement
of accounting methodologies to a range of different forms of assistance to developing
countries. These are hardly reasons for optimism. Yet the pressure on the negotiators
to do more, from the secretariat, observers, scientists and a majority of the parties (but
especially the most vulnerable states), remains intense. If the UNFCCC and the Kyoto
Protocol have become faux regimes, then why have no parties walked away from the
ADP negotiations? One answer might be that they acknowledge, through their ongoing
participation, that the climate regime, like large financial institutions, is now possibly
‘too big to fail.’
In any event, action is starting to take place in other parts of the broader climate
regime complex, and at the national and subnational levels, as other chapters in this
volume have demonstrated. Most of these initiatives would not have happened were it
not for the climate regime, even though many have been borne out of frustration with
the slow progress of the negotiations rather than admiration. If these initiatives begin to
snowball, then the first scenario outlined in the introduction may become possible, but
with a twist. That is, the negotiations for a new agreement may suffer another crisis point
as 2015 approaches, and may become temporarily disempowered, but a longer-term
climate crisis is averted because of the success of other initiatives. These, in turn, may buy
further time for the negotiations to be revived or relaunched and also make it easier for
agreement to be reached. Only time will tell.
NOTE
1. Reus-Smit’s article is the lead article in the special issue of International Politics, 44(2) (2007) on ‘Resolving
Crises of International Legitimacy.’ The author is a contributor to this special issue and was a participant
in the two research workshops out of which the special issue arose.

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45. Reform options
Frank Biermann
INTRODUCTION
Global climate governance has become a key challenge for politicians and political
scientists alike. Global mean warming has reached today 0.85°C above pre-industrial
levels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expects global tempera-
tures to further rise by 0.3–4.8°C within this century (IPCC 2013). These could be the
highest temperatures in the entire Quaternary Period of 2.6 million years. According
to calculations by the World Bank (2012), all current commitments by governments are
likely to lead to a global warming of more than 3°C by 2100, and—with a 20 percent like-
lihood—even of more than 4°C. If these commitments are not implemented, a warming
of 4°C could occur as early as the 2060s. Sea levels are currently rising at 3.2cm per
decade (World Bank 2012), and are expected to rise within this century by up to 98cm
(IPCC 2013). More dramatic sea-level rise is conceivable. In past periods of planetary
history, comparable high atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide often occurred
with sea levels that were several meters higher.
The international political response to this global climate crisis, however, has been
sluggish and ineffective so far. One reason is the particular problem structure of climate
change, which one could describe as one of the most ‘wicked’ problems of world politics
today. To start with, climate governance has to deal with high uncertainties both analyti-
cally (regarding its scientific basis) and normatively (regarding the political and ethical
principles that are applicable). Climate governance further needs to cope with high func-
tional, spatial and temporal interdependencies that require comprehensive coordination
and integration of governance responses across jurisdictional levels. Climate governance
is further complicated by the high stakes for many states in this policy domain. The
impacts of climate change might threaten economic systems or food production and
possibly require even relocation of some affected communities. Conversely, also the need
to mitigate will pose high burdens on some nations, in particular those with high emis-
sions compared to the size of their populations. These uncertainties, interdependencies,
and high costs of both regulation (mitigation and adaptation costs) and non-regulation
(costs of climate change impacts) place high burdens on negotiations, which makes the
development of a global climate regime tedious and fragile. So far, 20 years of negotia-
tions have thus not yielded an international regime with sufficient force and compliance
to substantially reduce harmful emissions of greenhouse gases (Biermann et al. 2010;
Andresen, Dimitrov this volume).
This slow pace of intergovernmental diplomatic negotiations, however, has given rise
to a plethora of new modes of climate governance beyond multilateral intergovernmen-
tal institutions, some of which bear some promise of success (Lederer this volume).
Importantly, global climate governance is no longer confined to nation-states and their
intergovernmental institutions but is characterized by increasing participation of actors
516
Reform options 517
that have so far been largely active at the subnational level (Betsill and Corell 2001;
Bäckstrand et al. 2010). This transnational multiactor governance includes private
actors such as networks of experts, environmentalists and multinational corporations,
but also new agencies set up by governments, including intergovernmental bureaucra-
cies (Biermann and Siebenhüner 2009; Siebenhüner this volume). Novel is not simply
the increase in numbers, but the ability of non-state actors to take part in steering the
political system. Agency—understood as the power of individual and collective actors to
change the course of events or the outcome of processes—is increasingly located in sites
beyond the central governments of states (Biermann et al. 2009, pp. 37–43).
For example, highly relevant in climate governance—and to some extent unique—is
the emergence of transnational networks of scientists (see for example, Haas 2000;
Mitchell et al. 2006). The initial high uncertainties about causes, timing and consequences
of climate change had stalled negotiations in the late 1980s and 1990s, leading to the
increasing institutionalization of scientific assessment and advice through the IPCC,
which now comprises several thousands of scientists, who jointly assess the state of
knowledge and condense it to succinct policy advice (Beck this volume). Because of the
intrinsic scientific and normative uncertainties in climate governance, assessment bodies
such as the IPCC became autonomous political actors, eventually diminishing the politi-
cal influence of so-called ‘climate skeptics’ and thus affecting the bargaining influence of
countries that first denied the global warming problem (Grundmann this volume).
Climate governance is also marked by the emergence of new types of non-governmental
institutions (Stripple and Pattberg 2010; Pattberg 2010). Many non-state actors have
become part of global norm-setting and norm-implementing institutions and mecha-
nisms, which denotes a shift from intergovernmental regimes to public–private and
increasingly private–private cooperation and global policymaking (Dingwerth and
Green this volume; Pattberg 2007). Public–private cooperation has received more
impetus with the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development and its
focus on partnerships of governments, non-governmental organizations and the private
sector—the so-called Partnerships for Sustainable Development. More than 330 such
partnerships have been registered with the United Nations (UN) around or after the
Johannesburg summit (Bäckstrand 2006; Bäckstrand et al. 2012; Glasbergen et al. 2007),
and many address climate-related issues.
Also global networks of (major) cities have evolved into important new players in
global climate governance, providing new standards for subnational entities even where
the national government is unsupportive of global regulation (Bulkeley and Betsill 2003;
Janković this volume). In addition, sectoral solutions have been explored in a variety of
networks, ranging from agreements on policy measures for particular pollutants (e.g.,
the Methane to Markets partnership), activities (e.g., the Global Gas Flaring Reduction
Partnership) or industries (e.g., the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership
or the Solar Energy Society), up to novel networks that emerge around new issues such as
carbon sequestration or geoengineering (Hansson et al. this volume).
The environmental effectiveness of these new mechanisms of global climate govern-
ance remains subject to academic and policy debate, and a general assessment of the
effectiveness of the entire system of non-state regulation is probably impossible given
the variation in mechanisms, commitments and types of implementation. Overall, there
are strong indications that the effectiveness of many of the public–private partnerships

registered with the UN is low; several of such registered networks appear to be non-
operational (Pattberg et al. 2012). The networks of cities might have some effects, even
though the causal link between transnational networks and local policies is difficult to
make, and many changes in city management will eventually have been motivated not by
global networks but by local concerns.
Importantly, the overall effects of these novel mechanisms are possibly larger than
their direct impact on the reduction of emissions. Maybe even more crucial are discursive
effects that help raise awareness in many countries and that may shape public debates and
decision-making. Forest certification schemes and climate labeling do not only inform
consumers about production methods, but also generally raise citizen awareness about the
need to make choices, thus contributing to changing lifestyles (Klintman and Boström
this volume). Also, in many countries that have at present rather weak governmental
regulations on climate governance, these new mechanisms beyond the realm of central-
government policymaking may provide a (non-binding) regulatory environment that
helps to stimulate innovation and action. For example, the non-binding self-commitment
of a university or a local community to achieve carbon neutrality at a certain date might
at present merely lead to small measures and succeed only through purchasing credits in
private offsetting schemes (the added benefit of which might be debatable). Yet in the
longer run, such self-commitments might set in motion changes in local perception and
behavior, institutionalize innovative search processes, and thus in the end provide for
emission reductions that would not have occurred through governmental programs.
The emergence of these new modes of governance in climate policy poses a number of
important questions for both politics and political science. From a theoretical point of
view it remains debatable how the new modes of governance in the climate realm—which
are essentially governance beyond the central governments as key actors—relate to the
remaining role of the state. It might well be that networks, markets and partnerships
that are populated and pushed forward by non-state actors are a direct response to the
complexities of the climate problem, which states can no longer handle without strong
non-state involvement. Yet at the same time, it is also possible that the current experimen-
tation with ‘governance beyond the state’ is not related to an incapability of the modern
state, but merely to temporary inaction and negotiation stalemates in the intergovern-
mental system (Hoffmann 2011). It may well be possible that once intergovernmental
consensus on the key parameters of a strong global regime emerges, also parallel net-
works, institutions and actors that have evolved in recent years ‘beyond the state’ might
lose their influence and be surpassed by stronger public regulation again.
In any case, it is highly doubtful whether such activities will be sufficient to fully and
effectively replace governmental action and intergovernmental agreements and to resolve
the global warming crisis. State action and intergovernmental cooperation will need to
remain an important pillar in global multilevel climate governance (Vogler this volume).
And despite recent setbacks, there is also sufficient evidence to show that multilateralism
can work. As one example, multilateral cooperation has helped to phase out the emis-
sions of chlorofluorocarbons and to protect the stratospheric ozone layer. However, even
this success story shows one major shortcoming—it took more than 20 years from the
first diplomatic conferences to a largely effective international institution. In many other
pressing issue areas, we do not have the time.
For this reason, we need to engage in a process of serious reform of international

Reform options 519
governance and institutions to tackle the climate change challenge. We cannot resolve
the problems of the twenty-first century with institutions that function with rules that
essentially stem from the twentieth century. Given the crisis of global climate diplomacy
(Eckersley this volume), we need to explore, scientifically and politically, new types
of multilateralism. In early 2012, a group of 33 social scientists assessed the state of
knowledge on the institutional framework for sustainable development (Biermann et al.
2012). The main conclusion was that business as usual is not the way forward in sustain-
able development. Instead, we called for a constitutional moment in international rela-
tions, and for fundamental reforms in the way in which negotiations and global policy
processes are conducted. There are various steps that need to be explored in order to
strengthen multilateral decision-making, in climate governance and beyond.
ADVANCING INSTITUTIONAL INTEGRATION
First, it will be important to counter the increasing fragmentation of decision-making by

stronger efforts in collaboration and integration of rule-making systems. Global climate
governance is today characterized by an increasing fragmentation of different layers and
clusters of rule-making and rule-implementing, both vertically between supranational,
international, national and subnational layers of authority (multilevel governance) and
horizontally between different parallel rule- making systems maintained by different
groups of actors (multipolar governance) (McGee, Zelli and van Asselt this volume).
This results in the coexistence of climate policymaking at the subnational, national,
regional and global levels, and the emergence of a multitude of climate-related institu-
tions and networks that include different actors and may over time develop into divergent
regulatory regimes in global climate governance (Biermann 2014).
Students of global environmental governance have highlighted the significant chal-
lenges that divergent policy approaches within such a horizontally and vertically frag-
mented policy arena pose. Lack of uniform policies may jeopardize the success of the
policies adopted by individual groups of countries or at different levels of decision-
making. Fragmentation of governance architectures—that is, of the overall institutional
arrangement of public and private institutions and actors in an issue area—may also
complicate positive linkages with other policies, whereas a universal and coordinated
architecture could allow systematic and stable agreements between institutional frame-
works (Biermann et al. 2009). Since a fragmented architecture decreases entry-costs for
participants, it is also conceivable that business actors use regulatory diversity to choose
among different levels of obligation, thereby starting a race to the bottom within and
across industry sectors. Power differentials are also crucial, since fragmented governance
systems give powerful states the flexibility to opt for a mechanism that best serves their
interests, and to create new agreements if the old ones do not fit their interest anymore.
On the other hand, fragmented climate governance may also have advantages. Distinct
institutions allow for the testing of innovative policy instruments in some nations or
at some levels of decision-making, with subsequent diffusion to other regions or levels
(Busch and Jörgens 2005). Regulatory diversity might increase innovation. Fragmentation
could enhance innovation at the level of the firm or public agency and increase innova-
tion in the entire system of climate governance. Important here is the notion of diffusion

of innovation, including innovations of policies, technologies, procedures, and ideas

(Linnér and Rayner this volume).
Overall, however, the current fragmentation of global climate governance appears on
balance to bring more harm than positive effects and can generally be seen as a burden
on the overall performance of the system, increasing the economic (e.g., leakage effects)
and political costs (e.g., regulatory chill and race to the bottom) of comprehensive
climate policies at the national level (in more detail, Biermann 2014). This raises the
policy question of how to minimize fragmentation and how to address its negative effects.
One important step forward is the strengthening of the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change as the central focus of normative development and
intergovernmental consensus. To increase synergies within UN climate governance, it
seems for instance crucial to better integrate processes under the climate convention
and all related activities outside the convention, from world trade law to specialized
regimes on air transportation, shipping, and so forth. Another overarching reform to
help integrate economic and environmental decision-making would be the establishment
of a UN Sustainable Development Council with sufficient authority to link policies of
the environmental and economic institutions of the UN and the Bretton Woods systems
(Biermann 2014).
REFORMING MULTILATERAL DECISION-MAKING
Second, as I have argued elsewhere in more detail, the decision-making rules in multi-
lateral negotiations are largely outdated (Biermann 2014, ch. 4). They are not effective,
and generally not fair. For one, the consensus rule is still one of the key decision-making
principles in many multilateral environmental agreements, including climate governance.
In consensus-based systems, each country has a veto. Any decision depends on the inter-
ests of the least interested government. This is not an effective way to make progress.
Majority voting can speed up decisions. Not every decision must be taken by majority;
yet the more majority-based decision-making is accepted, the better for speedy decisions
with sufficient force.
Majority voting is determined, of course, by the weight of the votes that each country
can hold and by the kind of majorities that are needed. In the climate convention, the
one-country-one-vote approach gives in theory an absolute majority of votes to a theo-
retical coalition of countries that represent roughly 5 percent of global population. This
underrepresents the millions of people who live in countries with large populations.
Alternatives, however, also come with problems. Suppose the votes of countries would
be weighted by the size of their population, an absolute majority would then be held by a
theoretical coalition of merely seven countries. The remaining more than 185 other coun-
tries together would hold less than 50 percent of the votes. Again, many countries will
have problems with such weighting of votes as well. Some might argue that the economic
strength and financial contributions of countries should be weighted in decision-making
in climate governance. Obviously, however, this would come with similar problems of
lack of acceptance by many countries. Others might argue for regional seats—yet what
would be these regions? Do we have clear and stable regional groupings of countries and
interests in all parts of the world, useful for all issue domains? Specifically with regard to

Reform options 521
the climate regime, one might argue that vulnerability and affectedness vis-à-vis climate
change impacts should be one factor in determining the weight of a country’s vote in mul-
tilateral decision-making. Yet most countries will be affected by climate change in some
way—how could this be measured, and what weight should be given to what type and
degree of climate change impact? Some type of regional representation—for example,
for small island states or for African states—could be conceivable here; yet where to draw
lines to convincingly define regions across the community of all states?
Compromises and innovative ideas are needed that generate support for a new type of
multilateralism. We could think about different majority and voting rules for different
issue areas. We can think about multiple, complex, combined or layered majorities. And
surely, we need to clearly define institutional guarantees that protect smaller countries.
STRENGTHENING INTERNATIONAL BUREAUCRACIES
Third, the complexity of global climate governance has increased the role of intergovern-
mental bureaucracies and their civil servants. Intergovernmental bureaucracies provide
in modern global governance important functions in the synthesis and dissemination of
knowledge and the shaping of global policy discourses (Siebenhüner this volume). They
also influence negotiations by informing governments about actions and commitments
by other actors, by reporting on the overall problem assessment, and by providing com-
promise solutions that may eventually influence negotiations (Biermann and Siebenhüner
2009). In climate governance, these roles are largely performed by the secretariat to the
climate convention, which also serves the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the convention. This
secretariat is largely independent from the overall UN system, and it has evolved into
one of the largest intergovernmental bureaucracies in the environmental field (Busch
2009). While the climate secretariat has initially shown sizable restraint in developing and
propagating its own policy visions, this restraint decreased over time. Important sources
of influence and political power for the secretariat stem from the overall complexity of
the negotiation system and the underlying problems that require in particular smaller
countries to rely on information and advice from intergovernmental bureaucracies to the
extent that these bureaucracies manage to maintain the trust upon which their formal
and informal influence relies. While a strong role of intergovernmental bureaucracies
is not new to world politics but evident in many areas, it is apparent that the analytical
and normative uncertainties in climate governance, along with strong interdependencies
that generate an overall complex political arena, have given rise to a particularly promi-
nent role of technocratic policy actors such as the climate secretariat (Biermann and
Siebenhüner 2009).
International organizations have also proven to be important negotiation arenas.
For these reasons, it is important to strengthen the role of the climate secretariat and
to increase its autonomy and independence as an actor. In parallel, increased policy
integration and the mainstreaming of climate concerns in other environmental issue
domains (van Asselt et al. this volume) could be strengthened by the upgrading of the
UN Environment Programme to a world environment organization or ‘United Nations
Environment Organization’, as it is now supported by numerous countries, including the
members of the African Union and the European Union. This organization would be an

independent specialized agency within the UN system with independent, contribution-

based funding, possibly operational tasks with field offices and project teams around
the world, and a mandate to initiate intergovernmental agreements (comparable to the
International Labor Organization) and possibly to oversee the numerous multilateral
environmental agreements and their mostly independent secretariats (see Biermann 2014
for more detail).
STRENGTHENING THE ROLE OF CITIZENS AND CIVIL

SOCIETY IN GLOBAL DECISION-MAKING
Another area of much needed reform is the accountability of global decision-making.
The new role of actors beyond the nation-state and of new modes of governance such
as transnational regimes, partnerships and markets raises questions about the legitimi-
zation of (global) decision-making. To the extent that new actors and new modes of
governance prove to be effective steering mechanisms, questions of power and of shift-
ing power constellations away from the central governments arise. Some transnational
regimes—notably the Forest Stewardship Council—have developed elaborated systems
of interest representation in different chambers that include North–South quotas and
different caucuses, yet this type of representation could also be criticized, for example
for over-representing Northern constituencies. As for non-rule-setting public–private
partnerships, the analysis of the Amsterdam-based Global Sustainability Partnerships
Database (which includes more than 300 partnerships, not all from the climate domain)
has shown that many partnerships tend to be dominated by larger countries, intergov-
ernmental bureaucracies and non-governmental organizations and give little space to the
voice and the interests of marginalized groups (Pattberg et al. 2012). Such problems could
be resolved by a parallel strategy of institutionalizing non-state regulation and collabo-
ration to the effect that Southern interests become better represented, and at the same
time of opening up the intergovernmental system to the institutionalized and balanced
involvement on non-state actors and civil society (Betsill, Fisher and Galli this volume).
On a more general level, the increasing role for intergovernmental institutions raises
problems of relating back to citizens and democracy (Stevenson, Fischer this volume).
The emergent influence of experts and bureaucrats can be seen as a technocratization
of global (climate) politics that further reduces the role of democratic oversight and, in
particular, the effective role of parliaments. Citizens lack knowledge about what happens
in anonymous international institutions that are difficult to understand, difficult to
follow and difficult to support. A democratic deficit of multilateral institutions such
as the climate convention is felt in many parts of the world. In order to strengthen the
legitimacy of climate governance, we have to address this potential lack of trust or under-
standing among citizens.
One way is to better include the voice of the citizens in multilateral institutions. In the
academic community, numerous proposals are being discussed. Some scholars argue for
models of deliberative democracy such as global deliberative assemblies of citizens of all
countries and regions (e.g., Dryzek et al. 2011; Stevenson this volume). Others call for a
parliamentary assembly as a second chamber in the UN system, bringing in the direct
representatives of the people (Falk and Strauss 2001); such a parliamentary assembly

Reform options 523
could also be institutionalized as a separate committee under the climate convention.

Others again argue for upgrading the current nine ‘major groups’ of civil society within
the UN (business, indigenous people, women, etc.) by establishing a ‘forum of civil
society organizations,’ which could also serve as a second chamber in the UN system
(on the idea of a UN forum of civil society, see also Commission on Global Governance
1995). Again, such a forum could also be institutionalized as a separate body under the
climate convention, focusing on civil society groups with a stake in climate governance
(see Biermann 2014, ch. 5 for more detail).
Interesting recent experiences with the delimitation of constituencies of civil society in
transnational governance exist in the realm of private rule-setting, for example the Forest
Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council, where stakeholders such as
business or environmentalist groups have been organized in separate voting chambers.
The current nine ‘major groups’ of civil society within the UN is a similar development
in the organization of caucuses of civil society at the transnational level. Such experi-
ences are at this stage certainly no model that can be easily adopted in intergovernmental
decision-making, and the resistance by some countries is predictably strong. However, the
parallel developments of increasing reliance on global decision-making—not the least in
the climate arena—and decreasing legitimacy of such types of rule-setting create a need
to further explore options for better civil-society representation and deliberation also at
the level of global rule-making (Stevenson this volume).
ADVANCING GLOBAL ADAPTATION GOVERNANCE
Finally, climate governance is still largely focused on the regulation of mitigation, which
stands at the center of most new mechanisms in climate governance. However, recent
scientific findings suggest that global warming can no longer be halted with a suffi-
cient degree of certainty, making global adaptation governance a key requirement for
institutional development (Dilling this volume). While many adaptation efforts are well
underway at local and national levels, the intergovernmental governance arena lacks
strong and specific mechanisms to deal with possibly drastic climate changes. Many inter-
governmental regimes and organizations are in place that could develop timely response
programs to drastic climate change, notably the international organizations in the field
of food, agriculture, development, and possibly even the UN Security Council. Yet it
remains doubtful to what extent existing governance mechanisms are able to react effec-
tively should global crises accelerate because of global warming. For example, the needs
of maybe millions of future climate migrants are at present hardly addressed in existing
governance mechanisms (Biermann and Boas 2010).
It is thus crucial to intensify research and rule-making on global adaptation. The
serious impacts of climate change are largely predicted only for the second half of this
century, based on the current state of climate science. However, the regions where major
climate change impacts, such as sea-level rise, are likely to cause harm and dislocation
are broadly known and allow for preparation and planning. We thus need to research
global adaptation governance not in terms of emergency response and disaster relief,
but as planned and organized global adaptation. In particular when it comes to sea-level
rise, there is no need to wait for extreme weather events to strike. This calls, however, for

early action in terms of setting up effective and appropriate governance mechanisms. The
planning for effective global adaptation governance cannot wait until 2050 or 2080 when
it might be too late for orderly and organized responses. It must begin now. Protecting
the most vulnerable members of humankind to possible drastic climate change requires
strong reforms, ranging from the development of sui generis legal titles for climate
migrants to large-scale long-term adaptation programs at local level, with the help and
support up of new funding mechanisms and programs to help developing countries to
become ‘climate proof’ (Biermann and Boas 2010).
CONCLUSION
Climate change is unprecedented in its problem structure that combines new types and
degrees of uncertainty, interdependence and impacts. This makes the negotiation and
development of new institutions and modes of governance conflictive and tedious, but
creates at the same time room for new ideas and innovations in governance. However, the
effectiveness of the overall global effort of halting global warming and leading human
societies to a low-emissions trajectory is still uncertain. This chapter has proposed a
number of reforms in multilateral negotiations and intergovernmental institutions that
are urgently needed to increase the speed, effectiveness and legitimacy of global climate
governance.
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46. Re-politicizing climate governance research
Ian Bailey and Piers Revell
INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICS DEFICIT IN CLIMATE

GOVERNANCE RESEARCH
Social scientists from a range of disciplines have made important contributions in recent
years to debates on how climate change has been framed as a governance issue, the evolu-
tion of climate governance regimes, and factors aiding and inhibiting efforts to mitigate
and adapt to anthropogenic climate change. A prominent (but by no means the only)
example of these advances is the recent literature examining changes in climate govern-
ance stemming from the growing involvement of non-nation-state actors in governance
networks that operate outside traditional lines of nation-state authority and, often, across
state boundaries (Andonova et al. 2009; Betsill, Fisher and Galli this volume; Hoffmann
2011; Pattberg and Stripple 2008; Bulkeley and Jordan 2012). This work has provided an
important corrective to climate governance research that privileged multilateral nego-
tiations under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC) as a primary modus operandi of governing climate change by explor-
ing the diverse modes of climate governance emerging across the multiple spheres of
global society (Dingwerth and Green, Lederer this volume; Bulkeley and Newell 2010).
Despite the importance of such contributions to understanding the changing nature of
climate governance, this chapter examines current trends in scholarship from a more crit-
ical direction, focusing on the danger of gaps opening up between the major theoretical
storylines being developed within academic research and the political landscapes faced
by public and private actors engaged in practical efforts to govern climate change. The
nature of this gap might be broadly characterized as one of over-abstraction, wherein
enquiry into transnational climate governance and other major trends in climate govern-
ance tends to center on developing universalistic theorizations of these phenomena and,
in so doing, underemphasizes or disregards the importance of local contextual factors
in shaping the dynamics and outcomes produced by ostensibly shared forms of climate
governance. Similar concerns also exist about the growing literature on the putative rise
of ‘post-political’ climate governance, in which debate and disagreement is replaced by
politically engineered consensuses about the nature of climate threats and the types of
responses to be adopted (Swyngedouw 2010), and recent literature conceptualizing the
forces shaping the invention, diffusion and effects of climate policy innovations (Jordan
and Huitema 2014), which provides interesting new perspectives on how to conceptualize
policy innovation but pays limited attention to the influence of political contingencies on
debates about, and processes of, climate policy innovation.
What seems to be particularly absent from these strands of research is strong evidence
of their engagement with the adversarial aspects of climate mitigation and adaptation.
Ironically, in both liberal and critical discourses, a defining feature of climate govern-
ance—its politics—seems to be marginalized in arenas where understanding political
526
527
Re-politicizing climate governance research
interplays is greatly needed. In other words, key strands of political science research on
climate governance risks becoming apolitical through lack of engagement with the politi-
cal immediacies shaping attempts to govern climate change. This concern is more than an
academic one if, as Zito (2000, p. 2) argues in relation to environmental policy develop-
ment in the European Union: ‘a substantial portion of EU policy change occurs in the
day-to-day accretion of policy decisions – not in grand political acts.’ Greater attention
to such interactions may thus help to provide middle range theoretical frameworks that
assist both in understanding processes of climate governance and in helping political
actors to respond to the forces of interdependence created by the need to gain support
for climate governance initiatives.
Before proceeding, it is worth differentiating the current meaning of ‘apolitical’ from
other possible meanings. The first concerns the ontological possibility that aspects of
climate governance are being depoliticized as principles and norms such as climate
change as a common planetary threat, the political-scientific construction of climate
thresholds and targets, and intersubjective biases towards technological and market led
solutions become established (Blühdorn 2013; Swyngedouw 2010). Second, usages of the
term ‘apolitical’ can cluster around calls to set aside political partisanship or critiques
of the compatibility of combating climate risks with consumer orientated and growth
centered capitalism. For obvious reasons, important normative debates can be margin-
alized by those who argue that they may stymie political action by challenging existing
institutions (see Giddens 2011) or scientific consensuses.
The third meaning focused on in this chapter centers on apolitical outlooks that stem
from research that treats transnational climate governance and other major trends from
generic standpoints which fail to probe beyond predictable enclaves in environmental
political discourse (Stevenson this volume; Stevenson and Dryzek 2014). Under such
research rubrics, governance trends may be described, conceptual architecture remapped,
new realms of climate authority charted and areas of political tension surveyed, but at
levels of resolution that tell little about the key actors, their motivations, how agency
is exercised, how these factors affect outcomes or relationships in tangible situations
(who gains, who loses?), or how those involved in governing climate change might ‘steer’
political situations to counter political obstacles. Conversely, more detailed comparative
analyses of representative samples of transnational climate governance initiatives, such
as Bulkeley et al. (2012), illuminate the politics of climate governance to a degree by
highlighting the complexity and variability of the political contexts within which climate
governance takes place but, equally, by exposing the murkiness in understandings left by
not exploring climate governance in the detail.
Does it matter if climate governance scholarship focuses on meta-tendencies but not
the detailed political contours of climate governance? A major source of social con-
tingency is the complexity of collective responses to structural constraints that tend to
produce variability while at the same time replicating familiar patterns of obstacles to
change. For this reason, climate governance research would fall short of its potential
if remained satisfied with stylized depictions of intensely contested and differentiated
realities. Fixating on ‘the unfolding of structural logics’ (Gibson-Graham 2008, p. 615)
without supplementing these with more context-oriented approaches may thus uncon-
sciously prioritize social structures over human agency and fail to differentiate critically
between transnational climate governance networks that consciously or unintentionally

institutionalize unsustainable practices and more sustainable forms of climate govern-

ance, and may overlook promising examples of transnational climate governance that
might be disseminated more widely. For example, Abbott’s (2012) transnational regime
complex is useful in distinguishing between state, civil-society, corporate and collabora-
tive modes of climate governance but is restricted in its ability to shed light on the ways in
which alliances were forged, their associated power dynamics or the outcomes produced.
Similarly, Jordan and Huitema’s (2014) invention, diffusion and evaluation perspectives
on climate policy innovations provide helpful clarification of the dimensions of policy
innovation processes but rely on more detailed examinations of individual ‘innovation
journeys’ (e.g., Voß’s (2007) study of the diffusion of emissions trading) to unveil the
underlying politics of moving climate policy innovations from theory to practice. In
warning of the dangers of more essentialist approaches, Gibson-Graham (2008) empha-
sizes how sensitivity to the performativity of knowledge creates new possibilities and
responsibilities for scholars to recognize their own constitutive role and their potential
to create and critically evaluate new alternatives to existing practices through embracing
ontological diversity rather than trying to shape it into neat patterns.
It is important also to stress that many strands of research do engage actively with the
politics of climate governance across its macro-, meso-and micro-levels. Indeed, chap-
ters in this volume offer a variety of insights on how climate politics can be apprehended
from political economy (Newell this volume), feminist (Kronsell this volume), political
ecology, discourse and governmentality (Stripple and Bulkeley this volume) perspectives.
However, the ability of social science research to contribute to unlocking the potential
of transnational and other forms of climate governance is likely to be restricted unless
it moves beyond generalized narratives to develop more detailed comparative analytical
and evaluative tools that elucidate the heterogeneous landscapes and processes through
which different modes of climate governance emerge and evolve. Above all, climate gov-
ernance scholarship needs more fully to recapture the essence of governance as arenas
where rival positions are contested and conflicts are mediated rather than being sub-
sumed into amorphous scientific-technocratic-policy networks, and where political pro-
cesses, individual events and political maneuvering are pivotal to the types of governance
and outcomes achieved. The next section examines explanations for why elements of the
climate governance literature have developed apolitical orientations.
EXPLAINING THE POLITICS DEFICIT
Explanations for why some branches of the climate governance literature have shied away
from detailed engagement with the politics of climate governance can be argued to fall
into three broad categories: intellectual norms, intellectual pragmatism and the character
of the academy. These categories are neither neatly separable nor necessarily premedi-
tated but nevertheless provide useful lenses for probing the lines of reasoning that might
deter scholars from analysis of the detailed politics of climate governance.
Intellectual norms with technocratic motivations relate predominantly to arenas where
decision-makers seek direct advice about the costs, benefits and risks of different modes,
rules and instruments of climate governance (Haas 1990). Such situations tend to
propagate a relatively technocratic science-policy dialogue in which the role of analysts

529
is constructed as one of providing information, but where political decision-making

about courses of action remains the preserve of mandated authorities. This relationship
particularly characterizes the remit of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
to provide ‘policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive’ advice to governments on climate
change (Metz 2010, p. xiv; Beck this volume). Such relationships may encourage wari-
ness among scholars to engage in contentious political debates, not least to protect the
conditions that have enabled academics to contribute to political deliberations on climate
change. The fear is that, if members of epistemic communities stray too far into policy
prescription, they may leave themselves open to the accusation that: ‘an ad hoc group
of mostly appointed bureaucrats, no different from any other coalition of nonelected
actors, had disproportionate influence over crucial global decisions’ (Susskind 1994,
p. 4). Climate governance scholars must thus remain mindful of the long-term damage to
academic credibility that might ensue from accusations of usurping legitimate political
authorities.
It could be argued that this explanation only really applies to relationships where
climate governance scholars engage in explicit ‘government or intergovernmental work.’
Furthermore, avoiding policy prescription does not forestall analysis of the political
dynamics of climate governance. For example, there is little to distinguish between
the academic legitimacy of analyzing the effectiveness, cost-efficiency and distributive
implications of emissions trading schemes and that of more politically engaged inves-
tigation of the sources of, motivations for, and policy and political options to manage,
political opposition to climate governance initiatives. Difficulties only really arise if the
latter takes ethical positions on the viewpoints held by societal actors, such as industry
groups, to the point where judgments are based on standpoints rather than evidence-
based assessments.
Intellectual norms with epistemic motivations relate to deeper-seated academic conven-
tions that emphasize traditional contributions to understanding developments in climate
governance. According to this approach, the primary task is to describe, explain and
assess the implications of trends towards transnational and multi-actor forms of climate
governance or how multilevel technological or governance innovation systems operate.
More positivist understandings of political science may thus be inclined to avoid norma-
tive commentary on the politics shaping such climate governance arrangements because
of self-limiting constructions of the goals of knowledge creation or because the vari-
ability of the political processes involved is inconsonant with gaining conceptual clarity
about processes. We discuss this further shortly.
Intellectual pragmatism explanations, like intellectual norms, can have multiple motivat-
ing logics. Systemic pragmatism can be characterized as a reformist outlook that refrains
from demands for the fundamental restructuring of states and markets in exchange for
courting support for incremental reforms that may create trajectories that accumulate
into more radical change (Dryzek 2013). As one example, Newell and Paterson reason in
Climate Capitalism that the causes of climate change are deeply rooted in the global capi-
talist economy and that meeting the challenge requires the abandonment of capitalism or
finding ways to decarbonize capitalism (Newell and Paterson 2010, p. 9). The scale and
idealism of such an agenda, however, leads Newell and Paterson to suggest that the more
pragmatic approach might be to explore strategies to achieve more sustainable forms of
capitalism. Giddens (2011, p. 4) meanwhile argues that:

Some authors say that coping with climate change is too difficult a problem to be dealt with
within the confines of orthodox politics . . . I agree with them, since profound changes will be
required in established ways of political thinking. Yet we have to work with the institutions that
exist and in ways that respect parliamentary democracy.
Intellectual pragmatism thus rests on distinguishing between objectives that fall within
the art of the possible and those that demand the impossible, and the corresponding
inclination to pay less attention to critiquing systemic features of the capitalist political
economy in favor of analyzing aspects of capitalist accumulation that might be more
amenable to ecological modernization or other reformist approaches. The point here is
that systemic pragmatism is sometimes derived from abstract and universal assumptions
about the structural constraints upon human agency, rather than upon the pragmatics
and political dynamics of specific contexts and circumstances.
Strategic intellectual pragmatism, meanwhile, operates by developing lines of enquiry
about how to encourage traditionally competing political forces towards a political con-
cordat in favor of stronger climate governance (Giddens 2011). This logic implies that
scholarship that politicizes climate change along traditional national and international
cleavages may encourage some political actors to engage in laggard behavior to gain
material advantages where ‘progressive’ governance might entail implementing unpopu-
lar decisions against powerful forces (Bailey and Compston 2012). Scholarship that
aligns climate politics with traditional political alliances is also problematic. If the politi-
cal ‘left’ successfully dominates the climate issue, the ‘right’ might be tempted to seek
success by aligning with movements opposing aspects of climate governance. Likewise, in
international politics, if climate concern is constructed as a political preoccupation of the
Global North, then some political and economic elites in the South might seize oppor-
tunities to campaign against what it sees as neocolonial climate governance (Gupta this
volume; Parks and Roberts 2010).
Again, the obvious problem with explanations based on intellectual pragmatism is that
they might militate against political partisanship but they do not preclude analysis of the
political interests and processes shaping trends in climate governance. Nor can scholars
like Newell and Paterson be described as politically disengaged. Their work is deeply con-
cerned with politics but focuses on more macroscopic analysis and still leaves disjunctures
between the investigation of general processes and probing of how everyday political
pressures and interactions create, reinforce and reproduce these situations.
This generalization of course neglects the extensive use of relational and other micro-
scale approaches in many social sciences. Its logic can nonetheless be illustrated through
two examples. The first concerns governmentality research examining how powerful
agents in the neoliberal political economy have utilized their discursive power to frame
climate change as an issue of human security and risk management (Stripple and Bulkeley
this volume; Swyngedouw 2010; Methmann 2010). The effect of such fabricated consen-
suses, they argue, has been to stifle debate and create a post-political condition, wherein
climate security and risk management provide empty signifiers around which key actors
can reconstruct activities that contributed to the problem under the term ‘climate govern-
ance’ in order to integrate them into the global mainstream without changing the basic
structures of the world economy. For Swyngedouw and Methmann, such tendencies also
exert a gravitational pull on scholarship by producing hegemonic storylines that scholars

531
must observe to make ‘legitimate’ contributions to climate debates. There is certainly evi-
dence to support claims of depoliticization, not least the influential trend towards carbon
markets as a primary means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, as Bailey and
Caprotti (2014) stress, this narrative overlooks the vibrant political debates taking place
across political, economic and social arenas about how to govern sustainable develop-
ment. So, while this approach offers an important viewpoint, its depiction of the place of
politics in climate governance draws attention away from analysis of how and why micro-
and meso-level political processes shape broader trends in climate governance.
The second example returns to transnational climate governance (Dingwerth and
Green this volume), where Bulkeley and Jordan (2012) identify a number of critical
themes for future research in this area. These include a need to deepen understandings
of the future role of the state within networked climate governance and to probe the
motivations and accountability of the non-nation-state actors involved. The latter is
important because governance research has always had a normative dimension linked to
governing for sustainability and preventing vested interests masquerading as legitimate
forms of climate governance. Addressing both questions nevertheless requires attention
to the processes that shape how states and transnational partnerships organize their rela-
tionships, and why hybrid networks become (or fail to become) responsible, accountable
and coordinated entities. Although it is useful to identify general factors and processes
that have made climate change a business risk and triggered greater transparency in
corporate reporting of carbon emissions and initiatives, attention is also needed to the
negotiations and tradeoffs involved in such transitions and the reasons for the limited
impact of initiatives like the Carbon Disclosure Project on corporate actions or decisions
by institutional investors (Gupta and Mason this volume; Pattberg 2012). Equally, as
the dispersal of governing capabilities and governments’ desire to consult make climate
decision-making more polycentric, consideration is needed of the dynamics of these rela-
tionships and their implications for policy outputs and outcomes. The politics of such
processes are again often issue, actor and context specific, so can only be understood
by interrogating the worldviews, relationships and power relations of the actor groups
involved (Hargreaves 2012).
A final explanation for the limited engagement with the everyday politics of climate
governance lies in the forms of research valued by academia and individual institutions.
Hargreaves (2012), following Flyvbjerg (2001), explains the problem as symptomatic
of longstanding attempts by the social sciences to emulate natural science in produc-
ing context independent and invariable theorizations of social life. Hargreaves (2012,
p. 316) claims this approach is deeply misguided because ‘context is fundamental to social
phenomena’; as such, explanations of social life founded on context independent theo-
ries, however well developed, fail to capture its situated and changeable nature. Martin
(2001, p. 197) also warns of a trend within many social sciences: ‘for overtheorized and
superficial empirical inquiry’ and an ‘emphasis on “sexy” philosophical, linguistic and
theoretical issues [. . .] and a retreat from detailed, rigorous empirical work; the intel-
lectual bias against policy studies; and the lack of political commitment’ (Martin 2001,
p. 189). Martin blames this on strictures imposed by government research quality assess-
ments that reward more theoretical research more highly than policy study, and on the
subversion of less favored research by funding bodies and government departments that
commission and fund research. The complaint is that through funding, selection and

assessment procedures, external institutions set agendas, define issues, control access to
data, and even influence the nature of policy research.
We do not wish to overemphasize this point but if such tendencies exist, they may
encourage more ‘context divorced’ research and a shift away from rich empirical enquir-
ies into the politics of climate governance. This does not mean that higher-level theoriza-
tions lack value, but they need to be complemented by greater recognition of research
that explicitly aims to capture interplays of values and power in specific settings and to
help those involved in climate governance to understand and tackle specific climate gov-
ernance dilemmas. The next section considers how climate governance scholarship might
develop these additional attributes while charting a viable course between abstraction
and exceptionalism.
ADDRESSING THE DEFICIT
Space constraints prevent a detailed review of the theoretical perspectives that might be
used to probe the political dimensions of climate governance. Our focus instead is on
methodological approaches that might enable climate governance research to re-engage
more actively with its underpinning politics, regardless of its theoretical inclinations. This
evidently requires more than just rigorous empirical work. Clearly constructed criteria
are needed to avoid blind empiricism that merely accumulates facts or narratives without
providing deeper insight into the challenges and opportunities such empirics pose for
climate governance.
A first approach is to develop a priori questions that focus attention on deconstructing
where, why, how and with what effects climate governance becomes politicized and the
power relations sculpting different approaches to, and arenas of, climate governance. One
such option is the phronetic approach advocated by Flyvbjerg (2001) and Hargreaves
(2012), which prioritizes the need to understand power relations in context through the
interrogation of four ‘value-rational questions’:1
1. Where are we going?

2. Who gains and who loses, by which mechanisms of power?
3. Is this desirable?
4. What should be done?
Addressing these questions in turn, each climate governance initiative or network is

based around (usually self-made) claims about its principles, goals and methods of opera-
tion, which can be interrogated in terms of the programs introduced, contributions to
mitigation or adaptation, or at least direction of travel. Such ‘track records’ can then be
accounted for by tracing the accumulation of day-to-day and month-to-month decisions
that have shaped the composition, approach and efficacy of the governance networks.
Such decisions invariably produce winners and losers and, especially within studies of
conventional intergovernmental climate governance, the distribution of these costs and
benefits often follow a rational actor model of seeking to minimize costs and maximize
benefits using whatever levers or mechanisms are available (Parks and Roberts 2010).
Many scholars are critical of the power relations within conventional intergovernmental

533
climate politics and, equally, many alternatives exist to rational actor analyses of inter-
governmental climate negotiations, not least constructivist approaches that emphasize
interplays between the material and ideational aspects of climate politics and the social
construction of structures by actors involved in climate governance activities (e.g., Death
2011; Vogler 2010). However, less detailed attention has arguably been paid to unpicking
the political levers and instruments applied to alternative forms of climate governance
(although see North’s (2010) review of the politics of eco-localization as one excellent
exception). Partly, this deficit reflects the analytical challenges created by the diversity
and fragmented character of such initiatives. However, it also reflects a general lack
of transparency and accountability resulting from the lower levels of public attention
and scrutiny that non-state climate governance initiatives tend to receive, which in itself
increases the justification for academic research aimed at critically analyzing the power
mechanisms utilized and at making the winners and losers from different forms of
climate governance networks more visible.
Assessing the direction of climate governance initiatives and the mechanisms by which
winners and losers are generated then creates a critical space for normative debates on
the desirability of outcomes. Although many such debates are likely to follow well-known
lines in environmental political thought, the sustained pursuit of empirically verifiable
examples of transnational climate governance might equally reveal normative surprises,
instructive nuances and unexpected opportunities. Either way, breaking down trans-
national climate governance into its constituent parts should dramatically improve the
quality of normative debates previously conducted at very high levels of generalization.
Ultimately, such enquiries are likely to trigger suggestions about how to address deficits
in existing climate governance. Such suggestions would doubtless depend on the answers
generated to the previous questions and be influenced by existing political preconcep-
tions. For example, Hoffmann (2011) regards each empirical example pragmatically as
an experiment in transnational climate governance that leads to collective learning, the
phasing out of failed experiments, and the diffusion and ‘scaling up’ of successful experi-
ments, judged on their individual merits. For critical theorists like Stevenson and Dryzek
(2014), meanwhile, different examples of climate governance might be evaluated against
reasoned assertions about the superior performance of governance provided through
deliberative democracy.
Such framing questions can be applied to any scale of climate governance from meta-
trends in transnational public–private networks to more meso-and micro- levels of
decision-making, such as terms of government, initiatives, organizations or the negotia-
tion and implementation of individual climate policies. Their chief distinction lies instead
in deliberately steering analysis towards investigation of how ideas, interests and power
relations shape different types and arenas of climate governance, and thus towards the
politics and institutions used to mediate these influences.
A complementary approach would be to combine framing questions with abductive
reasoning that begins with the accumulation of observations about an aspect of climate
governance. Analysis of these observations then forms the basis for generating hypoth-
eses or conceptualizations that might explain the phenomena, creating the starting point
for testing through further empirical research. This approach underpins Stevenson’s
(2012) analysis of the institutionalization of unsustainability and also mirrors the evolu-
tion of work by Hugh Compston examining political strategies to overcome political

opposition of climate policy at the national level. The process began with the proposition
that political opposition was a pivotal but poorly understood barrier to the strengthen-
ing of climate policy and was followed by investigation of the sources, types and effects
of opposition in a number of developed economies (Compston and Bailey 2008). This
in turn enabled identification of common and distinctive political barriers and political
strategies that governments had used, or could use, to counter these barriers.
The process of conceptual development then evolved through the development of
a more systematic typology of political strategies and variants of these strategies, the
latter process being especially important in avoiding over-abstraction and ensuring the
framework retained strong connections with the diverse challenges faced by governments.
This research focused on political barriers facing national governments but could equally
be extended to subnational, multilevel, international and non-state climate governance
processes, and to market rather than political barriers. The final stage consisted of meso-
level and micro-level testing of the political strategies framework. The meso-level analysis
focused on political barriers to climate policy in rapidly industrializing countries (Bailey
and Compston 2012), while micro-level analysis tested the framework by tracing the poli-
tics of carbon pricing initiatives in Australia (Bailey et al. 2012).
This example is only intended to be illustrative, not least because it rationalizes post
hoc an emergent research process. One might also question whether abductive reasoning
provided substantively more perceptive insights than could have been obtained from
more theoretically led approaches. This is difficult to answer but the ideas and frame-
works arising from the research are clearly relatable to national contexts and power
dynamics. We certainly do not argue against a priori theory-building as an approach for
understanding and addressing climate governance problems, but such approaches do
require critical reflection about how they connect to the real-world governance arenas
and dynamics they seek to scrutinize.
CONCLUSION
Political dispute is a defining characteristic of climate governance. Were this not the
case, governing climate change would be much less contentious, debates over agency,
accountability and justice would be largely replaced by technical questions of innovation,
cost-efficiency and effectiveness, and, crucially, greater progress would probably have
been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But whether one surveys international
negotiations, the uneven commitments to (and progress made in implementing) national
climate strategies, corporate responses, non-governmental organization and other civil-
society involvement in climate governance, or attempts to promote low-carbon lifestyles,
how societies and economies respond to the causes and effects of climate change remains
deeply contested. In some if not most spheres where climate issues are ostensibly being
governed, inconsistencies between decision-making and long-term wellbeing in a chang-
ing climate can only really be decrypted by examining ideas, interests, power relations and
the institutions and processes through which they are mediated.
The case for analysis of the political processes shaping climate governance to occupy a
more conspicuous place in the climate governance literature therefore seems compelling.
This does not mean that this rich literature is bereft of good political analysis; however,

535
attempts by political science, international relations and human geography to produce

encompassing theoretical frameworks do appear to have drawn attention away from the
multiple and context-specific ways in which politics crucially shape climate governance.
Put another way, has the science subsumed the political in political science? The core
argument in this chapter is that greater re-engagement with the political dimensions of
climate governance is central to understanding climate governance and any aspirations
by scholars to change it.
In this spirit, our analysis offers tentative suggestions on how to promote such
re-engagement through the adoption of more context-centered approaches that place
power at the core of analysis and that attempt to get close to reality whilst not engaging
in blind empiricism that would inhibit the search for broader insights. There are doubtless
many other ways and many may challenge our diagnosis, but we hope it is a useful con-
tribution in provoking greater reflection about the goals of climate governance research
and whether its politics is being underrepresented.
NOTE
1. Bulkeley and Newell (2010) apply a similar questioning rubric in their book, Governing Climate Change:
who is governing, on whose behalf, and with what effects?
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47. Property and privatization
Ronnie D. Lipschutz
In his On the Origin of the Inequality of Mankind (1754), Jean-Jacques Rousseau posed
a foundational challenge to the very order of liberal society and the power relations con-
cealed by the concept of property. He famously wrote
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine,
and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how
many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one
have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows,
‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the
earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’ (Part 2, §1)
Whether private property is truly the source of all of Earth’s ills is a contestable
proposition; that the Earth and its physical, biological and intellectual wealth have been
divided countless times for the benefit of some and not others can hardly be disputed.
Under the rubric of ‘climate governance,’ even the atmosphere may be privatized through
cap-and-trade and other permitting mechanisms (Wettestad this volume), and people’s
actions and behaviors governed through private data as part of climate governance. Yet,
it is claims to the highly decentralized political authority inherent in private property
rights (Wood 1995) that stand in the way of almost any form of global climate govern-
ance. This problem is often framed as a case of Garrett Hardin’s (1968) parable of ‘the
tragedy of the commons’—a logically coherent yet poorly informed story—for which the
prescribed solution is said to be more private property and further fragmentation of an
already divided world (Araral 2014). Economists describe this conundrum as the ‘free-
rider problem’: markets, left to themselves, lack the political authority and capacity to
overcome a large N-body collective action problem. We are told that only the authorita-
tive allocation (or rescission) of regulated property rights by states can do so—and, even
then, success is not at all guaranteed.1 For the purposes of global governance, whether
this comes about by force or negotiation is largely a matter of taste rather than necessity.
In the realm of climate, the instantiation of private property in the form of greenhouse
gas (GHG) or carbon emission allowances (CEAs) is designed to impose order on a
highly complex assemblage of human and natural practices and phenomena that cur-
rently operate in a state of nature or market-based anarchy. What now exists is a largely
unregulated market in which there are few, if any, boundaries or restrictions on GHG
emissions into the atmosphere. (Note that this describes Garrett Hardin’s ‘tragedy of
the commons,’ but blames such a ‘commons’ not on human nature but on institutional
structures, i.e., markets; see Peet et al. 2011). Through cap-and-trade and CEAs, those
who emit GHGs must acquire a private property entitlement that puts limits on behav-
iors and practices. In effect, climate governance becomes an essential element in liberal
governmentality, via the disciplining properties of property, rather than an impetus to
‘more efficient’ and lessened use of the Earth’s resources, the latter a common argument
537
for privatization of Nature (Stripple and Bulkeley this volume). Indeed, such property
relations have behavioral and social effects rarely, if ever, noted by those who write about
either global environment or property: private property functions as a mode of social
management of people, effecting a biopolitics through which social order is created and
individuals disciplined in the name of society’s interest. Privatization creates boundaries
to be policed, and respect for private property requires self-policing. It is through such
management that, I argue, climate governance may eventually be achieved.
I begin this chapter with a brief genealogy of private property—how has the Earth
come to be divided and owned?—and examine the constitution of private property rights
as a form of social relation that governs and orders society. I then turn to the organization
and implication of privatization of the atmosphere as a means of slowing or stopping
damage to it, and how this constitutes liberal governmentality. Finally, I shift my focus
to the governmental management of climate change through privatization and control
of individual ‘rights’ to buy, spend, eat, travel and engage in other activities. While this
might seem far-fetched, it is no more far-fetched than many other proposed approaches
to climate governance.2
A BRIEF GENEALOGY OF PRIVATE PROPERTY
More than a thousand years ago, Catholic theologians puzzled over the existence of
private property. God, according to the Old Testament, had given Earth to man in
common, to be used and shared by all. Private property seemed to militate against this
gift. Clearly, something had gone amiss since the expulsion from Eden, inasmuch as
private possession had a long history (Garnsey 2007).3 I will, however, point to the resus-
citation of the Earth as commons during the 1970s, encoded in the concept ‘common
heritage of mankind’ (Kant [1795] 1996, p. 329).4 Until now, ‘common heritage’ has been
limited to those sites with little near-term prospect of being appropriated to anyone’s
benefit: Antarctica, the deep seabed, the moon (the Arctic, long-regarded as having
limited utility, is now threated with partition by its littoral states).
I distinguish here between purely open-access commons and common property
resources (CPR)—although I have my doubts that the former has ever truly existed, the
term being more of an instigation to the expropriation and division of resources (or
‘primitive capital accumulation’) than its ostensible protection (Basu 2007). A large body
of research by Elinor Ostrom and others (Dietz et al. 2003) has documented the care
with which common property is treated when managed by an organized user group, and
the threat to such resources when CPRs are regarded as ‘open access’ by late arrivals and
powerful parties.5 As a rule, CPRs are regulated through accepted and normalized group
practices rather than textually inscribed laws and rights. It is the high individualism of
contemporary liberal society—in effect, the anarchy of market and civil society—that
makes necessary legal texts, police and courts and the legitimate political authority that
creates and protects private property rights. Privatized rights are a necessary political
corollary to the imposition of order on the anarchistic tendencies of markets.
We conventionally think of private property as material or intellectual stuff to which
some individual legal entity holds written, lawful title. At the core of capitalism today,
as both an economic and social system, stands title. Only if title is unequivocally held

Property and privatization 539
can property be transferred or sold, and only in that way does property have exchange
value. Indeed, in the face of uncertainty about ownership, the sale and transfer of goods
are illegal and possible only through gray and black markets. In other words, no title, no
markets, no profits. It is the lost opportunities afforded by uncertain title to commons
and public spaces that so infuriates market libertarians and fundamentalists: such spaces
are simply not being used ‘efficiently’ and are being ‘wasted.’6
But a conception of private property as mere enclosure is too circumscribed, too
idealized and too libertarian. Through recognized title, a property ‘right’ also conveys
society’s acceptance of (or acquiescence to) the owner’s claim to control over and use
of a specific thing. A private property right is not so much title to a thing possessed as it
recognition of possession of the thing by society and its members.7 Property is a social
relation among people in society (Macpherson 1962, p. 4; Peet 1981), not simply a thing
legally possessed. For private property to exist, therefore, the members of society must
recognize and acknowledge a title holder’s essential and legitimate relationship to the
thing that is ‘owned’ (Veblen 1898; Hegel [1821] 2001, sec. 1). This recognized relation-
ship also permits the holder to engage in certain actions with respect to that thing (albeit
actions not unlimited in scope), which also implies certain restrictions on behaviors and
practices of both owner and others.
In other words, property is a social construct subject to recognition, intervention and
modification by recognized authority as well as custom. As such, although a property
right may be defined by law and inscribed through title, it is never finally fixed and
its boundaries are a focus of perennial social struggle and contestation. In this sense,
property is as much a naturalized practice as anything else, reproduced on a daily basis
through the myriad of recognitions of ‘mine and thine’ that make up daily life. As
naturalized practice, property is also limiting and constraining, and civil behavior in
civil society is premised on each person knowing and being socialized into these limits.
Calling private property a relation (or a legal abstraction) does not deny its materiality
or role in practice and practices (Bourdieu 1989). It is not law but practice that creates
such property relations and—much of the time—these relations shape and direct our
practices. Quite clearly, I have left a great deal out of this discussion, but my goal is not to
explore the endless labyrinth of property law.8 Here, I make only three points: property is
relational; property is historical; and property is practice.9
‘THE FRUITS OF THE EARTH BELONG TO US ALL, AND THE

EARTH ITSELF TO NOBODY’
At the heart of the emergence of private property was land and title.10 Today, all kinds
of property exist but, historically, land was the source of food and control of food was a
source of political and social power. Hence, to control the food supply, one must control
its source and those who produce it: land and peasants.11 (One might further argue that
food is not possible without climate, and therefore control of climate is also control of
food). It was the use value of land that was central: land was valued for the food it could
produce to ensure survival, not for the profits it might generate. To ensure production,
however, it was also necessary to compel peasants to work, and to work beyond that
which was necessary for bare survival. Such compulsion came through the lord’s property

in those peasants, a form of social relation that involved explicit forms of behavior, domi-
nation and control. Those peasants who refused to acknowledge such control were pun-
ished or simply expelled from the manor, whence they had no ‘masters’ to control them.12
Where such private property relations did not exist, the state created them (Guha
1990). In India, the British Raj had the power to designate as unused ‘wastelands’ those
lands that were not farmed, which then became fair game for expropriation and transfer
(this authority continues to reside with the Indian state today; see Basu 2007). But such
enclosure took place in those spaces where states were able to exercise authority. In the
case of the common heritage of humanity—spaces defined under international law as res
nullis, subject to no state’s sovereignty—such authority does not exist, and much of the
political struggle among competitors takes place over creation of ‘fair’ rules of property
among authorized entities (i.e., John Rawls’ (1971) thought experiment on the Original
Position, albeit with power and wealth added).
As we know, the distribution of such entitlements in global commons has favored the
states of the Global North, who control the global economy and the making of its laws.
The Global South (Gupta this volume) may dominate in terms of absolute numbers of
people, but its members remain largely also-rans in terms of relative power and wealth;
the best they can do is block legalized privatization (Krasner 1985). A per capita alloca-
tion of title in the common heritage would favor the Global South but result in a potential
redistribution of resources and income to the considerable disadvantage of the Global
North. As illustrated by the results of distribution of corporate shares in post-socialist
countries, where the better-off bought them from those impoverished by the collapse of
socialism (Ellerman 2001), even the equitable distribution of carbon emission permits in
the atmosphere or other commons would almost certainly result in the poor selling theirs
in order to survive and the rich buying those shares as speculative investments, getting
even wealthier in the process.
How should we regard the Earth’s atmosphere, which is, after all, the focus of ‘climate
governance’? It is almost certainly res nullis in terms of its life-supporting properties,
notwithstanding claims of state sovereignty over airspace and court decisions that have
either forbidden or enabled practices impinging on the rights of states and corporations.
Here, however, we enter into tricky territory, because action affecting ‘the atmosphere’
can be disaggregated in a number of different ways. The most common approach is to
discuss GHG emissions as negative externalities that interfere with the ecological ser-
vices provided by the atmosphere, and to treat this as illegal appropriation of a public
commons by private actors. Except in the case of evident pollution and harm, it is dif-
ficult to specify either injuries or specific injured parties resulting from GHG emissions,
especially if they are hypothetical injuries whose future distribution is uncertain.
The dictum that one must not use one’s own property in ways that injure others or
their property does not work well when those impacts are poorly specified (Coase 1960).
Hence, regulation or management are in order, of which four broad approaches may be
identified: prohibition, regulation, taxation and marketization. These are summarized in
Table 47.1.
The first two of these approaches are based on political action, imposing direct
regulation and behavioral constraints on individual actors through management of
(or restrictions on) their private activities. The third and fourth depend on economic
intervention in the market. Taxation generates individual fear of loss of money as

Table 47.1 Approaches to internalization of greenhouse gas injuries
Mode of Means of internalization Costs Property impacts

internalization
Prohibition Restrictions on vehicle or Reduction in Loss of personal
use or particular uses individual mobility property and freedom
Direct regulation Use restrictions on vehicle, Reduction in Loss in value of
either mileage or fuel individual mobility personal property
Taxation Levy imposed on first cost Increase in operating Loss of monetary
and/or operation costs resources
Marketization (via Tradable emission permits Possible increase in Gain in property via
cap-and-trade) to continue operation operating costs service acquisition
property; marketization affects incentives to acquire additional private property. In

other words, the first three approaches operate on already existing property; the fourth
involves creation of new forms of private property. I do not address here the fairness of
these arrangements or their economic consequences; the point is that governance—and
government—are instantiated through control of private property, which constitutes
climate governance and a form of governmentality.
How does this apply to climate? Cap- and-
trade’s carbon emission allowances,
as exemplified by the European Union Emissions Trading System (Wettestad this
volume), rest on the ex nihilo creation of private property in an open-access commons,
the global atmosphere. To accomplish this, some transnational entity, granted the legiti-
mate authority to create property rights, must distribute fractions of the atmosphere
as spaces to be polluted with GHGs to those segments or populations of the world
deemed eligible to hold title. These CEAs can be distributed to and through states,
although there is no reason such allocations could not be made to other entities, such
as individuals or corporations. The ‘cap’ sets a limit on the total number of CEAs in
existence, and holders may buy or sell their property rights, as required or necessary.
If structured properly, it is proposed, this arrangement will lead to a gradual overall
reduction in emissions.
BUT DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH
Cap-and-trade seems reasonably straightforward and doable, and holders of CEAs are
left with the freedom to choose whether they will emit more or less GHGs. How, then, do
private CEAs effect (not ‘affect’) social management and order? Consider two examples,
the first resting on state control of CEA distributions, the second on individual posses-
sion of CEAs. The various carbon markets that have emerged over the past decade or so
are premised on the belief that, eventually, authoritative allocations of private property in
the atmosphere will be made and CEAs distributed by individual states, who will guaran-
tee them. For example, in the case of California’s AB32, the Global Warming Solutions
Act of 2006 (CARB 2014a, 2014b), all entities emitting more than 10,000 metric tons of
carbon dioxide equivalent per year are required to report their emissions to the state. All

those emitting more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year are
required to reduce current emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, to take place under a cap-
and-trade regime. The precise mechanics of the AB32 system and particular means of
internalization are of no relevance here (see CARB 2014a, 2014b); what matters are the
social effects of obeying the law.
GHG emitters required to obey AB32 have two choices: reduce emissions according
to the law’s prescription or purchase CEAs in the market from some entity that has put
its allowances up for sale. The latter constitutes a relatively straightforward transfer of
titled property between buyer and seller. For the buyer, the cost of emissions simply rises.
Emissions reductions, however, require emitters to alter behaviors and practices in order
to avoid future financial penalties and associated losses. This implies a restriction on the
right to pollute, that is, to the individual right to appropriate res nullis as a free private
property right. How the emitter chooses to effect the required reduction does not matter,
so long as the reduction is made.
AB32’s stipulation that the law applies only to emitters above a certain threshold
points to large-scale enterprises as subjects of the law, and presumes that any additional
costs of obeying the law will be passed on to the buyers of goods and services from these
entities. For the time being, individuals are not covered. Yet, more than 60 percent of
the American economy is constituted by personal consumption, in the form of goods,
services and activities, all associated with GHG production, either as a result of those
activities (e.g., water skiing) or as embodied in those goods and services (e.g., food).13
Why should individual consumers not be held responsible for reducing their emissions
(Stripple and Bulkeley this volume) or have to buy CEAs that will allow them to maintain
their practices? Of course, choosing to consume selectively or use less could have signifi-
cant impacts on national economies, especially in the Global North, but that is another
matter. The key point here is that the requirement to reduce personal GHG emissions
also implies necessary changes in behaviors and practices.
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE, I SEE WHAT YOU DO
At the end of the day, how could privatization of the atmosphere at the individual level
be accomplished? How would entitlements to CEAs be decided? What would be the prin-
ciples of distribution? And how could fair distribution be ensured? More to the point,
could individuals be relied upon to make the decisions required to reduce emissions?
There are many guides and websites on offer for reducing ‘carbon footprints,’ and there is
no shortage of personal studies of and reports about footprint reduction (Padgett et al.
2008; Kenny and Gray 2009). There is, so far, no practical way to monitor or measure
individual emissions and claims about them; commitment does not mean accomplish-
ment. What is to be done?
One potential means of controlling and limiting individual behaviors and prac-
tices could result from management through surveillance and ‘police’ (Lipschutz and
Hester 2014). It is not necessary to point out that many of the world’s consumers have
become deeply enmeshed in the global system of electronic transactions, exchange and
communications.14 The data generated by accessing this system are assiduously accumu-
lated in many locations, for profit and edification, for monitoring and surveillance. These

data are ‘mined’ by algorithms and analyzed for purposes of prediction and entreaty
(Duhigg 2012; King 2014). Such data can also be manipulated to manage and control
what people do (Skidelsky 2014; Head 2014).
Data-mining is a new arrow in the growing quiver of government(ality). It can permit
identification of individuals’ tastes, predilections, beliefs, desires, intentions, moods and
actions; in the future, it will almost certainly be deployed in the effort to modify and
‘nudge’ (Thaler and Sunstein 2012) individual behaviors in more socially beneficial and
orderly directions (whatever those might be). Indeed, it is not far-fetched to imagine
that, at some date in the future, we will be advised by personal electronic devices about
what to do next or what not to do, who to meet and who not, and what to buy and what
to avoid.15 And, as they already do, those devices will report back to public and private
entities about what we have done or failed to do. If what we have done, or not done, fails
to comport with some sort of approved or individually tailored profile or program, we
will be gently reminded and nudged toward the ‘correct’ behavior. Failure to comply may
subject violators to punishments and penalties, growing in severity with each additional
violation. In other words, as long as we can receive an electronic signal, we can be gov-
erned through the tools and good graces of the global security-economy-surveillance
network and those machines and algorithms whose task it is to keep watch over the world
and ensure that it is an orderly place.
In the case of GHGs, imagine an activity monitoring system linked to individual
carbon emissions accounts. Each individual receives a set number of CEAs, equal to
a fixed annual carbon emission allowance. So long as they are linked to electronic
networks, all transactions are assessed in terms of embodied and real-time emissions,
which are charged against individuals’ account. Account holders are permitted to buy
and sell CEAs, as they wish, but anyone who exceeds their annual allowance without
acquiring more CEAs is charged a hefty fee or even denied rights to purchase addi-
tional goods and services. Moreover, this control system could deny specific transac-
tions if they represent an unacceptable GHG burden. You want to go to Thailand
this year? Sorry, that trip to Sweden last month used up your carbon emission quota
for the year. Perhaps you can present that conference paper via Skype. Oh, and by the
way, your house is too warm; put on a sweater, because your thermostat is about to
be turned down by the authorities via the ‘smart grid.’ Under such a monitoring and
disciplining arrangement, our individual ‘right’ in free markets to travel or buy the
goods and services that each of us desire and can afford becomes subject to control,
limitation and governmentality.
CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter, I have argued that private property is essential to governmentality, that
new forms of governmentality are emerging as individuals’ material and intellectual
rights are appropriated and that climate governmentality may come to rest on manage-
ment of individuals’ private property, in this instance, of rights in the self, our individual
‘freedoms’ to act in certain ways without fear of social sanction. The accumulation of
notionally private data about individual acquisitions and actions, through electronic
networks, and their mining to identify which give rise to unacceptable greenhouse gas

emissions, offers the possibility of control of those acquisitions and actions. While such
limitations might appear to violate the tenets of liberalism and its advocacy of indi-
vidual rights and freedoms, it is helpful to recall Anatole France’s much quoted dictum
about ‘the majestic quality of the law which prohibits the wealthy as well as the poor
from sleeping under the bridges, from begging in the streets, and from stealing bread.’16
Surely in the name of ‘saving’ the Earth and humanity, no price is too great, no limit
too onerous.
NOTES
1. Those who believe that property rights can be established in the absence of state power and authority have
not read their Hobbes.
2. I note a recent review, by Robert Skidelsky (2014) of a new book by Simon Head (2014), that describes
how cyber versions of Taylorism allow computer-based management of the activities of all kinds of
workers.
3. We can think of the tale of Cain and Abel as marking the onset of restricted property. Cain made his
living from the open-access commons, from what he was able to hunt and kill. Abel, by contrast, had to
cultivate a parcel of land, and the survival of him and his family was dependent on restricting access to
the food he was able to grow.
4. The term first appears as a legal one in the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the
Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, which entered into
force on October 10, 1967.
5. In many situations, both historical and contemporary, when commons are not visibly exploited by a user
group, governments declare those spaces to be ‘waste’ and, therefore, subject to appropriation.
6. A sentiment expressed by John Locke in The Second Treatise.
7. This point elides, of course, how possession was acquired and whether that did violence to those who
might have previously had access. See Ribot and Peluso (2003) and Basu (2007).
8. A simple search for ‘property’ on Google Scholar yields more than 2 billion hits (August 4, 2015).
9. Theorists of property like to think of it as consisting of a ‘bundle’ of rights, rather than a single, fixed
entitlement, which allows certain elements to be added or removed without eliminating ownership. See, for
example, Penner (1995–1996).
10. While some argue that private property existed in Rome, in fact, those property relations were quite
different from ‘private’ property relations today; see Garnsey (2007, pp. 178–195).
11. Some land was restricted to being a source of wild game; peasants were not allowed access to such lands
(Pheasants, not Peasants!).
12. A matter of especial concern to Thomas Malthus (1798).
13. A significant fraction of China’s GHG emissions arise from the manufacture of low-cost goods exported
to Europe and North America. At the moment, these are China’s responsibility, but that could change in
the future (Liu et al. 2013).
14. In India, citizen rights and services are being linked to biometric identification cards, which all individuals
will be required to carry (Polgreen 2011). The very poor are also being encouraged to open bank accounts
(Barry 2014), which will further embed them in the electronic data system.
15. As seen in the recent Spike Jonze film Her, Dave Eggers’ The Circle (2013) and Gary Shteyngart’s Super
Sad True Love Story: A Novel (2010). Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, is reported to have said: ‘We know
roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are . . . The power of indi-
vidual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume some-
thing that has not in some sense been tailored for them . . . I actually think most people don’t want Google
to answer their questions . . . They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next’ (quoted in
Jenkins 2010).
16. The full quote, from Le Lys Rouge, is: ‘Another reason to be proud, this being a citizen! For the poor it
consists in sustaining and preserving the wealthy in their power and their laziness. The poor must work
for this, in presence of the majestic quality of the law which prohibits the wealthy as well as the poor from
sleeping under the bridges, from begging in the streets, and from stealing bread’ (France 1894, ch. 7, emphasis
added).

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48. Innovation investments
Björn-Ola Linnér and Steve Rayner
FROM END-OF-PIPE REGULATION TO INCENTIVIZING

ALTERNATIVE
As countries negotiate future global agreements on climate change, they run the risk
of perpetuating the erroneous assumption of the Kyoto Protocol: that one day a cap
on emissions will be effectively implemented and that it will trigger a carbon price
sufficient to induce a systemic transformation of the global energy system. The meagre
track record of the current cap-and-trade path under the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) can at best be characterized as a tiny but
costly adjustment of the carbon society. Faced with a rising global emissions and an
expected 37 per cent upsurge in energy demand between 2012 and 2040 (IEA 2014; IPCC
2013), decision-makers and experts are increasingly placing their hopes in a new radical
societal transformation toward a low-carbon global economy (e.g., Brand et al. 2013;
Driesen et al. 2013). The Kyoto Protocol has fallen short of the already low expectations
of its capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, let alone to incentivize a low-carbon
development transformation of the participating countries’ economies.
The aim of this chapter is, however, not to critique the targets-and-timetables strategy
of the Kyoto Protocol. Its failures and shortcomings have been well documented (Prins
and Rayner 2007; Driesen 2008; Rayner and Caine 2014). Instead we propose an alter-
native architecture for international climate policy based on investments in low-carbon
energy innovation (Lovell this volume). Such an architecture could provide a bridge from
an end-of-pipe approach, fixated on regulating emissions, to an agreement that incentiv-
izes a shift to low-carbon development.
Ironically, in borrowing the convention-and-protocol approach from the stratospheric-
ozone regime, climate negotiators missed the key element in the success of the predeces-
sor, which was the explicit focus on limiting production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)
rather than emissions. In other words, the ozone regime directly confronted CFC emis-
sions as a technology innovation problem rather than indirectly as an environmental one.
In this chapter we argue that investments in innovation and diffusion of low-carbon
energy technology (LCET) would establish a direction of travel for emission reductions
instead of specifying the timetable for arrival. A technology investment agreement would
provide a political ‘golden bridge’ (Rayner 2010) that could let concerned parties exit the
failed Kyoto approach with dignity.
A FAILED ATTEMPT TO ACCELERATE DECARBONIZATION
Historically, the global economy decarbonized (reduced its carbon dioxide emissions per
unit of gross domestic product, GDP) at about 1.5 per cent annually between 1980 and
547
2006, a period with 3.5 per cent annual GDP growth. If the world is to reduce emissions
to 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050, the average rate of decarbonization will need
to triple (Pielke 2010). Rather than seeing the rate of decarbonization accelerating in
recent years, the world has also seen a re-carbonization of economic activity – the world
is moving in the wrong direction. The observed increase in carbon and energy intensity
is at least partly a result of developments in China and India (see Stalley this volume for
further details). To reverse the current course of increasing carbon intensity and move in
the right direction requires an unprecedented drive for the innovation and diffusion of
LCET. Whereas global carbon pricing and emission trading provides little or no incentive
for China and India, these countries have strong incentives to participate in energy
modernization. China is a leader in wind and solar technology and India in information
technology systems, which will be an essential component of electrical smart grids.
The failure of the targets and timetables approach for mitigation can be seen in data
that show no detectable change in rates of decarbonization in Europe over the past
three centuries. Consequently, we see no evidence of the effects of the Kyoto Protocol
and associated policies compared to previous decarbonization incentives. As shown in
Figure 48.1, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per unit of GDP display no deviation from
the historical decarbonization rate (1980–2011) for the EU15. Compared to the USA,
4,500 0.6
Carbon Dioxide Emission
Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide per Thousand Year 2005 U.S. Dollars
4,400 Carbon Intensity PPP
0.5
4,300
4,200
0.4
Million Metric Tons
4,100
4,000 0.3
3,900
0.2
3,800
3,700
0.1
3,600
3,500 0
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
Note: Shows annual rate of change in metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per US$1,000 of GDP
expressed in 2005 US dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity as well as total carbon dioxide emissions
from the Consumption of Energy (million metric tons).
Source: US Energy Information Administration, www.eia.go.
Figure 48.1 Decarbonizaton rate of the EU15: 1980–2011

Innovation investments 549
who opted not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the decarbonization rate between 1990 and
2009 was even slightly lower for the European countries (IEA 2011a).
Six years after the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, PricewaterhouseCoopers’
Low Carbon Economy Index 2011 reported that the decarbonization rate of the world
economy was decreasing. It fell back to 0.7 per cent. By 2014 the decarbonization rate
had increased slightly to 1.2 per cent, still far from the 4.4 to 6.2 per cent estimated to be
required in order to be on track for a 450 parts per million (ppm) stabilization by 2050
assuming a 3 per cent annual GDP growth rate (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2014; Pielke
2010). Growth of coal fired power for electricity generation increased by 45 per cent
between 2000 and 2010, while the power generated for non-carbon sources only increased
by 25 per cent growth (IEA 2013). New data from the International Energy Agency (IEA)
indicates that global emissions of carbon dioxide from the energy sector stalled in 2014,
marking the first time in 40 years in which emissions growth halted without being tied
to an economic downturn (IEA 2015). Even if we see some progress in the diffusion and
costs of renewable energy technologies, current international policy instruments have not
incentivized their innovation and diffusion sufficiently to profoundly accelerate decar-
bonization rates (IEA 2014).
INCENTIVIZING INNOVATION
Simplified, societies have three policy levers for tackling emissions: (1) policies and
regulations to help nudge an economy toward reduced emissions; (2) pricing and
market creation, where taxes or cap-and-trade are hoped to provide price signals driving
consumption and production changes, innovation and diffusion; (3) investments and
incentives for innovation, diffusion and infrastructure priorities (see Grubb 2014).

Whether cap-and-trade is better suited to drive large-scale emission reductions and tech-
nology transitions than regulatory approaches has been debated for a long time (e.g.,
Stewart and Wiener 2003; Driesen 2003; Avi-Yonah and Uhlmann 2009). Driesen (2008)
found that cap-and-trade systems only promote innovation in companies that are selling
carbon credits. It fails to take into account positive spillover effects of innovation and
long-term economic transformation and sustainable development goals. He concludes
that the traditional view that market mechanisms encourage the innovations needed for
sustainable development, including GHG mitigation, works in theory, but is flawed in
practice. This critique is consistent with Taylor’s (2012) findings in an analysis of cap-
and-trade programmes for sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide control.
The research literature on the measurable impacts of the European Union Emissions
Trading System (EU ETS) on low- carbon investments and innovations is growing
(Wettestad this volume). Yet, it is hard to assess as the measurable impact of such deci-
sions are on a timescale of decades. The literature has used data for patenting activities,
surveys and interviews. Decisions on large-scale investments to transform energy systems
are dependent on many factors such as technology policies, economic cycles, energy
prices as well as cultural and social preferences. Nevertheless, taken together, these studies
indicate no significant effects yet, except for possibly some small impacts of EU ETS on
small-scale investments (Laing et al. 2014; Löfgren et al. 2013). Experience shows that
it is not possible to implement an emissions price that is sufficiently high as to spur the

needed innovation effort (Fischer and Newell 2007; Galiana and Green 2009; Jones and
Williams 1998). Regardless, emissions pricing alone will not offer sufficient incentive
as the social rate of return on research and development is often substantially greater
than the private rate of return (Galiana and Green 2009; Jones and Williams 1998).
Innovation investments tend to generate positive knowledge-spillover externalities when
a technology becomes a public good (Jaffe et al. 2005; Popp 2011). Private actors thus
tend to be restrictive in investing in innovation knowledge production (Azar and Sandén
2011). A new push toward increased public spending on LCET will be needed if the inno-
vation efforts are to accelerate.
Even papers in support of a cap-and-trade arrangement to spur innovation point to
the inherent problem of attaining the required stringency in a cap-and-trade based treaty:
‘Studies of the inherent instability of international agreements systems without mecha-
nisms to enforcing participation or compliance imply that cap-and-trade systems based
on such agreements cannot create a credible incentive for long term R&D’ (Montgomery
and Smith 2005, pp. 330). It is well-established in the literature on innovation that unless
the results of research and development (R&D) are fully appropriable, the incentive effect
of even a certain future carbon price will be diluted or eliminated.
AN INNOVATION INVESTMENT BASED CLIMATE

AGREEMENT
A viable alternative to a Kyoto approach would be to stimulate policies and measures that
reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a beneficial side effect of energy modernization (Rayner
2010). While such policies are not dependent on international climate diplomacy, the ques-
tion is whether an international agreement could accelerate domestic initiatives on LCET.
The IEA concludes that the pace of innovation is far below that needed to secure globally
shared energy and environmental goals. After stagnating since the 1970s, LCET research,
development and diffusion (RD&D) have seen a recent increase, partly because it is included
in many countries’ ‘green’ stimulus packages in response to the recession (IEA 2010a).
The IEA estimated in 2010 that US$40–90 billion in annual LCET RD&D spending
would be required if global emissions are to be reduced by half compared with 1990 levels
by 2050. If we include the stimulus spending, investments will have to double from 2009
levels to be in the lower end of the target (IEA 2010b). In its 2013 report Tracking Clean
Energy Progress, the IEA estimates a need for a three-to sixfold increase of global energy
research, development, demonstration and deployment (RDD&D) spending to be on
track for the 2°C target. At least half of that is expected from public sources (IEA 2013).
Previous estimates of energy R&D expenditures necessary to reach the target point to a
need for significant increase. The UNFCCC (2007) estimated that this should be of the
order of increase of two to ten times. In 2009, the IEA called for a lift of three to six times
by the major economies (the EU and 16 other countries) and the following year proposed
a four-to ninefold increase in public expenditure on energy RD&D (IEA 2009, 2010b).
Yet, government spending on energy RD&D investments has remained at between 3 and
4 per cent since 2000. It has only increased by 30 per cent in absolute terms since 1990, still
falling far behind the 11 per cent peak in 1981 (IEA 2013).
Finance is a key issue in the negotiations on a new international climate change

agreement (Dimitrov this volume). Many of the mitigation mechanisms planned to be

included in the new treaty hinge on financial support to developing countries. Developing
countries have also increasingly emphasized the need for financial resources for adapta-
tion measures (Gupta this volume). The US$100 billion per year by 2020 promised in
Copenhagen is so far the most substantial pledge under UNFCCC. It is supposed to be
made up of both public and private contributions and suffice to both mitigation and
adaption measures. Lack of clarity on climate finance may prove to be major obstacles
to building the needed trust between developed and developing countries (Khan and
Roberts 2013).
To be acceptable to all parties of the UNFCCC, an innovation-focused agreement
would need to distribute countries’ contributions to the aggregated investment goal in a
way that could garner support and be implemented domestically. A technology invest-
ment agreement may benefit many developing countries, particularly the major emerging
economies, because of the opportunities to develop new technology and the prospects of
becoming low-cost energy consumers and/or suppliers.
An innovation investment framework could, at the very least, be included in the nation-
ally determined contributions to a new climate agreement. However, to garner developing
country support, any alternative must reflect the cornerstone principle of common but dif-
ferentiated responsibilities. Essentially, this means that countries with the most extensive
emissions track records as well as high financial and technological capacities have a greater
responsibility to advance the goals of the Convention. Reflecting the state of the world
in 1992, these two sub-principles resulted in the binary division of countries into Annex I
(developed) and non-Annex I countries (developing). Most Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development (OECD) countries are concerned that China, for example, has
had no obligations despite its rise in the world economy (Stalley this volume). Resistance to
revising the Annex I division has become an important factor in the UNFCCC deadlock.
Since the beginning of the UNFCCC process, various burden-sharing schemes have been
discussed, based, for example, on historical emissions, wealth, technological capacity and
land area (Friman and Linnér 2008; Page this volume; Thompson and Rayner 1998).
One alternative to the binary division between Annex I and non-Annex I countries
would be to distribute responsibilities to contribute based on countries’ ability to invest,
capacity for innovation and need for energy modernization. The logic behind ‘the capa-
bility/need approach’ is to distribute costs where they do the least damage to the economy
or social system (Rayner 1999). Responses within the International Negotiations Survey
from more than 1,200 participants in the United Nations (UN) climate conferences in
Copenhagen and Cancun shows that that ability to invest, in terms of GDP per capita,
garners great support and little opposition as a way of distributing commitments within
the convention.1 These results hold for both Annex I and non-Annex I countries. The
survey also identified strong support and weak opposition to the right-to-development
principle, which asserts that poorer countries are exempt from emissions-reductions
measures that would interfere with the provision of basic human needs.
Self-identified preferences in questionnaires need to be interpreted with caution, as
actually operationalizing international wealth distribution may change the support.
However, measured against other distribution principles considered in the UN climate
negotiations, ability to invest may provide a viable alternative to the binary annex division
when it comes to sharing the burden of innovation investments.

Table 48.1 Estimated contributions to LCET investments of US$45 billion in research,

development, demonstration and deployment (RDD&D) based on different
ways to calculate contributions based on Gross National Income (GNI) and
GDP per capita (GDP/CAP) in US$ millions (MUSD); selected countries
Country Share of Investment Share of Investment Share based Investment RD&D

global based on GDP/CAP 3 based on on average of based on LCET
GNI, % share of Share of GDP/CAP 3 global average of expenditure,
global GNI GNI, % Share of GNI plus global 2008
MUSD GNI, in GDP/CAP 3 GNI plus
share of GDP/CAP 3
GNI, % share of GNI
China 11.5 5,155 2.7 1,215 7.1 3,185 45
India 4.8 2,180 0.5 246 2.7 1,213 40
Sweden 0.5 230 0.8 349 0.6 290 111
United States 20.9 9,418 39.5 17,796 30.2 13,607 2455
United 3.1 1,410 4.4 1,961 3.7 1,685 185
Kingdom
Tanzania 0.1 34 0 2 0 18 NA
Source: World Bank 2014; IEA 2010b
Table 48.1 provides one illustration of how capacity to pay might be used to distribute
contributions to public funding of US$45 billion for new LCET. The upper figure for
RD&D is estimated by the IEA as necessary to fulfil planned energy needs and to achieve
the UNFCCC objectives assuming half of the US$90 billion will be invested through
private sources. We have also included deployment of LCET in the innovation investment
target. The calculations were based on a combination of country GNI and GDP per
capita, adjusting for purchasing power parity (PPP).
The examples can be refined in many ways of course; for example, by excluding all
countries below a certain gross national income per capita (PPP) or to exclude from the
calculations those who live below a threshold where basic needs, such as food security and
access to education, are not fulfilled. How to raise the contributions, for example through
carbon tax or emission allowance revenues, is up to national policy priorities (Matti this
volume). Also how the investments should be prioritized can be determined by national
priorities; indeed they would have to be for this approach to receive the necessary domes-
tic political support. Technologies must be deployed according to geographical, resource-
based and socio-economic conditions. National governments would be free to return
investment revenues to the economy as they see fit.
If LCET is to contribute substantively to the transformation of the global energy
system, then it would have to be adopted on a large scale by both developing and devel-
oped countries. RDD&D supported through an UNFCCC mechanism must therefore
ensure that a substantial portion of the investment targets individual country needs
in developing countries. For example, this could be channelled through funding for
the Climate Innovation Centres in developing countries set up through the UNFCCC
or the Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs), the current UNFCCC
support function by which developing countries can pledge voluntary contributions,

either domestically supported or facilitated by international funding. Furthermore, we

would expect the investment-based agreement to strengthen energy access for adaptation
measures as well as other sustainable development objectives of the Convention, such as
poverty reduction, increased electricity access and phasing out hazardous cooking fuels
(Forsyth this volume).
The prospect of one billion people still without access to electricity and 2.7 billion
without access to clean cooking facilities by 2030 would be a tremendous political failure
(IEA 2011b). Investment in RDD&D for LCET would give the UN a new and mean-
ingful role in the struggle to promote alternatives to fossil fuels, alternatives that will be
needed to secure energy modernization for development priorities.
NOTE
1. The International Negotiations Survey database contains more than 8,000 questionnaire responses from
delegates to the Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC, participants in 70 side-events as well as side-event
organizers. For data access, see www.internationalnegotiationssurvey.se.
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49. Knowledge pluralism
Mike Hulme
INTRODUCTION
In December 2011, atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of
Washington, Stanford, resigned from his Lead Author position in the 5th Assessment
Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In explaining
his surprise resignation Caldeira raised the following question:
I am all for scientific reviews and assessments . . . however, it is not clear how much additional
benefit there is to having a huge bureaucratic scientific review effort under UN auspices . . . can
anybody point to any important positive outcomes resulting from the IPCC AR4 process? Is
there reason to expect a greater positive impact from the IPCC AR5 process? (quoted in Revkin
2011)
This is indeed a question. What has been (what will be) the positive impact on policy,
and ultimately on climate, of the four-year effort made by the 800 scientists and social
scientists to produce AR5? Does governing the climate become any easier through sheer
weight of knowledge? At the same time that Caldeira was resigning from the IPCC, Ban
Ki-moon, secretary-general of the United Nations (UN), was raising the same question,
but more obliquely, in his address to the international political negotiating community at
the 17th Conference of the Parties in Durban:
It would be difficult to overstate the gravity of this moment. Without exaggeration, we can
say: the future of our planet is at stake. The science is clear. The WMO [World Meteorological
Organization] has reported that carbon emissions are at their highest in history and rising. The
IPCC tells us, unequivocally, that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by half by 2050 – if we
are to keep the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees since pre-industrial times. You are the people
who can bring us from the edge. The world is looking to you for leadership. (Ban Ki-moon 2011)
‘The science is clear,’ he said. But the politics are not. Knowing facts, or creating projec-
tions of the possible future, is not synonymous with enacting change in the world. In
which case, as Caldeira asked, why another IPCC report? Why more knowledge? Dan
Sarewitz has argued that there is already a surfeit of knowledge: ‘If humanity is unable
or unwilling to make wise use of existing technical knowledge . . . is there any reason
to believe that new knowledge will succeed where old knowledge has failed?’ (Sarewitz
1996, p. 142, emphasis added). The recent move to coalesce an enlarged global change
knowledge community through the Future Earth initiative (ICSU 2014), launched at
the Planet under Pressure (PuP) Conference in March 2012 in London, offered one
response to Sarewitz’s problem of excess knowledge. It is not so much that there is a lack
of knowledge, the thinking went, but that the knowledge that proliferates is of the wrong
sort to drive effective political and social action. Instead, knowledge is needed about
climate change that is ‘solutions-oriented, inter-disciplinary and participative.’
555
The convener of the London Planet under Pressure Conference conceives the relation-
ship between knowledge and politics in a particular way: ‘Achieving a sustainable world
will require . . . research . . . to build the consensus required for effective action at national
and global scales. There is no other viable way forward’ (Stafford-Smith et al. 2012, p. 6,
emphasis added). Consensual knowledge (of the right sort) is believed necessary to build
political consensus, which in turn is believed necessary for enacting change in the world.
The tone of this manifesto—‘there is no other way’—epitomizes the frustration of many
in the knowledge community concerned about climate change. If knowledge drives politi-
cal action (as they would understand it) and if there is no effective political action (as
many would claim), then knowledge must be made to work harder—to be made more
consensual—to overwhelm the political processes, which stand in the way of change.
If this cannot be achieved, then the alternative would be to suspend those obstructive
processes of democratic politics in favor of something more authoritarian. Or as Jim
Lovelock suggested a few years ago referring to climate change, ‘It may be necessary to
put democracy on hold for a while’ (quoted in Hickman 2010; see also Shearman and
Smith 2007).
In this chapter I reflect on the aspiration for climate governance from the perspective
of knowledge and its relationship with different understandings of agency (‘what causes
the climate?’) and democracy (‘who decides, and how do they decide, what to do?’). In
particular I suggest that the line of thinking summarized by PuP fails to do justice to
the political realities of the contemporary world. The chapter proceeds in four stages.
First, I describe briefly the changing relationship between knowledge and culture in the
context of enduring human attempts to bring order to (‘to govern’) the disorderliness
of climate. Second, I consider the implications for climate governance of the dominant
contemporary understanding of climate, namely as a calculable and predictable physi-
cal interconnected global system. Knowledge becomes inseparable from power and for
climate to be governed effectively, a high premium is placed on making this knowledge
global and consensual. I then reflect on the forms of democracy that are either assumed
or erased through these processes of knowledge-and decision-making. Finally, I consider
alternative moves that do not place knowledge as the sine qua non of climate governance
and which suggest that global climate is perhaps the wrong object of governance.
AGENCY . . . AND KNOWLEDGE
The idea of climate has deep and varied cultural origins since all human societies have
had to find ways of making sense of the turbulent atmosphere in which they live. Neither
is human anxiety about the performance of weather and climate anything new (Boia
2005). Climate never quite performs in the way humans want it to; it is too hot or too
cold, too wet or too dry, too unreliable or too tempestuous. The human imagination has
therefore embraced different explanations for the capriciousness of their weather and
this has led to different discourses of blame and weather control across different eras and
cultures. Let me give a few examples (Hulme 2008).
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European cultures frequently found expla-
nation for adverse weather as an expression of God’s will or as the work of the Devil.
Some elements of society held witches directly responsible for the high frequency of

Knowledge pluralism 557
amaging climatic anomalies during this era and some women were burned at the stake
d
as a scapegoat; an unpleasant form of climate governance one might say. In November
1703, a severe gale devastated parts of southern England and the damage was vividly
recorded by Daniel Defoe in his classic contemporaneous account ‘The Storm.’ This cli-
matic disaster occurred as scientific empiricism and naturalism was first emerging across
Europe, yet the dominant frame of causation remained theological; a national fast day
was held on January 19, 1704 to ask for God’s forgiveness and blessing on the nation.
As meteorological instrumentation rapidly extended across Europe during the early
nineteenth century, the idea of climate started to become detached from narrative
accounts of place, identity and cultural meaning in favor of universal scientific descrip-
tions. Standardized measurement enabled comparative analysis of climates in different
places—often linked to imperial projects in the tropics—and the ‘purification’ of climate
became part of the wider disenchantment of nature. For example, naturalistic explana-
tions for the anomalous weather events of 1816 in Europe—the ‘year without a summer’
following the 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano—were sought and the Swiss Natural
Sciences Society established a prize for the best explanation of the declining Swiss climate
(Bodenmann et al. 2011).
This modernist project had repercussions for how climate could conceivably be
‘governed’ (Stripple and Bulkeley this volume). As climate became disenchanted, it
became politicized. Secular explanatory frameworks emerged for how climatic misde-
meanors could be attributed to the wrong sorts of political projects rather than to the
expression of divine or satanic will. For example, the utopian socialist Charles Fourier
writing in the 1820s observed that: ‘Climatic disorder is a vice inherent to civilized cul-
tures that disrupts everything due to the battle between individual and the collective inter-
est’ (Fourier 1824, cited in Locher and Fressoz 2012). Two hundred years ago, climate
thus became an object of political governance; land clearance, forest decline, rampant
individualism all became tightly bound up with the fate of the climate (Locher and
Fressoz 2012). Without political association, Fourier would write, ‘those great labours
. . . which are necessary to bring the earth and the atmosphere into a healthy condition
are impossible.’ This new scientific knowledge of meteorology also opened the way for
more technologically oriented projects of weather control and governance. Technological
entrepreneurs in nineteenth-century America, for example, believed that rain could be
artificially induced by triggering explosions in mid-air, while in the immediate years fol-
lowing the Second World War, American scientists pioneered cloud seeding techniques
and even experimented with interventions to steer hurricanes away from landfall. These
too, one might say, were crude forms of climate governance.
Today’s dominant explanatory framework for the vicissitudes of climate offers a
thorough-going materialist account of climate. This framework is supported by Earth
system science, by globalized flows of digital data and by representations of manipulated
global climates in computer simulation models. Climate’s behavior is believed to emerge
from a deeply interconnected global physical system, a system which human activities
are now influencing, physically but not meta-physically, in a variety of ways. Although
this may be the dominant account of climate causation, in fact a more diverse matrix of
worldviews remains in circulation, a matrix that supports different notions of agency.
This plurality of cosmologies has been shown, for example, in Pacific cultures (e.g.,
Rudiak-Gould 2014), but competing conceptions of agency with regard to the weather

Table 49.1 A simple typology relating notions of human and divine agency
Human agency matters Human agency doesn’t count

Divine agency Religious optimists Religious fatalists
No divine agency Liberal progressives Fatalists, hedonists
are not limited to non-Western settings. The ultimate ‘causes’ of climate change are many
and varied in the popular imagination and include physical process (whether human-
influenced or not), the spirits, God, capitalism and Gaia. This supports a simple typology
with respect to who has influence on the climate (Table 49.1). How people understand the
relationship between agency and climate has a significant bearing on how climate may or
may not be governed.
KNOWLEDGE . . . AND POWER
Despite this coexistence of different worldviews at a popular level, for most political and
intellectual elites climate change is understood through a materialist paradigm. By under-
standing and enumerating climate system behavior in this way, science has placed (global)
climate in the line of various other projects of high modernism. As James Scott explains
in his book Seeing Like a State (Scott 1998), governments of the modern era have sought
to exercise their powers of regulation and control through enumeration of an expand-
ing array of subjects; thus a formalized cartography managed territorial disputes, the
national census disciplined citizens of the state and the index of gross domestic product
(GDP) regulated the national economy. The scientific account of weather and climate, as
distinct from earlier or contemporaneous non-materialist accounts of agency, opens the
way for climate to be similarly governed by the state (or in the case of global climate by
an association of states).
These moves have been theorized by Michel Foucault in the 1970s with his concept
of governmentality. The two key developments involved here are, first, making indexical
representations of the phenomenon to be governed and then, second, applying tech-
nologies of state intervention to manipulate that index towards a desired goal (Lövbrand
et al. 2009; Stripple and Bulkeley this volume). Entities, whether citizens, the economy
or climate, have first to be enumerated (e.g., through the creation of digital knowledge)
before technologies of control (e.g., pricing, regulation) can be exercised by the state.
Knowledge and power therefore become tightly connected. How one knows shapes how
one governs. Knowledge practices are tied to political rationalities that make the applica-
tion of power seem both natural and inevitable (Turnhout et al. 2014, this volume).
Applying this logic to climate governance suggests that the global kinds of knowledge
about climate that are brought forth by institutions such as the IPCC serve particular
expressions of power. For example, the global temperature index, global warming poten-
tials, the global carbon budget and Earth system models all become means through which
certain forms of governing action become imaginable and executable (Hulme 2010). Just
as a well-functioning economy became defined in the 1950s in terms of GDP growth
(Fioramonti 2013), which became the target around which government economic policy

focused, so a desirable global climate has become defined in terms of a stable global
temperature. While the economy is governed to secure GDP growth of 2 to 3 percent per
annum, the climate is to be governed to stabilize global temperature at no greater than
2°C warmer than the nineteenth-century level. This remarkable subjugation of climate–
society relations to the index of 2°C carries repercussions. For example, as revealed in
the earlier quote from Ban Ki-moon, human security becomes narrowly defined in terms
of an indexed global climate and effective political leadership in the world is reduced to
securing the 2°C target. Indexing desirable climates to global temperature also opens
the way for certain forms of technological adventurism to be imagined (Curvelo 2013),
for example the injection of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere and the creation of a
‘global thermostat’ (Hansson et al. this volume; Hulme 2014a).
The forms of knowledge that are most needed to secure these climate governance
objectives are then defined through circular reasoning. Scientific knowledge, and its
attendant political rationality, defines the object of climate governance to be securing
no more than a 2°C rise in global temperature. The same forms of global knowledge,
now under demand for ever greater precision, are then used by new global governance
systems to regulate climate to this end. This then becomes the language that emerges
from numerous transnational research programs and initiatives: globalized knowledge,
integration, action and solutions are knit together in institutionalized form and delivery.
These knowledge programs are to be the saviors of the planet.
Thus the Future Earth initiative referred to earlier is echoed by the Belmont Funders
Forum which calls for ‘transdisciplinary collaboration to address the coupled environ-
mental and socio-economic solutions to environmental change’ (Belmont Forum 2012).
Cornell et al. (2013), working for the European Science Foundation, argue for knowledge
systems which can ‘ensure effective interfacing arrangements for translating knowledge
to action,’ while the International Social Science Council urges ‘the social sciences to
take the lead in developing a new integrated, transformative science of global change’
(Hackmann and St. Clair 2012). And the flagship Earth System Governance Project of
the old International Human Dimensions Programme calls for ‘a fundamental reorienta-
tion and restructuring of national and international institutions towards more effective
Earth system governance and planetary stewardship’ (Biermann et al. 2012, p. 1306).
What is wrong with such programs is that they start from a predefined and singu-
lar understanding of the nature and place of knowledge necessary in political life.
Insufficient attention in these normative visions is paid to plural epistemologies or to
political philosophy: that is, to different cultural models of relating science and democ-
racy or to the difficulties of reconciling divergent human beliefs and values, especially in
transnational settings (Jasanoff this volume). Infrequently is there any direct question-
ing of how knowledge does and should relate to political debate and decision-making.
Instead, the implicit assumption seems to be that: (1) knowledge leads to action; (2) more
certain knowledge leads to more definite action; and (3) more integrated knowledge leads
to more joined-up action.
These (mostly implicit) assumptions reveal at work the linear model of science–policy
interaction (Balconi et al. 2010), which asserts that if researchers could only fill gaps in
knowledge, or skillfully join knowledge together, decision-making and policy enactment
would be easier to do (Beck this volume). The world would surely be a better and more
sustainable place. Development geographer Kathleen O’Reilly describes this position

succinctly in the context of knowledge for sustainable development: ‘if we knew just
a bit more, success would be imminent . . . there will come a point when we will know
enough and then development interventions will deliver on their promised positive out-
comes’ (O’Reilly et al. 2011, p. 2795, emphasis added). Confidence in this linear model,
in the power of ‘new knowledge’ to enable wise choices to be made, was expressed back
in 1990 by Sir John Houghton on the publication of the First Assessment Report of the
IPCC: ‘I am confident that the [IPCC] Assessment . . . will provide the necessary firm
scientific foundation for the forthcoming . . . negotiations on the appropriate strategy for
response and action regarding the issue of climate change’ (IPCC 1990, p. v, emphasis
added).
POWER . . . AND DEMOCRACY
The declaration that came from the Planet Under Pressure Conference in 2012 called
for one integrated knowledge system, serving one over-arching goal, to be delivered by
a unitary global governance system. The Earth system governance proposals emerg-
ing from this conference and from the later Future Earth initiative offer one form of
(global) politics drawing upon one form of (global) knowledge. ‘There is no other viable
way forward.’ The danger in such a singular conception of knowledge-for-policy is well
expressed by Kathleen O’Reilly:
If the will to know is deployed to gain knowledge for controlling others, then the will to know
is also a will to power. Although the will to power may be couched in terms of ‘doing good,’ it
remains a desire to know the world in order to manipulate people’s behavior. (O’Reilly et al.
2011, p. 2795, emphasis added)
How are assent and legitimacy to be given to such a unitary vision in an increasingly
expressive, connected and plural world? There is a need for more open arguments about
the forms of governance and politics—and hence the sorts of knowledge—that best serve
the diverse and diverging human projects that proliferate around the world that have a
bearing on climate change (Fischer this volume). Climate governance is not about creat-
ing the right forms of knowledge. It is thinking first about what forms of governance and
democracy are desirable and needed. Politics precedes knowledge.
Elements of this debate have been joined by numerous science and technology studies
(STS) scholars (e.g., Latour 1999; Leuschner 2012; Stehr and Grundmann 2012). For
example, Durant (2011) contrasted the positions of two prominent STS scholars, Harry
Collins and Sheila Jasanoff. In essence, the question is how should liberal democracies
structure public discussion and organize decision-making on matters that have a knowl-
edge content (as in the case of climate change)? Collins’ so-called ‘third wave’ of science
studies would bracket-out personal and cultural value commitments from knowledge
claims, demarcating political from technical questions and thereby authorizing experts
to be unchallenged experts. Jasanoff is critical of such a stance, arguing for deliberation
and participation across all relevant questions and for co-production between science
and society from upstream to downstream concerns. Durant then suggests these two
positions can be caricatured respectively by Rawlsian public reason and by Habermasian
discourse ethics.

There is no easy resolution to this debate. There are weaknesses and dangers in both
positions: capture by hegemons and elites on the one hand; dissolution into relativism
and identity politics on the other. But failure to engage with the debate or to reflect on the
different implications of the forms of knowledge being constructed about climate change
is surely not an option. Yet many of the programs cited above have failed to do just this,
at least on the radical political terms outlined by Swyngedouw (2013). Instead, the ques-
tions concerning climate governance which should be deliberated before knowledge gets
made take us a long way away from the linear model of science–policy interaction. They
would include the following:
● How is ‘expert’ knowledge accommodated within the wishes of ‘the people’?

● How are different versions of ‘the good life’ to be evaluated?
● Should cultural norms be deliberately engineered?
● What is the right balance between volunteerism and coercion?
● What forms of democracy—representative, participatory, centralized—are most
desirable?
● What is wrong with authoritarian environmentalism?
If the political nature of knowledge assessments such as IPCC or Future Earth is not
explicitly recognized, then knowledge will become contested on ostensibly non-political
grounds. It is even possible that the consensual knowledge-making practices of the
IPCC have actually made climate governance harder rather than easier (Hulme 2013;
Pepermans and Maeseele 2014). Better to be upfront about the politics of representation
in knowledge-making institutions, than to find knowledge claims standing in as a proxy
for political contest and obscuring the legitimate debate about goals and process. As
political theorist Chantel Mouffe explains in her book On the Political:
the belief in the possibility of a universal, rational consensus has put democratic thinking on the
wrong track. Instead of trying to design the institutions which, through supposedly ‘impartial’
procedures, would reconcile conflicting interests and values, the task for democratic theorists
and politicians should be to envisage the creation of a vibrant ‘agonistic’ public sphere of con-
testation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted. (Mouffe 2005, p. 3)
CAN GLOBAL CLIMATE BE GOVERNED?
The problems of governing climate have little to do with ‘gaps’ in knowledge that need
filling or ‘disconnects’ in knowledge that need integrating. The problems are proce-
dural and deliberative: how to decide what to do when worldviews and value systems
clash, whatever knowledge we may possess at any given moment? In contrast to John
Houghton’s confidence about the ‘firm foundations’ that he thought the IPCC was laying
down in 1990, Jean Goodwin, professor of rhetoric at Iowa State University, has a dif-
ferent take on the matter: ‘Maybe those of us who favour doing something about climate
change should admit that our policies aren’t going to have a “firm foundation” . . . and
start arguing about values and solutions instead’ (Goodwin 2009, emphasis added).
Addressing these arguments is a task of democratic theory and political philosophy.
These disciplines ask difficult questions about how democracies should be ordered and,

if not democracy, then what other forms of political organization and representation
are desirable for the Anthropocene. Such confrontations cannot escape dealing with
normative issues where knowledge-thickening (Davey 2011) rather than gap-filling is the
most we can achieve: issues such as goodness, justice, wellbeing, democracy and teleol-
ogy. They will not be resolved through merely discovering more knowledge. Reasoning
together in public to make ‘actionable knowledge’ must allow for the expression of con-
trasting value commitments, however inconvenient this may be.
This takes us towards the idea of ‘non-modern steering’ (Rip 2006) rather than of a
high-modernist project of governance, a reflexive activity in which it is more important
to make spaces for learning than to make knowledge for solutions. This would suggest
drawing upon elements of radical democracy, deliberative democracy, civic republican-
ism and political pragmatism, aspects of which I have alluded to thus far. Let me finish
by suggesting two directions that strike me as promising responses to climate change, not
least because they are able to pursue active projects in the world without making exclu-
sionary commitments to singular forms of knowledge.
The first is towards what has become known as climate pragmatism (Prins et al. 2010;
Atkinson et al. 2011). Climate pragmatism draws attention to the virtues of knowledge
pluralism and political pragmatism. Pluralism offers checks and balances to scientific
and political projects alike. It recognizes the inevitability of competing values and goals
and concedes that a world of more than seven billion people cannot move together. Such
a world will not agree on a single thermostat setting for the planet nor on a universal
governance system (Hulme 2014a). The corollary of epistemic pluralism is pragmatism.
Philosophical pragmatism forgoes the goal of establishing an ultimate truth in favor of
working with merely satisfactory truths, while political pragmatism suggests a cautious
and flexible approach to defining the problems we decide to tackle.
Pragmatism is thus content to recognize and name problems like climate change as
being neither definable nor solvable. It reframes the object(s) to be governed. Instead of
seeking to govern global climate, pragmatism is content to pursue multiple and clumsy
solutions to regularly reframed problems in order to achieve merely incremental gains.
‘Once we conceive of the [climate change] problem in its parts and not only its entirety,
new avenues will be opened up for negotiation. This is what we need most right now:
successes, even smallish ones, and new approaches that promise more successes’ (Barrett
2010). A pragmatic approach to climate–society relations does not set out to govern
climate, least of all through centralizing narratives, knowledges and policy frameworks.
It approaches the risks and dangers of a changing climate in ways which are more
open to multiple forms of governance, knowledge and democracy. Policy interventions
become deliberately fragmented and piecemeal (Prins et al. 2010). This is in the spirit of
Lindblom’s ‘muddling through’ (Lindblom 1959).
But there is another possible direction of movement that takes us even further away
from the high-modernist project of global climate governance driven by a universal
rationalist knowledge. While many of the transnational global change research programs
mentioned above call for ‘political action’ and ‘changes in the behavior of citizens,’ they
seem strangely reticent to enter into the knowledge worlds of politics, cultures, religions
and beliefs (Castree et al. 2014). This latter knowledge seeks out meaning, purpose and
identity, which for many provide the wellspring for motivated action in the world. Such
personal knowledge engages in complex ways with the positivist knowledge favored by

the transnational knowledge institutions. Absent in most of the cases of programmatic

research I have mentioned is an enthusiastic embrace of the humanities or a reflective
engagement with individual and collective human beliefs. Living with climate change is
about being rather than knowing, agonism not consensus, qualities before techniques,
processes not ends and emergence rather than control. How we live culturally matters
more than asserting technologies of control (cf. Jasanoff’s ‘technologies of humility’;
Jasanoff 2007). As Stirling explains in the context of the rhetoric of green transforma-
tion, ‘Recognising that [the processes of transformation] are more like the dynamics of
low culture than high policy . . . [they] might be thought of more as the “culturing” than
the controlling of radical social change’ (Stirling 2015).
Rather than putting science, economics, politics or the planet at the center of the story
of climate change, I am suggesting that an understanding and expression of human
purpose and virtue are placed at the center (Hulme 2014b). This of course sits awkwardly
with those who believe that the dangers of climate change can be diffused only through
various programmatic policy interventions guided by ‘actionable knowledge.’ But living
with climate change raises issues that are humanistic before they are political or scientific.
This was recognized by the European Science Foundation’s RESCUE (Responses to
Environmental and Societal Challenges for our Unstable Earth) project when they con-
cluded that the Anthropocene ‘creates a completely novel situation posing fundamentally
new questions, including issues related to ethics, culture, religion and human rights, and
requiring new approaches and ways of thinking, understanding and acting’ (ESF 2012,
p. 13).
Responding to the idea of climate change in this way is about cultivating the human
imagination and developing an acute sense of good character as the telos of man, rather
than it is about governing the climate through the instruments of reason and technology.
The call from Rio120 for a global conversation about ‘the world we want’ (UN 2012) was
perhaps at least a step in this direction. Before setting out on any project of global climate
governance, the prior question needs to be asked: what is the telos of Anthropos—what is
the goal of humankind? What are ‘the aspirations of all citizens’ as the call from Rio120
puts it? Is the goal (human) survival—at any cost? Is it sustained economic growth or
maximizing human longevity? Is it securing social justice or promoting some notion of
political freedom? The answer(s) will of course be plural, but what I am suggesting is that
any system of governance needs a more explicit Aristotelian contemplation on the good
life, the nature of wellbeing and the cultivation of virtue (cf. Hulme 2014b). The challenge
to be faced becomes less to make ‘the world we want’ than it is to be ‘the people we want
to be.’ Learning to govern ourselves might be a more necessary project than the ambition
to govern the climate.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An early version of this chapter was presented as the Alexander von Humboldt Lecture
at Radboud University Nijmegen in December 2013. Preparing this chapter has also ben-
efitted from the award of a Carson Writing Fellowship to the author, held at the Rachel
Carson Center at LMU Munich during the summer of 2014. Feedback from the editors
on an initial version of this chapter is also acknowledged.

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50. The future
Paul G. Harris
INTRODUCTION
Climate change is a consequence of politics—whether and how governmental and
non-governmental actors negotiate their respective roles and whether they do what is
necessary to mitigate its causes and consequences. If politics is about action, the politics
of climate change have failed. Despite more than three decades of scientific research,
diplomatic negotiations, national policymaking, environmental activism and technologi-
cal progress, far too little has been done relative to the scale of the problem (Andresen
this volume). Emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) continue to increase and efforts to
adapt to the problem are orders of magnitude below what is required, especially in the
world’s poorest places. A vital question is whether the future of climate politics will be
any less of a failure than its past.
It is not possible to predict the future with certainty, especially not very far into it. All
one can do is speculate. This can be done by reflecting on how the various actors have
behaved in the past and by considering established and evolving forces that may shape
and possibly alter the future in significant ways. Thinking about the future is important
because it can inform politicians about likely outcomes. When these are undesirable,
anticipating them can help politicians and policymakers avoid them—to, in effect, alter
the future so that the world potentially breaks free of regrettable trends. Doing this for
climate change will require major changes in the way that governments and other actors
behave. Alas, it is unlikely that climate politics will be up to the task of significantly miti-
gating, least of all preventing, very painful impacts, or indeed enabling adequate adapta-
tion to them. It is very likely that greenhouse pollution will continue to grow for some
decades, the Earth will continue to warm, climate will change in adverse ways and there
will be enormous human suffering, including many deaths. Nevertheless, alternative and
better futures may be real options; the situation need not be as bad as current trends are
set to make it. Indeed, the growing realization of likely failure might push policymakers
to do what is necessary to mitigate the most adverse effects.
As a means to consider the future of climate politics, this chapter looks briefly at a
number of key issues that have been important in recent decades and that look likely to
remain so for decades to come. The focus is on politics among and within states, with
some comments on other important themes. Each topic is covered only briefly in part
because this is an honest way to treat the future: the more detailed one becomes, the
less accurate one is likely to be. Before concluding, the chapter proposes a cosmopolitan
alternative to extant and likely climate politics. According to this proposal, by making
persons, including their rights and responsibilities, much more prominent in climate
politics, the world may be able to break through the multiple roadblocks that have so far
prevented effective responses to climate change.
566
The future 567
CLIMATE POLITICS AMONG STATES
Much of the focus of climate politics has been at the international level, most clearly
manifested in diplomatic negotiations that have resulted in a climate ‘regime’ comprising
a number of treaties and agreements (Dimitrov this volume). Negotiations have taken a
very traditional approach: they have been about the narrowly perceived national interests
of the states involved. This preoccupation with national interests has prevented robust
action on promoting the collective interest in combatting climate change. Indeed, all of
the agreements reached so far have resulted in only tiny limitations—but most definitely
not cuts—in global GHG emissions. What these agreements have mostly produced is
more international negotiations. The question is whether national and collective interests
will come together in the future to produce vastly stronger agreements that finally stem
and then drastically reduce climate pollution, and which do far more to prepare for inevi-
table impacts.
Diplomacy and International Negotiations
Extraordinarily complex international negotiations have been the stuff of climate politics
for more than a quarter century. This will continue because the normal response of states
is to deal with collective action problems through international negotiations and agree-
ments. Negotiations so far have resulted in the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, requiring modest GHG emissions limita-
tions—sometimes emissions cuts, sometimes limitations on emissions increases—by a
number of developed countries. If these agreements can be considered successful at all
it is in their role in serving as scaffolding for a broader and deeper international climate
change regime comprising these formal treaties and a number of less formal agreements
on the norms of climate politics. For example, up to now the prevailing assumption is
that most developed countries—certainly the United States and most European states—
are more responsible for acting on climate change (Bang, Dupont and Oberthür this
volume) This has been manifested in the principle of ‘common but differentiated respon-
sibility’ (CBDR): at least in principle, the world’s developed, more affluent states agreed
to take the lead by reducing their GHG emissions and by also helping developing coun-
tries to implement environmentally sustainable development and to adapt to the impacts
of climate change (Gupta this volume). This principle has been only barely implemented,
and it has come into open question as many developing countries, notably China, have
become more affluent and thus far-larger sources of GHG pollution than some might
have expected as recently as the 1990s (Stalley this volume). Hence we are now seeing an
evolving norm, pushed by the US especially, demanding that all countries act to address
climate change, albeit in accordance with their own (normally self-defined) capabilities.
At the time of this writing, governments are working assiduously to negotiate a post-
Kyoto treaty for implementation from 2020, ostensibly one that will require emissions
limitations (if not always cuts) by almost all countries. There is little reason to expect that
this agreement will be very successful, at least if success is defined as avoiding dangerous
climate change. No doubt it will involve emissions commitments by country parties, but
these will not be enough to avert considerable global warming and, like past agreements,
they are unlikely to be fully implemented by many of the largest polluters. The short-term

national interests of states, or more precisely perceived national interests—normally

defined in terms of economic growth and the national economic status quo (i.e., protec-
tion of particular national industries)—will continue to greatly influence future interna-
tional climate negotiations and the manner in which those are translated into concrete
policy action at the national level. Ceteris paribus, in international climate diplomacy and
treaty making, national interests will continue to trump, more or less, collective environ-
mental interests (Vogler this volume). If climate politics has a single theme, this is it.
Developed–Developing Country Relations
As in other aspects of international relations, there has been considerable ‘North–South’

rivalry in climate diplomacy (Gupta this volume). Because addressing climate change
requires the participation of larger developing countries, they have had more influence
than was traditionally the case in other issue areas. The need to garner participation
of major developing countries was very influential in bringing about agreement on
the principle of CBDR, in turn shaping subsequent formal and informal agreements.
For example, the Kyoto Protocol did not require developing countries to take on any
GHG emissions obligations whatsoever. To this day, emissions from China—the largest
national source globally—are not formally restricted by any treaty (Stalley this volume).
On top of the failure of almost all wealthy countries to limit their emissions significantly,
growing emissions from developing countries have essentially made a mockery of climate
diplomacy: it has not reduced, and only barely held back the growth of, GHG pollution.
The principle of categorizing states as ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ in the international
politics of climate change is coming under greater stress. The definition of ‘developing’
is becoming less clear: some wealthy countries of Asia are included in this category, as
is China, now the second largest economy in the world. The poorest countries, once in
alliance with China and other less-poor developing countries, now see China and some
of the other relatively affluent ‘developing’ nations as part of the problem that will harm
the poorest countries the most. Traditional solidarity among developing countries has
broken down, with the trend now toward China, India and other major countries doing
what the most-developed countries did when they were developing: polluting the atmos-
phere to the greatest detriment of the world’s poor. Not surprisingly, this has resulted
in more agreement between the relatively affluent ‘developing’ nations and the most-
developed countries, including China and the US, on climate change priorities.
The principle of CBDR is also under greater strain as developed states find it hard to
justify helping quite affluent developing ones. For example, while the past justifies Europe
aiding China in the context of climate change, the fact that China is using its vast foreign
reserves to invest in European businesses at least leaves European citizens to ask why they
are obliged to aid their financial benefactor, especially during hard economic times. Thus
future climate diplomacy will see much more disagreement among developing countries
and more common ground between the fastest growing developing countries and the his-
torically developed ones, exacerbating existing political differences among developed states
(for example, between the Americans and the Europeans) and between them and develop-
ing countries. The effect will not be robust, strong and effective international agreements to
combat climate change, but rather imperfect agreements that result in more muddling along,
albeit increasingly in the right direction, much as we have witnessed in recent decades.

The future 569
Climate Leadership
The international politics of climate change arguably requires leadership, but leadership
has been in very short supply (Parker and Karlsson this volume). For some years the
assumption was that the US should and would be the leader in climate diplomacy, with
leadership defined here as clearly moving in a direction that would help to prevent a
climate crisis. Insofar as the US has been a leader on climate diplomacy, it has often used
its power to prevent more robust policies to deal with the problem (Bang this volume). It
has tended (usually during Democratic presidential administrations) to support agree-
ments only when they do not require Americans to do much. At times (usually during
Republican administrations) is has actively tried to prevent any action whatsoever. The
administration of President Barack Obama has acted to limit US GHG pollution, for
example by pushing for tighter automobile efficiency standards and by requiring power
plants to use less coal. However, Congress is opposed to these measures (see below). In
lieu of US leadership, Western European states and the European Union in particular
have taken on a sort of leadership role (Dupont and Oberthür this volume). They have
pushed climate change negotiations toward greater international equity and the adoption
of developed-country GHG emissions limitations, albeit not nearly enough. To some
extent, the Europeans have acted by example; some European Union (EU) member states
have taken on difficult emissions cuts (see below). However, the Europeans have been and
remain held back by fear that unilateral action on climate change will make them uncom-
petitive relative to the US and other countries.
This has left the world looking for alternative leadership. From whence might it come?
Which state or group of states would want to lead this endeavor, and why? Surprisingly,
the answer might be found in Asia. China or, more specifically, the growing affluent
classes of China, could hold the key to climate leadership. One thing that has changed
utterly since international climate negotiations began is the economic rise of China, the
associated explosion of GHG pollution from China, and the growing wealth of tens
of millions of people in China. While there is no chance that China as a sovereign state
will soon accept major binding obligations to cut its GHG emissions greatly—doing
that would violate its strong and closely held interpretation of CBDR among states—
the Chinese government might be willing to implement policies (e.g., luxury taxes and
regulations) that curb significantly emissions of some of its most affluent people. Doing
this would launch China into the role of climate leader because it would be doing what
developed states have been demanding that it do: taking on emissions limitations as its
pollution and wealth grow. If China does this, it would leave the developed nations with
no justifiable excuse (short of naked, short-term national interests) to avoid following
China’s lead (see below and Harris 2013).
CLIMATE POLITICS WITHIN STATES: THE US, EUROPE AND

CHINA
The international politics of climate change are overwhelming influenced by domestic

politics within countries (see chapters Bang, Viola and Hochstetler, Stalley this volume).
More specifically, they are dominated by national governments’ perceptions of their

interests, the desire to protect the national economy, the powerful influence of domestic
vested interests and a strong bias toward business as usual. In economically developed
democracies, politicians do not want to suffer the potential political consequences of
requiring citizens to take on GHG emissions cuts and the associated obligations, even
when the ‘pain’ that their constituents experience might be nothing more than small
economic costs and changes to lifestyle that benefit those making them (e.g., the proven
health benefits of eating much less meat, the production of which contributes greatly
to climate pollution). In developing countries, politicians do not want their citizens and
industries to bear the burdens of mitigating climate change or adapting to it when they
believe strongly that the developed world is to blame and owes them compensation, and
they do not want to face any climate-related restrictions that might hold back economic
growth. More generally, politicians are risk averse: they do not want to bear the political
costs of policies that will have future (long-term) environmental and other benefits but
for which they fear present (short-term) political costs (Howlett 2014). The result is an
intense bias toward the status quo, with the result being muddling along in climate policy,
characterized by new policies around the world that are significant and commendable but
nevertheless vastly less than what is required to reverse the climate crisis.
The United States
Until quite recently, no other country mattered more for climate change than the United
States. It was until about a decade ago the largest national source of GHG pollution,
and it remains the largest historical polluter by most measures (Mathews et al. 2014).
Per capita emissions among Americans remain very high by global standards—several
times those in Western Europe and many times those in the world’s poor countries. The
US is an energy-intensive society; Americans rely in relatively low-cost energy for their
lifestyles, characterized by widespread use of private automobiles and mass consumerism
that is encouraged by cheap imported products. The latter often come from China and
other developing countries where energy use is growing, meaning that the GHG pollu-
tion built into imported products that Americans consume make its overall consumption
emissions (measured where things are consumed rather than the traditional method of
measuring production emissions where things are made) very high indeed. Recently US
GHG pollution has started to decline as the country shifts to using more natural gas from
increased domestic production and as automobiles become more efficient. American
climate politics is typified by policies that mitigate climate pollution—it is on track to
achieve an earlier pledge to cut emissions by 17 percent (compared to 2005)—but which
are always weak relative to the scale of the problem.
This is because US climate politics are a function of battles between those who want
to attack the problem aggressively and those who either do not believe in the reality of
climate change—including a large minority of US legislators who actively try to sow
doubt about the problem (Grundmann this volume). For example, the Republican chair
of the US Senate’s environment committee, James Inhofe, wrote a book arguing that
climate change is a hoax (Inhofe 2012). Ideological opposition to many of the most
obvious responses to climate change, such as energy taxes and government regulation,
are always opposed by many US lawmakers and indeed quite often by presidents. In the
latter case, the eight-year administration of President George W. Bush did everything in

The future 571
its power to prevent action on climate change. In contrast, the Obama administration
has chosen to bypass Congress (because it has little choice) to use administrative proce-
dures to, for example, move the US away from its heavy reliance on coal and to reduce
automobile pollution. In 2014 Obama pledged to reduce US carbon emissions by at least
a quarter by 2025 (compared to 2005), and he pledged that the United States would con-
tribute US$3 billion to the international Green Climate Fund. However, he did this the
same month that Republicans won back control of the Senate—putting them in charge
of the entire Congress starting in 2015. They promptly criticized Obama’s pledges and
said that they would block his energy policies (O’Keefe et al. 2014).
Thus the push and pull between action and inaction, and between the legislative and
executive branches of government, will continue to characterize US climate politics and
policies at the national level. At the subnational level—at the level of US states—there
is more promising action, with state and local governments, some major businesses, and
nongovernmental groups taking action, often cooperatively (Bang, this volume). The
net result will be significant limitations on US GHG emissions in the future, and very
likely gradual reductions. But these limitations will be nothing at all like what is required
to prevent climate crisis. The United States will continue to be an enormous part of the
problem.
Europe
Climate politics in the EU mirrors the way that member states address most other issues:
there is general agreement on the overall policy direction but substantial disagreement on
the details of policy (Dupont and Oberthür this volume). For the most part, European
governments, and most definitely the European Commission, have made mitigation of
climate pollution a major objective of the EU and its member states. What most distin-
guishes Europe from the US is a greater willingness to accept, and a far greater willingness
to act upon, member states’ ‘differentiated’ responsibilities, both because of historical
emissions and because Europe is capable of doing more. Looked at collectively, Europe
has done more to address the problem than any country or region: it has taken on obliga-
tions to reduce GHG pollution across the union, with some member states agreeing to
reduce emissions very substantially (with Denmark aiming to nearly eliminate emissions,
although the least affluent members of the EU have been allowed to increase emissions).
Europe has also done more to begin the process of adapting to climate change, both at
home and internationally, the latter through its development assistance programs.
This said, much as is true with the United States, there are opposing forces at work in
European climate politics and in the climate politics of individual member states. A dom-
inant concern is that of economic competitiveness. This is especially problematic given
Europe’s economic difficulties in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. However,
such thinking is less predominant in most European countries than in the United States,
meaning that it has been possible to agree upon and implement many stronger national
and union-wide policies on climate change. For example, Europe’s investment in alter-
native forms of energy, notably wind farms, is remarkable. Incredibly, solar power has
increased enormously in Germany, a country hardly known for being especially sunny.
Nevertheless, as in the United States, these policies are not nearly enough compared to
the scale of the problem, and powerful industries with interest in maintaining much of

the status quo (e.g., subsidies for fossil fuel exploration) push back against policy change.
Even the latest EU pledge to reduce the union’s collective carbon emissions by 40 percent
by 2030 (compared to 1990) falls far short of what scientists say is required to avoid
major disruptions to Earth’s climate—assuming global cuts were to match European
pledges, an impossible prospect (IPCC 2014).
It seems unlikely that recent trends in European climate politics will change very much
in the near-and medium-term. Many European countries will continue to become much
more energy efficient, they will continue to adopt alternative forms of energy at large
scale, and they will continue to do more than others to help developing countries cope
with climate change. Thus the trend is in the right direction. However, as in the United
States, European policies will not be adequate to stem climate change significantly. That
said, insofar as the world currently has a global leader on climate change, it would have
to be Europe (Parker and Karlsson this volume). This may continue for many years, but
it is hardly the kind of leadership that will avert climate crisis. In many ways, Europe will
be as good as it gets in the area of GHG emissions cuts anytime soon—even as emissions
in the developing world continue to take off.
China
Considering that China is a single-party authoritarian state, it may come as a surprise

to some that its climate politics are not dissimilar to those of Western nations: there is
growing concern about the problem of climate change, but different interests with com-
peting priorities mean that policies are inevitably a compromise (Stalley this volume;
Shehan 2014). The Chinese government’s overarching priority is economic growth. This
is almost certainly perceived by the ruling party to be essential to its long-term survival
and for the promotion of the government’s national and international policy objectives.
Alongside this focus on the national economy have been other climate-related objectives.
These include addressing national environmental problems, specifically air pollution,
which has reached horrendous levels in many Chinese cities. Air pollution is so bad that
it is a significant threat to government credibility; citizen protests related to air pollution
and the fear of air pollution are on the rise. Furthermore, the government has sought to
diversify energy sources, including through investments in non-fossil-fuel energy (espe-
cially hydroelectric and wind power) to improve reliability and provide reliable supplies
to industry and growing cities. As such, China is doing more than many Western states to
shift toward alternative forms of energy. Having said this, the country’s energy use and its
GHG emissions continue to increase, meaning that its contribution to the problem con-
tinues to grow, albeit at a slower rate than it would do without alternative energy policies.
Already, per capita carbon emissions in China exceed those of the world, and even exceed
those of several European countries (IEA 2014).
Climate politics in China are greatly driven by the nation’s history, and specifically
by the ‘century of humiliation’ during which outside powers intervened in the country’s
affairs. This may seem to outsiders to be utterly unrelated to climate change, but it cannot
be overstated how much the Chinese government, and a people fed on anti-West and
anti-Japan propaganda for more than half a century, value sovereignty in all its mani-
festations. In practice, this means that China takes the ‘differentiated’ aspect of CBDR
extremely seriously: it expects the West to repent for past pollution and to act a ccordingly.

The future 573
Consequently, China has so far refused to accept binding obligations for GHG cuts; only
policies that are home-grown and voluntary, or at least easily interpreted and sold to the
public as such, have significant chance of being implemented. Given these factors, there
is little chance that the Chinese government as a sovereign will do more than muddle
along like other governments.
To be sure, the Chinese president pledged in 2014 that China’s GHG emissions would
level off by 2030. This is better than no pledge at all, but it is nevertheless a recipe for
growing GHG pollution for a decade and a half, followed by decades more of gargantuan
emissions from what will, by then, be the world’s largest economy. Without major cuts in
China’s current emissions levels, stemming global warming will be impossible. As noted
previously, one possible way toward effectively achieving such cuts from within China is
for the government to creatively regulate (and/or tax) the behaviors of wealthy people
in the country, thereby limiting their GHG pollution and, in effect, that of the whole
nation. This would sell well at home—the government would be seen to be addressing
growing anxieties over concentrated and ostentatious wealth among the country’s afflu-
ent classes—and it could immediately cast China into the role of global leader to combat
climate change.
OTHER ISSUES IN CLIMATE POLITICS
Many cross-cutting issues shape climate politics. Space does not permit discussing many
of them here, but a few can be mentioned briefly. For example, one area of contention
among governments is that of climate mitigation versus adaptation (Dilling this volume).
Mitigation—cutting GHG emissions—is essential, but increasingly greater emphasis is
being given to adaptation. This is vital given the inevitable impacts of climate change,
to be felt most acutely in poorer countries. At the same time, however, by diverting
attention from mitigation it ironically will contribute to greater impacts in the future.
Finding the balance between mitigation and adaption will be difficult for climate politics
at all levels. One central reason for continued emissions is the world’s enthrallment with
capitalism, growth and consumerism. This is well-established in the West and spreading
rapidly across the developing world. Thus the trend is in the wrong direction—and may
be the biggest reason that climate politics may be unable to meet the challenge of climate
change. Related to this are the politics of trade and energy. The former has governments
contemplating trade policies that try to ‘level the playing field’: countries with greater
restrictions in GHG emissions may soon wish to restrict imports of products from coun-
tries with fewer restrictions. The latter has governments focused on finding both cheap
and secure sources of energy, thus favoring fossil fuels well into the future. This in turn
highlights the new ‘geopolitics’ of climate change (Ciplet et al. this volume). States that
rely on fossil fuel exports (e.g., Russia and Saudi Arabia) will use their influence to slow
the world’s shift to alternative forms of energy, even as Russian moves to control former
Soviet territories (e.g., parts of Ukraine) push Western Europe to find ways of rapidly
developing those very alternatives. Meanwhile, as global warming opens the Arctic to
energy exploitation, a new ‘great game’ has emerged, not just among countries with com-
peting claims to parts of the Arctic ocean but countries farther afield, notably China,
which might one day benefit from new sources of fossil fuels from the region.

Another issue that has permeated climate politics and will continue to do so is that of
justice (Page this volume). The impacts of climate change will bring about possibly the
most profound injustices the world has ever experienced (Harris 2010, 2016). The indi-
viduals, communities and states least responsible for creating the problem will be those
most harmed by its impacts, in large part because they are by definition least capable of
coping with them. This injustice has been recognized internationally in the principle of
CBDR. However, despite this principle underlying all climate-related international agree-
ments, its practice has been minimal: cuts in climate pollution have been small, barely
affecting the pace of global warming, and financial aid to help the world’s poor cope with
climate change has been absolutely paltry relative to need. This helps to explain why most
developing countries have joined climate agreements but show little willingness to take on
new obligations: they joined to realize the benefits of the developed world taking on its
differentiated responsibility, but they resist demands to limit their own emissions to avoid
the drawbacks of common responsibility, at least until their capacities increase and they
see the developed world fulfilling its obligations in this regard.
This raises quite profound questions of human rights, or more accurately violations
of them. Climate change will violate the most basic human rights: its impacts will
undermine the ability of millions of people to survive, let alone to be healthy and pros-
perous. Climate change will also diminish other kinds of human rights, even violating
the right to statehood, or at least the right to a state with livable territory, as some small-
island states become uninhabitable due to sea-level rise. Before long, climate change
may require that capable states act upon the United Nations-declared ‘responsibility
to protect.’ As some governments become incapable of protecting their citizens from
the ravages of climate change, international agencies and capable governments may be
required to intervene to protect vital human rights. The limits of international treaties
to protect refugees will be stretched as more people leave their homelands in search
of shelter from storms, floods, droughts and the spread of diseases brought about
by climate change. These and similar trends of climate injustice and climate-induced
threats to human rights, with all that they portend for climate politics, are set to grow
worse far into the future.
TOWARD COSMOPOLITAN CLIMATE POLITICS
There may be surprises in future climate politics. As often happens with history, unfore-
seen events, new ideas and changed values can alter the course of history. The world may
be surprised by the discovery of helpful new technologies or by the development of those
that only make things worse (e.g., geoengineering, see Hansson et al. this volume). One
thing that is unlikely to be a surprise is that climate politics will be slow to respond to
climate change. Generally speaking, we can expect more of the same—what will be, in
effect, years more of muddling along nationally and internationally. The policy results
will not be all bad; there will be significant policy progress, with substantial limitations
of GHG pollution globally, and even cuts in most developed countries. It is possible
that climate change will become bad enough to push governments to finally overcome
traditional vested interests and to act nationally and internationally to fight back against
the problem—to radically reduce GHG pollution and harden societies to cope with the

The future 575
impacts. But of course by then it will be too late to avoid very terrible effects set in motion
by decades of weak policies.
Is there any way to escape such a future? While most diplomats seem to recognize
and now accept a serious collective problem, and while they seem to generally agree that
this requires international cooperation, they are congenitally oriented toward protecting
the existing and perceived interests of their own states. When translated into concrete
policy proposals, this means protecting the shorter-term interests of domestic actors at
home. While we cannot avoid more of the same—that is, we cannot avoid national and
special interests competing with environmental protection to prevent full-speed move-
ment toward the latter—it may be possible to shift climate politics in a more positive
direction while enhancing human wellbeing globally. This direction involves doing some-
thing different, at the very least admitting that an alternative approach is needed—if not
replacing climate politics among and within states, at least having politics that effectively
supplements the prevailing ‘statist’ approach. What comes from this is the need to shift
diplomats and governments’ myopic focus away from national interests toward something
else: people’s interests.
Why is a people-centered climate politics necessary? This question can be answered
from both practical and normative perspectives (cf. Harris 2010, 2016). From a practical
perspective, the past has shown that a future of climate politics centered on states—their
rights (most of all) and their responsibilities (in words if not very much in deeds)—has
not worked. There is no reason to expect that it will work in the future. In contrast, a
people-centered politics has the advantages of getting around the ‘you go first’ mentality
that has prevailed in climate politics, especially internationally. If states will not or cannot
act as they should, capable individuals can and should. From a normative perspective, it
makes no sense to attribute all the rights and responsibilities of climate politics to states.
This is because individuals also have rights, bearing in mind that they (especially the poor
and weak who are least responsible for the problem) are the ones who will be harmed by
climate change, and because individuals (notably the hundreds of millions of affluent
people around the world contributing the most to the problem) have responsibilities,
especially if they are capable of doing so.
An alternative to extant climate politics that would put people first can be found in
cosmopolitanism (Harris 2010, 2011, 2016). People’s interests, rights and obligations
would come before those of states. To be sure, doing away with national interests as the
focus of climate politics is impossible in the near future. But to push for greater empha-
sis on humans, and their needs and duties, should be possible. After all, states exist, at
least in principle, to promote the interests of people living within them. A cosmopolitan
alternative to state-centric climate politics would involve less focus on international (i.e.,
inter-state) common but differentiated responsibilities—although this would remain—
and more focus on individual common but differentiated responsibilities. In practice this
would mean that those individuals most responsible for climate change, and/or those
who have benefitted from past GHG pollution the most or are most capable of acting
to address climate change, would take on their differentiated, greater responsibilities,
while individuals who are less responsible, less affluent and less capable would bear
few burdens (or none at all), and indeed should benefit from actions by the former
individuals.
A key aspect of such an alternative climate politics would be to treat all individuals

the same regardless of their nationality. In other worlds, while most Americans or
Australians (for example) would be required to reduce their GHG pollution and help to
muster resources for the world’s poor to cope with climate changes of the future, poor
Australians would not be required to take such action, and indeed they would be aided
insofar as they are the victims of climate change. Similarly, and vitally, the many mil-
lions of people in China or India (for example) who are now very affluent indeed, living
lifestyles equally as polluting as those of most people in the West, would have the same
obligations as affluent individuals in the West. In practice, this would mean that their
personal and collective GHG pollution would fall and they would be required to assist
those people in their own and other developing countries, and even the genuinely poor
in the industrialized countries, to cope with climate change.
This cosmopolitan approach would have an obvious political benefit at national and
international levels: rather than states taking on new obligations to combat climate
change, only the world’s affluent would be doing it. While most action would, for some
decades, continue to be taken in the more affluent countries, meaning not only GHG cuts
but also transfers of resources to poor countries, the display of action by many millions
of people in developing countries would make it vastly easier for the Western govern-
ments to ask their own (affluent) citizens to take action. Combined with gradual policies
already planned and proposed for and by states, this could tip the balance toward global
cuts in GHG pollution, rather than the current trajectory of limits on what would very
likely be global increases in such pollution. (For elaboration of a cosmopolitan alterna-
tive, see Harris 2010, 2013, 2016.)
CONCLUSION
It is too late to prevent painful impacts of climate change. It might not be too late to
avoid the worst. Ultimately, what we can be sure of is that a changing climate and increas-
ing global temperatures, and all that they portend, will be backdrops not only for future
climate politics but for all societies for the remainder of this century and beyond. Climate
change and its impacts will occur relatively quickly; climate politics and policies will
respond relatively slowly. The world will likely remain wedded for decades to capitalist
growth, more or less in its current form. This means more environmental pollution of all
kinds. The underlying driving forces of climate change will become more intense before
they are addressed adequately. In other words, while things could be worse were it not for
some past and future progress in climate politics, the opportunity to create and imple-
ment truly powerful, transformational policies will frequently be lost. Thus the time has
come to think of alternatives to state-centric climate politics. A cosmopolitan reorienta-
tion toward greater emphasis on human needs and obligations offers a way to change
direction. Of one thing there is absolutely no doubt: whatever future one believes to be
more or less likely, climate politics will not be going away. The importance of climate
politics will increase as we move into the future.

The future 577
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Edinburgh University Press.
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Harris, P.G. (2013), What’s Wrong with Climate Politics and How to Fix It, Cambridge: Polity.
Harris, P.G. (2016), Global Ethics and Climate Change, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Howlett, M. (2014), Why are policy innovations rare and so often negative? Blame avoidance and problem
denial in climate change policy-making, Global Environmental Change, 29, 395–403.
IEA (2014), CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion 2014, Paris: International Energy Agency.
Inhofe, J. (2012), The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, Washington,
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Index
Abbot, T. 510 Aldy, J. 431

Abbott, K.W. 156, 512, 528 Alexander von Humboldt Cities and Climate
ability to pay principle (APP) 88–9 Change Network 333
accountability 446, 448–9, 453, 455 Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) 15, 21,
accounting 359 117
see also carbon accounting and REDD+ climate diplomacy 99, 100, 102
Actor–Network Theory 54 climate leadership 193, 197
Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban North–South divide 146, 147, 150
Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) Allwood, G. 77–8
100, 203, 510, 512–14 Alston, M. 75
adaptation 61, 147, 164, 171, 470–77, 497–8, Anderson, B. 53, 464
573 Andresen, S. 134, 139, 256
as additional 471–2 Annex I countries (developed) 245, 510,
autonomous or spontaneous 168 551
barriers 472 regime effectiveness 427–31
cities 333 transparency 446, 450–51
climate policy integration (CPI) 391–4 Anshelm, J. 417
as climate response 471 Appadurai, A. 481
community-based 171 Argentina 21
as development 168, 471–2 Arora-Jonsson, S. 169
effective responses 474–5 Arrhenius, S. 38
frontier 473 Arrighi, G. 109, 113, 118
and governance 473–4, 523–4 Ascui, F. 361
international bureaucracies 277 Asia 65, 103, 105, 142
just adaptation 92, 472 Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean
limitations 473 Development and Climate (APP) 129,
necessity for 475–6 134, 137–8
planned 168 Asian Development Bank 458
Adaptation Framework 98 Asian Pacific Partnership 9
Adaptation Fund 147, 148 Asilomar Conference (2010) 415
adaptive capacity 33, 474–5, 497–8 Asset Vulnerability Framework 165
additionality 167, 369–70 auctioning 349, 351
Adey, P. 464 auditing and certification firms 157
Adger, W.N. 171, 471–3 austerity measures 112
Adler, E. 287 Australia
advanced liberal climate government 54–5 carbon pricing initiatives 534
Africa 117, 150, 245, 277 Climate Commission 191
Africa group 150 climate diplomacy 99, 101, 103
African Union 521 climate skepticism/newspaper reporting 176,
Agarwal, A. 44–5, 473 184, 185
agencement 358–9 deliberative democracy 64
agency 134, 165, 280–82, 315, 483–4, 517, fragmentation 129
556–8 geopolitics 110, 112–13
situated 373 legitimacy 509, 510
air pollution 208, 335, 572 minilateralism 137–8
Akenji, L. 315 North–South divide 147, 148
Alaimo, S. 487 automobile industry 265–6
Alberta Climate Dialogue 62 Aylett, A. 55
579
Baber, W.F. 438 boundary organizations 38, 42

Bäckstrand, K. 68–9, 133–4, 347 boycotts and buycotts xxiii, 254, 310
Bahro, R. 439 Boyd, E. 167
Bali Action Plan see Conference of the Parties Boyd, R. 182
(COP) 13 Bali (2007) Boykoff, J.M. 324
Baliunas, S. 181, 183 Boykoff, M.T. 185, 323, 324
Ban Ki-moon 169, 191, 555, 559 BP 155, 265–6
Bankoff, G. 166 ‘Beyond Petroleum’ campaign 264–5
Barad, K. 486 Brauch, H.G. 460
Barnett, M.N. 273, 287 Brazil xxiii, 237–46
Barrasso, J. 216 adaptation 475
Bartlett, R.V. 438 Amazon Forum (2009) 239
Barton, J. 182, 183 anti-deforestation policies 239–40
BASIC group 4, 203–4, 209, 237, 243, 244–6 Baptists and bootleggers coalition 239
climate diplomacy 100 cities 336
climate leadership 193, 195, 197 climate diplomacy 103
global governance 9 climate emissions profile 238
international power structure 19, 20–21 climate leadership 193, 198
legitimacy 512 common but differentiated responsibilities
North–South divide 148, 150 (CBDR) 244
regime effectiveness 429 deforestation 238, 246
Beck, U. 46, 487 deforestation sectoral plans 242
Belarus 145, 510 deliberative democracy 68
Belgium 324 domestic politics of climate action 239–43
Bell, K. 79 Ecologica 156
Belmont Funders Forum 559 energy plan 242
beneficiary pays principle (BPP) 88, 89 environmental democracy 438
Bennett, L.W. 301, 305 ethanol 238
Bergen school of weather forecasting 38–9 financing 245
Berglez, P. 326–7 Foreign Ministry Itamaraty 240
Berlin Mandate see Conference of the Parties Forest Code (2012) 242
(COP) 1 Berlin (1995) geopolitics 113, 114
Bernstein, S. xxii, 135–6, 139, 258, 448 global climate negotiations 243–6
best available technology 216 global governance 8
Betsill, M.M. 49, 333, 462 greenhouse gases (GHGs) 237, 238, 242
Bhutan 148 House of Representatives 240
Biermann, F. xx, 125–6, 158, 273–5, 279, 281 hydro power 242
bilateralism 111, 226 land use 238
biodiversity 155, 277, 286 legitimacy 509
secretariat 277, 279, 281 low carbon agriculture plan 242
see also Convention on Biological Diversity Ministry of Environment (MMA) 239,
(CBD) 240–41, 243
bioregionalism 439 Ministry of Foreign Affairs 240, 243
biosphere or global ecosystem 109 Ministry of Science and Technology 240
Bodansky, D. 97, 414, 507 National Development Bank (BNDES) 238,
Bolin, B. 290 242
Bolivia 112 National Policy on Climate Change (NPCC)
Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) 18, 21, 150 240, 242
Bomberg, E. 298 oil and gas sector (pre-salt) 238, 241–2
Bonn conference (2014) 99 Petrobras 241–2, 243
Bookchin, M. 439 political economy 30–31
Borick, C.P. 400 regime effectiveness 432
bottom-up approach xxii, 10, 99, 109, 134, 358 Rio+20 Summit (2012) 245, 431, 563
climate leadership 197, 198, 200 Rio Conference (1992) 245, 431, 563
state-based 8–9 Rio Summit (1992) 243

Index 581
Second National Report to United Nations news media 325

Framework Convention on Climate North–South divide 144, 148
Change (UNFCCC) (2005) 238 oil tar/sand oil 115, 144, 265
transparency 451 ‘Toronto target’ 253
see also BASIC group; BRIC countries Urban Form and Climate project 336
Brazilian Proposal 204 World Conference on the Changing
Brenton, T. 21 Atmosphere (Toronto 1988) 253, 425–6
Bretton Woods system 520 Cancún summit see Conference of the Parties
BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) (COP) 16 Cancún (2010)
111, 245 Caney, S. 85
Brouwer, S. 391 cap-and-trade system xxviii, 348–52
Brown, G. 102 China 207
Brulle, R.J. 321 innovation investments 549–50
Brundtland Report (1987) 336, 389 property and privatization 537
Bryson, R. 52 United States 213, 215
Brzoska, M. 462 cap-setting model 348–52
Bulkeley, H. 333, 527, 531, 535 Caprotti, F. 531
Burton, I. 167–8 carbon accounting and REDD+ xxiv, 53, 156,
Busch, P.-O. 275–6, 280 366–75
Bush, G.W. 18, 122, 124, 132, 137, 185, 191, carbon credit 53
233, 508, 570–71 compliance and resistance and making of
business 262–71 carbon subjectivities 372–4
ambivalence and incongruity era constitutive role of carbon knowledge
(2010–present) 266–7 370–72
cooling off and backtracking era forest carbon accounting 368–70
(2006–2009) 265–6 national carbon sink 53
corporate climate strategies 263 personal carbon budget 53
denial and opposition era (1985–1999) 264 as technology of governance 367–8
indecision and reluctant support era carbon allowance and carbon reduction action
(2000–2008) 264–5 groups (CRAGs) 313
management 267 carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology
socio-cultural theory of corporate climate 45, 216, 224
governance 267–70 carbon clubs xxii
see also corporate social responsibility (CSR) carbon commodification 29
business-as-usual scenarios 224, 268, 369 carbon conduct 55–6
Byrd–Hagel Resolution (1997) 147, 213, 221, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) 411–13
508 carbon disclosure initiatives xxvi, 155–6, 446–7
Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) 28–9, 155,
C40 Climate Leadership Group 154 257, 265, 266, 452–3, 455, 531
Cairns, R. 416 carbon emission allowances (CEAs) 537, 541–3
Caldeira, K. 555 see also cap-and-trade
Callon, M. 358–9 carbon emissions
Canada business sector 266
Alberta Climate Dialogue 62 cities 337
cities 335 international power structure 20
climate diplomacy 99 national interest, high politics and
climate engineering 416 environmental security 15
climate skepticism/newspaper reporting 176, reform options 516
184, 185 regime effectiveness 425, 428
fragmentation 123, 125 science and technology studies (STS) 36, 38
geopolitics 112–13, 116, 117 United States 214, 215–19
legitimacy 510 see also decarbonization; EU Emissions
minilateralism 137–8 Trading System (EU ETS); low-carbon
national interest, high politics and economies
environmental security 15 carbon footprints xxviii, 542

carbon labeling xxiii National Coordination Committee on

carbon management 156 Climate Change 206
carbon market price xxiv National Development and Reform
carbon markets 10, 29, 54, 454–5 Commission (NDRC) 206
Carbon Neutrality Network 157 national interest, high politics and
carbon offsetting 154, 156, 312, 446–7, 452–3 environmental security 15
carbon performance 156 North–South divide 143, 144, 148, 149–50
carbon pricing initiatives 534 1000 Enterprise Program 207
carbon rationing 312–13 political economy 30–31
Carbon Rationing Action Group 55 recognition and prestige 17
carbon reduction pledges xviii regime effectiveness 429, 431
carbon reporting schemes xxiii, 156 Renewable Energy Law (2006) 207
carbon sequestration 517 reputation 209
Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum 127 security 458
carbon taxes 312–13, 400–401, 403–4, 406 solar power 207
Carbon Tracker (2011) 266 technical and political capacity, lack of 206
Carbon Trust think tank 349 transparency 450, 451
Caring for Climate initiative 156, 160 and United States bilateral agreement 214,
Cartagena Dialogue on Progressive Action 21, 219–20, 233, 432, 513
102, 122 wind energy 207
Cartwright, N. 41 see also BASIC group; BRIC countries
Cashore, B. 258 chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) 547
Central and Eastern Europe 144–5, 230 Christian, D.L. 441–2
Centre for a New American Century 462 Christy, J. 180
Chandler, T. 334 cities 275, 332–9, 517–18
Chenoweth, L. 492 adaptation 474
Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) 157 current practice 336–8
China xxi, xxiii, 202–210, 244, 246 hazards 333
air pollution 208 historical context 333–5
climate diplomacy 97, 104 Cities for Climate Protection Programme
climate leadership 191–200 (International Council of Local
climate politics among states 572–3 Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI)) 123,
coal 205–6 155, 257
common but differentiated responsibilities citizen journalism 322–3
(CBDR) 202–4, 207, 209–210, 572–3 citizen-consumers 309–318
deliberative democracy 68 actor-oriented with climate mitigation as
diplomacy and international negotiations explicit, primary goal 310–311
567–9 actor-oriented with non-climate primary
Energy Conservation Law (2008) 207 goals 314–15
energy installations 234 structure-oriented with climate mitigation as
evolving climate change diplomacy 203–5 explicit, primary goals 312–13
factors contributing to evolution of structure-oriented with non-climate primary
diplomacy 207–9 goals 315–17
factors inhibiting more ambitious action citizens: strengthening in global decision-
205–7 making 522–3
five-year plans 103, 207 citizens’ juries 438
geopolitics 112, 113–14, 117, 118 citizenship, ecological 437–9, 440–41
global governance 4, 8, 9 civil society actors/groups xxvii, 123, 253, 254,
green economy 149 297–306, 523
greenhouse gases (GHGs) 202, 209, 213–14, collaboration and conflict in climate
544, 573 activism 303–5
innovation investments 548, 551, 552 ‘insiders’ 297–300, 302, 304, 305
international power structure 18–19, 20, 21 multi-stakeholder governance: REDD+ in
legitimacy 509, 510 Indonesia 384
Meteorological Administration 206 ‘outsiders’ 297–303, 305

Index 583
participation in climate movement 298–300 climate leadership 281–2, 569

strengthening in global decision-making China 191–200
522–3 competing leadership visions for new climate
transnationalism 156, 158, 298–9 deal 195–9
transparency 452 Copenhagen outcome 194
Clark, I. 505 directional 192, 198–9
Claude, I.L. 20 European Union 191–6, 199–200
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) 32, idea-based 192, 198
68, 99, 147, 312, 347 importance of leadership and main
Brazil 240 leadership candidates 192–3
carbon accounting 366, 371 instrumental 192
China 207 leadership recognition 2008-2013 – general
EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) trend for main actors 193
348, 349, 351, 353 structural 192, 198
Executive Board 453 United States 191–5, 198–200
regime effectiveness 427–8 see also North–South divide
transnationalism 158, 160 climate modeling 53
transparency 452, 455 climate movements 302–3
Climate Action Network (CAN) 113, 251, 256, climate negotiations see North–South divide
298, 301, 302 climate policy instruments 400–408
climate activism: collaboration and conflict effectiveness 404–5
303–5 fairness and freedom: consequences 403–4
climate art see post-humanist imaginaries individual motivation: values, beliefs and
Climate Change Expert Group on the norms 401–2
UNFCCC (CCXG) 279 personal outcome expectancy 403
Climate and Clean Air Coalition 125, 128 trust, institutional 406–7
climate clubs 9, 122, 126, 132–3 trust, interpersonal 405–6
Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance climate policy integration (CPI) in European
(CCBA) 257, 366–7, 369 Union xxv, 388–96
Climate Council 264 adaptation 391–4
climate diplomacy 97–106 democratic accountability 395
climate negotiations in academic literature and environmental policy integration (EPI)
97–8 388, 389–90, 392, 394, 396
persuasion and argumentation 97–8 inter-sectoral policies 394
global climate negotiations: assessment intra-sectoral policies 394
98–104 mitigation 391–4
Climate Disclosure Project (CDP) 154 non-climate environmental goals 394
climate engineering (geoengineering) xxv, 45, in practice 392–5
411–21, 465, 517 incentive structures 392–4
framing 416–19 in theory 390–92
balancing stakes 417–18 climate politics among states 567–73
climate emergency and failed politics 417 China 572–3
uncertainty 418–19 climate leadership 569
international agreement and coordination cosmopolitanism 574–6
413–14 developed–developing country relations
Oxford principles 415–16 568
regulatory frameworks 414–15 diplomacy and international negotiations
technology control dilemma 412–13 567–8
climate impact, adaptation and vulnerability European Union 571–2
(CIAV) 164 United States 570–71
Climate Innovation Centres 552 climate proofing 393, 394
Climate Justice Action (CJA) 301, 302 Climate Savers 257
climate justice movement 253–4, 299–300, 301 climate secretariat 274, 275–7, 279, 281
Climate Justice Now! (CJN) xxiii, 301, 302 climate skepticism: United States (New York
climate labeling 518 Times) 175–85

‘benign’ skepticism (pre-1997) 177–81 recognition and prestige 17

blogs 184 regime effectiveness 431
defenders 180 United States 219
deniers/denialism 183–5 common but differentiated responsibilities and
dissenters 180 respective capabilities (CBDRRC) 100,
frequency of ‘climate change’ or ‘global 144, 196–7
warming’ and ‘skeptic’/’sceptic’ or common property resources (CPR) 538
‘denier’/’denial’ 178 community monitoring 373–4
‘hobbyists’ and new social media (post-2005) compensation 91–2
184 complexity theories 133
industry shills 181–2, 184–5 Compston, H. 533–4
Lexis Nexis 176 Conference of the Parties (COP) 16, 17, 253,
major world newspapers: frequency of 297
‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ Conference of the Parties (COP) 1 Berlin
and ‘skeptic’/’sceptic’ or ‘denier’/’denial’ (1995) 19, 77, 146, 154, 425
177 Conference of the Parties (COP) 3 Kyoto
newspaper reporting 176–7 (1997) 16
NYT archive 176 Conference of the Parties (COP) 6 Hague
terminology 175–6 (2000) 302, 305
climate skeptics 324–5, 517 Conference of the Parties (COP) 7 Marrakech
see also climate skepticism: United States (2001) 77, 147, 226
(New York Times) Conference of the Parties (COP) 13 Bali (2007)
Climate Technology Centre and Network 19, 20, 77, 98, 99, 102, 103, 196, 203, 370,
128 429, 509
‘climategate’ 41–2, 291–3, 324 civil society 301, 302
Climatic Research Units (CRUs) 43–4 Conference of the Parties (COP) 14 Poznan
Clinton, B. 182 (2008) 148
CNA Corporation: National Security and Conference of the Parties (COP) 15
Climate Change report (2007) 462 Copenhagen (2009) xviii
coal sector 115–17, 205–6 Brazil 238, 239–40, 245
Coalition for Environmentally Responsible China 203
Economies (Ceres) 155 civil society 298, 301, 302–3, 305
Coalition of Rainforest Nations 150 climate diplomacy 98
Code, L. 487 climate leadership 193–5, 197, 198–9
Colebrook, C. 384 deliberative democracy 65
collective action problem 403, 509, 537 European Union 228, 233
Collingridge, D. 412–13 geopolitics 114
Collins, H. 560 global governance 4
Committee for the Review and Implementation international bureaucracies 274, 276
of the Convention (CRIC) 277 international power structure 20
common but differentiated responsibilities legitimacy 512
(CBDR) 574 minilateralism 132, 138
Brazil 244 national interest, high politics and
China 202–4, 207, 209–210, 572–3 environmental security 16
climate diplomacy 100 NGOs 251
climate leadership 197 North–South divide 143, 148
cosmopolitan climate politics 575 political economy 30
deliberative democracy 64–5 regime effectiveness 429
diplomacy and international negotiations transparency 450
567–9 United States 219–20
innovation investments 551 Conference of the Parties (COP) 16 Cancún
international power structure 19 (2010) 4, 22, 98, 148, 193, 199, 303–4
legitimacy 512–13 fragmentation 128
minilateralism 132–3, 136–7, 138–40 North–South divide 143
North–South divide 146, 147 transparency 450–51

Index 585
Conference of the Parties (COP) 17 Durban dangerous anthropogenic interference (DAI)

(2011) 4, 22, 67, 98 84–6
China 203 Dankelman, I. 74
civil society 304 data-mining 543
climate diplomacy 103 Dauter, L. 357
climate leadership 193, 196, 197, 199 Davoudi, S. 492, 494
knowledge pluralism 555 Dawson, J. 441
legitimacy 509, 510, 512 de Coninck, H. 127
North–South divide 148 De Goede, M. 55–6, 464–5
Conference of the Parties (COP) 18 Doha de-politicization and power 494
(2012) 10, 99, 101, 245, 304, 509 debt-for-nature swaps 154
climate leadership 193, 196, 199 decarbonization 224, 225, 228–32, 234, 547–9
Conference of the Parties (COP) 19 Warsaw decentralization 299–300, 379
(2013) 191, 193, 199, 244, 304, 512 deforestation 53, 238–40, 242, 246
Conference of the Parties (COP) 20 Lima see also REDD+
(2014) 198–9, 200, 431, 512–13 Delbeke, J. 350–52
Conference of the Parties (COP) 21 Paris delegation 159–60
(2015) xix, xxii, 5, 10 Deleuze, G. 358, 483
climate leadership 194, 196, 200 deliberative democracy 60–70, 438–9, 442, 522
European Union 230, 233 democratic theory and the environment
North–South divide 149 60–62
regime effectiveness 425, 432 macro-deliberation: deliberative capacity
United States 220 65–9
Connell, R.W. 79 micro-deliberation 62–5, 69
conservation 370 democracy 556
constituency groups 255–6 ecological xxvii, 437–8
constructivism 134–5, 286–8, 291, 448, 467, participatory 437–9, 441–2
506 and power 560–61
contributor pays principle 88 see also deliberative democracy;
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) environmental democracy
122, 273, 277, 414–15 democratic deficit 437
Conway, E.M. 324–5 democratic tradeoff 395
Cooney, P. 325 deniers/denial 176–7, 324
coordination 127 see also hobbyists; industry shills; skeptics
gaps 126 Denmark 31, 571
Copenhagen Accord see Conference of the World Wide Views on Global Warming
Parties (COP) 15 Copenhagen (2009) 64–5
Copenhagen School 458, 459–61, 463, see also Conference of the Parties (COP) 15
466–7 Copenhagen (2009)
Cornell, S. 559 Depledge, J. 21, 97–8, 275–6, 280
Corner, A. 416, 418 desertification secretariat 277–8, 281
corporate social responsibility (CSR) 254, 262, Detraz, N. 79, 462
267–8, 270 Deudney, D. 14
Corry, O. 461, 465 developed countries see Annex I countries
cosmopolitanism 574–6 (developed)
Cox, R. 25–6, 109, 116, 118 developing countries see Like-Minded
critical approaches xx, 513 Developing Countries (LMDC); non-
critical mass of major emitters 509 Annex I countries (developing);
critical political economy approach 262–3 North–South divide
critical post-humanities 481 Di-Aping, L. 148
critical theoretical perspective 448 Dietz, T. 406
critical transparency studies 448 DiMuzio, T. 116
Croatia 145 diplomacy and international negotiations 17,
Cuomo, C. 76, 79 567–8
Czech Republic 145 disaster risk management (DRM) 492

disclosure see carbon disclosure initiatives; scenarios 53

Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) see also International Energy Agency (IEA)
Dobson, A. 437 Energy Information Administration Annual
Dow, K. 473 Energy Outlook 2014 217–18
Dowling, R. 56 Engle, N. 475
Dryzek, J.S. 63, 65, 66–8, 134, 256, 438, 533 Environment Council 225
Duffield, M. 53 environmental accounting 369
Dunlap, R.E. 182 Environmental Defense Fund 113
Dupont, C. 391, 395 environmental democracy 435–44
Durant, D. 560 citizenship and deliberation 437–9
Durban Platform of Action (ADP) 21, 98–9, ecological citizenship: ecovillage as
100, 148, 196, 200 participatory democracy in practice
China 203, 204 440–41
climate leadership 197, 198 ecovillage governance and consensual
see also Ad Hoc Working Group on the decision-making 441–3
Durban Platform for Enhanced Action ecovillage movement in theoretical
(ADP); Conference of the Parties perspective 439–40
(COP) 17 Durban (2011) ecovillages 443
technocratic guardianship 436–7
Earth Negotiation Bulletin 432 environmental policy integration (EPI) xxv,
Earth System Governance Project 388, 389–90, 392, 394, 396
(International Human Dimensions environmental populism 466
Programme) 559 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 115,
Eckersley, R. 134 179, 199, 214, 215–18, 220
ecological exhaustion 114–16 environmentalism see liberal environmentalism
economies in transition (EITs) 110, 427–9 equal sacrifice 85–6
ecovillage movement xxvii, 438–43 equilibrium climate sensitivity 40
governance and consensual decision-making equity 17, 511–12, 513
441–3 inter-generational 414
as participatory democracy in practice norms 207
440–41 principles 196
in theoretical perspective 439–40 reference framework 513
Edwards, P.N. 52 equivalence 368–9
Egeland, B. 492 Ergas, C. 78
Eggers, D. 544 EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) xxiv,
Egli, E. 334 225–30, 233, 345–53
Ekstrom, J.A. 472 20/20/20 targets 348, 350, 352
emergency-deployment frame 417 advocacy coalitions 350
emerging economies see economies in business sector 266
transition (EITs) cap-setting invention (2008) 347–9
emissions 369 central external determinants: global
allowances see carbon emission allowances interaction and policy diffusion 352
(CEAs) constitution 28
best system of emission reduction Directive 2004/101/EC 348
216–17 economics 346
critical mass 509 ETS Directive (2003/87) 347
equal per capita 86 ETS phase I (2005–2007) 347, 353
grandfathering 85–6 ETS phase II (2008–2012) 347, 350
sufficiency 86–7 ETS phase III (2013–2020) 347–8, 352
see also carbon emissions; EU Emissions fragmentation 123
Trading System (EU ETS); greenhouse innovation investments 549
gases (GHGs) internal determinants: law, politics and the
energy economy 349–52
investment initiative xxviii internal versus external determinants 346
new politics 114–16 invention stage 346–7

Index 587
law 346 ETS Directive (2003) 346

low-carbon economies 358 external factors 232–4
policy entrepreneurs 346, 350 feminism and gender aspects 75, 76, 77, 78
policy innovation and modes of governance Fluorinated GHGs Regulation (2014) 229
346–7 forestry sector 394
political economy 31 fossil fuels 224
politics 346 funding schemes 230–31
property and privatization 541 geopolitics 112, 113
recognition and prestige 18 global governance 9
shock events/crises 346, 350 greenhouse gases (GHGs) 202, 224, 225,
European Bank for Reconstruction and 227, 228, 230, 233, 572
Development 115 innovation investments 548–50
European Climate Change Programme internal factors 231–2
(ECCP) 226, 348 international bureaucracies 276
European Institute for Gender Equality: international power structure 19–21
Gender Equality and Climate Change 77 leadership decline xxi
European Investment Bank 115 legislative acts 228–9
European Science Foundation 559 legislative package 228
RESCUE (‘Responses to Environmental and legitimacy 510, 513
Societal Challenges for our Unstable majority voting 232
Earth’) project 563 Multi-Annual Financial Framework 393
European Steel Association (EUROFER) 264 non-legislative progress 228
European Union xxiii, 224–35 North–South divide 144, 147, 148
ALTENER 225 Parliament 228, 230, 232, 345
budget reforms 393 re-politicizing climate governance research
business sector 266, 267 527
Carbon Dioxide and Cars Regulation (2014) realism 23
228–9 recognition and prestige 17–18
climate diplomacy 97, 99, 100–103, 104–5 reform options 521
climate and energy framework (2030) 232–4 regime effectiveness 429–30, 432, 433
climate leadership 191–6, 199–200 Regional Development Fund 393
climate policy pre-2008: towards Kyoto Renewable Energy Directive 228
Protocol implementation 225–7 renewable energy (RE) 227, 229
climate policy since 2008: improved roadmaps 228
credibility 227–9 SAVE 225
climate politics among states 571–2 security 461
climate-related legislation since 1990 226 Structural Funds 391
Commission 232, 346, 348–50, 352–3, 392–3, transnationalism 154
432, 571 see also climate policy integration (CPI) in
Council of the EU 228, 229–31, 232, 348–9, European Union; EU Emissions
458 Trading System (EU ETS)
Council of Ministers 195 Europolis Deliberative Opinion Poll 62
DG CLIMA (2010) 392 Ewald, F. 464
diplomacy and international negotiations extreme weather events xvii, 164, 486, 492
567, 569
drivers and barriers 231–4 Falkner, R. 126
Effort-Sharing Decision 228 feminism and gender issues 73–81, 481
emerging climate policy framework to 2030 critical feminist perspectives 74, 78–80, 81
229–31 critical mass and critical acts 77–8
‘Energy and Climate Package’ legislation equal representation 77–8
(2008) 102, 227, 231–3 feminist perspectives and gender power
Energy Efficiency Directive (2012) 229, 232 order 73–4
energy efficiency (EE) 227, 229 intersectional aspects 75–6
Energy Performance of Buildings Directive women as vulnerable victims and virtuous
(2010) 229 heroines 74–6

Figueiredo, L. 244 G77 21, 246

Figueres, C. 98 Brazil 244
financial issues 111–13, 117, 145, 277, 359, 393, China 208–210
550–51 climate leadership 193, 197
Finland 77, 324 deliberative democracy 67
Finnemore, M. 273, 287 fragmentation xxi
Fisher, D.R. 254 geopolitics 114
Fleck, L. 37 Green 146, 149
flexibility mechanisms 427–9 North–South divide 147, 149–50
Fligstein, N. 357 Gaard, G. 76
Florini, A. 447 Gabrys, J. 53, 480
Floyd, R. 461 Garrett, K.R. 304
Flyvbjerg, B. 531–2 GDP per capita 548–9, 551–2, 558–9
Fogel, C. 371 Gehring, T. 281
Forest Code (Brazil) 242 Gelbspan, R. 181
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) 155, 522, General Circulation Models (GCMs) 41
523 geoengineering see climate engineering
forests/forestry 155, 394 (geoengineering)
carbon accounting 368–70 geopolitics 30, 109–118, 573
carbon credits 453 configuration of interests 99
certification schemes 518 ecological exhaustion and new politics of
ecology 362 energy 114–16
policies 147 global political economy shifts 110–113
see also deforestation strategic approach: states, markets and
former Yugoslavia 335 ecosystems in change 109–110
fossil fuels 115, 224 United States, China and Global South
Foucault, M. 50–51, 54–6, 287, 356–7, 359–63, 113–14
367, 374, 463, 467, 558 George C. Marshall Institute 39
Fourier, C. 557 German Advisory Council on Global Change
fragmentation 6–7, 31, 121–9, 519–20 (WBGU): Future Bioenergy and
causes 124–5 Sustainable Land Use report (2008) 462
consequences 125–6 Germany 9, 16, 202, 335, 336, 571
United Nations Framework Convention on Bonn conference (2014) 99
Climate Change (UNFCCC): see also Conference of the Parties (COP) 1
navigation of institutional Berlin (1995)
fragmentation 126–9 Gibson-Graham, J.K. 528
framing 328, 360–61, 416–19, 533 Giddens, A. xxvii, 25, 443, 529–30
France see Conference of the Parties (COP) 21 Global Change programs 294
Paris (2015) Global Climate Coalition (GCC) 182, 185,
France 264–5, 325
Paris Treaty 433 global climate negotiations: assessment 98–104,
France, A. 544 347
free-rider problem 5, 8, 311, 537 current debates 100–101
Friedman, M. 267 persuasion and policy change 101–4
FTSE Global Equity Index 154 recent political developments 99–100
Fuller, B. 29 Global Day of Action 304, 305
Funtowicz, S.O. 43 global ecovillage network (GEN) 440, 443
future directions xvii–xxviii, 566–76 Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) 154, 155
climate politics among states 567–9 Global Sustainability Partnerships Database
Future Earth Initiative 294, 555, 559, 522
560–61 global temperature rise xvii, 516, 559, 573
global temperature stabilization target 143, 465
G7 20, 113, 233 globalization 27–8, 111, 439
G8 16, 20, 122, 462 Gold Standard 123, 155, 257
G20 20, 113, 122, 126, 233, 245 Goodin, R.E. 65

Index 589
Goodwin, J. 561 normative theory 84–6

Gore, A. 191, 291, 458, 460 North–South divide 142, 144, 145–6
Gould, C. 435–6 property and privatization 537, 540, 541–3
governance Protocol 159, 257
and adaptation 473–5, 523–4 regime effectiveness 425, 426, 427, 428, 432
by disclosure 446 Registry 257
environmental 135–6 science and technology studies (STS) 38, 40,
gaps 156 42
global 3–10 United States 123, 202, 216, 571
imperative 63 Greenpeace 303
initiatives, private 154 GRILA 150
market-based xxiv Grobe, C. 98
neoliberal environmental 136–8 Grothmann, T. 473
networked 133–4 Group on Africa 150
processes and sites xxi–xxii Group on Latin America 150
stakeholder xxiv Guattari, F. 358, 483
transnational 531 Gulbrandsen, L. 256
see also multi-stakeholder governance:
REDD+ in Indonesia Haas, P.M. 286–7, 289–92
governmentality 49–57, 361–3 Hadden, J. 253, 302
advanced liberal climate government 54–5 Hagel, C. 182
carbon conduct 55–6 Hagmann, J. 494
Foucauldian 467 Hale, T. 160
imagining climate change 52–4 Hammar, H. 313
low-carbon economies 360 Hammati, M. 77, 79
making climate change governmental 50–52 Hansen, A. 326
research 530–31 Hansen, J. 38, 179–81
resilience 463–5 Hansson, A. 417
Gramsci, A. 109, 118, 270 Haraway, D. 80, 481–2, 485, 488
Grasso, M. 134 Hardin, G. xix, 537
Green Climate Fund 98, 117, 127, 128, 148, Hargreaves, T. 531–2
198, 571 Harper, S. 137
Greenhouse Gas Inventories 369 Harring, N. 401, 406
Greenhouse Gas Protocol 155 Harvey, D. 32
greenhouse gases (GHGs) xvii, xix, 566 Harvey, J. 183
Brazil 237, 238, 242 Hawaii 36
China 202, 209, 213–14, 544, 573 Hayward, T. 435
cities 338 Head, L. 484
climate leadership 191–2 Head, S. 544
climate policy instruments 400 Hearn, J. 79
climate politics among states 567–8 Heat Island Group 334
constitution 27–8, 29 Hedegaard, C. 102
cosmopolitan climate politics 574–6 hegemonic stability 19, 22
diplomacy and international negotiations Herriman, J. 65
568–71 Hertsgaard, M. 181
EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) Hilberseimer, L. 334
348, 349, 351 Hildén, M. 417
European Union 202, 224, 225, 227, 228, historical responsibility argument 244
230, 233, 572 hobbyist movement 176, 184, 185
global governance 4 Hobson, K. 63
governmentality 55 hockey stick graph 39, 183
innovation investments 549 Hoffman, A.J. 263
international power structure 19–20 Hoffmann, M. 258, 533
national interest, high politics and Holling, C. 492
environmental security 15 Hong Kong 336

Houghton, Sir J. 560–61 rational choice 133, 447

Hovden, E. 390 ‘Integration of Climate Change and Ecosystem
Howard, J. 137 based Adaptation into National
Huitema, D. 346, 528 Biodiversity Planning Processes’
Hulme, M. 475–6 Workshop (2013) 277
human rights 148, 574 Intended Nationally Determined
Humphreys, D. 417 Contributions (INDCs) xxii
Huntjens, P. 474–5 InterAcademy Council 43
Hurrell, A. 21 intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) 160,
Husu, L. 79 522
Huttunen, S. 417 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
hydropower 242 (IPCC) xvii, 286–95
Hyogo framework for action (2005–2015): carbon accounting 369, 370
building resilience of nations and China 205
communities to disasters 492 civic epistemologies 293
climate diplomacy 102
Iceland 147, 510 climate skepticism 176, 180, 181, 182
ICs (Annex I and Annex II countries) 143–6 contested autonomy 287
Idso, S.B. 177–8 empirical findings 289–93
Impact Assessments (IAs) 348, 351 intergovernmental status: political ‘leash’
impact indicator 426, 428 or ‘muscle’ 289–90
inclusivity 67, 69, 384 policy relevant but not prescriptive 290–91
Independent Association of Latin America political impacts 291–3
and Caribbean States (AILAC) 117 environmental democracy 439
India expertise: neutral or political nature 287–9
carbon accounting 371 feminism and gender aspects 74, 75, 80
climate diplomacy 104 Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) 167, 170–71,
climate leadership 193, 198 290, 411, 458, 462, 498–9, 555
co-benefits 149 Fifth Synthesis Report (2014) 36
deliberative democracy 68 first assessment cycle (1988–1990) 290
geopolitics 113, 114 First Assessment Report 560
global governance 10 Fourth Assessment Report (2006) 39, 41,
innovation investments 548, 552 143, 168
international power structure 20, 21 fragmentation 122
legitimacy 509, 510, 512 future research issues 293–5
North–South divide 148 international bureaucracies 278, 281
People’s Planning 438 international expert organizations: role in
political economy 30–31 global climate governance 286–9
property and privatization 540, 544 justice 90
recognition and prestige 17 knowledge pluralism 561
regime effectiveness 431, 432 low-carbon economies 361
transparency 451 Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and
see also BASIC group; BRIC countries Disasters to Advance Climate Change
Indonesia xxiv–xxv Adaptation 492
see also Conference of the Parties (COP) 13 North–South divide 145, 148
Bali (2007); multi-stakeholder re-politicizing climate governance research
governance: REDD+ in Indonesia 529
industry shills 176, 184–5 reform options 516–17
Inhofe, J. 217, 570 responsiveness and embeddedness in
innovation investments 547–53 changing contexts 293–5
climate agreement 550–53 scenarios 412
decarbonization 547–9 science and technology studies (STS) 36, 38,
incentivizing innovation 547, 549–50 39, 40, 43–4, 46, 286–95
institutionalism 5 Second Assessment Report (1995) 225
liberal xix, 3, 447 security 458

Index 591
Third Assessment Report 41 International Renewable Energy Agency

vulnerability 166 (IRENA) 124
Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity International Social Science Council 559
and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) 281, International Youth Climate Campaign 300
286 internet tactics and mobilization 304
International Accounting Standards Board Interpol 453
(IASB) 359 Irland, B. 480, 485–8
International Alert 462 Israel 336
International Assessment and Review (IAR) Israel, A. 80
450
international bureaucracies 273–83 Jacobs, M. 28
biodiversity secretariat 277 Jagers, S.C. 313, 480
climate secretariat 275–7 Jakobsson, C. 403
cognitive influence 279 Japan 335, 416, 510
desertification secretariat 277–8 climate diplomacy 98, 99
executive influence 279 geopolitics 110, 112
growing influence 279–80 Heat Environment Map 337
importance of international agencies 273–5 Ministry of Environment: Cool Biz 337
interactions 280–82 Ministry of Environment: Super Cool Biz
international treaties and specialization 280 337
knowledge, expertise and communication Mitsubishi Ecozzeria boutique 338
281 Mitsubishi Estate Company 337
leadership and organizational culture 281–2 North–South divide 144, 148
normative influence 279 Outline of the Policy Framework to Reduce
Organisation for Economic Co-operation Urban Heat Island Effects 337
and Development (OECD) 279 recognition and prestige 17–18
problem structure of climate governance regime effectiveness 430, 432
280–81 Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG)
strengthening 521–2 337
United Nations Environmental Programme Wall Greening Guidelines (2006) 337
(UNEP) 278 Jasanoff, S. 560
International Carbon Reduction and Offset Jinnah, S. 277
Alliance 453 Joint Implementation (JI) 146, 348–9, 427
International Civil Aviation Organization 129 Joint Liaison Group 281
international climate insurance and Joint Work Programmes 278
compensation mechanism 92 Jones, P. 41–2
International Consultation and Analysis (ICA) Jones, R.N. 167, 171
450–51 Jonze, S. 544
International Council of Local Environmental Jordan, A. 346, 394, 395, 528, 531
Initiatives (ICLEI) – Local Governments Jordan, C. 489
for Sustainability 123, 155, 257–8, 332 Juncker, J.-C. 230
international donor activities 6 justice 574
International Energy Agency (IEA) 103, 124, in adaptation 87–9, 92
266, 279, 549, 552 corrective 91
Tracking Clean Energy Progress (2013) 550 distributive 91
International Financial Reporting Standards emissions sufficiency 86–7
(IFRSs) 359 equal per capita emissions 86
International Meteorological Organization see equal sacrifice 85–6
World Meteorological Organization in loss and damage 90–92
(WMO) in mitigation 84–7, 92
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 111 movement, global 300–303
International Negotiations Survey 551
international power structure 18–21 Kahan, D.M. 476
international relations (IR) 6, 14, 233–4, 287–9, Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, S.I. 507
291 Kazakhstan 145, 510

Kellstedt, P.M. 406 Lafferty, W.M. 390

Kenya 144, 149, 170 Lahsen, M. 373
Keohane, R.O. 18, 22, 125–6, 158 Latin America 67, 103, 111, 114, 117, 150
knowledge 281, 556–8 Latour, B. 44, 287
-based regime theories 124–5 Lave, L. 179
and politics 42–4 law of the least ambitious program 133
see also knowledge pluralism leadership see North–South divide
knowledge pluralism xxviii, 555–63 least developed countries (LDCs) 109, 245
agency and knowledge 556–8 climate diplomacy 102
human and divine agency 558 climate leadership 195, 197, 198
knowledge and power 558–60 fragmentation 126
power and democracy 560–61 geopolitics 111–12, 117
Koizumi, J. 337 North–South divide 145, 147, 150
Kolk, A. 263 Leggewie, C. 435
Kratzer, A. 334 legitimacy 60, 68, 69
Krugman, P. 185 and authority: relationship 258
Kyoto Protocol xviii, xx, xxiii, 99 crisis 508–510
Brazil 245 feminism and gender aspects 74
business sector 265 gaps 126
cap-and-trade model xxviii input (procedural fairness) 68, 507–8, 513
carbon accounting 370 multilateralism 505
China 204 outcome 507–8, 513
climate diplomacy 97 output (effectiveness) 68, 507–8, 513
climate engineering 414 recovering 510–513
climate leadership 194, 196, 199 and social recognition 506–8
climate skepticism 176, 182, 185 sociological 508
constitution 26 Lemos, M.C. 167, 473, 475
diplomacy and international negotiations Lenschow, A. 389, 394
567, 568 Lenton, T.M. 417
EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) Levy, D.L. 264, 269–70, 489
348 Levy, J. 243
European Union 225, 226, 228, 231, 233 Li Keqiang 206
flexibility mechanisms xxiv, 105 Li, T.M. 367–8
fragmentation 122 liberal civil regulation 258
global governance 4 liberal environmentalism xxii, xxviii, 135–6,
innovation investments 547–8 157, 258, 448–9
international power structure 19, 20, 21 liberal institutionalism xix, 3, 447
legitimacy crisis 509–510 Lie, J. 357
minilateralism 132, 133, 140 Lieberman, J. 183
national interest, high politics and Liechtenstein 145
environmental security 15 Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs)
North–South divide 147, 148, 150 99–100, 204, 209–210
political economy 30, 31 Lindblom, C.E. 562
recognition and prestige 18 Linden, S. 442–3
reform options 521 Lindenfeld, L. 327
regime effectiveness 425–6, 427, 430, 433 Lindzen, R. 180–81
security 460 Linnér, B.-O. 418
transnationalism 153, 157, 158, 159 Lippert, I. 373
transparency 449–50 Litfin, K.T. 441
United States 215 lobby groups 182, 185
see also Clean Development Mechanism Locke, J. 544
(CDM); multilateralism: Kyoto Lomborg, B. 183
Protocol and United Nations London Dumping Convention 414
Framework Convention on Climate London Protocol 414
Change (UNFCCC) Lövbrand, E. 52–4, 68, 371

Index 593
Lovelock, J. xxvii, 61, 436, 556 Mexico 111, 166, 246, 373
low-carbon economies 356–63 see also Conference of the Parties (COP) 16
Foucauldian approaches 360–63 Cancún (2010)
framing 360–61 Meyer, D.S. 299
governmentality 361–3 Michaels, P. 179–81
STS approaches 357–9 Mickwitz, P. 390
low-carbon energy technology (LCET) 547, micro-level studies 327, 389, 528, 533–4
549 Milbrath, L.W. 402
research, development and diffusion Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) 286
(RD&D) 550, 552–3 Miller, C.A. 52
low-carbon framework xxvii, 7 Miller, D. 85
low-carbon road maps 53 Minc, C. 240
Lula da Silva, L. 239–42, 245 mini-publics 63, 65
Lumsdaine, D. 135 minilateralism xxii, 122, 132–40
Lundqvist, L.J. 313 critical reflection 138–9
Lynas, M. 183 existing analysis 133–4
global environmental governance 135–6
Machin, D. 326 liberal environmentalism 135–6
MacKenzie, D. 41, 54 neoliberal environmental governance 136–8
macro-deliberation 62, 65–9 Mintzer, I. 179
macro-scale studies 327, 528 Mirowski, P. 137
Magnusdottir, G. 78 mitigation 61, 92, 171, 391–4, 573
Mahanty, S. 371, 373 see also Nationally Appropriate Mitigation
Major Economics Forum on Energy and Actions (NAMAs)
Climate Change 9, 122, 245 modes of climate governance xxiv–xxv
majority voting xxvii–xxviii, 111, 232, 520 Monaco 145
Malaysia 371 Monbiot, G. 265–6
Manabe, S. 180 monitoring, reporting and verification schemes
Manchin, J. 216 (MRVs) xxvi
Maniates, M. 311 carbon accounting 369, 373
Mann, M.E. 39, 183 China 203
Mansfield, B. 136–7 low-carbon economies 362
Marain, S. 450–51 REDD+ 378, 451
Marine Stewardship Council 523 transparency 446, 450, 453–4
market stability reserve (MSR) 353 Montford, A. 184, 185
marketization 449, 453, 540–41 Montreal Protocol for Protection of the Ozone
see also cap-and-trade Layer 122, 129, 414
Márquez, C. 496 Morgenthau, H.J. 14
Marshall, G.C. 39 Morocco see Conference of the Parties (COP)
Martin, R. 531 7 Marrakech (2001)
Mathews, A.S. 373 Moser, S.C. 472
Matthews, K. 105 Mouffe, C. 561
McAlpine, C.A. 451 Mozambique 144
McCain, J. 183 Müller, H. 98
McConnell, A.M. 217 multi-stakeholder partnerships 122–3, 265
McCright, A.M. 182 multilateralism xxvii, 518–19
McDonald, M. 460, 462–3, 467 fragmentation 122
McGee, J. 507 geopolitics 109
McIntyre, S. 183–4, 185 inclusive 111, 513
McKibben, B. 267 Kyoto Protocol and United Nations
McKitrick, R. 183 Framework Convention on Climate
Merton, R.K. 182, 185 Change (UNFCCC) 3, 505–514
meso-level 528, 533–4 Kyoto Protocol: legitimacy crisis 508–510
Methmann, C. 53–4, 465, 530–31 legitimacy, recovering 510–513
Metz, B. 510 legitimacy and social recognition 506–8

recalibration of goals, principles and Netherlands 21

commitments: lowering expectations see also Conference of the Parties (COP) 6
511–13 Hague (2000)
reform 520–21 Never Trust a COP (NTAC) network 301
multi-stakeholder governance: REDD+ in Neves, A. 242–3
Indonesia 377–86 New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale 402
Constitutional Court of Indonesia 378 New Zealand 98, 99, 148, 510
deforestation, forest governance and Newell, P. 79, 258, 448, 452, 529–30, 535
REDD+ 377–8 newly industrializing states 110, 427–9
district level 381, 383–4 news media 320–28
Fund for REDD+ in Indonesia (FREDDI) blurring of news and public relations (PR)
382 322–3
hybrid actors 380–84 false balance 323–5
indigenous people 378 future research directions 325–8
Letter of Intent with Norway 378, 380, 382 breadth and depth 327
Ministry of Environment and Forestry internationally comparative research 326
(MEF) 378, 380, 382, 384 online and offline flows 325–6
monitoring, reporting and verification political elites, policymakers and industry
schemes (MRVs) 381 sources 327
national level 381–3 transdisciplinary research 327–8
non-state actors 380–84 visual media 326
provincial level 383 public attitudes, framing and patterns of
REDD+ governance 379–81 media attention to climate change
REDD+ Management Agency (BP 321
REDD+) 378–80, 382–4 see also climate skepticism: United States
REDD+ MSG design 380 (New York Times)
REDD+ National Strategy 378 NGOs 251–9, 414
SATGAS 380, 383 as activists 251, 253–4
SEKBER pilot projects 383 adaptation 474
shaping or limiting governance 381–4 advisory environmental 256
Taskforce 378, 380, 384 Brazil 239
Muniesa, F. 359 business/industry 255–6
‘My Space’ 55 civil society 297, 298, 299, 302, 303
conceptualization 252–3
N-body collective action problem 537 constitution 29
Nagel, J. 75 as diplomats 251, 255–6
Najam, A. 110 environmental and socially oriented 253
Narain, S. 44–5 as global governors 251, 256–9
NASA satellites 39 ‘insider’ tactics 254–5
Nasiritousi, N. 67–8 international bureaucracies 274, 275
nation-states actors (NSAs) 262 low-carbon economies 362
National Academy of Science (NAS) 178–9 minilateralism 134
National Adaptation Plans of Action 147 multi-stakeholder governance: REDD+ in
National Allocation Plans (NAPs) 347, 348 Indonesia 383
National Assessment Report on Climate reform options 517
Change (2006) 205 socially oriented 255
National Research Council 39 transnationalism 154
Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions Nicholson-Cole, S. 476
(NAMAs) 103, 147, 159, 203, 277, 552 Niemeyer, S.J. 63
natural disasters (or disaster-risk reduction) Nixon, R. 487
(DRR) 164 non-Annex I countries (developing) 143–4,
neo-institutionalism 5 146, 245
neoliberalism 28, 286–7, 448, 452 climate diplomacy 97
geopolitics 110, 111–12, 116–17 geopolitics 110, 111
Nepal 168, 438 innovation investments 551, 552

Index 595
regime effectiveness 431 Obama, B. 18, 115, 122, 132, 134, 148, 191,
science and technology studies (STS) 44 193–4, 198–9, 209, 213–17, 219–21, 569,
transparency 446, 451, 454 571
non-annex I actions: monitoring, reporting Oberthür, S. 281
and verification schemes (MRVs) for O’Brien, K. 476
REDD+ 451 Occupy COP17 304
Nongovernmental International Panel on ocean fertilization 414–15
Climate Change (NIPCC): Nature, Not Oels, A. 53–4
Human Activity, Rules the Climate report official development assistance (ODA) 145, 393
182 Offset Quality Initiative (OQI) 452
Nordhaus, W. 45, 178–9 Oil and Climate Initiative 125–6
Norgaard, K. 78 oil and gas sector
normative approach xx, xxv–xxvii, 84–93, 506, Brazil 238, 241–2
513, 575 Canada 115, 144, 265
justice in adaptation to climate change 87–9 United States 115, 144, 218–19
justice in management of loss and damage Okereke, C. 136
90–92 Olausson, U. 326–7
justice in mitigation of climate change Olsson, P.V. 494, 498
84–7 O’Neill, S.J. 185
norms 135, 207, 209, 316 online blogs 325
activation model 402 ‘Opinion Mapping’ Q methodology-based tool
intellectual 528–9 63
minilateralism 139 Oppenheimer, M. 179–81
regime theories 124–5 orchestration 8, 127–9, 160
social 403 O’Reilly, K. 559–60
North America 105, 110 Oreskes, N. 324–5
see also Canada; United States Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
North–South divide 142–51, 568 Development (OECD) 103, 273, 279, 282,
climate change as North–South issue 142–5 551
evolving coalitions from the South 150 Declaration on Integrating Climate Change
evolving relations in climate negotiations Adaptation into Development
145–9 Co-operation 393
phase 1: defining leadership paradigm Group of Experts 281
145–6 Rio markers 393
phase 2: institutionalizing leadership Organization of Petroleum Exporting
concept 146 Countries (OPEC) 147, 149–50
phase 3: conditional leadership 147 organizational culture 281–2
phase 4: leadership competition 147–8 organizational theorists 274–5
phase 5: leadership from the South 148 O’Riordan, T. 476
phase 6: Paris Agreement (2015) 149 Ostrom, E. 405, 538
feminism and gender aspects 74–6, 79 Osuna, J.L. 496
fragmentation 113–14, 117 Ottinger, G. 373
greenhouse gases (GHGs) xxi outcome indicator 426, 428
procedural governance challenge 149–50 outsider mobilization at climate negotiations
property and privatization 540 300–303
reform options 522
regime effectiveness 429, 431, 433 Paavola, J. 472
Norway 147, 451, 510 Pachauri, R. 182
Global Environmental Change and Human Pahl-Wostl, C. 475
Security project (GECHS) 462 Painter, J. 324
Letter of Intent with Indonesia 378, 380, Pakistan 458
382 Papua New Guinea 111, 371–2
Nova, J. 184 Paris Treaty 433
nuclear power 224 Parks, B.C. 110
Nye, J.S. 18 Parry, M. 334

Partnerships for Sustainable Development 517 governing climate imaginaries in

Paterson, M. 54–5, 105, 448, 452, 453, 529–30 Anthropocene 482–8
Patt, A. 473 ice books (Irland) 480, 485–8
payment for ecosystem services (PES) 449 social imaginaries 482
peak car 314–15 ‘Thinking like a Cloud’ project (Sobecka)
‘peak oil’/‘peak fossil fuels’ 115 485–8
Peet, R. 482 post-structuralism 287
Personal Carbon Allowances 55 power 17, 22
Peru see Conference of the Parties (COP) 20 concert of 20–22
Lima (2014) and democracy 560–61
Petersen, L. 494 and depoliticization 494
petitions 254 and knowledge 558–60
PEW Institute 191 multilateralism 505
State of the Media 2013 Report 322 relations 494
Philippines 100, 149, 166 structure, international 18–21
Pimm, S. 183 pragmatism
Pinkse, J. 263 assured 63
Planet under Pressure (PuP) Conference climate 562
(London 2012) 555–6, 560 intellectual 528–30
planetary boundaries 473 philosophical 562
Planned Behavior Theory 403 political 562
pledge and review mechanism 8, 198, 220–21, principled 161
430 strategic intellectual 530
pluralism 31 systemic 529–30
epistemic 562 precautionary principle 146, 414, 464
see also knowledge pluralism Pressure and Release model 165
Point Carbon analysts 353 prestige 17–18, 22
Poland 228, 232, 234 Preston, B. 473
Conference of the Parties (COP) 14 Poznan PricewaterhouseCoopers Low Carbon Economy
(2008) 148 Index (2011) 549
Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss principal–agent theory 289, 293
and Damage (WIM) 90 Prior, T. 494
see also Conference of the Parties (COP) 19 private actors 123, 454
Warsaw (2013) see also public–private partnerships
political economy 25–33 privatization see property and privatization
consequences 32–3 problem-solving effectiveness 426–9
constitution 26–9 prohibition 540–41
critical 262–3 Pronk, J. 299
global 109 property and privatization 537–44
governance 29–32 ‘fair’ rules 540
politics genealogy of private property 538–9
high politics 14–17, 21, 27 land and title 539–41
politicization 324 protest tactics 300
‘politics of truth’ 54–5 see also boycotts and buycotts
post-humanist imaginaries 481 public–private partnerships 68–9, 158, 258–9,
re-politicization 526–35 517–18, 522
see also climate politics among states;
geopolitics; political economy Qatar 145
pollutionist approaches 167–8 see also Conference of the Parties (COP) 18
pollutionist models of risk 171 Doha (2012)
Portugal 147 quota trading system 427
post-humanist imaginaries 480–89
alter-Anthropocene imaginaries 484–8 Rabe, B.G. 400
Anthropocene climate imaginary 481 Rabinow, P. 361–2
environmental or ecological imaginaries 482 radicalism 300, 440

Index 597
constructivist 288–90, 292 cities 333

green 67 in climate-related disasters 492
Rajamani, L. 97 conceptualization: origins and evolution
Randalls, S. 55–6, 464–5 491–2
Ravetz, J.R. 43 definitions of in disaster risk management
re-politicizing climate governance research 493
526–35 evolutionary 499
politics deficit 526–34 public policies, number of 496–7
realism xix, 14–23 rationale 494
classical 17 shortcomings in uses 492, 494
environmental security 15–16 social-ecological 495
high politics 15–16 summary of search results, document
international power structure 18–21 selection and final inclusion 495
national interest 15–16 wheel 499
neo-realism 14 Resources for the Future 113
recognition and prestige 17–18 respect 67
structural 14 responsibilities see common but differentiated
rebound effect 315 responsibilities (CBDR)
Reclaim Power 302–3 Resurrección, B. 76
recognition 17–18 Reus-Smit, C. 514
REDD+ Revkin, A. 183
Brazil 239–40 Ribot, J. 167
international bureaucracies 277 Rice, J.L. 55
low-carbon economies 362 Riedy, C. 65
monitoring, reporting and verification Rienstra, S.A. 403
schemes (MRVs) 451 right-to-development principle 143–4, 551
North–South divide 148 Rio+20 Summit (2012) 245, 431, 563
transnationalism 158 Rio Conference (1992) 136, 252
transparency 450, 453 Rising Tide 300
see also carbon accounting and REDD+; Risse, T. 98
multi-stakeholder governance: REDD+ Roberts, T. 134
in Indonesia Roger, C. 160
REEEP 127 Röhr, U. 77, 79
Reference Emission Levels (RELs) 369 Rosenau, J.N. 257
Reference Levels (RLs) 369 Rothe, D. 53, 465
reform options 516–24 Rouseff, D. 240–43, 246
citizens and civil society: strengthening in Rousseau, J.J. 537
global decision-making 522–3 Ruggie, J.G. 506, 513
global adaptation governance 523–4 Runge-Metzger, A. 102
institutional integration 519–20 Russia 226, 233
international bureaucracies: strengthening climate diplomacy 99
521–2 international power structure 20
multilateral decision-making 520–21 legitimacy 509, 510
regime complex 7, 31, 104, 158, 160, 425 national interest, high politics and
Reinalda, B. 273 environmental security 15
renewable energy 124, 227–9 news media 325
see also hydropower; nuclear power; solar North–South divide 144, 147, 148
power; wind power regime effectiveness 432
Renewable Energy Certificate trading schemes security 458
31 see also BRIC countries
reputation 209 Rutland, T. 55
research trends and policy practice xvii–xxix
resilience xxvi, 463–5, 491–9 Sachs, C. 80
in academic discourse and public policies Sachsman, D. 322
495–7 Sahel 169–70

Sale, K. 439 Senegal 170

Sarewitz, D. 555 National Agency for Ecovillages 443, 444
Saudi Arabia 15 Sengupta, S. 21
Scandinavian countries 78, 400 Shabecoff, P. 179
see also Denmark; Finland; Iceland; Sharman, A. 184
Norway; Sweden Shell 265, 266
scenario modeling and worst-case scenarios shock events/crises 346, 350
464 see also extreme weather events
Schade, J. 403 Shteyngart, G. 544
Scharpf, F. 507 Shue, H. 88
Schelling, T. 178–9 side-events 67–9
Schlag, B. 403 Siebenhüner, B. 287
Schmacher, E.F. 441 Silva, M. 239–42
Schmidt, E. 544 Silver, B. 109, 113, 118
Schneider, S. 179–81 Singapore 145, 336
Scholte, S. 416 Singer, F. 182
Schwartz, S.H. 402 Singh, A. 74–5
science and technology studies (STS) 36–46 skepticism
climate science and world-making 44–5 benign 176
knowledge pluralism 560 self assured 63
knowledge and politics 42–4 see also climate skepticism: United States
low-carbon economies 356, 357–9, 360–61, (New York Times)
363 Skidelsky, R. 544
making climate a topic for science 37–40 Slovakia 145
uncertainty and ignorance 40–42 Slovenia 145
science-based global policy see small island states 97, 245, 460–61, 464–5,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 574
Change (IPCC): science-based global see also Alliance of Small Island States
policy (AOSIS)
Scott, D. 420 Smit, B. 470
Scott, J. 370, 558 Smith, H. 327
sea level rises/melting ice caps xvii, 516, 523–4, Snidal, D. 512
574 Sobecka, K. 485–9
Seager, J. 80 Social Carbon standard 156
‘Seattle tactics’ 301 social ecological systems (SES) 492, 494
security 15–16, 267, 458–67 social media and mobile technologies 184,
China 208 304–5, 322, 325
contingency 464 social motivation approach 314–16
Copenhagen School 459–61 social movements 317
ecological 79, 462, 467 socio-cultural theory of corporate climate
environmental 462 governance 262, 267–70
European Union 233 Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA)
governmentality studies: resilience 463–5 266
human 461, 467 solar power 9, 207, 266, 571
international 462–3, 467 solar radiation management (SRM) 45,
liberal biopower/government 463 411–14, 418, 419
national 461, 463, 467 Solidarity in the Greenhouse 77
populism 465–6 Soon, W. 183
referent objects analysis 461–3 South Africa 30, 113, 114
sovereign logic 463 World Summit on Sustainable Development
surveillance 463–4 (Johannesburg 2002) 68, 517
technological fix 465–6 see also BASIC group; Conference of the
Segerberg, A. 305 Parties (COP) 17 Durban (2011);
Seitz, F. 182 Durban Platform of Action (ADP)
Sen, A. 166 South America 65, 105, 112, 117

Index 599
South Korea 145 innovation investments 552

‘Green Growth Institute’ 103 Stockholm Conference on the Human
sovereignty principle 206–7 Environment (1972) 21, 135
Spain 395 Switzerland 510
Special Climate Change Fund 147 Natural Sciences Society 557
speech acts 459–61, 466 Swyngedouw, E. 466, 530–31, 561
Spencer, R. 180
SPICE project on stratospheric aerosol Tange, K. 335
injection 418 Tanzania 552
Spicer, A. 269–70, 489 Tarrow, S. 158, 298, 299, 301
Spiegel, J.B. 482–3 taxation 540–41
standardized methods 373–5 see also carbon taxes
standpoint theory 76 Taylor, M.R. 549
state agents of climate governance xxii–xxiv TckTckTck 304
status-seeking behaviour 17, 22 technocratic guardianship 436–7
Stavins, R.N. 431 technocratic motivations 528–9
Stehlik, D. 492 technological fix 465–6
Stern, N. 26 technologies of climate governance xxiv–xxv
Stern Review (2006) 45, 148, 179 see also science and technology studies (STS)
Stern, T. 198 technology control dilemma 412–13, 419
Stevens, C. 289–91 Tegelberg, M. 325
Stevens, W. 179–81 Teixera, I. 241, 245
Stevenson, H. 134, 438, 533 temperature target see global temperature
Stevis, D. 23 Terhalle, M. 21
Stirling, A. 563 Terry, G. 74
strategic approach 67, 109–110 Thailand 168
Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) 414, 417, theorizing climate governance xix–xxi
418, 419 350.org xxiii, 305
Stratospheric Ozone regime 21, 418 Tickner, J.A. 79
see also Montreal Protocol for Protection of Tinsley, B. 181
the Ozone Layer tipping points 417, 473, 484
Stripple, J. 68, 371, 480 Tol, R. 475
Su Wei 191 Tompkins, E.L. 64
subsidiarity principle 379, 395 top-down approach xxi, 133, 134, 197, 200
Subsidiary Bodies of the Convention 276 Torgler, B. 405
Subsidiary Body on Implementation 159 ‘Toronto target’ 253
Sudan (Darfur) 169–70 tragedy of the commons xix, 537
Sullivan, W. 177 transformation 497–9
Summary for Policymakers (SPM) 290 transnational corporations and networks
sustainability/sustainable development 68, 155, 274–5
336, 517, 549 transnationalism 153–61
discourses 157 emergence 154–7
environmental democracy 439 implications for scholarship and policy
environmental policy integration (EPI) 389 practice 160–61
expansive 67 mapping interactions 158–60
goals 155, 171 social movements 254
mainstream 67 transparency 126, 446–55
standards movement 155 climate policy integration (CPI) in European
Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches (SLAs) Union 393
165 critical transparency studies 447–9
Svallfors, S. 401 democratization driver 448–9
Sweden 77, 324, 390 evaluation in private climate governance
citizen-consumers 313 452–4
climate engineering 416, 418 evaluation in state-led climate governance
climate policy instruments 404 449–51

multi-stakeholder governance: REDD+ in climate engineering 417

Indonesia 381, 384 feminism and gender aspects 75
supported non-annex I actions: monitoring, geopolitics 109, 117
reporting and verification schemes minilateralism 134
(MRVs) for REDD+ 451 multi-stakeholder governance: REDD+ in
voluntary non-annex I actions: international Indonesia 381, 383
consultation and analysis 450–51 Peacekeeping 76
Trombetta, M.J. 461 and REDD+ 148
Trondal, J. 273 United Nations Conference on Environment
trust 446 and Development (UNCED) xxv, 161
Tsing, A. 374–5 United Nations Convention to Combat
Tuana, N. 80 Desertification (UNCCD) Joint Liaison
Turkey 144 Group 277
Tuvalu 98 United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP) 458, 461–2
Ukraine 147, 233, 510 United Nations Environment Programme
Uldam, J. 305 (UNEP) 5, 42, 144, 458, 521
Umbrella Group 100–102 Governing Council 278
uncertainty and ignorance 40–42, 419 international bureaucracies 273, 278–9,
Underdal, A. 133 281–2
Ungar, S. 321 vulnerability 169–70, 171
unilateralism 111 see also Clean Development Mechanism
United Kingdom (CDM)
adaptation 476 United Nations Framework Convention on
business sector 268 Climate Change (UNFCCC) xx, xxiii, 290
cities 334 Adaptation Committee 277
Climate Change Citizens’ Summit 62 Brazil 243–4
climate diplomacy 101–2, 105 carbon accounting 369–70, 371, 373
climate engineering 416 China 204
climate skepticism/newspaper reporting 176, civil society 297, 301, 303
184, 185 Climate Change Expert Group (CCXG) 279
Department of Energy and Climate Change: climate diplomacy 97, 98, 100, 101, 104
carbon calculator 412 climate engineering 414
emissions trading schemes 31 climate leadership 192–3, 194, 195–6, 199
geopolitics 115–16 climate skepticism xxii
House of Commons Select Committee on constitution 26
Science and Technology 323, 415, 464 deliberative democracy 67, 69, 70
innovation investments 552 diplomacy and international negotiations
London Dumping Convention 414 567
London Protocol 414 European Union 225, 233
national interest, high politics and Expert Group on Technology Transfer 127
environmental security 16 feminism and gender aspects 77
news media 322, 324 fragmentation 121–2, 123–4, 125–9
Planet under Pressure (PuP) Conference global governance 4, 5, 7
(London 2012) 555–6, 560 innovation investments 547–8, 550, 551–3
Royal Commission on Environmental international bureaucracies 273, 281
Pollution 413 justice 92
Royal Society report 413–15, 419 low-carbon economies 358
scenario-based stakeholder engagement minilateralism 132–3, 134, 136, 138
method 64 national interest, high politics and
science and technology studies (STS) 45 environmental security 16
SPICE project on stratospheric aerosol North–South divide 146
injection 418 political economy 30, 31
United Nations re-politicizing climate governance research
Charter 299 526

Index 601
reform options 520 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

regime effectiveness 425–6, 427, 432, 433 115, 179, 199, 214, 215–18, 220
secretariat 6, 255 feminism and gender aspects 76
security 460 filibuster mechanism 215
Technology Executive Committee 128 fragmentation 129
transparency 446, 452 geopolitics 111–17
see also Conference of the Parties (COP); global governance 4, 9
multilateralism: Kyoto Protocol and Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32)
United Nations Framework Convention (2006) 123, 541–2
on Climate Change (UNFCCC); greenhouse gases (GHGs) 123, 202, 216, 571
REDD+ hydraulic fracturing/fracking 115, 218–19
United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) innovation investments 549, 552
21, 42, 243, 458 international power structure 18, 19–21
United Nations regime effectiveness 425–33 J.P. Morgan Chase 116
bottom-up approach 429–33 knowledge pluralism 557
environmental institutions: effectiveness legitimacy 508, 509, 510, 512
426–7 Major Economics Forum 134, 138
Paris Treaty 433 Major Economies Process 137–8
progress 428–30 market-driven emissions cuts: shale gas
top-down approach 429–30 218–19
United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 16, Mercury and Air Toxics Standards 217
76, 433, 458, 460, 466 minilateralism 136–8
United Nations Stockholm Conference on the national interest, high politics and
Human Environment (1972) 21, 135 environmental security 15
United Nations Sustainable Development National Mining Association 216
Council 520 New York City Department of Air
United States xxiii, 213–21 Resources 335
ambitions for climate leadership 219–21 New York Urban Air Pollution Dynamics
American Petroleum Institute 325 Research Program 335
business sector 266, 267 news media 321–2, 324–5
Byrd–Hagel resolution 147, 213, 221, 508 North–South divide 144, 147, 149, 150
carbon emissions reduction 215–19 political economy 30–31
Centre for a New American Century 462 previous barriers to participation 214–15
Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) 157 regime effectiveness 429–30, 433
and China bilateral agreement (2014) 214, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiatives 123
219–20, 233, 432, 513 Republicans 175, 182, 215, 323, 569, 570–71
Clean Air Acts 215–17 science and technology studies (STS) 39, 43
Clean Energy and Security Act 215 Securities and Exchange Commission 28
Climate Action Plan 213–14, 216–19, 221 shale gas 115, 144
climate diplomacy 97, 99, 101, 102, 104 SO2/NOx model 352
climate engineering 416 Waxman–Markey climate bill 352
climate leadership 191–5, 198–200 Wells Fargo 116
climate politics among states 570–71 Western Climate Initiative 123
Climate Stewardship Act (2003) 183 see also climate skepticism: United States
coal use 115–17 (New York Times)
common but differentiated responsibilities Urban Climate Change Research Network 333
(CBDR) 219 Urwin, K. 395
Constitution rules concerning treaty
ratification 214–15 value regimes 481
Democrats 182, 215, 323, 569 value–action or attitude–behavior gap 311
diplomacy and international negotiations value-belief-norm (VBN) theory of
567–8 environmentalism 402–4, 407
Energy Information Administration Annual value-rational questions 532–3
Energy Outlook 2014 217–18 values and behaviors 481
energy installations 234 values, beliefs and norms 401–2

Van der Sluijs, J. 40–41 willingness-to-pay 311

van Rompuy, H. 21 win–win solutions 101–3, 105, 267–8, 371
van Steenbergen, B. 437 wind power 207, 238, 266, 571
Vanderheiden, S. 87 Winter, G. 414, 419
Verbeek, B. 273 Wolf, J. 473
Verified Carbon Standard 155, 156 Wolfers, A. 15
veto coalition 19 Wollenberg, E. 380–81
Victor, D.G. 125–6, 158, 176, 184 World Bank 28, 32, 115, 122, 126, 273, 516
video-sharing platforms 322 geopolitics 111
Vihma, A. 104, 507 Pilot Program for Climate Resilience
Vogler, J. 105 (PPCR) 168
Voluntary Carbon Standard 123 security 458
voluntary initiatives 313 World Business Council for Sustainable
voluntary non-annex I actions: international Development (WBCSD) 155
consultation and analysis 450–51 World Climate Research Program Coupled
von Storch, H. 43 Model Intercomparison Project 170
Vormedal, I. 256 World Commission on Environment and
vulnerability 84, 164–72, 497–8 Development (WCED) 39, 44, 156
Asset Vulnerability Framework 165 World Conference on the Changing
cities 333 Atmosphere (Toronto 1988) 253, 425–6
and climate change 166–9 World Environment Organization xxvii
and social sciences 164–6 World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
violent conflict, risk of 169–70 38, 42, 145, 278, 334, 555
First World Climate Conference (1979) 53
Wade, R.H. 113 World Security Council 274
Wæver, O. 460–61 World Summit on Sustainable Development
Walgrave, S. 302 (Johannesburg 2002) 68, 517
Walker, R.L. 486 World Trade Organization (WTO) 20, 21,
Waller, M.A. 491 110
Walters, W. 51–2 World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) 262
Waltz, K.N. 14 World Wide Views project 62–3
Wandel, J. 470 Worldwatch Institute 171
Wang, B. 209
Wang Jiechi, 209 Xi Jinping 208
Wang Yang 208 Xie Zhenhua 204
Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and
Damage (WIM) 90 Yamin, F. 98
Washington Consensus 110–112 Yohe, G. 475
Watts, A. 184, 185 York, R. 78
Watts, M. 482 Young, O. 139
Weart, S.R. 38 Yudhoyono, S.B. 377–8
Welzer, H. 435 Yusoff, K. 480
‘wicked problem’ of climate change xvii, xxv,
xxvi, 388, 516 Zapfel, P. 350–52
Widodo, J. 377 Zelizer, V. 357
Williamson, J. 110 Zito, A. 527


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RESEARCH HANDBOOK ON CLIMATE

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.

A catalogue record for this book

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015945552

This book is available electronically in the

ISBN 978 1 78347 059 4 (cased)

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

List of figures and tablesix

PART I THEORIZING CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

PART II PROCESSES AND SITES OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

13. The North–South divide 142

PART III THE STATE AND CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

17. Climate leadership 191

PART IV NON-­STATE AGENTS AND INSTITUTIONS OF CLIMATE

22. NGOs 251

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

29. The city 332

PART V MODES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

30. EU emissions trading 345

PART VI NORMATIVE IDEALS OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

37. Regime effectiveness 425

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

PART VII THE FUTURE OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE: THEORY AND

44. Multilateralism in crisis? 505

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

16.1 Major world newspapers: frequency of ‘climate change’ or ‘global

13.1 Evolving coalitions from the South 150

Carolina E. Adler is a Geographer and Environmental Policy Scientist at ETH Zurich,

David Ciplet is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

CLIMATE GOVERNANCE IN THE POST-­COPENHAGEN ERA

The 2009 UN climate conference in Copenhagen is often represented as a turning point

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

THEORIZING CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

Needless to say, there is no unified theory or methodology of climate governance. The

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

Other ­chapters critically interrogate the micro-­political processes of knowledge-­making

PROCESSES AND SITES OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

unilateral and voluntary mitigation commitments. The Intended Nationally Determined

STATE AND NON-­STATE AGENTS OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

MODES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

post-­colonial, post-­authoritarian state. This is an interesting finding, given that most of

NORMATIVE IDEALS OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

The literature on climate governance post-­Copenhagen frequently blends empirical analy­

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

address a number of political ideals mobilized in the climate governance ­scholarship.

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand - 9781783470594

List of figures and tablesix

13. The North–South divide 142

17. Climate leadership 191

PART IV NON-STATE AGENTS AND INSTITUTIONS OF CLIMATE

22. NGOs 251

29. The city 332

30. EU emissions trading 345

37. Regime effectiveness 425

44. Multilateralism in crisis? 505

16.1 Major world newspapers: frequency of ‘climate change’ or ‘global

13.1 Evolving coalitions from the South 150

CLIMATE GOVERNANCE IN THE POST-COPENHAGEN ERA

Other chapters critically interrogate the micro-political processes of knowledge-making

STATE AND NON-STATE AGENTS OF CLIMATE GOVERNANCE

post-colonial, post-authoritarian state. This is an interesting finding, given that most of

The literature on climate governance post-Copenhagen frequently blends empirical analy

address a number of political ideals mobilized in the climate governance scholarship.

CLIMATE SCIENCE AND WORLD-MAKING