Governing Climate Change: Lessons from other Governance Regimes

The urgent challenge of climate change poses a critical test for modern democracy and rules based international politics. Democracies need to shift from loose policy commitments to real and binding action. Yet, there are enormous collective action problems in combating climate change. Can democratic systems evolve to confront the challenge? At global governance level there has so far been a failure to generate a sound and effective international framework for managing global climate change, whilst at state level solutions are weak and struggle to transcend the normal push and pull of partisan politics. By setting out a range of focused governance and policy recommendations, this paper proposes steps for reforming a rulesbased politics, from the nation state to the global level. To coherently combine democracy, markets and universal standards, global governance systems need to develop into inclusive and representative institutions with the legitimacy and capacity to translate policy commitments into real world outcomes. This will require the wealthy industrialised states to shoulder a significant part of the cost of the transformation in developing countries. The nation state holds the key; it must broaden and deepen the deliberative process through democratic agency, involving citizens and civil society in the making and delivery of policy and ensuring that flexible regulation is in place to encourage entrepreneurialism and drive technological innovation.

2012

Recent attempts to create a concrete framework for mitigation have fallen short. This failure has been explored in a number of studies. These have mostly focused on the pursuit of a global deal through international negotiations, or on the domestic mitigation policies of Annex 1 states. However, large developing countries, such as China and Brazil, are now widely considered to be the vanguard of climate change policymaking , taking actions that are comparable to anything being done by Annex 1 states.

Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2014

Climate change is a relatively new governance area in which policy and practice tend to precede theory or advance simultaneously. Establishing effective legal and institutional frameworks is crucial to its management. This chapter conducts a comparative analysis of the climate change governance frameworks of four developing countries, namely, Philippines, Mexico, South Africa, and Kenya, all of which have enacted or propose climate change legislations, strategies, and related institutional structures, and have decentralized governments. These are contrasted with the United Kingdom, the first to globally enact a framework climate change law. The results indicate that despite being time- and resource-consuming, enactment of stand-alone framework climate change legislation is preferred over piecemeal amendments to relevant laws. Another key finding is the overwhelming adoption of mainstreaming as an important approach to managing climate change. Moreover, both adaptation and mitigation are considered equally important, mitigation being seen as a function of adaptation. This disabuses the notion that developing countries do not or should not focus much on mitigation. Institutionally, establishment of (often) a new high-level cross-sectoral climate change coordinating institution domiciled in the Office of and/or chaired by the head of state is common. Such institutions offer general policy guidance and are supported at lower levels by an advisory panel of experts and a technical administrative secretariat. Procedures to ensure clear coordination between the central and devolved governments are in many instances outlined. Climate finance sources and management strategies are mixed. Keywords Climate change - Governance - Policy - Legal and institutional frameworks - Developing countries

Environmental Politics, 2021

How do states respond to the challenge of climate governance? The Paris Agreement has led to heightened interest in domestic climate policies, but attention to underlying national climate institutional architectures has lagged behind. This literature gap deserves to be addressed, because climate change brings considerable governance challenges. Drawing on a collection of country studies, this paper outlines a framework to explain the path-dependent emergence of climate institutions, based on the interplay of national political institutions, international drivers, and bureaucratic structures. The resultant institutional forms suggest four varieties of climate governance, based on the extent of political polarisation and the narrative around climate politics in the country. The functioning of existing climate institutions indicates they have so far played a modest role in addressing climate governance challenges, but also illustrates their importance in structuring climate politics and outcomes, suggesting a substantial agenda for future research.

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics

Research on global climate change governance is no longer primarily concerned with the international legal regime, state practice and its outcomes, but rather scrutinizes the intricate interactions between the public and the private in governing climate change. This broad trend has also taken center stage within the pages of INEA. Two decades after its establishment, we sketch the main theoretical debates, conceptual innovations and empirical findings on global climate change governance and survey the new generation of climate governance scholarship. In more detail, we sketch how climate governance research has developed into three innovative sub-debates, building on important conceptualizations and critical inquiries of earlier debates. Our aim is not so much to provide an all-encompassing assessment of global climate change governance scholarship in 2022, but rather to illustrate in what important ways current research is different from research in the early phase of INEA, and wha...

Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, Institute for Research and European Studies - Bitola, 2023

The decades of increased Green House Gas (GHG) emissions have increased global average temperature to 1.1 degrees over pre-industrial levels. In order to hold the global average temperature rise below 2degreesCelsius and, if possible,1.5 degree Celsius, the governments signed various treaties. However, countries ‟collective agreements to reduce their emissions were never kept. This study outlines why the method of mitigating global climate change has failed. The main problem was the inability to enforce goals and timelines. Ideas for even tighter emission limits will be ineffective unless they solve the enforcement gap. Trade restrictions are one method, but they introduce significant complications, particularly when used to enforce economy-wide carbon reduction agreements. The applied methodology is qualitative. This study proposes a novel strategy to unpack the climate challenge, targeting various gasses and industries with various instruments. It also illustrates how failing to address the climate problem fundamentally would generate incentives for various solutions, offering new problems for climate change governance.

Climate change management, 2013

This article provides a critical missing piece to the global climate change governance puzzle: how to create incentives for the major developing countries to reduce carbon emissions. The major developing countries are projected to account for 80 percent of the global emissions growth over the next several decades, and substantial reductions in the risk of catastrophic climate change will not be possible without a change in this emissions path. Yet the global climate governance measures proposed to date have not succeeded and may be locking in disincentives as carbon-intensive production shifts from developed to developing countries. A multi-pronged governance approach will be necessary. We identify a new strategy that will be an important component of any successful effort. Our strategy recognizes that in the context of climate change, the simplified Coasian approach to pollution should be updated to include a more complete view of the options firms face in response to emissions reduction pressure and the sources of that pressure. We demonstrate how governments and

The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses, 2011

This paper outlines the evolution of the concept of global environmental governance, and its expression within climate-change related problem-solving institutions. A number of institutions address climate change on a global level, with a variety of institutional structures and processes. This leads to difficulties for comparative analysis, particularly when it comes to assessing quality of governance. Governance performance is important, since it helps stakeholders determine whether a given institution is sufficiently legitimate to merit participation, or whether their efforts are better served in other forums. Using a set of principles, criteria and indicators of governance quality, the paper provides an analysis of the 'REDD-plus' process (United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries). It highlights REDDplus' strengths and weaknesses and provides a rating of institutional legitimacy. It concludes with some observations on the challenges facing REDD-plus, and calls for the development of standards to ensure institutional quality-of-governance.

Climate change is one of the most daunting global policy challenges facing the international community in the 21st century. This mapping paper takes stock of the current state of the global

Environmental Politics, 2014