Charles Roger

The Comparative Politics of Transnational Climate Governance

ABSTRACT We live in an era of remarkable transformations in how governance is supplied at the global level, as traditional means of intergovernmental institutions are being joined by a growing diversity of transnational arrangements. Yet, at present, we still have only a superficial understanding of what causes actors to adhere to transnational rules, norms, and initiatives once they appear, and especially what role domestic political, economic and social variables play in their decision making. Focusing on climate change as an issue exemplifying the tendency for complex governance interplay, this special issue provides a comparative political economy perspective on the increasing but uneven uptake of transnational climate governance (TCG). This article articulates a conceptual framework for the analysis, highlighting the interplay between transnational and domestic politics and how such interactions shape the incentives, opportunities, and modalities of participation in transnational initiatives. An original data set of participation in transnational governance initiatives is introduced to capture the significance of the phenomenon and to provide a common basis to systematically address, for the first time, questions about the cross-national patterns of involvement we find across different arenas and types of TCG, be they networks of sub- or nonstate actors, private rules, or hybrid arrangements.

Africa in the global climate change negotiations

The African Group of Negotiators (AGN) has become a much more significant bargaining coalition in the global climate change negotiations. It has been participating more proactively and on a much more significant scale, and, as a result, it has had a greater impact on bargaining outcomes, notably in Nairobi, Copenhagen and Durban. Yet, at present, the group remains poorly understood by both scholars and policymakers. Compared to other groups in the climate negotiations, such as the Group of 77 and Alliance of Small Island States, it has received relatively little attention. This paper fills this gap by tracking the evolution of the AGN over the course of the climate change negotiations. In the early years after the Earth Summit, it shows that the AGN faced tremendous difficulties pursing regional objectives effectively, largely due to a number of “internal” barriers to participation, which compounded the structural barriers that the continent faced by making it difficult to use “low-power” negotiating strategies such as coalition building, agenda-setting and persuasion. However, in recent years, the group has become much more proactive as a result of greater access to material, ideational and institutional resources. These have relieved, somewhat, the internal barriers that the group faced, making it possible for the AGN to negotiate much more confidently and effectively than before.

Conclusions – Looking Beyond Transnational Climate Change Governance

Our intention at the outset of this project was to move beyond the focus on individual cases or particular segments of the world of TCCG in order to examine what we might be able to discover collectively about this phenomenon. In this final chapter, we return to this overarching theme and identify the ways in which our analysis of TCCG contributes to ongoing debates in the field. Underpinning this contribution, we suggest, are two novel aspects of our work. First, the book provides the first analysis of transnational governance that includes both an extensive database of a large number and a diverse array of particular case-studies. Existing research in the field of transnational governance has been mostly based on either individual examples or a small number of cases; whereas these can provide rich and nuanced analyses, there is nevertheless a significant value added in attempting to say something about this phenomenon as a whole. While we have not been able to survey the entire universe of cases in the transnational climate governance arena, a task that would be difficult to undertake given that much of this activity is relatively unknown, we have devised a strategy to maximise the diversity of cases we explore. In the sense that the approach we have developed includes the full variety of forms of TCCG, we thus suggest that it can be regarded as representative of the phenomenon as a whole. The database approach has enabled us to see patterns in the types of initiatives that predominate in TCCG, in terms of the types of actors, the issues upon which they focus, the forms of institutionalisation, the practices of governance, the claims to legitimacy and the geographical reach of TCCG initiatives.