Matthew J. Hoffmann

Governing climate change transnationally: Assessing the evidence from a database of sixty initiatives

With this paper we present an analysis of sixty transnational governance initiatives and assess the implications for our understanding of the roles of public and private actors, the legitimacy of governance ‘beyond’ the state, and the North–South dimensions of governing climate change. In the first part of the paper we examine the notion of transnational governance and its applicability in the climate change arena, reflecting on the history and emergence of transnational governance initiatives in this issue area and key areas of debate. In the second part of the paper we present the findings from the database and its analysis. Focusing on three core issues, the roles of public and private actors in governing transnationally, the functions that such initiatives perform, and the ways in which accountability for governing global environmental issues might be achieved, we suggest that significant distinctions are emerging in the universe of transnational climate governance which may have considerable implications for the governing of global environmental issues. In conclusion, we reflect on these findings and the subsequent consequences for the governance of climate change.

A Tale of Two Copenhagens: Carbon Markets and Climate Governance

Assessments of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 have tended to see it as a ‘return to realism’ — as the triumph of hard interstate bargaining over institutional or normative development about climate change. This article contests that interpretation by showing how it focuses too closely on the interstate negotiations and neglects the ongoing development of carbon markets as governance practices and systems to deal with climate change. It shows that there remains a strong normative consensus about such markets, and a deepening set of transnational governance practices. These governance practices only partly depend on the interstate negotiations. Thinking about the future of global climate governance needs to start with the complexity of interactions between these transnational governance systems and the interstate negotiations.

Reinvigorating International Climate Policy: A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Nonstate Action

As countries negotiate a new climate agreement for the United Nations climate conference in December 2015, a groundswell of climate actions is emerging as cities, regions, businesses and civil society groups act on mitigation and adaptation, independently, with each other and with national governments and international organizations. The Paris conference provides a historic opportunity to establish a framework to catalyse, support, and steer these initiatives. Without such a framework, ‘bottom-up’ climate governance runs the risk of failing to deliver meaningful results. Social science research highlights the need for a comprehensive approach that promotes ambition, experimentation and accountability, and avoids unnecessary overlaps. This article specifies functions and design principles for a new, comprehensive framework for sub- and nonstate climate actions that could provide effective coordination.

The Micro Foundations of Policy Diffusion Toward Complex Global Governance An Analysis of the Transnational Carbon Emission Trading Network

Greenhouse gas emissions trading (ET) systems have become the centerpiece of climate change policy at multiple scales, unexpectedly largely outside of the UN climate governance process. The diffusion of ET is best described as a case of polycentric diffusion, where ET systems diffused to multiple loci of governance, but where they all serve similar goals under a broad policy framework guided loosely by the UN-based climate regime. Using network analysis combined with qualitative data, we explain how this polycentric pattern of policy development emerged, who carried and spread it and how, and how the idea has spread into a polycentric governance system. We contribute to the policy diffusion literature in a novel way to explain diffusion toward polycentric governance, show the limits of the existing literature to explain the diffusion of ET, and show the utility of network analysis in understanding the process and mechanism of polycentric diffusion.

Valuing the Contributions of Nonstate and Subnational Actors to Climate Governance

Nonstate and subnational climate governance activities are proliferating. Alongside them are databases and registries that attempt to calculate their contributions to global decarbonization. We label these registries “orchestration platforms” because they both aggregate disparate initiatives and attempt to steer them toward overarching objectives such as improved transparency, accountability, and effectiveness. While well-intentioned, many orchestration platforms adopt a narrow conception of “value” as either quantifiable greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions or relevant outputs. We offer a more comprehensive approach to valuing nonstate and subnational climate governance that is rooted in recognizing the potential for initiatives to become far-reaching (i.e., achieve scale) and durable (i.e., become entrenched). We illustrate the comparative advantage of our approach with reference to a particular case of nonstate governance: The Carbon Trust’s attempt to create product carbon footprints. By tracing the direct and indirect impacts of product carbon footprinting, we show that initial failures to generate quantifiable GHG reductions or produce relevant outputs do not reflect the intervention’s broader impacts through scaling to other jurisdictions and entrenching business practices that contribute to decarbonization. Taking this broader view of “value” can help policy-makers better understand and gauge the contribution of nonstate and subnational climate governance to global decarbonization.

From Rio to Rio and Beyond Innovation in Global Environmental Governance

The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro unleashed new energy in environmental governance, engaging actors beyond the state and across scales, from local to global, from communities to large transnational networks. In this paper we argue that this expanded pluralism has contributed to a remarkable array of governance experimentation and innovations for the environment. The impact and legacy of Rio thus goes far beyond the formal agreements that emerged in 1992. We explore why Rio had this effect by examining the context within which Rio took place and the dynamics that it served to catalyze. We close by discussing the need to generate processes that lead to coordinated innovations. Such a reorganization of the global governance space could start a new legacy of collective wondering and multiple pathways to a greener future.

Just Scraps of Paper? The Dynamics of Multilateral Treaty-Making

Despite its importance in the global system, the literature provides little guidance on how treaty-making emerged as a well-accepted practice. In either assuming the appropriateness of treaty-making (and then analysing design) or treating treaties as strategic choices in the pursuit of gains (without analysing how treaties came to be a way to pursue gains), the current literature discounts the emergence and evolution of treaty-making. This lacuna contributes to a biased view of treaty-making as the epiphenomenal result of specific, ahistorical factors, rather than as a patterned, historical practice. We contend that the evolution of the practice of treaty-making is significant for questions of design/compliance, the future of multilateral interaction and global order. In addressing this concern, we pursue two linked goals. The first is self-consciously descriptive. We introduce a dataset of multilateral treaties that provides a novel picture of treaty-making across time, space and issue-areas. The second goal is explanatory. We develop and test a social constructivist and path-dependent explanation for the patterns of treaty-making evident in the data, especially 150 years of exponential growth, the spread of treaty-making across multiple issues and the diffusion of the practice across the world.

The politics of decarbonization and the catalytic impact of subnational climate experiments

The Paris Agreement of 2015 marks a formal shift in global climate change governance from an international legal regime that distributes state commitments to solve a collective action problem to a catalytic mechanism to promote and facilitate transformative pathways to decarbonization. It does so through a system of nationally determined contributions, monitoring and ratcheting up of commitments, and recognition that the practice of climate governance already involved an array of actors and institutions at multiple scales. In this article, we develop a framework that focuses on the politics of decarbonization to explore policy pathways and mechanisms that can disrupt carbon lock-in through these diverse, decentralized responses. It identifies political mechanisms—normalization, capacity building, and coalition building—that contribute to the scaling and entrenchment of discrete decarbonization initiatives within or across jurisdictions, markets, and practices. The role for subnational (municipal, state/provincial) climate governance experiments in this new context is especially profound. Drawing on such cases, we illustrate the framework, demonstrate its utility, and show how its political analysis can provide insight into the relationship between climate governance experiments and the formal global response as well as the broader challenge of decarbonization.

The Analytic Utility (and Practical Pitfalls) of Accountability

This forum provides commentary on five accountability articles in this issue. In response to those pieces, it advances the argument that the study of accountability through the framework proposed by Kramarz and Park (and demonstrated by the empirical articles) can uncover key political dynamics that drive the design of global environmental governance initiatives. The utility of the practical application of accountability measures to ensure good design, rather than proper implementation, is less clear. Using the framework to study accountability does, however, provide an opening for debates over initiative design that may lead to improvements in global environmental governance outcomes.

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.