Thomas Hale

Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Can the Johannesburg Partnerships Coordinate Action on Sustainable Development?:

At the 2002 UN World Summit on Sustainable Development, a new multi-stakeholder partnerships initiative was launched. It was hoped that partnerships would catalyze nongovernmental participation in and additional funding of sustainable development projects around the world. The authors find that at present, however, little partnership financing is coming from new sources; most is coming from governments and less than 1% from the private sector. Guided by empirical findings from the partnerships to date, we propose the following to make the partnership program more effective: (a) establishing a learning network; (b) increasing the transparency of partnerships; (c) increasing private sector and small stakeholder participation; (d) establishingan institutional home to support partnerships; and (e) ensuring that the partnerships are consistent with multilateral priorities.

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.

All Hands on Deck: The Paris Agreement and Nonstate Climate Action

The 2015 Paris Climate summit consolidated the transition of the climate regime from a “regulatory” to a “catalytic and facilitative” model. A key component of this shift was the intergovernmental regime’s embrace of climate action by sub- and nonstate actors. Although a groundswell of transnational climate action has been growing over time, the Paris Agreement seeks to bring this phenomenon into the heart of the new climate regime. This forum article describes that transition and considers its implications.

A Climate Coalition of the Willing

Intergovernmental efforts to limit the gases that cause climate change have all but failed. After the unsuccessful 2010 Copenhagen summit, and with little progress at the 2010 Cancun meeting, it is hard to see how major emitters will agree any time soon on mutual emissions reductions that are sufficiently ambitious to prevent a substantial (greater than two degree Celsius) increase in average global temperatures. It is not hard to see why. No deal excluding the United States and China, which together emit more than 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases (GHGs), is worth the paper it is written on. But domestic politics in both countries effectively block ‘‘G-2’’ leadership on climate. In the United States, the Obama administration has basically given up on national cap-and-trade legislation. Even the relatively modest Kerry-Lieberman-Graham energy bill remains dead in the Senate. The Chinese government, in turn, faces an even harsher constraint. Although the nation has adopted important energy efficiency goals, the Chinese Communist Party has staked its legitimacy and political survival on raising the living standard of average Chinese. Accepting international commitments that stand even a small chance of reducing the country’s GDP growth rate below a crucial threshold poses an unacceptable risk to the stability of the regime. Although the G-2 present the largest and most obvious barrier to a global treaty, they also provide a convenient excuse for other governments to avoid aggressive action. Therefore, the international community should not expect to negotiate a worthwhile successor to the Kyoto Protocol, at least not in the near future.

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.

Gridlock: From Self‐reinforcing Interdependence to Second‐order Cooperation Problems

Growing interdependence requires greater global cooperation, but across a range of issues multilateral policy making seems to have stalled. We argue that this growing gap between the need for global governance and the ability of intergovernmental institutions to provide it must be understood as a general and conjunctural state of the multilateral order, which we term gridlock. The causes of gridlock are diverse – rising multipolarity, institutional inertia, harder problems, increased complexity – but can be found across a range of global issue areas. Importantly, these drivers are, in part, products of previous, successful cooperation over the postwar period, and can therefore be understood as ‘second-order’ cooperation problems. We argue that a process of self-reinforcing interdependence has altered the nature of global politics over the past decades, and has therefore in part undermined the ability of multilateral institutions to sustain the very interdependence they have helped to create. This article lays out this argument with regard to three core areas of world politics: security, trade and finance.

Climate Finance in and between Developing Countries: An Emerging Opportunity to Build On

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations are evolving to reflect changes in national and global economic circumstances. However, this shift has been far smaller in the critical issue of climate finance, which remains too mired in an increasingly antiquated North–South, developed–developing country dichotomy. This inertia poses a serious threat to our ability to mobilize the finance required to meet the climate challenge, and could hamstring the new climate agreement countries are seeking. However, an important new trend can help move this discussion forward: the rise of climate finance within and among developing countries. Far from diminishing the need for developed countries to increase their support for mitigation and adaptation in developing countries, so-called ‘South-South Climate Finance’ (SSCF) can help unlock much needed additional resources for the climate challenge. This article provides an initial mapping of SSCF and argues that: (1) the emergence of SSCF offers countries an opportunity to mobilize additional climate finance, including through multilateral development banks (MDBs); and (2) parties to the UNFCCC should track and foster the role of SSCF so as to more effectively align it with ‘traditional’ climate finance that flows from developed to developing countries.

The de facto preferential trade agreement in East Asia

ABSTRACT East Asian countries apply lower tariffs on their neighbors’ products than they are required to under the various trade agreements to which they belong, a concession they grant only rarely to countries outside the region. The result is a de facto preferential trade area in East Asia in which applied tariff rates significantly undercut the legally bound rates. This gap, termed binding overhang, is an under-studied aspect of international political economy, but provides information about the nature of East Asian regionalism. To wit, the regional bias in applied tariffs is driven by transnational production networks that must move components across borders, not geopolitics or state preferences for increased regional integration. This finding supports a ‘bottom up’ interpretation of East Asian regionalism.

When and how can unilateral policies promote the international diffusion of environmental policies and clean technology

How can governments manage transnational problems when other governments refuse to cooperate? We examine the conditions under which regulation in one jurisdiction can induce other jurisdictions to regulate. The analysis emphasizes the relationship between public policy, private actors, and technological change. We find that ambitious regulations in large markets can induce private actors to make technological changes that lower the cost of regulation for less ambitious jurisdictions. Our model specifies the conditions under which such transboundary effects are possible, qualifying the received wisdom on global collective action by outlining conditions under which unilateral regulatory leadership can be effective. Case studies of wind turbines and photovoltaic cells provide empirical support.

Breaking the cycle of gridlock.

There is a growing gap between the need for effective global governance and the ability of intergovernmental institutions to provide it. In Gridlock: Why Multilateralism Is Failing when We Need It Most, published in 2013, we argued that self‐reinforcing interdependence, rooted in the extraordinary success of the post‐war multilateral order, has created a range of ‘second‐order problems’ that are threatening to undermine our ability to engage in further global cooperation. As we show in this article, gridlock is itself reinforcing and structurally embedded in global politics. The corrosive effect of unmanaged globalization on domestic politics is provoking anti‐global backlashes that further erode the capacity of intergovernmental institutions to provide solutions to global problems. It is possible, however, to detect a number of significant counter‐trends and exceptions to global governance dysfunction. We set out seven pathways ‘through’ and ‘beyond’ gridlock, explain their significance, and provide examples of how these pathways can effect positive change. While none of these pathways alone offer a silver bullet, they all highlight possible ways of moving towards a more resilient, adaptive, and innovative global governance arrangement.