Expert judgments are a necessary part of environmental management. Typically, experts are defined by their qualifications, track record, professional standing, and experience. We outline the limitations of conventional definitions of expertise and describe how these requirements can sometimes exclude people with useful knowledge. The frailties and biases in expert judgments can interact with the social status afforded to experts to produce judgments that are both unassailable and wrong. Several approaches may improve the rigor of expert judgments; they include widening the set of experiences and skills involved in deliberations, employing structured elicitation, and making experts more accountable through testing and training. We outline the most serious impediments to the routine deployment of these tools, and suggest protocols that would overcome these hurdles.

As international negotiations struggle to deliver timely, binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to safe levels, the environmental legal community has begun to contemplate the scope for climate governance ‘beyond’ the international climate change regime. Many see merit in a more decentralized, disaggregated approach, operating across multiple governance levels. This article examines the development of climate change law in an era of multi-level governance. It analyzes several case studies of current manifestations of multi-level governance in climate change law, including the fragmented global emissions trading system, developing arrangements governing forests and land-based sinks, the growth of climate litigation establishing transnational liability principles, efforts to ensure adaptation to unavoidable climate change, and the emergence in federal systems of a decentralized approach to climate change regulation. The article concludes by considering whether the emerging multi-level system of climate governance is adequate to meet broader international goals of climate change mitigation and adaptation.

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