Experiments in EU Climate Governance: The Unfulfilled Potential of the Covenant of Mayors

Abstract

Over the last decade, a growing body of academic literature has reflected on how and under which conditions experiments in global climate governance lead to broader changes in rules, norms, and practices helping to meet the challenge of climate change. Drawing on the assumptions of the scholarship on experimentalist governance architectures, this article analyzes the effectiveness of the Covenant of Mayors (CoM) as a comprehensive governance framework that enables the development and coordination of local policies for sustainable energy and climate through a range of joint instruments for recursive goal setting, monitoring, and benchmarking. Our findings illustrate the CoM’s significant potential in terms of both general political uptake and policy output, which could make of this program, if appropriately fine-tuned, a successful governance experiment contributing to building a more effective global climate regime.

Predicting European Cities’ Climate Mitigation Performance using Machine Learning

“…36 Few city actors participating in transnational climate initiatives report monitoring and inventory data, and even major cities claiming global climate leadership are absent from reporting. 9,10,34,37 Our study provides the most consistent approach and time series data to date, providing quantitative evidence of cities' participating in transnational climate governance mitigation performance, with potential for broadening the scope to areas outside of Europe.…”

“…The evidence in support of this claim is scarce, making it hard to predict precisely what conditions would have this effect. Transnational climate initiatives typically require reporting of climate action plans and regular monitoring in the form of emissions inventories to assess whether mitigation goals are met, yet in practice only a small fraction of subnational actors meet these requirements 8,9 . Hsu et al…”

The role of cities in the European Union climate action under the European Green Deal in the post-2020 funding period

“…The Horizon Europe Mission Area for Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities is going to foster financial mechanisms and governance transformation to identify policy gaps and support local authorities. The initiative presents the following five key goals: (1) to set an agenda for the cities' transformation into innovation hubs; (2) to develop a new financing and economic model for climate policies; (3) to establish new forms of city governance and innovative participation; (4) to put in place an "integrated urban planning model"; (5) to unfold data platforms and smart systems [De Gregorio Hurtado 2021: 30].…”

The politics of climate change: Domestic and international responses to a global challenge

“…But networks consisting of business interests only can also prevent proportionate responses to climate change (Meckling and Nahm, 2018). On the other hand, transnational city networks have the potential to strengthen climate policy by scaling up local-level policy experiments to the national level although they have yet to live up to this potential (Domorenok et al, 2020).…”

“…Yet some earlier studies (Harrison and Sundstrom, 2007, 2010) and many newer ones have alluded to the importance of domestic politics, as well as the interaction between the domestic and international or transnational levels for explaining international climate negotiation outcomes (see, e.g., Castro, 2020). A specific body of research takes this argument a step further by highlighting the importance of subnational actors such as regional governments and cities (Jordan et al, 2015; Morrison et al, 2017) and networking among subnational actors such as the Covenant of Mayors, launched in 2008 with the ambition to gather local governments in Europe committed to achieving and exceeding climate and energy targets as defined by the European Union (Domorenok et al, 2020).…”