Taking a wider view on climate governance: moving beyond the ‘iceberg,’ the ‘elephant,’ and the ‘forest’

Abstract

Attention in the literature on global climate politics has recently turned from a focus on intergovernmental negotiations to conceptualizing climate governance 'beyond' or 'outside' the UN regime. However, this literature differs on three key aspects: the underlying research paradigms, what is identified as the heart of the problem, and proposed solutions. One group of scholars calls for an attention shift from the 'tip of the iceberg' of climate governance to its much larger 'hidden parts,' conceptualized through notions such as the 'climate change regime complex,' a 'fragmented climate governance architecture,' and 'transnational climate governance.' A second set of authors points to the 'elephant in the room,' namely underlying power structures and material configurations in the international system that block effective responses to the climate crisis. A third group has argued that instead of looking at the individual 'trees' of climate negotiations, research should focus on the 'forest' of climate governance, made up of framings, norms, and emerging 'climate governmentalities.' The article proposes the concept of a 'schism of reality' as a means to overcome this fragmentation of the literature. This notion offers a new way of understanding interactions between the climate regime and its wider environment by focusing on discrepancies and contradictions. It accommodates different theoretical perspectives and provides common ground for future research: on how paradoxes and contradictions are dealt with in climate governance; how they can be overcome; how current developments in climate governance reduce the schism; and where and why aspects of the schism persist.

The IPCC and the new map of science and politics

“…When the IPCC was formed in 1988 it fitted neatly into the UN's multilateral order of centralized governance regime based on national representation and the search for internationally negotiated solutions (Eckersley, ). The Paris agreement, however, adopts an essentially voluntary, decentralized climate policy architecture which has important implications for how we think about the relationship between science and politics (Aykut, ; Aykut, Foyer, & Morena, ; Geden, ).We shouldn't necessarily take the Paris regime's polycentricity for granted and risk obscuring apparent international convergence on (a) the fact that climate change is happening, and (b) business‐as‐usual can largely continue despite face‐value commitments to the contrary . Amidst this potential disjoint between the rhetoric and reality of policy commitments, outstanding technical questions about the monitoring and reporting of policy performance, which are essential for the compliance and enforcement within the climate regime, become even more urgent for the climate science community to address (Dooley & Gupta, ; Gupta, Lövbrand, Turnhout, & Vijge, ; Schoenefeld, Hildén, & Jordan, ; Turnhout et al, ).…”

Exploring the contours of climate governance: An interdisciplinary systematic literature review from a southern perspective

“…For example, emerging public–private partnerships (Pattberg, 2010; Tosun & Schoenefeld, 2017) or more informal lawmaking (Kahler, 2017) are common features. This corpus addresses the challenges related to the sustainability over time of different transnational initiatives (Pattberg, 2010) and presents concrete examples (Wilshusen & Macdonald, 2017) but agrees that the State remains a central actor within transnational governance (Andonova et al, 2017; Aykut, 2016; Kahler, 2017). However, questions of the authority and legitimacy of these new actors (Okereke et al, 2009) are often neglected with an enthusiastic narrative on transnational initiatives, namely marketization, privatization, technocratization (Gupta & Mason, 2016), financialization (Wilshusen & Macdonald, 2017), market‐based mechanisms such as trading schemes (Bailey & Maresh, 2009), commodification of the commons (Rice, 2014), among others.…”

“…Given these complexities, Gupta (2016) states dealing with climate change demands more significant participation from multiple stakeholders at different levels of society. Consistently, the last decade's growing literature on climate governance shows trends towards displacing the traditional top‐down institutionally driven climate governance for more polycentric bottom‐up and locally implemented strategies (Aykut, 2016). These latter increasingly focus on the role of non‐State and sub‐national actors and their associated networks, which may help to partially overcome the limitations of the dominant approaches and be more adequate to the need to integrate climate governance into the complex process of achieving sustainable development and overcoming poverty and inequality in developing countries.…”

The Value of a Valuation Perspective for Theorizing about Social Change and Climate Change: A Study on Carbon Pricing in China

“…Climate change is a wicked social problem, and all policies aimed at promoting low-carbon development have problematic aspects. We can then engage in a much more fruitful debate on how each of these policies would have to be designed to be more effective (Patt 2015;Aglietta et al 2015;Martin et al 2015;Aykut 2016).…”