Conference Agenda

An emerging body of literature is exploring goal setting as a global governance strategy. “Governing through goals” (the title of a book in the ESG book series with MIT Press) can be an alternative to traditional “governing through rules” which is challenged by countries’ resistance to prescribed courses of action. Indeed, the approach of the Paris Agreement is to let countries determine their own contributions to globally agreed goals. Next to the temperature goals the Paris Agreement also established the “Global Goal on Adaptation” (GGA), a qualitative and aspirational goal. Unlike greenhouse gas emissions which can be measure in physical quantitities irrespective of context, climate change adaptation is more difficut to standardize and measure. At the most recent UN climate change conference in Egypt in November 2022 it was decided to develop a framework for the GGA. Doing so raises numerous governance questions including: to what extent can a context-specific subject matter like climate adaptation be governed globally? How can the inherent trade-offs between specificity and detailed guidance on the one hand and flexibility to countries’ circumstances and national sovereignty on the other be addressed? How exactly could a framework under a global goal “govern”? What potential and limitations do global indicators have?

This research is based on participant observation in the UN climate change negotiations including participation in the UNFCCC workshops that inform the development of the framework. It offers unique insights into a real-time case of creating a new governance modality under the Paris Agreement including how the development is utilized by different actors to advance their respective interests. The research also draws on literature and experiences on goal setting under other global governance processes including the 2030 Agenda and the Sendai Framework. It makes an empirical contribution to literature on governing through goals that is of high relevance to earth system governance scholarship.

Institutional reforms are crucial to meeting growing sustainability challenges. However, the scholarship recognizes that institutions are often sticky due to path dependencies. Nevertheless, previous scholarship has highlighted architecture and agency as important concepts in understanding how change can take shape. For instance, the literature on transformations of international organizations suggests that institutional reforms are likely when it is demanded by powerful member states, when there are external shocks, or when the international organization faces legitimacy challenges, such as when there is a growing recognized gap between rhetoric and actions. An international institution that faces growing calls for reform is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The calls for reform come from a range of actors and involve both legitimacy concerns and consideration for a change in the purpose of the UNFCCC as it enters an implementation stage. Nevertheless, previous calls for reform have largely failed (reference removed to annonymise review process). This paper therefore examines the prospects for UNFCCC reform through an interview study with a range of stakeholders familiar with the UNFCCC. The semi-structured interviews with (former) UNFCCC officials, climate diplomats, business and civil society representatives and academics show that there is a recognized need to reform the UNFCCC; however, few believe in the prospects of meaningful reforms. Besides the well-recognized difficulties of decision-making by consensus, the paper highlights the issue of trust – or the lack thereof – amongst member states as a stumbling block to reform. It also shows how prospects for reforms depend on the types of reforms considered, ranging on a spectrum of how politically controversial they are. The paper concludes by discussing its findings and its implications for understanding architecture and agency in climate governance and by identifying ways forward toward fostering institutional reforms through adaptation and learning.

The climate regime has been criticized for ineffectiveness because of the multiple, overlapping and even competing institutions and agreements, leading to the fragmentation of global climate governance. However, climate governance post-Paris has also been heralded for its experimental, polycentric and bottom-up logic. Research has predominantly focused on the effectiveness of non-state climate action within polycentric governance, while less attention has been paid to challenges of democratic legitimacy, accountability and inclusion. In response, the aim of the paper is to take stock of the legitimacy and accountability of the non-state climate action orchestrated by the Marrakech Partnership for Climate Action (MPGCA) and the Global Climate Action Portal of 27,000 commitments, including companies, investors, cities and regions. The multi-actor, multilevel, multi-scale, multisector and cross-jurisdictional climate action under the umbrella of MPGCA can be conceptualized as polycentric climate action. First, the paper discusses legitimacy and accountability challenges facing polycentric climate action, namely skewed participation, weak accountability, and low transparency, which can be explained by its non-hierarchical, networked, and non-electoral nature. Second, it maps three types of accountability mechanisms – public, peer and market – in the MPGCA workplan, Yearbook of Climate Action, annual reports by the High-Level Champions, alongside submission by non-state and state actors. While accountability mechanisms have been strengthened in the second phase, monitoring, review and verification (MRV) are still weak, amplified by problems of low transparency and imbalanced participation of stakeholders. Finally, the paper proposes how to improve legitimacy and accountability in polycentric climate governance.

The system of institutions governing climate change is often described as complex, fragmented, or polycentric – referring to the intricacy and dispersed authority of international and transnational institutions across the public-private divide engaging in climate mitigation. Institutional fragmentation has been connected to questions and challenges concerning effectiveness, legitimacy and justice in climate governance, and been studied in detail in terms of norms and actors. This paper adds a new perspective and empirics to institutional fragmentation, namely a discursive dimension. Studies on discourses in global climate governance are limited, despite plausibility that the way climate change is described, explained and imagined has an effect on its solutions. The paper analyzes discursive structures in global climate governance and how they changed over time using Discourse Network Analysis (DNA). The starting point is a dataset of more than eighty international and transnational climate institutions with the intentionality to steer policy and behavior towards a common goal to mitigate climate change. By processing and analyzing a structured set of texts of these institutions, DNA demonstrates how climate institutions are connected at a discursive level and reveals key properties of the discursive debate underlying climate governance. Thereby the paper focuses on the shift of the global dialogue from the “two-degrees target” in the Paris Agreement (2015) to the “net-zero agenda” at the latest United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow (2021). The paper also reflects on the extent to which the discursive structure of global climate governance can be characterized in terms of fragmentation, complexity or polycentricity by relating these findings to the specifics of the three concepts. The contributions of this paper are consequently threefold: first, it provides new empirical insights into the discourses underlying global climate governance. Second, it contributes a distinct perspective to the interrelated concepts of fragmentation, complexity and polycentricity. Third, it strengthens the position of discourses and the innovative method of DNA traditionally applied in linguistics, communication and media studies, in political science and international relations studies on global governance.

Experts play a significant role in shaping global and local norms on how states should respond to the climate crisis. However, current scholarship on the relationship between states and expertise has not fully addressed recent transformations in the field, specifically the emergence and increasingly influential role of what we term ‘green transition expertise’. In this paper, we argue that if earth system scholars want to further deepen their grasp of the politics of the green transition analytically and normatively, they need to embrace a ‘post-IPCC’ research agenda that turns increasingly towards state actions predicated on new forms of expertise as a prime mover in addressing climate change. We advance this claim based on a literature review of the relationship between expertise and the state in climate mitigation research. Overall, we find that while existing research has provided highly nuanced studies of state-expertise relations, it has tended to cast the issue of expertise as one of climate science consensus construction and the issue of state action as determined largely by failed (or limited) intergovernmental collaboration. To advance the study of state-expertise relations in the green transition, we outline a post-IPCC research agenda centered on the study of what we, drawing on Bourdieu, term ‘green state nobility’.

This agenda sets out to understand how experts shape state action on the green transition and how the state actively assembles green transformation expertise, including the actors recognized by states as appropriate members of the emerging green state nobility. This includes analysis of how state action is conditioned by informal networks, partnerships, and inter-expert competition about what should constitute expertise within the state and which forms of expertise matter. To capture the green state nobility, we combine literature on the green state with insights from the Sociology of Expertise. This research agenda proposes a three-pronged approach to studying green transition expertise in the state: (1) focusing on expert actors to understand who is recognized as a legitimate green transition expert over time and their location, (2) examining expert content to understand the nature of green transition expert work, including what gets left out, and (3) considering expert context to examine the institutional, cultural, and political factors that shape the relationship between green transition expertise and state behavior. Overall, a post-IPCC knowledge politics agenda seeks to address the agency of experts in influencing how the green state is currently carrying out its sustainability transition activities.