Fossil fuel subsidy reform can contribute to both climate change and sustainable development goals. However, subsidies to fossil fuel consumption and production continue to persist in developed and developing countries. International cooperation can play an important role in promoting or hindering reform. This chapter examines the coherence of international governance of fossil fuel subsidy reform. The chapter discusses the emergence of a core norm of fossil fuel subsidy reform, the distribution of membership across international institutions, and the various governance functions fulfilled by the international institutions active in this area. To further assess coherence, the chapter focuses on a subset of three international coalitions active in the area of fossil fuel subsidy reform: the Group of 20 (G20), the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), and the Friends of Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reform. The chapter identifies an emerging division of labour, with different institutions taking charge of various governance functions. Where activities do overlap, they generally appear to reinforce one another. With respect to the G20, APEC, and the Friends of Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reform, the high level of consistency appears to be the result of planned coordination, overlapping memberships, as well as a brokering role taken on by some countries. test

How does institutional complexity affect effectiveness? This chapter addresses this question for the three policy fields studied in this book: renewable energy, fossil fuel subsidy reform, and carbon markets. The chapter takes a comprehensive perspective across the three case studies by examining three dimensions of effectiveness: output (generating regulations and intrastructure), outcome (changing behaviour), and impact (solving the problem). The study relies on a two-track approach, integrating assessments by researchers and interviews with key stakeholders. The results show how the considerable institutional complexity in the climate-energy nexus has consequences for effectiveness. Notwithstanding the methodical challenges for evaluating effectiveness under conditions of institutional complexity, these insights demonstrate that such an assessment is of high importance and should be continued for other contexts of global governance. In particular, the findings of this chapter help to identify suitable management options – i.e. options for formally regulating the linkage between institutions – for the climate-energy nexus. With these suggestions and its conceptual and empirical novelty, the chapter contributes to a variety of literatures – on climate and energy governance, on institutional complexity, and on effectiveness – while being of interest to different stakeholders operating in the climate-energy nexus.

This chapter establishes four evaluative themes that will be employed across this volume to analyze the institutional complexity of policy fields in the climate-energy nexus: coherence, management, legitimacy, and effectiveness. Coherence among institutions is conceptualized along four dimensions: convergence on an overarching core norm for the policy field, balanced coverage and distribution of memberships (private, public, hybrid), balanced coverage and distribution of governance functions (standards and commitments, operational activities, information and networking, financing), and mechanisms underlying cross-institutional relations (cognitive, normative, behavioural). Management will be examined according to types of managing agents, political levels (from domestic to global), and the consequences of management efforts in enhancing coherence. Legitimacy will be assessed along nine dimensions, among them expertise, transparency, accountability, or procedural and distributive fairness. Effectiveness, finally, will be examined in terms of normative and legal output produced by the institutions, their behaviour-changing outcome, and their ultimate problem-solving impact. Altogether, the four themes and their dimensions make up a novel framework for an in-depth analysis of a governance nexus. They help us examine a variety of important questions in a comparative research design, combining a high level of ambition with feasibility and novelty.

Given the regulatory gap in earth system governance, numerous new governance initiatives, such as multilateral clubs, private certification schemes and multi-stakeholder forums, have emerged to tackle transboundary environmental challenges. This plethora of different governance initiatives has led to a significant increase in the institutional complexity of global (environmental) policymaking and to more interlinkages between such institutions. Chapter 6 perceives dyadic institutional interlinkages as a key ‘microscopic’ structural feature of the overall global governance landscape and most basic building blocks or units of analysis in current scholarship on global governance architectures. After defining the term institutional interlinkages, we synthesize the literature on institutional interlinkages with a particular view on the expansion of interlinkages across different governance levels and scales. Against this backdrop, we examine to what extent the existing concepts and typologies of institutional interlinkages can capture the various new interlinkages between different kinds of institutions in earth system governance.

Hierarchization is a deliberate process to create a vertically nested governance architecture where actors and institutions in a lower rank are bound or otherwise compelled to obey, respond to or contribute to higher-order norms and objectives. Drawing on this definition, we review recent research on hierarchization in earth system governance and the political and legal processes that establish, maintain and legitimize it. Here we present three mutually non-exclusive forms of hierarchization – systematization, centralization and prioritization. Each involves different actors and rationales, mechanisms and strategies, while achieving different purposes with varying governance outcomes. We illustrate our argument with empirical examples including the proposed Global Pact for the Environment, the proposal to establish a world environment organization and the Sustainable Development Goals. We conclude with an assessment of the benefits and drawbacks of hierarchization as an approach to some of the challenges inherent in earth system governance, and offer suggestions for future research.