Focusing on three initiatives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat – the Momentum for Change Initiative, the Lima–Paris Action Agenda, and the Non-state Actor Zone for Climate Action – this chapter studies how an international environmental bureaucracy can evolve from a low-key and servant-like secretariat to an actor in its own right. It argues that international environmental secretariats increasingly take on the role of an orchestrator that seeks to shape policy outcomes through changing the behavior of others. Using orchestration as a conceptual lens, the chapter identifies new types of influence of international bureaucracies. The forms of influence that the UNFCCC Secretariat exerts include in particular (i) awareness-raising, (ii) norm-building, and (iii) mobilization. This new way of how soft power is deployed underscores the increasingly proactive role of the UNFCCC Secretariat. The chapter concludes that the UNFCCC Secretariat is currently “loosening its straitjacket” by gradually expanding its original mandate and spectrum of activity. It is no longer a passive bystander but has adopted new roles and functions in the global endeavor to cope with climate change.

The 2-degrees target of the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goal 7 on energy are intrinsically intertwined and highlight the urgency of an effective and integrated approach on climate change and energy. However, there are over a hundred international and transnational institutions with different characteristics and priorities that aim to address climate and energy-related targets. While prior research has contributed useful insights into the complexity of climate and energy governance, respectively, an integrated and coherent analysis of the climate-energy nexus is lacking. This chapter therefore maps, visualizes, and analyzes this nexus, i.e. institutions that seek to govern climate change and energy simultaneously. In addition, the chapter zooms in on three specific subsets of institutions: renewable energy, fossil fuel subsidy reform, and carbon pricing. The mapping and analysis are based on a new dataset and provide first insights into the gaps, overlaps, and varying degrees of complexity of the climate-energy nexus and across its subfields. Moreover, the chapter serves as the empirical basis for further analyses of coherence, management, legitimacy, and effectiveness, and as the first step in creating a knowledge base to guide actors who seek to navigate the institutionally complex landscape of 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.

Introduction

After the previous chapters surveyed a wide array of policy instruments for governing ecosystem services at the global level, this chapter scrutinizes one specific approach to governing ecosystem services, public–private partnerships (PPPs) for sustainable development. PPPs have become a highly visible and much discussed element of global sustainability governance. Especially since the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), transnational PPPs have multiplied, now counting well above 300 partnerships in the register maintained by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. In policy and academic debates alike, partnerships are promoted as a solution to deadlocked intergovernmental negotiations, to ineffective treaties and overly bureaucratic international organizations, to power-based state policies, corrupt elites, and many other real or perceived current problems of global governance. However, systematic evidence of the impacts of PPPs is scarce and the broader consequences of outsourcing and privatizing environmental governance are not well understood. This chapter draws on a multi-year research project on the emergence and effectiveness of PPPs for sustainable development that utilizes a large-N database to understand the role and relevance of PPPs in contemporary global environmental governance.

In addition to providing a general assessment of partnerships, this chapter also presents an analysis of the subset of partnerships most closely related to governing ecosystem services.

This book is the result of a collective effort of more than two dozen scientists, all sharing an interest in finding effective solutions to the imminent crisis of global warming and large-scale alterations of the Earth system. Our common goal was to develop new ideas and insights that may assist negotiations of new global agreements on global climate governance for the period after 2012, when the current commitment period under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change expires.

Many have described the creation of a stable long-term architecture for global climate governance as one of the largest political challenges of our time, with tremendous implications for most areas of human life. These implications range from far-reaching reforms in the richer industrialized countries with high per capita emissions of greenhouse gases to the parallel quest of the many poorer societies in the developing world to lift the living standards and eradicate poverty while limiting growth in greenhouse gas emissions to the extent possible. While mitigation of global warming must have centre stage in current policies to prevent further build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also vital to prepare for a world that may be substantially warmer than today due to failed or belated climate policies in the past. This book thus addresses both governance for mitigation and governance for adaptation, and, in particular, possible synergies and conflicts between both policy objectives.

The research documented in this volume has been part of a larger research programme on Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies: Supporting European Climate Policy (the ADAM Project). The ADAM Project lasted from 2006 to 2009 and was funded as an ‘integrated project’ by a major grant from the European Commission under its sixth framework research programme (Global Change and Ecosystem Priority, contract No. 018476). In total, more than 100 researchers from 26 institutes in Europe, India and China were part of the ADAM Project at one stage.

Introduction

Next to governing through markets, networks have emerged as a central steering mechanism in modern governance. Climate governance is no exception. Uncounted numbers of initiatives, projects, programmes, institutions and organizations fill the realm of global climate governance, at times targeting public actors and intergovernmental decision-making processes, while on many other occasions targeting private actors such as corporations or individuals. While it is generally acknowledged that these forms of networked governance have become more widespread and pervasive, there is rather little scholarship on their performance and broader implications (exceptions are Bäckstrand 2008; Okereke et al. 2009).

This chapter appraises different types of networked climate governance, including public non-state networks such as the C40 global cities partnership; hybrid networks emanating from public–private sources of authority such as the more than 340 partnerships that have emerged out of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg; and networks whose authority derives from purely private sources, such as corporate social responsibility and standard-setting initiatives. I appraise these different types of networked governance in the climate realm according to three sets of criteria. First, their potential contribution to effective climate change mitigation and adaptation; second, their contribution to broader political goals such as increased participation and inclusiveness in global environmental governance; and third, their linkages and fit with the existing institutional architecture of international climate change governance. The chapter concludes with a number of policy options for strengthening the contribution of networked governance mechanisms to effective climate policies.

Future historians might remember the period 2009–2012 as a turning point in the political response to global warming and climate change. The 1980s were a time of agenda-setting in which climate change became accepted as a political problem; the 1990s saw the first institutionalization through adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 and its Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The 2000s marked the period of ratification of the protocol and further institutionalization of its means of implementation. Yet the Kyoto Protocol was merely a first step, and its core commitments expire in 2012. Even full compliance with the Kyoto agreement will not prevent ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’ – the overall objective of the climate convention. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are rising, while drastic reductions of emissions are needed according to current scientific consensus (IPCC 2007).

These years are thus a crucial moment for human societies to change current economic, social and political development paths and to embark on a transition to new ways of production and consumption that emit less carbon – or to adapt to a world that is substantially warmer and hence different from the world that human and natural systems have been adapted to so far. At the planetary level, this is the quest for long-term, stable and effective ‘global governance’. The term governance derives from the Greek word for navigating, and this challenge of turning around the wheel and charting a new course is indeed what is at stake in current negotiations on climate change.

Introduction

It has almost become a truism that global climate governance is about more than bargaining among governments within the United Nations climate convention. For many observers of the climate negotiations, side-events have been for some time as interesting as the official negotiations. Already around the Kyoto negotiations of 1997 many important activities took place in parallel with the official negotiations among governments. The idea of side-events had diffused from the forums of non-governmental organizations that had accompanied the series of high-level UN conferences in the early 1990s.

A brief glance at the numerous side-events at any conference of the parties may serve as an illustration of the multiplicity and complexity of contemporary climate governance and, consequently, can help to illuminate from where ideas about ‘agency beyond the state’ have emerged. Already at the fourth conference of the parties in Buenos Aires in 1998, the insurance industry held seminars on the increased frequency and costs of extreme weather events. The Climate Action Network drew media attention to its ‘Fossil of the Day Award’ and organized seminars on justice and equity with regard to emissions of greenhouse gases. The Global Commons Institute presented early work on ‘contraction and convergence’ as an approach to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases through converging per capita emissions. In several workshops, academics and policy advisors debated the implications of the newly launched Clean Development Mechanism. The nuclear power industry and the wind power industry both presented their low-carbon technologies, and the city of Curitiba held an exhibition about its public transport system as a best practice of transport-related energy efficiency. This ‘social forum’ of climate-related activities was crowded and energetic. It was, of course, much smaller and less organized compared to, for example, later meetings in Bali (2007) and Poznań (2008), where the daily Earth Negotiations Bulletin had a specific coverage of a sample of side-events.

Introduction

This chapter complements the analysis in Chapter 2 by a policy-oriented inquiry of how different degrees of fragmentation of governance architectures are likely to affect the environmental effectiveness of policies. Our study relates here to an area of widespread contestation in academic and policy writing. It is often maintained, as we describe further below, that a more integrated climate governance architecture would promise higher effectiveness. This claim, however, is also contested, and several authors emphasize the potential benefits of a multitude of agreements, institutions and approaches within an overall fragmented architecture. Claims in favour and against stronger or lesser fragmentation are found in a variety of literatures, ranging from international relations and international law to the comparative study of environmental policy. We review these claims here, organized along the questions of: (1) the relative speed of reaching agreements; (2) the level of regulatory ambition that can be realized; (3) the level of potential participation of actors and sectors; and (4) the equity concerns involved.

The four aspects of speed, ambition, participation and equity are interrelated and eventually will have a bearing on overall governance performance. Based on our typology in the previous chapter (Biermann et al., this volume, Chapter 2), we view the propositions as a continuum of different claims as to the relative positive or negative consequences of higher (conflictive) or lower (synergistic) degrees of fragmentation.

Methodology

For this qualitative assessment, we reviewed and discussed the state of the art in the scholarly literature regarding the promises or perils of fragmentation of global governance architectures. We analysed different bodies of literature, comprising writings on international law, international relations and cooperation theory in general as well as more specific writing on global environmental governance and institutional interlinkages. We contrasted these bodies of literature with evidence from current climate negotiations. As a further ‘reality check’, we discussed the pros and cons of fragmentation repeatedly with international experts of the Contact Group of the ADAM Project and other experts of the project.