Whereas scholars have typically modeled climate change as a global collective action challenge, we offer a dynamic theory of climate politics based on the present and future revaluation of assets. Climate politics can be understood as a contest between owners of assets that accelerate climate change, such as fossil fuel plants, and owners of assets vulnerable to climate change, such as coastal property. To date, obstruction by “climate-forcing” asset holders has been a large barrier to effective climate policy. But as climate change and decarbonization policies proceed, holders of both climate-forcing and “climate-vulnerable” assets stand to lose some or even all of their assets' value over time, and with them, the basis of their political power. This dynamic contest between opposing interests is likely to intensify in many sites of political contestation, from the subnational to transnational levels. As it does so, climate politics will become increasingly existential, potentially reshaping political alignments within and across countries. Such shifts may further undermine the Liberal International Order (LIO); as countries develop pro-climate policies at different speeds and magnitudes, they will have incentives to diverge from existing arrangements over trade and economic integration.

Despite the increasing urgency of many environmental problems, environmental politics remains at the margins of the discipline. Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project, this article identifies a puzzle: the majority of international relations (IR) scholars find climate change among the top three most important policy issues today, yet fewer than 4% identify the environment as their primary area of research. Moreover, environmental research is rarely published in top IR journals, although there has been a recent surge in work focused on climate change. The authors argue that greater attention to environmental issues—including those beyond climate change—in IR can bring significant benefits to the discipline, and they discuss three lines of research to correct this imbalance.

The work on ‘regime complexes’ – loosely coupled regimes linked through non-hierarchical relationships – provides a lens for understanding the increasing density of international rules and institutions. However, the role of private authority in the regime complex – situations where non-state actors set rules or standards that other actors adopt – has only recently received academic attention. In this article, we ‘unbundle’ the concept of the regime complex in two novel ways. Firstly, we argue that an accurate depiction of any regime complex must also include private authority. Secondly, using examples from environmental governance, we carefully elaborate four specific mechanisms through which public and private authority interact, demonstrating the ways in which private authority can improve the problem-solving capacity of regime complexes. In short, a full understanding of the contributions of private authority to solving environmental problems requires examining its interactions with public rules and institutions.

The institutions of global governance have changed dramatically in recent years. New organizational forms—including informal institutions, transgovernmental networks, and private transnational regulatory organizations (PTROs)—have expanded rapidly, while the growth of formal intergovernmental organizations has slowed. Organizational ecology provides an insightful framework for understanding these changing patterns of growth. Organizational ecology is primarily a structural theory, emphasizing the influence of institutional environments, especially their organizational density and resource availability, on organizational behavior and viability. To demonstrate the explanatory value of organizational ecology, we analyze the proliferation of PTROs compared with the relative stasis of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Continued growth of IGOs is constrained by crowding in their dense institutional environment, but PTROs benefit from organizational flexibility and low entry costs, which allow them to enter “niches” with limited resource competition. We probe the plausibility of our analysis by examining contemporary climate governance.

This paper seeks to explain the success of two NGOs in creating standards for calculating and reporting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the level of an entire company. These emissions accounting standards, called the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, have been widely adopted by multinational firms, emissions reporting registries, and even an emissions trading scheme. The paper traces the widespread adoption of the standards, and then offers an explanation for this successful instance of private regulation. It presents a supply and demand model of private entrepreneurial authority—where private actors project authority without delegation by states. The two NGOs were successful rule-makers because they were able meet a demand for three benefits to potential users of the standard: reduced transaction costs, first-mover advantage, and an opportunity to burnish their reputation as environmental leaders. The paper also explains the supply of private authority—that is, why we see entrepreneurial authority rather than delegation by states. The disagreement among developed countries on the appropriate role for emissions trading in the climate regime delayed action on developing firm-level accounting methodologies. Moreover, the relative weakness of the focal institution in the climate regime—the climate change Secretariat—meant that there was no obvious international organization to take up the task of creating new measurement tools.