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.

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.

The concluding chapter first summarizes some of the volume’s main results along the four evaluative themes. In terms of coherence and management, the three policy fields under scrutiny – renewable energy, fossil fuel subsidy reform, and carbon pricing – are roughly marked by coordination, rather than competition or outright harmony. Regarding legitimacy, the specializations and work backgrounds of stakeholders lead to considerable variations in their perceptions of institutions. For effectiveness, institutional complexity plays both a supportive and a hindering role across all three cases. Following the summary, a series of policy recommendations is developed, including: improving awareness of each other’s activities to avoid duplication of efforts and conflicting messages; aligning interpretations of central concepts, i.e. what constitutes renewable sources of energy, fossil fuel subsidies and carbon pricing; building stronger connections to counterparts in other areas of the climate-energy nexus and beyond; and entrusting one institution with an orchestrator role. Finally, the chapter suggests a future research agenda on the governance of the climate-energy nexus, e.g. to learn more about the causes of institutional complexity, to identify conditions for successful management efforts, and to examine further subfields and even other domains outside 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.

The introduction first explains the rationale and theoretical and empirical contributions of the edited volume. The book seeks to address a considerable gap in knowledge of the nature of the relationship between institutions governing the climate-energy nexus in a multilevel context. In particular, there is scant research on consequences on the legitimacy and effectiveness of governance arrangements and the climate-energy nexus as a whole. For an in-depth analysis of institutional complexity in the nexus, we selected three policy fields as case studies: renewable energy, fossil fuel subsidy reform, and carbon pricing. We made this choice since the three cases represent urgent and major components of the climate-energy nexus, since they vary considerably in the number and mix of institutions that govern them at the international level, and since they differ in their positioning within the climate-energy nexus – with carbon pricing primarily a climate change issue, renewable energy lying at the core of energy governance, and fossil fuel subsidy reform falling in between. The chapter concludes with an outline of the ccontributions to the book, structured along the volume’s three parts on mapping (I) coherence and management (II), and legitimacy and effectiveness (III).

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.

This chapter reviews the literature on transnational institutions and networks in earth system governance research over the past decade. The chapter focuses in particular on the issues of emergence, effectiveness and legitimacy of transnational governance and outlines key debates and controversies surrounding the shifting authority between public and private actors. The chapter also identifies major research lines and open questions and provides an outlook towards the most promising directions in future research. The review is based on 215 articles identified in the Web of Science (co)authored by fellows of the Earth System Governance Project from 2008 to 2018.

− ESG–Agency scholarship highlights the fragmented, expanding, and complex forms of authority that prescribe, steer, and govern behaviour on environmental issues. − Agency scholarship on earth system governance covers interdisciplinary debates in four broad areas: the types of agents, the ways authority is exercised, the nature of agents’ influence, and the varieties of governance structures or architectures within which agents act.− Even with increasing scholarship into the fragmentation of authority and multiplication of the types agents to include nonstate, transnational, and subnational actors, states continue to be the centre of agency scholarship. Future research is needed on agency theory and the theoretical nature of relationships between actors and within differing geographic, economic, and political contexts.