Building Productive Links between the UNFCCC and the Broader Global Climate Governance Landscape1. This article reflects and builds upon discussions at a December 2013 workshop held in Neemrana, India, sponsored by the Centre for Policy Research (New Delhi) and the Mitigation Action Plans and Scenarios (MAPS) program of the Energy Research Centre (Cape Town). This article builds on pp. 14–19 of the workshop report. See Centre for Policy Research 2014.

Abstract

Global climate governance has undergone a significant transformation in the past decade. Previously it might reasonably have been characterized as a system governed by the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol, with a secondary role for national policy regimes. Since then, a large array of governance initiatives acting across international borders have joined the UNFCCC regime, including those created by subgroups of governments, private sector actors of various types (specific industrial sectors, institutional investors, etc.), non-governmental organizations, and subnational actors like cities and regions. These initiatives are variously understood through ideas such as transnational, private, or non-state governance.2Many academic and policy debates about the UNFCCC, however, have largely ignored these developments. “Multilateralists” tend to focus on the design of intergovernmental agreements, with an at least implicit assumption that a “good” design of such a climate regime, combined with national government action, would be necessary and perhaps sufficient to meet the challenge of climate change.3 By contrast, many “transnationalists” are pessimistic about the multilateral process and at times ignore the UNFCCC and its role, instead focusing on the conditions that give rise to alternative forms of climate governance and how these activities might collectively result in climate governance from the “bottom up.”4 In practice, we know these two spheres interact. The latest round of UNFCCC negotiations launched in Durban in 2011 focuses on increasing ambition through international cooperative initiatives (ICIs), but little explicit attention has been paid to the nature of such interactions. We see this as a missed opportunity for the research community and policy-makers.With this article, we seek to open a research agenda that takes a more sophisticated approach to the question of linkages within the broader global climate governance landscape. Many scholars focus exclusively on the multilateral or transnational spheres without considering the ways they are interconnected.5 Those working in the areas of institutional interplay and fragmentation tend to focus on dyadic relationships between arrangements (often within the multilateral context) without enough theorizing about the nature of these relationships.6 In the policy sphere, the recognition of ICIs is a promising development, but we suggest a need to think more deeply about the nature of these different types of initiatives and their relationship to the UNFCCC regime. That would include the possibility of the UNFCCC playing a coordinating role in the broader landscape, based on the empirical observation that several initiatives (but not all) voluntarily define themselves in relation to the UNFCCC. Our view is that a global climate governance landscape with coordination will be more effective than one without. After briefly laying out the global climate governance landscape, we argue for deeper engagement with questions of linkages to better understand the existing system and envision ways it could be developed further. We introduce two ways of thinking about these possible linkages—division of labor and catalytic—to illustrate the value of this line of inquiry, before concluding with suggestions for future research.The research agenda we seek to open would be particularly useful and important for exploring empirical and normative questions about the role of the UNFCCC in global climate governance. By enabling research on the ways initiatives are already connected to the UNFCCC, this research agenda could allow for better understanding of the extent to which the UNFCCC is currently positioned as the core institution in the climate governance landscape, and thus the specific ways it may be able to coordinate governance across the landscape.We reject the notion that new climate governance spaces provide a distinct alternative to the multilateral treaty regime. Instead of this false dichotomy, we see a need for ways of articulating this emergent governance landscape. Some have characterized broader action collectively as part of a climate “regime complex,”7 although this concept focuses mostly on interstate agreements. Abbott extends this notion to refer to a “transnational climate regime complex,”8 but this in turn leaves out the interstate agreements. We prefer the term “global climate governance landscape” as a way to capture all these elements and shift the focus to broader patterns of governance. We see “landscape” as a neutral term that does not presuppose particular types of relationships between governance arrangements or theoretical orientation.Notions of complex systems are useful for understanding the global climate governance landscape, and for enabling us to reconceptualize the UNFCCC less as an authority that attempts to govern climate change in its entirety and more as a coordinating node in a diverse landscape of initiatives.9 This perspective allo