Governing The Climate

The first volume on critical social and political studies of climate change for advanced students, researchers and policy makers.

World's foremost experts explain how polycentric thinking can enhance societal attempts to govern climate change, for researchers, practitioners, advanced students. This title is also available as Open Access.

This fully revised and expanded new edition provides a short and accessible introduction to how climate change is governed by an increasingly diverse range of actors, from civil society and business actors to multilateral development banks, donors, and cities. The issue of global climate change has risen to the top of the international political agenda. Despite ongoing contestation about the science informing policy, the economic costs of action and the allocation of responsibility for addressing the issue within and between nations, it is clear that climate change will continue to be one of the most pressing and challenging issues facing humanity for many years to come. The book: Evaluates the role of states and non-state actors in governing climate change at multiple levels of political organization: local, national, and global Provides a discussion of theoretical debates on climate change governance, moving beyond analytical approaches focused solely on nation-states and international negotiations Examines a range of key topical issues in the politics of climate change Includes multiple examples from both the north and the global south Providing an inter-disciplinary perspective drawing on geography, politics, international relations, and development studies, this book is essential reading for all those concerned not only with the climate governance but with the future of the environment in general.

The 2009 United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen is often represented as a watershed in global climate politics, when the diplomatic efforts to negotiate a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol failed and was replaced by a fragmented and decentralized climate governance order. In the post-Copenhagen landscape the top-down universal approach to climate governance has gradually given way to a more complex, hybrid and dispersed political landscape involving multiple actors, arenas and sites. The Handbook contains contributions from more than 50 internationally leading scholars and explores the latest trends and theoretical developments of the climate governance scholarship.

Offers a multidisciplinary edited volume on policy dimensions of climate change for the world's oceans, for researchers, policymakers and activists.

This volume, the second in a series of three, examines the institutional architecture underpinning the global climate integrity system. This system comprises an inter-related set of institutions, governance arrangements, regulations, norms and practices that aim to implement the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Arguing that governance is a neutral term to describe the structures and processes that coordinate climate action, the book presents a continuum of governance values from ‘thick’ to ‘thin’ to determine the regime’s legitimacy and integrity. The collection contains four parts with part one exploring the links between governance and integrity, part two containing chapters which evaluate climate governance arrangements, part three exploring avenues for improving climate governance and part four reflecting on the road to the UNFCCC's Paris Agreement. The book provides new insights into understanding how systemic institutional and governance failures have occurred, how they could occur again in the same or different form and how these failures impact on the integrity of the UNFCCC. This work extends contemporary governance scholarship to explore the extent to which selected institutional case studies, thematic areas and policy approaches contribute to the overall integrity of the regime.

The confluence of global climate change, growing levels of energy consumption and rapid urbanization has led the international policy community to regard urban responses to climate change as ‘an urgent agenda’ (World Bank 2010). The contribution of cities to rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions coupled with concerns about the vulnerability of urban places and communities to the impacts of climate change have led to a relatively recent and rapidly proliferating interest amongst both academic and policy communities in how cities might be able to respond to mitigation and adaptation. Attention has focused on the potential for municipal authorities to develop policy and plans that can address these twin issues, and the challenges of capacity, resource and politics that have been encountered. While this literature has captured some of the essential means through which the urban response to climate change is being forged, is that it has failed to take account of the multiple sites and spaces of climate change response that are emerging in cities ‘off-plan’. An Urban Politics of Climate Change provides the first account of urban responses to climate change that moves beyond the boundary of municipal institutions to critically examine the governing of climate change in the city as a matter of both public and private authority, and to engage with the ways in which this is bound up with the politics and practices of urban infrastructure. The book draws on cases from multiple cities in both developed and emerging economies to providing new insight into the potential and limitations of urban responses to climate change, as well as new conceptual direction for our understanding of the politics of environmental governance.

Analysing the interactions between institutions in the climate change and energy nexus, including the consequences for their legitimacy and effectiveness. Prominent researchers from political science and international relations compare three policy domains: renewable energy, fossil fuel subsidy reform, and carbon pricing. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.