Classroom Response System Integration in a Distance-Learning Introductory High School Physics Course

Tennessee ranks among the lowest states in terms of high school physics availability. This fact is compounded in rural areas by limited enrollment and a lack of accredited physics teachers. A distance-learning physics course was established between the University of Tennessee Knoxville and Morristown West High School in order to offer an introductory physics course in a school with no accredited physics teacher. Because classroom response systems have been shown to increase interactivity and discussion in physics courses, leading to better learning gains, the course was taught via live video-conferencing with the integration of a classroom response system

Governing Complexity: Design Principles for the Governance of Complex Global Catastrophic Risks

Why are existing global governance structures “not fit for purpose” when it comes to addressing complex global catastrophic risks (CGCRs) such as climate breakdown, ecosystem collapse, or parasitic artificial general intelligence? This article argues that a deeper appreciation of these risks as complex—as opposed to complicated—is vital to an effective global governance response. It joins other IR scholarship seeking to invigorate a rigorous research agenda on complex system dynamics within world politics, highlighting the value of complexity theory, not simply as a contextual descriptor, but as a conceptual toolkit to inform CGCR governance research and action. Taking seriously the implications of “restricted complexity,” it interrogates why the legacy governing toolkit—the assumptions, heuristics, models, and practices conventionally employed to solve international collective action problems—are unlikely to suffice. It further draws laterally upon design science to offer a novel design model for governing complex systems, with broad application across global policy domains. A case study of the COVID-19 pandemic response illustrates the importance of supplementing inherited “complicated” governance system design and practices with design principles explicitly oriented to working with complexity, rather than against it. We contend that IR scholars and practitioners must update old ways of thinking in light of a complexification of the discipline. Such a shift involves both revisiting the design logics underlying how we build global governance structures, as well as pursuing a generative research agenda more capable of responding adequately to instability, surprise, and extraordinary change

Complexity Theory and Education in Times of Insoluble Problems

COVID-19 has demonstrated the threats that systemic disruptions pose in our interconnected world. This paper explores the proposition that complexity or systems education is now vital to achieving greater levels of collective and personal resilience in the face of rapid non-linear change and potential catastrophic risks

Mapping Global Climate Change Governance

Climate change is one of the most daunting global policy challenges facing the international community in the 21st century. This mapping paper takes stock of the current state of the global climate change regime, illuminating scope for policymaking and mobilizing collective action through networked governance at all scales, from the sub-national to the highest global level of political assembly. It provides an unusually comprehensive snapshot of policymaking within the regime created by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), bolstered by the 2015 Paris Agreement, as well as novel insight into how other formal and informal intergovernmental organizations relate to this regime, including a sophisticated EU policymaking and delivery apparatus, already dedicated to tackling climate change at the regional level. It further locates a highly diverse and numerous non-state actor constituency, from market actors to NGOs to city governors, all of whom have a crucial role to play. Page 4 from 7 Keywords: global governance, climate change, global public policy, global public goods, multi-level governance, policy transfer, implementation, Paris Agreemen

Private Sector and Climate Change A Case Study of Carbon-Based Governance

Global greenhouse gas emissions are the main contributor to anthropocentrically-induced climate change and have risen 41% since 1990. We are still yet to reach peak emissions. A large share of those emissions result from private sector activity. At the same time, the private sector possesses major resources which should be harnessed to scale up funding and emissions reduction technologies to benefit the 3 climate. Since the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, there has been an upsurge in private sector activity on climate change, especially in the corporate sector. Researchers have suggested that this groundswell of private sector activity especially in reduction of carbon emissions holds out the promise of plugging conspicuous public governance gaps. But while this surge in private action since the Paris Climate Agreement is to be encouraged, and indeed has been formally welcomed by global public climate governance actors under the UNFCCC, the measurable success of private, public-private and “hybrid” climate governance arrangements on reducing emissions remains unclear. Through an in depth empirical investigation of the actors and initiatives that play a key role in this emerging domain of bottom-up climate change governance, this study finds that, despite a groundswell in private activity, zones of fragmentation among a multiplicity of private actors, initiatives and standards is stymying progress: while key actors are increasingly networked, key metrics remain severely fragmented; while substantial resources have been dedicated to governing carbon emissions, greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. These observations are demonstrated through an empirical analysis of the “carbon-based” governance regime, which we define as the governance of climate change through a unitary focus on carbon measurement, disclosure, and verification. So far, the ultimate goal of carbon-based governance to reduce emissions is far from being realized. Whether this regime can be repurposed to fulfil this crucial function remains an open question

Governing Relationships: The New Architecture in Global Human Rights Governance

The global human rights regime has undergone extraordinary expansion in the last thirty years. It is particularly notable for its profusion of state and non-state actors and levels of formal articulation. This article seeks to make legible the human rights governance architecture from the global to the local level, within an issue-specific domain. Orchestration theory is employed as a general mode of governance, with application across political units and political levels. Orchestration applies when a focal actor enlists and supports third-party actors to address the target indirectly in pursuit of shared governance objectives. Using the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT) as an example, the article explores the authority relationship across two central political units (the orchestrator and intermediary), with a focus on how this new global human rights architecture may offer a way of bridging the steps separating international instruments from practices on the ground

Global human rights governance and orchestration: National human rights institutions as intermediaries

The United Nations remains the principal international governmental organisation for promoting human rights. However, serious concerns focus on persistent compliance gaps between human rights standards and domestic practice. In response and against a backdrop of growing regime complexity, United Nations human rights agencies have increasingly sought to bypass states by coordinating new forms of non-state and private authority. International Relations scholarship has captured this governance arrangement using the concept of orchestration, defined as when an international organisation enlists and supports intermediary actors to address target actors in pursuit of international governmental organisation governance goals. This article explores the implications of an orchestration topology for human rights governance by analysing national human rights institutions in the context of an established global human rights regime and its dedicated orchestrator: the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. I use the experience of national human rights institutions to further refine the concepts of managing versus bypassing states to capture how networked intermediaries are affected by, and respond to, new opportunities within international governmental organisation structures. The article identifies the conditions under which orchestration may be particularly well-suited to a human rights governance function. It further examines the analytical limitations of this mode of influence for addressing a multi-level compliance gap, as well as what the analysis means for international organisations and understanding orchestration more generally

Diffusion across political systems: The global spread of national human rights institutions

This article examines the proliferation of national human rights institutions (NHRIs) and seeks to explain the drivers of this institutional innovation across contrasting political regimes. This article suggests that the NHRI phenomenon can be attributed to increasingly sophisticated international organizational platforms and three distinct, but complementary, mechanisms of diffusion: (1) coercion, (2) acculturation, and (3) persuasion. The article argues that a powerful international process of diffusion is at work and NHRIs are no longer the exclusive preserve of liberal democratic regimes. Instead NHRIs have diffused to a wide range of political systems, subjecting these human rights institutions to new and often competing demands and expectations

Multilevel Governance of Global Climate Change: Problems, Policies and Politics.

How do global and regional climate targets, rules, policies, and standards emerge and under which conditions are they effectively enabled within domestic political systems? When and how do national policy innovations diffuse and who are the principle actors involved? This paper aims to shed light on the multilevel intermediation processes that shape climate policy development and implementation, with a particular focus the interplay between the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), regional multilateral institutions, and their member states. As per the original project deliverable, the aim of this study is both descriptive – providing a detailed and historical perspective on “multi-level implementation of the UNFCCC regime through coordinated action within and between member states” – as well as analytical, namely, to assess its “effectiveness and ability to accelerate climate governance implementation”. It builds upon earlier ground-clearing research that produced a comprehensive mapping of the current UNFCCC regime and the wider climate governance regime complex, illuminating scope for action by a wide variety of actors at all scales, from the sub-national to the highest global level of political assembly (Coen, Kreienkamp, and Pegram 2020). By focusing on interscalar interactions on the regional level, this paper zeroes in on particularly important dynamics within this complex ecosystem of global climate governance. More specifically, we compare governance arrangements in the European Union (EU), where supranational climate policymaking is most advanced, to those in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), where regional cooperation on climate change remains very limited.1 Regional organizations provide an instructive domain of analysis because they sit neither at the “top” nor at the “bottom” of the global climate change regime, providing vital governance (regulatory) as well as meta-governance (steering) functions.2 Although there are significant differences between the EU and ASEAN, both case studies point to linkages between global, regional, and national climate governance, with the international framework setting boundary conditions for regional and national policy development and vice versa. However, while these linkages have, at several points in time, accelerated policymaking processes in the EU, they have created few opportunities for significant policy change within ASEAN. Whereas our previous mapping of the global climate governance landscape employed scholarship on regime complexity to illustrate the growing institutional diversity on the inter- 1 This emulates recent scholarship seeking to advance comparative leverage between the EU and ASEAN focused on institutional design, in light of temporal and spatial variation in regional integration processes (Hofmann and Yeo 2017). 2 Meta-governance arrangements do not regulate or govern directly but rather engage in the “organization of self-organization” by providing ground rules for and ensuring the coherence and consistency of different governance regimes and mechanisms, whether through networks, markets, or hierarchical steering (Jessop 1998, p. 42). 4 and transnational level, this paper aims to provide a more sophisticated account of the governance dynamics playing out within this cluster of institutional arrangements through a multilevel governance (MLG) lens. Given space constraints, our focus is on the UNFCCC regime, which remains at the core of the broader climate regime complex (Keohane and Victor 2011). While the regime complexity literature is primarily concerned with the rising density of institutions on the same level of governance and the resulting proliferation of overlapping rules (Alter and Meunier 2009), MLG is more concerned with linkages and interactions between multiple scales and levels of governance and how this affects where policymaking authority is located. This provides a useful frame for exploring if, how, when, and why the UNFCCC regime affects the design of regional and national institutional arrangements and how, in turn, actors at various levels of governance seek to shape the rules and institutions that make up the regime. We show how MLG structures can be exploited by progressive policy entrepreneurs, who advance novel policy solutions, as well as policy obstructers who, for various reasons, are invested in the status-quo. To do so, we employ John Kingdon’s (1984) multiple streams framework (MSF), which highlights both the structural conditions that facilitate or impede non-incremental policy change – problem perception, availability of policy solutions, and political willingness – as well as the ability of different agents to exploit these conditions. Understanding these processes, and under which conditions they result in more ambitious climate action, is vital for any efforts to make existing governance arrangements more effective. As such, this paper speaks not just to scholars of global governance, International Relations, public policy, and related disciplines but first and foremost to policymakers at various levels of decision-making, seeking to better understand and reform policy processes. We supplement the EU and ASEAN case studies – which focus primarily on vertical interactions in multilevel governance arrangements – with a case study on transnational policy diffusion, tracing how national climate framework laws have emerged as important governance tools for internalizing UNFCCC rules and norms, mostly in Europe but increasingly beyond. Climate laws are significant because they enshrine binding long-term mitigation targets and establish overarching governance frameworks to realize these targets. While they have primarily diffused horizontally, we also document how policy entrepreneurs have recently managed to “upload” the concept to the EU-level. Some design elements of climate framework laws are even reflected in the Paris Agreement. Because the latter does not set legally binding mitigation targets for individual countries, relying instead on voluntary national commitments, climate laws can provide an important “link between international obligations and national policymaking” (Nash and Steurer 2019, p. 1061). However, for mitigation commitments to be meaningful, accountability structures must be in place to ensure that targets are grounded in science and implemented effectively. As we will show, independent climate advisory bodies 5 (ICABs) can play an important role in this regard – but only if they are properly resourced and vested with requisite powers. To date, only a handful of countries, primarily in Europe, have implemented strong and robust climate laws, with ambitious and quantifiable long-term targets, clear governance provisions, and ICABs that are not just offering scientific advice but also rigid progress monitoring. Meanwhile, in the ASEAN region, long-standing structural limitations to political accountability, participation, and civil society engagement have impeded the development of climate laws and formal ICABs. However, as we will argue, the emergence of informal monitoring regimes comprised of domestic civil society organizations could provide an alternative, albeit “softer”, avenue for driving more ambitious climate action and holding governments to account. This paper begins by introducing multilevel governance (MLG) and the multiple streams framework (MSF), which provide the theoretical anchor for our case studies. We then apply these concepts to reflect on the development of climate governance in the EU, with particular focus on the interplay between the EU and the UNFCCC. This is followed by a case study on ASEAN, where regional climate governance structures are much less developed and there is little coordinated engagement with the UNFCCC regime. To illustrate the diversity of national approaches within ASEAN and identify obstacles and opportunities for more sophisticated climate governance arrangements, we supplement the regional case study with reflections on the current situation in Indonesia and Singapore. The next part of the paper focuses on national climate framework laws, explaining their emergence and ongoing diffusion as well as weighing in on their potential as innovative governance solutions. The paper concludes by reflecting on the future of global, regional, and national climate governance in light of conflicting problem definitions and the need for urgent action, even in the face of other pressing challenges, such as the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic