Non-state actors in hybrid global climate governance: justice, legitimacy, and effectiveness in a post-Paris era

In this article, we outline the multifaceted roles played by non-state actors within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and place this within the wider landscape of global climate governance. In doing so, we look at both the formation and aftermath of the 2015 Paris Agreement. We argue that the Paris Agreement cements an architecture of hybrid multilateralism that enables and constrains non-state actor participation in global climate governance. We flesh out the constitutive features of hybrid multilateralism, enumerate the multiple positions non-state actors may employ under these conditions, and contend that non-state actors will play an increasingly important role in the post-Paris era. To substantiate these claims, we assess these shifts and ask how non-state actors may affect the legitimacy, justice, and effectiveness of the Paris Agreement

The expanding field of cooperative initiatives for decarbonization: a review of five databases

Climate governance beyond the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—including countries, companies, civil society, and international organizations, forming cooperative initiatives—is increasingly framed as complementing, supporting, and even substituting the multilateral negotiations. Cooperative initiatives activating nonstate actors could help bridging the ‘ambition gap’ between governmental greenhouse gas mitigation pledges and the decarbonization pathway needed to halt global warming at 2°C. But what do we know about the performance of cooperative initiatives and their participants? We examine the content of five databases aiming to capture the emerging field of cooperative initiatives and assess whether it is possible to measure the performance of cooperative initiatives based on current data. Overall, we find a substantial lack of ex post data for measuring performance. Available studies either focus on nonemission-related qualitative variables and characteristics of cooperative initiatives such as governance function, participants composition, and thematic areas, or use quantitative modeling approaches to estimate their potential impact. Consequently, we currently lack information to assess how existing initiatives perform in relation to the socio-technical systems they are intended to intervene in, or how initiatives align, scale-up, and form low-carbon pathways. Given the increasingly important role and legitimacy attributed to cooperative initiatives in addressing climate change, we argue that focusing more on gathering ex post data, improving exchange between academic and policy-oriented work, and developing assessment methods accommodating diversity in terms of function, goal, and output, are needed to understand the performance of climate governance beyond the UNFCCC. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:486–500. doi: 10.1002/wcc.396. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website

Finding synergies and trade-offs when linking biodiversity and climate change through cooperative initiatives

The causes and consequences of biodiversity loss and climate change are deeply intertwined. Hundreds of existing cooperative initiatives—gathering thousands of states, regions, cities, companies, civil society organisations and communities—are potentially bending the curve on biodiversity loss and tackling climate change simultaneously. More research is needed to understand if, how and under what conditions cooperative initiatives are delivering on their promises and importantly how they can contribute to both ‘biodiversity positive outcomes’ and ‘net-zero emissions’ at the same time