In recent years, several scholars of world politics have observed a relocation
of authority in different issue areas of global policy-making. This
development appears to be particularly evident in the field of global climate
politics where a number of authors have highlighted the gradual loss of
authority by national governments and the emergence of new spheres of
authority dominated by actors other than the nation-state. In fact, due to the
existence of a regulatory gap in this policy domain, various new governance
arrangements have emerged which work simultaneously at different levels (some
top-down and others bottom-up) to cope with the problem of climate change.
However, despite several broader descriptions and mapping exercises, we have
little systematic knowledge about their workings, let alone their impact on
political-administrative systems. Given these shortcomings, in this paper we
explore how (and how far) different types of globally operating governance
arrangements have caused changes in the distribution of authority within
national governments and their public administration. We will focus on two
stylized governance arrangements: one that operates bottom-up (i.e.
Transnational City Networks, TCNs) and another that operates top-down (i.e.
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, REDD+).
Departing from our hypotheses that the former is likely to lead to more
decentralization and the latter to more centralization of environmental policy
making, we will present some preliminary findings from our case studies in
Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa