In the last decade there has been a significant shift in the framing of
climate governance. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has
moved from an explicit focus on mitigation, to also include adaptation.
Climate change is no longer simply about reducing emissions but also about
enabling countries to deal with its impacts – be it on development, migration,
or health. Yet most studies of the climate regime have focused on the
evolution of mitigation governance, not adaptation. This tendency is partly
because adaptation was considered a ‘taboo’ topic in the UNFCCC as many states
did not want to concede that climate change was occurring, or did not want it
to be considered a substitute for mitigation. In short, global adaptation
governance is understudied and poorly conceptualized. In this paper, we ask:
what constitutes and characterizes global adaptation governance? We attempt to
characterize governance efforts in terms of what, who and how adaptation is
governed. We examine: the constituent parts of an emerging regime (principles,
norms, rules, decision-making procedures), the institutions involved, and how
these parts have been manifested in concrete modes of governance (standards
and commitments, operations, finance, knowledge and networking). To aid this
mapping, we use the mitigation regime as a heuristic for comparison. We find
that there is indeed an emerging global regime around adaptation, although
characterized by ‘soft’ procedural and facilitative modes of governance.
Furthermore the institutional complexity and fragmentation we see in global
adaptation governance arises for different reasons than for the mitigation
regime. Namely the epistemic ambiguity around adaptation, including its scalar
framing, and the power politics around controlling donor funds for adaptation.
This paper contributes to our understanding of the shift in framing of global
climate governance, from mitigation to adaptation, and the coherence of this
regime
