In the past few decades, accountability has become a key concept to assess the
role and place of a wide range of trasnational institutions. Such trend can be partially
explained by the widespread sense of unaccountability that permeates the legal realm
beyond the state.
The aim of this thesis is to investigate three particular institutional actors of
the Climate Change Regime: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
the Compliance Committee of the Kyoto Protocol (CCKP), and the Clean
Development Mechanism (CDM). This investigation is carried out through the
descriptive and critical lenses of accountability. It resorts to the Global Administrative
Law (GAL) project in order to pursue that task.
Along the way, the thesis asks four interrelated research questions. The first is
conceptual: what is accountability? The second is an abstract normative question:
what is regarded as a desirable accountability relationship at the national and the
global level? The third is purely descriptive: how accountable are the three
institutions? The fourth, finally, is a contextualised normative question: how
appropriate are their three accountability arrangements? The two former questions are
instrumental and ancillary to the two latter. That is to say, they respectively provide
the analytical and evaluative frameworks on the basis of which a concrete description
and a concrete normative assessment will be done
