Effective governance of transnational adaptation initiatives

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - Transnational climate governance has mainly been preoccupied with climate change mitigation, both in practice and as studied in...     

Strategic cooperation for transnational adaptation: lessons from the economics of climate change mitigation

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - The literature on climate adaptation has so far conceptualized it as a domestic issue, to be governed somewhere between the...     

20 Years of global climate change governance research: taking stock and moving forward

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - Research on global climate change governance is no longer primarily concerned with the international legal regime, state...     

The framing and governance of climate change adaptation projects in Lao PDR and Cambodia

This study explores the way climate change adaptation projects in Cambodia and Lao PDR have been framed. Four frames were identified: inadequate infrastructure; information deficits; limited planning capacity; and insecure access. In all frames, there was internal coherence among: the problems identified; the form solutions are expected to take; and who should be included and in what roles. All projects claimed to be addressing the needs of farmers vulnerable to climate change. The infrastructure, information, and capacity frames are apolitical and privilege expert knowledge, whereas the access frame places rights and justice issues centrally, and thus holds more potential for addressing the root causes of vulnerabilities and supporting more just distribution of resources and power. Framing can interact with how projects are governed, for example, through assigning roles to actors based on types of solutions prescribed. The extent and direction of frame elaboration also depend on how a project is governed. Meeting local needs and objectives, for example, is constrained when external actors have too much influence in project governing structures, and initial project plans written from afar are followed too narrowly. This study shows that frames are an important part of the governance of adaptation projects.     

Access and allocation in climate change adaptation

As climate change impacts become increasingly apparent, adaptation becomes increasingly urgent. Accordingly, adaptation to climate change has shifted towards the centre of attention in both policy and research. In this article, we review the last 10 years of adaptation research (2008–2018), with a focus on work within the Earth System Governance network. We use the lens of access and allocation to structure our review and examine how adaptation affects, and is affected by, access to basic needs, basic rights, and decision-making on the one hand, as well as allocation of responsibilities, resources, and risks on the other. We find that questions of justice, equity, and fairness are fundamental to all dimensions of adaptation. The access perspective, for example, suggests that we need to assess vulnerability, understood broadly, while the allocation perspective focuses on questions of responsibility for being vulnerable, e.g. when people live, or move to, hazard-prone areas exposed to climate risk. This also relates to questions of who is responsible for selecting, implementing, and funding adaptation measures. Overall, we find that the framework of “access and allocation” and its subcategories offer a detailed approach to adaptation and adaptation research, but that it is not intuitive. The notion of “climate justice” seems to resonate more with both academic and policy debates.

     

Ecosystem-based approaches to climate change adaptation: progress and challenges

Resilient ecosystems are vital to human well-being and are increasingly recognised as critical to supporting communities’ efforts to adapt to climate change. The governing bodies of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are encouraging parties to adopt ‘ecosystem-based adaptation’ (EbA) approaches, which utilise biodiversity and ecosystem services to support climate change adaptation. These approaches are wide ranging and include mangrove restoration to buffer against storm surges; watershed management to protect against droughts and floods; rangeland management to prevent desertification; and sustainable management of fisheries and forests to ensure food security. This article examines the emergence of EbA in international legal frameworks for climate change and biodiversity and progress towards implementation. The EbA concept is potentially powerful in catalysing international and national commitments to act due to its key defining features of a focus on societal adaptation rather than ecocentricism, and a targeting of the immediate adaptation needs of the poorest and most vulnerable communities who are adversely affected by climate change. However, examination of national policy and practice in two least developed countries, Samoa and Cambodia, reveals that institutional and legal barriers at national level can pose significant challenges to operationalising EbA to achieve adaptation objectives.     

Beyond the public and private divide: remapping transnational climate governance in the 21st century

This article provides a first step towards a better theoretical and empirical knowledge of the emerging arena of transnational climate governance. The need for such a re-conceptualization emerges from the increasing relevance of non-state and transnational approaches towards climate change mitigation at a time when the intergovernmental negotiation process has to overcome substantial stalemate and the international arena becomes increasingly fragmented. Based on a brief discussion of the increasing trend towards transnationalization and functional segmentation of the global climate governance arena, we argue that a remapping of climate governance is necessary and needs to take into account different spheres of authority beyond the public and international. Hence, we provide a brief analysis of how the public/private divide has been conceptualized in Political Science and International Relations. Subsequently, we analyse the emerging transnational climate governance arena. Analytically, we distinguish between different manifestations of transnational climate governance on a continuum ranging from delegated and shared public–private authority to fully non-state and private responses to the climate problem. We suggest that our remapping exercise presented in this article can be a useful starting point for future research on the role and relevance of transnational approaches to the global climate crisis.

The roles of non-state actors in climate change governance: understanding agency through governance profiles

Globalization processes have rendered non-state actors an integral part of global governance. The body of literature that has examined non-state actor involvement in global governance has focused mainly on whether and how non-state actors can influence states. Less attention has been paid to the comparative advantages of non-state actors to answer questions about agency across categories of non-state actors, and more precisely what governance activities non-state actors are perceived to fulfil. Using unique survey material from two climate change conferences, we propose that different categories of non-state actors have distinct governance profiles. We further suggest that the different governance profiles are derived from particular power sources and that agency is a function of these profiles. The study thereby contributes to a strand in the literature focusing on the authority of non-state actors in climate governance and broadens the methodological toolkit for studying the “governors” of global governance.     

Access and allocation in earth system governance: water and climate change compared

A significant percentage of the global population does not yet have access to safe drinking water, sufficient food or energy to live in dignity. There is a continuous struggle to allocate the earth’s resources among users and uses. This article argues that distributional problems have two faces: access to basic resources or ecospace; and, the allocation of environmental resources, risks, burdens, and responsibilities for causing problems. Furthermore, addressing problems of access and allocation often requires access to social processes (science, movements and law). Analysts, however, have tended to take a narrow, disciplinary approach although an integrated conceptual approach may yield better answers. This article proposes a multi-disciplinary perspective to the problem of access and allocation and illustrates its application to water management and climate change.     

Africa in the global climate change negotiations

The African Group of Negotiators (AGN) has become a much more significant bargaining coalition in the global climate change negotiations. It has been participating more proactively and on a much more significant scale, and, as a result, it has had a greater impact on bargaining outcomes, notably in Nairobi, Copenhagen and Durban. Yet, at present, the group remains poorly understood by both scholars and policymakers. Compared to other groups in the climate negotiations, such as the Group of 77 and Alliance of Small Island States, it has received relatively little attention. This paper fills this gap by tracking the evolution of the AGN over the course of the climate change negotiations. In the early years after the Earth Summit, it shows that the AGN faced tremendous difficulties pursing regional objectives effectively, largely due to a number of “internal” barriers to participation, which compounded the structural barriers that the continent faced by making it difficult to use “low-power” negotiating strategies such as coalition building, agenda-setting and persuasion. However, in recent years, the group has become much more proactive as a result of greater access to material, ideational and institutional resources. These have relieved, somewhat, the internal barriers that the group faced, making it possible for the AGN to negotiate much more confidently and effectively than before.     

Exploring the agency of global environmental consultancy firms in earth system governance

In contemporary global environmental governance, private companies are both recipients of as well as contributors to the development and spread of environmental practices, norms, standards, and legislation. One sector that seems to be of particular significance is the environmental consultancy industry. It assists public and private actors in developing environmental solutions and ensuring implementation and compliance by providing particular knowledge, management, and assessment skills. However, little attention has been paid to the environmental authority and agency of companies active in this field. This exploratory study on global environmental consultancy firms is guided by the basic research questions on agency in earth system governance: What is agency? How do actors acquire authority and become agents? How can we evaluate the effects these agents generate?     

Networking for climate change: agency in the context of renewable energy governance in India

Climate change has disastrous impacts in the developing world and confronts countries like India with immense challenges. The dilemma of addressing these challenges encourages the appearance of new modes of agency. However, the extent to which new agents are able to address these challenges depends on several factors. The aim of this article is to examine these factors and how they affect the ways in which climate change-related challenges to development are tackled in the case of the Indian wind energy sector. By firstly examining the attributes and capabilities of the different actors and secondly applying a stakeholder network analysis, the article identifies different characteristics that support the effective and efficient deployment of wind energy in one Indian state and hinder it in another.     

Transaction costs in the evolution of transnational polycentric governance

Polycentric systems of governance may help address two key challenges in the transnational governance of socioecological systems, the problems of fragmentation and fit, but there is limited understanding of the processes through which polycentric governance systems emerge. This paper draws on institutional economics and accounts of international regime formation to develop an ideal-type model of the evolution of transnational polycentric governance. In particular, the model highlights systematically different transaction costs across different phases of polycentric governance evolution. These costs result in important trade-offs between building a broad coalition during agenda setting and addressing complexity in implementation. The plausibility of the model is probed using the case of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), drawing on global-level data on REDD+ collaboration, as well as fieldwork in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. This case suggests that low transaction costs in the agenda-setting phase led to a confused vision for what REDD+ should be, ultimately hampering implementation.     

Exploring the agency of Africa in climate change negotiations: the case of REDD+

Emerging climate change regimes, such as the mechanism for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), are increasingly aiming to engage developing countries such as those in Africa, in sustainable development through carbon markets. The contribution of African countries to global climate negotiations determines how compatible the negotiated rules could be with the existing socioeconomic and policy circumstances of African countries. The aim of this paper is to explore the agency of Africa (African States) in the global climate change negotiations and discuss possible implications for implementing these rules using REDD+ as a case study. Drawing on document analysis and semi-structured expert interviews, our findings suggest that although African countries are extensively involved in the implementation of REDD+ interventions, the continent has a weak agency on the design of the global REDD+ architecture. This weak agency results from a number of factors including the inability of African countries to send large and diverse delegations to the negotiations as well lack of capacity to generate and transmit research evidence to the global platform. African countries also perceive themselves as victims of climate change who should be eligible for support rather than sources of technological solutions. Again, Africa’s position is fragmented across negotiation coalitions which weakens the continent's collective influence on the REDD+ agenda. This paper discusses a number of implementation deficits which could result from this weak agency. These include concerns about implementation capacity and a potential lack of coherence between REDD+ rules and existing policies in African countries. These findings call for a rethink of pathways to enhancing Africa’s strategies in engaging in multilateral climate change negotiations, especially if climate change regimes specifically targeted at developing countries are to be effective.     

Building institutional capacity: knowledge production for transnational security governance in Mexico

ABSTRACT

This article engages with institutionalist knowledge production in US-Mexican security relations, demonstrating how anti-crime governance in the Americas has shifted from a heavy-handed military rationale to a good governance and civil society–centred approach. This shift has been facilitated by the newly emerging resilience discourse which advocates turning local communities from passive beneficiaries of government-sponsored law enforcement into pro-active security partners. It will be argued that the rise of good governance and society-centred policy thinking has enhanced the epistemic authority of a heterogeneous, but ideologically aligned set of human rights advocacy groups, think tanks, policy-oriented academics and for-profit development NGOs – both in Mexico and the United States. This transnational expert community has been instrumental in inserting the issue of drug-related violent crime in Mexico into a globally dominant statebuilding framework. In consequence, security governance in Mexico has taken on a more transnational character and become the object of a highly intrusive international monitoring regime.     

Methods and motives: Exploring links between transnational organized crime and international terrorism

The nexus with transnational organized crime is increasingly a focus for security planners in their analyses of terror groups. Their approach is best described by the phrase “methods, not motives.” While the motives of terrorists and organized criminals remain divergent most often, our research indicates this is not always the case. For that reason, this report argues that such a general approach has become too restrictive and can be misleading since the interaction between terrorism and organized crime is growing deeper and more complex all the time. In short, the lines of separation are no longer unequivocal. The report analyzes the relationship between international organized crime and terrorism in a systematic way in order to highlight the shortcomings of the “methods, not motives” argument. In so doing, the report considers the factors that most closely correspond to crime-terror interaction and identifies those regions of developed and developing states most likely to foster such interactions. Likewise, the paper will suggest an evolutionary spectrum of crime-terror interactions that serves as a common basis for discussion of such often used terms as “nexus.” The centerpiece of the report is a groundbreaking methodology for analysts and investigators to overcome this growing complexity, identify crime-terror interactions more quickly and to assess their importance with confidence. The approach is derived from a standard intelligence analytical framework, and has already proven its utility in law enforcement investigations. The report is the product of a recently concluded and peer-reviewed 18-month NIJ sponsored research project, and includes empirical evidence drawn from numerous case studies developed in the course of the research program. This project was supported by Grant No. 2003-IJ-CX-1019 awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the US Department of Justice. Research assistance on this project was provided by Allison Irby, Douglas M. Hart, Patricia A. Craig-Hart, Dr. Phil Williams, Steven Simon, Nabi Abdullaev, and Bartosz Stanislawski. Drafting and editing help was provided by Laura Covill.