The Comparative Politics of Transnational Climate Governance

Liliana B. Andonova, Thomas N. Hale, Charles B. Roger, Liliana B. Andonova, Thomas N. Hale, Charles B. Roger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367530617
• eBook ISBN: 9781351135412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Following the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the global politics of climate change depends more than ever on national climate policies and the actions of cities, businesses, and other non-state actors, as well as the transnational governance networks that link them. The Comparative Politics of Transnational Climate Governance sheds new light on these critical trends by exploring how domestic political, economic, and social forces systematically shape patterns of non-state actor participation in transnational climate initiatives. The book develops a common conceptual framework and uses a unique data set to explore the interplay between transnational and domestic politics and how these interactions shape the incentives and modalities of participation in transnational governance. The contributing chapters explore the role of cities, non-governmental organizations, companies, carbon markets, and regulations, as well as broader questions of effectiveness and global governance. Bringing together some of the foremost experts in the field of global governance and environmental politics, this book significantly advances our understanding of transnational governance and provides new insights for policymakers seeking to address the problem of climate change.

This book was originally published as a special issue of International Interactions.

The Comparative Politics of Transnational Climate Governance

Charles B. Roger, Thomas N. Hale, and Lilian B. Andonova¹

ABSTRACT
We live in an era of remarkable transformations in how governance is supplied at the global level, as traditional means of intergovernmental institutions are being joined by a growing diversity of transnational arrangements. Yet, at present, we still have only a superficial understanding of what causes actors to adhere to transnational rules, norms, and initiatives once they appear, and especially what role domestic political, economic and social variables play in their decision making. Focusing on climate change as an issue exemplifying the tendency for complex governance interplay, this special issue provides a comparative political economy perspective on the increasing but uneven uptake of transnational climate governance (TCG). This article articulates a conceptual framework for the analysis, highlighting the interplay between transnational and domestic politics and how such interactions shape the incentives, opportunities, and modalities of participation in transnational initiatives. An original data set of participation in transnational governance initiatives is introduced to capture the significance of the phenomenon and to provide a common basis to systematically address, for the first time, questions about the cross-national patterns of involvement we find across different arenas and types of TCG, be they networks of sub- or nonstate actors, private rules, or hybrid arrangements.

Introduction

We live in an era of remarkable transformations in how governance is supplied at the global level. Across nearly all areas of global politics—from climate change, to conflict, to trade, to finance—the traditional means that have been used to govern cross-border issues, such as formal treaties and intergovernmental organizations, are being joined by transnational forms of governance. These new varieties of cross-border governance include transgovernmental networks that link together public actors, such as cities and local governments; private governance schemes involving businesses, civil society groups, and individuals; and a wide variety of hybrid arrangements that bring together combinations of public and private actors to provide collective goods.

Due to the pace of these changes and their potentially vast implications, transnational governance has attracted a great deal of attention from scholars. Much productive research has focused on when and why transnational governance appears, how different kinds of initiatives operate, and the dynamics that lead transnational actors to become global governors (Andonova 2010; Avant, Finnemore, and Sell 2010; Avant and Westerwinter 2016; Bulkeley, Andonova, Betsill, Compagnon, Hale, Hoffmann, Newell, Paterson, Roger, and VanDeveer 2014; Büthe and Mattli 2011; Falkner 2003; Green 2013; Hale and Held 2011; Hall and Biersteker 2002; Haufler 2005; Potoski and Prakash 2009; Roger and Dauvergne Forthcoming). Prevailing explanations largely focus on how markets, norms, and networks motivate the creation and diffusion of initiatives by a variety of substate and nonstate actors. While such theories offer important insights, they tend to abstract from domestic political conditions and neglect their influence on the uptake of transnational governance.² However engagement in transnational governance varies enormously across countries, and is fundamentally shaped by the different domestic political contexts that actors are embedded in. If we are to provide a comparative insight on this variable engagement, which is essential for understanding the role of transnational governance in world politics, it is therefore critical to consider the role of domestic interest groups, policies, and institutions in conditioning transnational forces.

This special issue seeks to fill this research gap by focusing on the comparative politics of participation in transnational climate governance across jurisdictions, actors, and types of governance arrangements. The independent variables we are concerned with therefore include the varying domestic policies, institutions, and other national-level economic, social, and political factors that collectively shape the domestic contexts within which sub- and nonstate actors are embedded. The core dependent variable of interest—“participation” in transnational governance—is the act of adhering, or claiming to adhere, to transnational rules. It can include public claims about compliance with transnational rules or membership in a transnational initiative that specifies criteria for admittance. We seek to examine comparatively how domestic political, economic, and social variables can systematically boost or dampen actors’ propensities to engage in governance transnationally.

To do so, the special issue uses the domain of climate change as a “laboratory.” Within this issue area, a groundswell of transnational climate governance (TCG) initiatives has arisen alongside decades of interstate gridlock (Bulkeley et al. 2014; Victor 2011). Recent research has made significant progress toward mapping this universe of TCG by building data sets of TCG initiatives that allow scholars to move beyond individual case studies to assess broader trends (Bulkeley et al. 2014; Hale and Roger 2014; Hoffmann 2011; Widerberg and Stripple 2016). These data sets have uncovered a wide variety of TCG schemes, composed of varying combinations of substate and nonstate actors that address different aspects of the underlying problem. Building on these efforts, a new cross-national data set produced by the organizers of the special issue expands our understanding of TCG by showing not only which schemes are active across countries but also what actors in which countries participate in TCG initiatives (Andonova, Hale, and Roger 2017). This allows the articles in this issue to systematically address, for the first time, questions about the cross-national patterns of involvement we find across different arenas and types of TCG, be they networks of public actors, private rules, or hybrid arrangements.

By explaining how country-level factors affect TCG, the special issue also makes an important contribution to a pressing policy question. The climate regime is becoming increasingly complex, with a proliferation of TCG initiatives, intergovernmental clubs, and “unilateral” national actions emerging alongside, and increasingly linked to, the United Nations process (Abbott 2012; Falkner, Stephan, and Vogler 2010; Held, Roger, and Nag 2013; Keohane and Victor 2011). The 2015 Paris Agreement gave unprecedented prominence to sub- and nonstate actors, calling on cities, companies, civil society groups, and others to act on climate change, creating a Web portal to record and track their actions (Hale 2016). Such initiatives are intended to support the new institutional structure of the climate regime, which is centered on a system in which country targets will be determined nationally at regular intervals but then subject to verification and review at the international level. The Paris conference appointed two “High-Level Champions” to actively orchestrate and expand TCG initiatives in critical areas, and created an annual event at UNFCCC summits for sub- and nonstate actors to be recognized (Chan, De Souza, Hale, Lang, McCoy, St John, and Weigum 2014; Hale 2016). In other words, the multilateral components of the climate regime are increasingly complemented by—and intertwined with—both national policies and transnational governance. Understanding the relationship between the domestic and transnational arenas, and how the former constrains, supports, or drives the latter, is thus crucial for understanding the emerging climate regime. Will this shift provide a new way to manage the global commons as suggested, for example, by Elinor Ostrom’s (2009) vision for “polycentric” climate governance? Or is transnational governance merely a second-best alternative to, or even a deliberate diversion from, more comprehensive regulatory efforts at the global level, as skeptics charge?

While the special issue focuses on the climate regime, the articles individually and collectively seek to contribute theoretical insights to the broader literature on transnational governance and institutional interaction. Beyond climate change, there are a number of issue areas that have been characterized by multilateral gridlock, institutional pluralism and complexity, and the rise of transnational governance, and these trends are arguably increasing across many realms of world politics. While testing the broader generalizability of the special issue’s findings is beyond its scope, the hypotheses and theories are explicitly designed to reach beyond the climate realm.

In what follows, we provide an overview of the empirical and theoretical concerns of the special issue and preview how the findings of the individual articles contribute to our understanding of the domestic politics of transnational governance. We start by discussing the database that is employed by the contributing articles and providing a descriptive overview of trends in the field of TCG to help readers visualize the range of variation in participation in TCG. We then discuss three core theoretical themes addressed in the special issue: determinants of sub- and nonstate actors’ motivations and strategies; domestic institutions and their conditioning effects on participation in transnational governance; and how transnational governance relates to the public objectives and policies. We locate the contributions of the special issue within the broader literature on these themes, offering an overview of the individual articles. We then discuss the general findings that emerge across the articles, highlighting insights that may extend to other areas of world politics. We conclude by considering the implications of these findings for the evolving climate regime.

Mapping the world of transnational climate governance

Transnational governance is an increasingly important phenomenon in world politics. It can be said to arise when nonstate or substate actors located in at least two states adhere to a common set of rules aimed at steering their behavior toward shared, public goals (Andonova, Betsill, and Bulkeley 2009; Bulkeley et al. 2014; Roger and Dauvergne Forthcoming). When the objective of such rules is to steer behaviour so as to address some aspect of the problem of climate change, we term this phenomenon transnational climate governance (TCG). We refer to a specific instance of transnational climate governance—that is, a particular set of TCG rules—as a “TCG initiative” or “TCG scheme.” Participation in TCG is each specific instance in which an actor becomes a member of a TCG initiative or claims to comply with the rules of a TCG scheme. In recent years, a burgeoning number of studies have been concerned with why TCG schemes arise and take the shape that they do. In doing so, they have focused on analyzing individual TCG initiatives, primarily relying on case studies to document the causal processes at work. However, in recent years, several attempts have been made to develop databases of TCG schemes that have helped scholars to systematically map patterns of variation across different initiatives and to move toward a large-N analyses (Andonova et al. 2017; Bulkeley at al. 2014; Hoffmann 2011; Widerberg and Stripple 2016). These have greatly expanded the kinds of questions that can be asked about TCG and provide additional sources of leverage for answering more traditional ones.

This special issue draws on a new data set, which documents the participation of substate and nonstate actors in 71 TCG schemes. To create the data set, we used as a baseline the aggregate data on 75 TCG initiatives constructed by Hale and Roger (2014), which in turn builds on previous data collection efforts by Hoffmann (2011) and Bulkeley et al. (2014). The 75 TCG initiatives included in the baseline data set had to meet a range of criteria (Hale and Roger 2014). First, to count as an instance of TCG, an initiative had to be transnational in nature. This meant, in practice, that an initiative had to involve nonstate or substate actors from at least two different states as participants in a TCG scheme. Thus, if all of the participants in a particular scheme came from a single state, then it was excluded from the database; if at least one actor came from a different state, it was included. This meant that an initiative like Refrigerants, Naturally!, which has multinational corporations from both the United Kingdom/Netherlands (Unilever) and United States (Coca-Cola) as participants, was included, but schemes like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that only involve participants from several American states were excluded.

Second, an initiative had to address climate change. Given that climate change is a multidimensional issue that involves nearly all aspects of economic and social activity, TCG schemes focus on many different aspects of the problem. A scheme could therefore be concerned with a range of different substantive activities, but provided that these were framed by the initiative itself as an attempt to address climate change, it would count as an instance of TCG. This meant that a scheme could also combine a focus on climate change with other nonclimate issues, so long as climate change was regarded as one of the central and overarching goals. For example, the Climate Alliance of European Cities and Indigenous Peoples, which combines concerns about climate change and indigenous rights, is included in the database, whereas a transnational certification scheme like the Forest Stewardship Council—which may have implications for the climate but does not explicitly state that addressing climate change is an overarching objective—is excluded.

Finally, in order to enter the database, an initiative had to count as an instance of governance. In many ways, this is the most difficult aspect of TCG to define precisely since the term governance itself is an essentially contested concept. However, we argue, along with other work in the field, that the core ideas behind the concept of governance are the notions of “steering” and “publicness” (Andonova, Bestill, and Bulkeley 2009; Bulkeley et al. 2014). An initiative counts as an instance of governance if it somehow seeks to “steer” those who participate toward some common, “public” goal. Here, “steering” means that an initiative aims to somehow change or coordinate the actions of those who participate through the setting or rules, standards, or other kinds of guidelines that aim to regulate the behavior of individuals or corporate bodies or the characteristics of goods or services they produce. More subtly, governance can also be said to arise when an initiative aims at facilitating adherence to such rules through capacity-building programs, technical assistance, climate finance, or efforts to alleviate information asymmetries. However, even if an initiative aims to steer behavior, for it to count as an instance of governance it must steer participants toward an explic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The Comparative Politics of Transnational Climate Governance
• 2. Join the Club: How the Domestic NGO Sector Induces Participation in the Covenant of Mayors Program
• 3. Transnational Climate Governance and the Global 500: Examining Private Actor Participation by Firm-Level Factors and Dynamics
• 4. Transnational Climate Governance Networks and Domestic Regulatory Action
• 5. Blurred Lines: Public-Private Interactions in Carbon Regulations
• 6. Transnational Climate Governance Initiatives: Designed for Effective Climate Change Mitigation?
• 7. Domestic Sources of Transnational Climate Governance
• Index