Global Climate and Energy Governance

Towards an Integrated Architecture

Harald L. Heubaum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138958159
• eBook ISBN: 9781317339793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Tracing the changing activities of international bureaucracies active in global climate and energy governance, this book provides an in-depth analysis of processes of institutional innovation and governance integration between the two fields.

It shows that rather than the consequence of a designed strategy, governance integration – the convergence of approaches and practices among different actors within one or between two or more governance architectures – has come as the result of organizational changes arising from the international bureaucracies' various efforts to pursue and broaden their mandate in a complex and dynamic global policy environment. Each of the three cases analyzed (the UNFCCC Secretariat, the IEA Secretariat and the World Bank) began their life focused on particular activities that today, following periods of sustained organizational change, make up only part of their operations. Beyond creating greater synergies for cooperation across the governance architectures, improving policies, and mobilizing greater investment to tackle the climate emergency, the book shows governance integration to have contributed to preserving and expanding the role and relevance of all three international bureaucracies.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of global climate and energy governance, climate policy, and international organizations and their bureaucratic arms. Practitioners will find this book useful in thinking about why innovation in governance emerges and how it may be directed.

1Studying governance integrationA conceptual framework

DOI: 10.4324/9781315661339-2

This chapter develops the conceptual framework used in this study to analyze processes of organizational change in international bureaucracies as the driving force behind governance integration. It begins by defining governance integration as a discrete and novel concept, following a brief review of the literature on the fragmentation of governance architectures. While governance integration has not received much scholarly attention to date, it is closely related to existing accounts of policy integration and polycentric governance. The chapter then conceptualizes international bureaucracies as the objects of this study and elaborates on what is required for governance integration to occur: organizational change in these bureaucracies prompted by a changing global policy environment. Although organizational change has been addressed by the IR and international bureaucracy literatures, existing definitions of the concept are often labored and in need of greater clarity.

The third main section sets out this book’s analytical approach, detailing the four key factors that are argued to explain the change that has taken place: a changing global policy environment, organizational autonomy, organizational structure, and organizational leadership. The choice of factors is adapted from the wider literature on international bureaucracies more generally, and Bauer et al.’s conceptual exploration of organizational change in international bureaucracies and Biermann and Siebenhüner’s work on the influence of international environmental bureaucracies more specifically.¹ However, influence is not considered as a separate factor here as the influence of the UNFCCC Secretariat, the World Bank, and the IEA Secretariat, respectively, is treated as a given and as it is not directly relevant to this work to assess how the three international bureaucracies shape policy outcomes in various countries or how the information they disseminate is received by the wider public, the media, and specialized policy communities. This study aims to make sense of the four factors through the lens of governance integration in an increasingly polycentric governance system. A changing global policy environment, organizational autonomy, organizational structure, and organizational leadership are conceptualized by drawing on international bureaucracy, IR, and public policy literatures. The final section details the rationale for selecting the three cases.

Conceptualization of governance integration

In contrast to governance integration, the fragmentation of governance architectures has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. The consequence has been a detailed theoretical understanding of the concept of fragmentation as well as an extensive empirical application, particularly in the field of global environmental governance. Expanding on Raustiala and Victor’s definition of a regime complex as “an array of partially overlapping and non-hierarchical institutions governing a particular issue-area,”² Biermann et al. define the term governance architecture as the “overarching system of public and private institutions that are valid or active in a given issue area,” that is as comprising “organizations, regimes, and other forms of principles, norms, regulations and decision-making procedures” and resembling “the meta-level of governance.”³ A governance architecture may be considered fragmented, they further contend, when the issue area governed by this architecture is “marked by a patchwork of international institutions that are different in their character (organizations, regimes, and implicit norms), their constituencies (public and private), their spatial scope (from bilateral to global), and their subject matter (from specific policy fields to universal concerns).” A degree of fragmentation has been observed to be common to all global governance architectures, regardless of the issue area.⁴

And indeed, the issue areas under observation in this study are fragmented with a patchwork of international bureaucracies, states, and non-state actors addressing a variety of different aspects. While the global climate governance architecture is more hierarchical than its counterpart in the energy field, with the UNFCCC as the central framework around which most other actors revolve, it is still marked by the presence of a multitude of different organizations at various levels of political authority. These organizations may well partially overlap in their goals and activities, which is hardly surprising given the cross-cutting, global nature of climate and energy concerns. However, for the purposes of this research, the work on fragmentation is only the starting point. Indeed, as Biermann et al. point out, “the concept of architecture allows for the analysis of situations of both synergy and conflict between different regimes or other types of institutions.”⁵ This study seeks to show how growing synergies may lead to integration within and between governance architectures. While there can be no governance integration without some kind of fragmentation, integration is more than just the interaction of actors in an otherwise fragmented governance environment.

Therefore, despite the close links to governance fragmentation, governance integration is not simply the opposite of the former. It is a discrete and novel concept with an independent quality. Building on Heubaum and Biermann, governance integration is defined as a positive interaction of actors either within a governance architecture or, the focus of this study, between two (or more) different governance architectures that may result in a convergence of approaches and activities.⁶ Governance integration, whether within a governance architecture or between two different architectures, may begin to occur if at least one of the actors involved changes or adjusts their approaches and activities in ways that align it with the approaches and activities of another actor or group of actors. In the context of this study, it would require an international bureaucracy operating in global energy or climate governance or, indeed, in a related field, to adapt and start behaving in ways that align its approaches and activities with those of another international bureaucracy, operating either within global energy or global climate governance.

Governance integration is related to the concept of polycentricity as applied to climate change governance by Ostrom⁷ and further developed by Jordan et al.,⁸ among others. Understood as a polycentric system, global climate governance is a complex network of “multiple governing authorities at different scales rather than a mono-centric unit. Each unit within a polycentric system exercises considerable independence to make norms and rules within a specific domain” in order to effectively address climate change.⁹ Such a system exists both vertically, across multiple levels of political authority, from the international all the way down to the local, and horizontally, for example, across the multitude of actors populating this governance arena at the international level, including international bureaucracies as the objects of this study. The core assumptions are not dissimilar to the work on governance fragmentation discussed above; yet in its normative application “on how better to govern, poly-centric governance thinking provides a rather different starting point to other stock-in-trade terms and concepts.”¹⁰ Polycentric governance moves beyond the focus on states as governing climate change within the UNFCCC regime complex and avoids the somewhat more negative connotations of governance fragmentation through an acknowledgment of the opportunities for learning, innovation, integration, and mutual reinforcement in global climate change governance that arise from the activities of a range of independent yet connected actors.

The concept is also closely related to the literatures on legal and policy integration and mainstreaming, which have drawn on examples ranging from EU policymaking to international development cooperation.¹¹ There are a number of important overlaps between legal and policy integration on the one hand and governance integration on the other. First, both assess the ways in which new responsibilities are integrated into separate policy streams, be it in local planning bodies, national government ministries, or policy units within international bureaucracies. For example, manifestations can be found in the integration of EU nature conservation objectives into urban land use planning in Bulgaria,¹² the integration of environmental concerns into national energy and agriculture ministries in Sweden,¹³ or, indeed, the integration of climate change matters into the activities of the IEA as a leading international bureaucracy operating in the energy field.¹⁴

Second, both emphasize a number of requirements necessary for integration to occur as well as criteria against which such integration can be measured. In policy integration studies, this includes the creation of coordinating structures and legal procedures as well as the need for communication and dialogue to explain and relate the interconnections and need for integrated approaches to address external changes.¹⁵ Relatedly, environmental and climate mainstreaming assesses the directed inclusion of environmental and climate considerations into all relevant activities pursued by a state or non-state actor.¹⁶ While there is no one agreed upon definition of mainstreaming, it is here understood as the active promotion, usually by governments, of climate goals and sustainability as cross-cutting issues in the identification, planning, design, and implementation of strategies, policies, and investment programs. As regards governance integration, this study identifies organizational change and adaptation driven by external challenges as the main determinant. This change is evident in a widening of the issue portfolio the bureaucracy addresses which is, in turn, connected to changing internal structures, the building of partnerships and closer interaction with other actors operating within energy and/or climate governance, and a change advocacy on behalf of specific choices which points to the importance of communicating integration efforts.

However, policy integration, mainstreaming, and governance integration are also conceptually different. Policy integration and mainstreaming follow the kind of designed strategy or top-down plan not currently evident across cases of governance integration. For example, within the EU and its member states, integrating formerly separate policy portfolios in one ministry (such as climate change and energy) and, indeed, mainstreaming specific goals and targets into local planning policies are the intended outcomes of deliberate acts by a government. Governance integration as understood in this study, on the other hand, emerges through international bureaucracies’ various efforts to pursue and broaden their mandate in a complex and fast-changing global policy environment largely independent of individual governments. Even though member states exert a degree of control, the relative autonomy of the international bureaucracies analyzed herein has meant that their changing activities have not always come as the result of explicit government direction or, indeed, top-down direction within the bureaucracy. Further, policy integration and mainstreaming in supranational, national, and local contexts have direct impact on policymaking taking place at each of these levels of political authority. While international bureaucracies operating within climate and energy governance show some elements of policy integration and mainstreaming, no such direct impact can be established. The UNFCCC Secretariat, the IEA Secretariat, and the World Bank are each influential players in their own right, but they are not directly involved in domestic policymaking processes. However, recent research has demonstrated that international bureaucracies have considerable impact on global governance even without these direct powers.¹⁷ They do so, for example, through the provision of energy policy expertise in the case of the IEA Secretariat, advocacy and agenda setting in the case of the UNFCCC Secretariat, and implementation and financial support in the case of the World Bank. Governance integration as a concept is therefore specific to the context in which it is found.

Conceptualization of international bureaucracies

The empirical examples discussed in this study are the administrative entities of IOs in the case of the IEA Secretariat and the World Bank, and an international treaty in the case of the UNFCCC Secretariat. International bureaucracies, often also referred to as international public administrations, are here understood, following Biermann et al., as

agencies that have been set up by governments or other public actors with some degree of permanence or coherence and beyond formal direct control of single national governments (notwithstanding control by multilateral mechanisms through the collective of governments) and that act in the international arena to pursue a policy.¹⁸

This definition separates international bureaucracies from a range of other international actors, including transnational non-governmental organizations and transnational corporations. It also distinguis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: The case for governance integration
• 1 Studying governance integration: A conceptual framework
• 2 The transformation of the UNFCCC Secretariat
• 3 The IEA as an adaptive bureaucracy
• 4 The World Bank’s unlikely climate leadership
• 5 Conclusion: Governance architectures in transformation
• Selected bibliography
• Index