1.1 Introduction
Anthropogenic climate change unequivocally embodies one of humanity’s defining challenges of the twenty-first century with severe and far-reaching societal implications (IPCC 2014; Steffen et al. 2018; WBGU 2011). The Special Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlights the urgency for fast and radical changes to achieve the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target as well as for adapting to non-revocable impacts of climate change (IPCC 2018).
As we finalise this book and reason for a new lens and framework to shape governance actions for climate change, the COP25 meeting in Madrid in December 2019 concluded in a disappointing stalemate: no agreement on action. Specifically, COP25 in Madrid ended with no political agreement for taking the needed bold and transformative action required to rise up to the amounting challenge of climate change despite the efforts of activists like Greenpeace, Greta Thunberg’s movement Fridays-For-Future and many citizens worldwide rising voices and protests about extinction crisis, cities around the globe declaring climate emergency, as well as the pressing voices of scientists about climate emergency (see Ripple et al. 2019). This further underscored that combating climate change is a tenacious task: while climate change is a scientifically proven and societally acknowledged problem for more than three decades, global emissions are still on the rise and societies struggle to adapt to the impacts of climate change (Roberts et al. 2018).
Over the past years, and in part in response to the disappointing international progress, climate governance has taken a turn to decentralised and multilateral relations and agreements outside of the realm of nation state commitments alone (Jordan et al. 2018; Ostrom 2014; van Asselt et al. 2018). Climate governance by now builds on an extensive international regime centred on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement’s goal of holding “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C” (UN 2015: p. 3). Around this regime, multiple subnational and non-state actors started to take climate action at international, transnational, national and subnational levels (Burch et al. 2016; Hildén et al. 2017; Wurzel et al. 2019). Especially cities have been recognised as ideally placed for responding to calls for co-shaping global urban agendas. Cities are also seen as agents of change with the potential to deliver effective climate action dealing directly with the sources of emissions while strengthening local communities and restoring urban nature (Elmqvist et al. 2018a; WBGU 2016; Castán Broto 2017). Climate change objectives have been increasingly integrated with broader policy priorities and goals, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG 13 explicitly addresses the goal to take “urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts” (UN 2016: p. 23). and SDG 11—“the urban target”—positions resilience alongside liveability and sustainability highlighting the importance of an integrated approach to dealing also with climate change.
However, the mechanisms and effectiveness of this type of ‘climate experimentation’ (Hoffmann 2011; van Asselt et al. 2018) are still poorly understood (Jordan et al. 2015). For example, while the Paris Agreement is widely lauded for formalising bottom-up and decentralised approaches to reducing emissions (Chan et al. 2015; Huitema et al. 2018), the pledges made by national governments are thus far insufficient to stay well below 2°C (Rogelj et al. 2016). Some scholars interpret this as a ‘lowest-common-denominator governance’, a ‘downloading of responsibility’ from nation states to private actors and a weakened differentiation in international environmental law (McGee and Steffek 2016). Van Asselt et al. (2018) conclude from an examination of the global governance architecture post-Paris that key challenges relate to a lack of clear coordination as well as metrics‚ monitoring and review of progress.
In our view, these decentralised developments of mobilised new networks, agents and institutions respond to a governance deficit for climate responses at local, regional, state and global levels. Looking beyond the climate governance regime and structures across levels, it seems that climate change is still often addressed as an add-on priority. As a result, climate governance commitments and negotiations—besides producing results far too slowly—are not able to counter the negative effects of conventional policy-making and planning that perpetuate business-as-usual (e.g. investments in fossil fuels) (Maor et al. 2017). Any action to address climate change is toppled by the negative impacts of globalisation, economic growth and urbanisation.
In this book, we put forth a change of perspective in evaluating and even surfacing climate governance action. The emerging paradigm of climate change as a transformation challenge in scientific and policy discourses—especially post-COP21 in Paris in 2015—frames the clima...