This book examines why accountabilities matter for international climate governance . It brings together diverse approaches to understand how increased accountabilities can improve the effectiveness of climate change governance in promoting orderly social transitions against a backdrop of transforming environments . These are timely discussions because there are real-world consequences of changing ideas regarding how best to achieve effective climate governance . Independent sovereign states are central pillars of the international political system and the practices of the international political economy in which states , intergovernmental organisations and major economic corporations, are dominant actors, can pose institutional impediments to effective climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. Understanding why and how increased accountabilities can overcome or avoid these limitations, by strengthening mechanisms for climate governance and meeting the popular expectations of informed citizens, may transform the prerogatives and privileges of sovereign states and trigger a further evolution in notions of state sovereignty.
Throughout, authors systematically examine links and tensions between diverse approaches to climate governance , aiming to improve understandings of current and anticipated environmental transformations and to extend capacities to distribute responsibilities for managing their impacts. They pay sustained attention to whether and how understandings and applications of accountability can improve international climate governance mechanisms and institutions. Overall, these chapters hold in mind one of the most pressing questions concerning effective climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies: How does global climate change increase the need for accountable governance ?
Effective responses to mitigate the worst consequences of global climate change rely upon global governance mechanisms that commit states to more responsible courses of action. Achieving these will rely upon collective agreements and effective authorities to ensure that internationally agreed targets are met. Orderly and equitable mitigation strategies cannot be achieved through simple broadly based agreements concerning shared responsibilities and common goals of ensuring the longevity of human societies. Such goals necessitate changed international approaches to economic and social policies, including new structures for resolving contested interests (United Nations Development Programme, 2008; Najam, 2005).
This book integrates knowledge and perspectives from biology, environmental and climate science, policy studies, international law, environmental ethics , human geography, economics , philosophy and international relations. Utilising interdisciplinary approaches, they examine new opportunities for developing accountable climate governance mechanisms as climate change-induced environmental transformations disrupt complex natural systems and the global distributions of species, water, arable and habitable land. They also examine their consequences in disrupting current systems of political, economic and social order. They thereby present new interdisciplinary approaches to improving climate governance as environmental transformations and new accountabilities challenge established structures, processes, ideas and values concerning rights, responsibilities and authoritative capacities.
The key aims of this book are to examine the ways that climate change highlights imperatives for increasing the capacities of global governance mechanisms to accelerate the slow rates of progress achieved to date. By creating accountable adaptation and mitigation strategies through new rules, compliance requirements and operational responsibilities , climate governance mechanisms can enhance the effectiveness of the climate change regime complex to achieve better environmental outcomes and improved prospects of sustainable political order. Authors recognise the limitations of existing governance mechanisms and advocate for more systematic and integrated approaches that take heed of ecological and biological systems, human and environmental interfaces, political and economic sectoral interplay and scalable solutions . Throughout, their chapters examine how and why predictable and orderly climate-related transitions depend upon effective and accountable climate governance that incorporates international political leadership.
While slow responses sometimes arise from a lack of political will, it is more often the case that policy-makers become caught in uncertainties concerning risk assessments and fluctuating prospects of effectively managing changed practices (Young, 2002). The political impacts of global climate change go beyond the consequences they pose for the forms, locations and distributions of human societies and their centres of production. They challenge core political values and ideals which seem fitting for the most significant set of issues yet to have faced human civilisations. Problematically, the prospect that existing core political values are challenged by global climate change is a dawning realisation that few political actors readily accept and acknowledge .
This book shows that accountability is an important attribute of effective climate governance mechanisms because it goes to the heart of security , equitable access to resources, cost and burden sharing, and intergenerational protectionary imperatives. In the twenty-first century, accountability is a central feature of many government systems, especially for liberal democratic states , in ways that vastly exceed the earlier historically grounded foundational social contracts between governments and citizens. In the international political system, accountability is not restricted to liberal democratic states as all states seek to ensure that others are accountable to them. These processes of holding to account include recognising the limits of states â territories and jurisdictions, and expectations that states will contribute to orderly international relations by respecting territorial integrity and governmental authority , and ensuring sustainable development practices that do not prevent each otherâs access to natural resources .
Accountability is an important attribute of effective environmental governance mechanisms because it goes to the heart of security , equitable access to resources, cost and burden sharing, and intergenerational protectionary imperatives. Accountable governments and governance mechanisms imply transparency in terms of being able to see and measure who is accountable, what is being accounted for, and who is held to account and by whom. International climate governance mechanisms enmesh states in networks of mutual accountability . Among the reasons that greenhouse gas emissions targets are debated and international agreements sometimes struggle to achieve extensive levels of implementation are because parties are concerned to clarify the measures by which they might be held to account. Accountability does not, of itself, guarantee that meaningful targets are set or met, and the normative expectations attached to mutual accountabilities can delay or disrupt international agreements. Nonetheless, accountability processes will be essential in orchestrating the many mitigation and adaptation strategies that are required and for advocating for those that are most effective.
As central sources of authority in the international political system, states provide unique sites of accountability for global, regional and local climate change impacts and the governance mechanisms created to deal with them. Climate change governance has also resulted in states accepting new responsibilities for collective mitigation and adaptation strategiesâand a contingent range of accountabilities for the goals they set and actions they take to achieve them. Accountabilities are thus perceived as fundamental to states behaving well as they respond to global climate change and collectively establish and implement governance mechanisms , mitigation and adaptation strategies. Although states often fall short of meeting the goals and targets they have set, at least some of these goals and the means of moving towards meeting them would not have been set in the first place without some common ground in a...