Climate Governance at the Crossroads Experimenting with a Global Response After Kyoto

About this book

The global governance of climate change is in flux. Conventional strategies of addressing climate change through universal, interstate negotiations--the most prominent of which is the Kyoto Protocol--have been stymied by the gaps that exist between the negotiating powers of states, rendering such initiatives stagnant and ineffectual.

In response, a number of new actors and processes have begun to challenge the traditionally exclusive authority of nation-states to create rules and manage environmental problems via multi-national treaties. Dozens of innovative climate response initiatives, or "governance experiments," have emerged at multiple levels of politics and across multiple jurisdictions: individuals, cities, states/provinces, corporations, and even new multilateral initiatives.

This book explains how and why these new governance experiments have emerged, drawing upon a database of such initiatives to ascertain how these initiatives fit together and how they influence what is defined as environmental governance. In assessing the relational impact of these initiatives, Matthew Hoffmann provides insight into whether this experimentation is likely to result in an effective response to climate change. Additionally, he draws broader conclusions about how we understand global governance, addressing questions of how we understand authority and what we accept as modes of rule-making in global political spaces.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Into the Void
Chapter 2 The World of Climate Governance Experimentation
Chapter 3 Making Sense of Climate Governance Experimentation
Chapter 4 Experimenting in Practice
Chapter 5 Experimenting with Cities and Technology
Chapter 6 Constructing Carbon Markets
Chapter 7 Lost in the Void or Filling the Void?

Appendix
List of Interviews Undertaken
Works Cited
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Matthew J. Hoffmann is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough and in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He teaches and pursues research on climate change politics, global governance, multilateral treaty-making, complex systems, and international organization. Hoffmann is the author of "Ozone Depletion and Climate Change: Constructing a Global Response" and coeditor with Alice Ba of "Contending Perspectives on Global Governance: Coherence, Contestation, and World-Order".