ABSTRACT
After more than two decades of inter-state negotiations aimed at addressing and managing the problem of climate change, scholars and policy-makers have become increasingly frustrated and disillusioned with the international climate regime. Although the obstacles to reaching an international agreement for collective action have largely been identified, a fundamental breakthrough in the international climate negotiations is unlikely to occur in the near future (e.g. Keohane and Victor 2011; Hale, Held, and Young 2013; Abbott 2014). Therefore, in recent years, a number of authors have begun to direct increasing attention to transnational climate initiatives launched by different types of sub-and non-state actors1
(e.g. Jagers and Stripple 2003; Betsill and Bulkeley 2006; Bäckstrand 2008; Pattberg and Stripple 2008; Andonova, Betsill, and Bulkeley 2009; Bulkeley and Newell 2010; Hoffmann 2011; Pattberg 2012; Green 2014). Many of these authors claim that multilateral treaty-making has lost much of its spark, and conceive the various initiatives developed by sub-national, non-profit, or business actors as alternative governance arrangements to the instruments established at the intergovernmental level. In particular, they hold that the increasing involvement of sub-and non-state actors in climate policy-making has generated a ‘shift in the centre of gravity in climate governance away from traditional state-centric multilateral processes to multilevel governance whereby diverse, decentralised initiatives (…) form the basis for the global response to climate change’ (Bernstein et al. 2010: 171).
