Innovativeness and Paralysis in International Climate Policy

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Streck
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Climate Regime ◽  
Market Mechanisms ◽  
International Climate Policy ◽  
To Come ◽  
Private Actors

AbstractThis article describes the challenges of using the constrained tools of international law to negotiate a sustainable framework to address climate change. It sets out to show how the particularities of the problem have led to creative and innovative solutions expanding the borders of international law. To this end, the article discusses carbon market mechanisms, the compliance regime of the Kyoto Protocol, and the emerging framework to create incentives to reduce land-based emissions in developing countries. These examples illustrate that the recognition of the role of sub-national and private entities in mitigating climate change has had significant impact on the rules of the climate regime. But the article also asserts that the un process, while recognizing the role of private actors, is still inadequately equipped to involve non-state actors in a meaningful way. The climate regime therefore challenges the traditional thinking about interstate relationships. No longer solely a matter for international environmental law, contemporary environmental governance has become a global affair, which makes the lens of transnational law a useful tool to think about these issues in practice in a more intellectually fruitful and relevant way. This article thereby provides a snapshot of the type of issues and discussion that readers of this journal can look forward to in the years to come.

Filling in for Governments? The Role of the Private Actors in the International Climate Regime

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Charlotte Streck
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Paris Agreement ◽  
Climate Regime ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
State Actor ◽  
International Climate ◽  
Private Actors

The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change abandons the Kyoto Protocol’s paradigm of binding emissions targets and relies instead on countries’ voluntary contributions. However, the Paris Agreement encourages not only governments but also sub-national governments, corporations and civil society to contribute to reaching ambitious climate goals. In a transition from the regulated architecture of the Kyoto Protocol to the open system of the Paris Agreement, the Agreement seeks to integrate non-state actors into the treaty-based climate regime. In 2014 the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Peru and France created the Non-State Actor Zone for Climate Action (and launched the Global Climate Action portal). In December 2019, this portal recorded more than twenty thousand climate-commitments of private and public non-state entities, making the non-state venues of international climate meetings decisively more exciting than the formal negotiation space. This level engagement and governments’ response to it raises a flurry of questions in relation to the evolving nature of the climate regime and climate change governance, including the role of private actors as standard setters and the lack of accountability mechanisms for non-state actions. This paper takes these developments as occasion to discuss the changing role of private actors in the climate regime.

The Role of Universities in Private Environmental Governance Experimentalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 466-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Light
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Competitive Environment ◽  
Private Governance ◽  
Federal Constitutional ◽  
Constitutional System ◽  
Private Actors

In our federal, constitutional system of government, the states are often lauded as “laboratories of experimentation” for public policy, including for public environmental law. Yet private actors are playing an increasingly important role as parallel regulators through the adoption of private environmental governance. Private environmental governance can functionally advance one of federalism’s core values: policy experimentalism. To the extent that private governance by business firms arouses skepticism for this experimental role because firms’ motives to achieve profit in a competitive environment differ from the incentives motivating public regulators, private universities offer an alternative institutional locus for experimentalism. Using Yale University’s recent adoption of a private carbon charge as a case study, this article argues that universities should play a greater role in private environmental governance experimentalism, and are worthy of more scholarly focus.

The Role of Universities in Private Environmental Governance Experimentalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-74
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Light
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Competitive Environment ◽  
Private Governance ◽  
Federal Constitutional ◽  
Constitutional System ◽  
Private Actors

In our federal, constitutional system of government, the states are often lauded as “laboratories of experimentation” for public policy, including for public environmental law. Yet private actors are playing an increasingly important role as parallel regulators through the adoption of private environmental governance. Private environmental governance can functionally advance one of federalism’s core values: policy experimentalism. To the extent that private governance by business firms arouses skepticism for this experimental role because firms’ motives to achieve profit in a competitive environment differ from the incentives motivating public regulators, private universities offer an alternative institutional locus for experimentalism. Using Yale University’s recent adoption of a private carbon charge as a case study, this article argues that universities should play a greater role in private environmental governance experimentalism, and are worthy of more scholarly focus.

scholarly journals INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE: SOUTHERN INFLUENCES.

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (32) ◽  
pp. 143-165
Author(s):  
Fernando Cardozo Fernandes Rei
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Global Environmental Governance ◽  
Sustainable Society ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Scientific Expertise

The purpose of this article when it discusses the southern approaches brought to global governance gets mixed with the addressing of the challenges facing the legal science in harmony with the others sciences to deal with the complex environmental issues of the 21st century. Thinking of a successful international environmental regulation is talking about an effort to understand the need for the instrumental law to comply with its role to solve complex issues that are typical of the construction of a sustainable society. The first part of the article consider that the international environmental law has been facing the emerging global environmental issues in an innovating way, incorporating a new form of global environmental governance based on which new players are brought to the discussion and implementation of measures to face environmental problems. After that, the article highlights the southern actions in the role of the scientific expertise and in the environmental paradiplomacy, and evaluates the influence and contributions in the decision making scenario and in the news perspectives of international law. The article concludes that the southern influences suggest a more pragmatic, finalistic international law that is concerned about the results, the achievement of the goals proposed

Fostering climate change consensus: The role of intimacy in group discussions

2021 ◽  
pp. 096366252110206
Author(s):  
Lyn M. van Swol ◽  
Emma Frances Bloomfield ◽  
Chen-Ting Chang ◽  
Stephanie Willes
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Group Consensus ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
Group Attraction ◽  
Climate Change Information ◽  
To Come ◽  
Collective Engagement

This study examined if creating intimacy in a group discussion is more effective toward reaching consensus about climate change than a focus on information. Participants were randomly assigned to either a group that spent the first part of an online discussion engaging in self-disclosure and focusing on shared values (intimacy condition) or discussing information from an article about climate change (information condition). Afterward, all groups were given the same instructions to try to come to group consensus on their opinions about climate change. Participants in the intimacy condition had higher ratings of social cohesion, group attraction, task interdependence, and collective engagement and lower ratings of ostracism than the information condition. Intimacy groups were more likely to reach consensus, with ostracism and the emotional tone of discussion mediating this effect. Participants were more likely to change their opinion to reflect that climate change is real in the intimacy than information condition.

Part V Subject Matter, Ch.29 Climate Change

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajamani Lavanya ◽  
Werksman Jacob D
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Paris Agreement ◽  
Due Diligence ◽  
Address Climate Change ◽  
Rules And Principles ◽  
Harm Prevention ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Universe

This chapter provides an overview of international regulatory efforts to address climate change. It focuses on the UN climate change regime, which comprises the 1992 UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement, and decisions of parties under these instruments. However, the universe of climate change law extends well beyond the UN climate change regime. There are rules and principles of general international law, such as the harm prevention principle, due diligence, and state responsibility, which apply to climate change. There are treaty regimes and institutions, including those addressing other areas of international environmental law or other fields of international law, which intersect with, complement, and function to implement the UN climate change regime. There are also a multiplicity of rules, regulations, and institutions at the regional, sub-regional, and national levels that directly or indirectly address climate change, many of which have been put in place in response to the UN treaties.

scholarly journals The Nation Ex-Situ: On climate change, deterritorialized nationhood and the post-climate era

Climate Law ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxine Burkett
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
International Law ◽  
Ex Situ ◽  
Climate Regime ◽  
Analogous Structure ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Impacts Of Climate Change

It is plausible that the impacts of climate change will render certain nation-states uninhabitable before the close of the century. While this may be the fate of a small number of those nation-states most vulnerable to climate change, its implications for the evolution of statehood and international law in a “post-climate” regime is potentially seismic. I argue that to respond to the phenomenon of landless nationstates, international law could accommodate an entirely new category of international actors. I introduce the Nation Ex-Situ. Ex-situ nationhood is a status that allows for the continued existence of a sovereign state, afforded all of the rights and benefits of sovereignty amongst the family of states, in perpetuity. In practice this would require the creation of a government framework that could exercise authority over a diffuse people. I elaborate on earlier calls to use a political trusteeship system to provide the framework for an analogous structure. I seek to accomplish two quite different but intimately related tasks: first, to define and justify the recognition of deterritorialized nation-states, and, second, to explain the trusteeship arrangement that will undergird the ex-situ nation. In doing so, I introduce the notion of a post-climate era, in which the very structure of human systems—be they legal, economic, or socio-political—are irrevocably changed and ever-changing.

Climate Change-related Displacement of Persons

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane McAdam
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
International Law ◽  
Internal Displacement ◽  
Address Climate Change ◽  
Political Incentives ◽  
International Borders ◽  
Refugee Law ◽  
International Refugee Law ◽  
Impacts Of Climate Change

This chapter examines the scope of existing international law to address ‘climate change-related displacement’, a term used to describe movement where the impacts of climate change affect mobility decisions in some way. It looks into the role of international refugee law, human rights law, and the law on statelessness in protecting people displaced by the impacts of climate change. The extent to which international law and international institutions respond to climate change-related movement and displacement depends upon: whether such movement is perceived as voluntary or forced; the nature of the trigger; whether international borders are crossed; the extent to which there are political incentives to characterize movement as linked to climate change or not; and whether movement is driven or aggravated by human factors, such as discrimination. The chapter also considers the extent to which existing principles on internal displacement provide normative and practical guidance.

scholarly journals Domestic Courts and the Paris Agreement's Climate Goals: The Need for a Comparative Approach

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Julia Saiger
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
International Law ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Protection Measures ◽  
Domestic Courts ◽  
Functional Understanding ◽  
International Obligations ◽  
International Climate ◽  
National Governments

AbstractDomestic courts enjoy generous attention in international political and legal climate change literature. As a result of the reluctance of national governments to pursue climate protection measures, courts are called on to enforce international climate goals. This article assesses two domestic climate change cases (the Thabametsi Case and the Vienna Airport Case) in the light of Anthea Roberts’ functional understanding of the role of domestic courts in international law. It argues that domestic courts play a pivotal role in linking international obligations of conduct with national obligations of result. This role depends on domestic contexts and, therefore, requires a comparative approach.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document