Rethinking authority in global climate governance: How transnational climate initiatives relate to the international climate regime

In the past few years, numerous authors have highlighted the emergence of transnational climate initiatives, such as city networks, private certification schemes, and business self-regulation in the policy domain of climate change. While these transnational governance arrangements can surely contribute to solving the problem of climate change, their development by different types of sub- and non-state actors does not imply a weakening of the intergovernmental level. On the contrary, many transnational climate initiatives use the international climate regime as a point of reference and have adopted various rules and procedures from international agreements. Rethinking Authority in Global Climate Governance puts forward this argument and expands upon it, using case studies which suggest that the effective operation of transnational climate initiatives strongly relies on the existence of an international regulatory framework created by nation-states. Thus, this book emphasizes the centrality of the intergovernmental process clustered around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and underscores that multilateral treaty-making continues to be more important than many scholars and policy-makers suppose.