n/a
Previous research points to leadership as a key ingredient in mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. We adopt a polycentric perspective and use focus group interviews with Swedish actors within the business sector, politics, and government agencies, to analyse participants views on what it means to lead, preconditions of leadership, and division of responsibilities, in a context of transformative change. Our results suggest that participants focus on collective dimensions of leadership rather than front-running but see multiple ways of demonstrating climate leadership as being available to actors across governance levels and issue areas. Challenges to these views on leadership include the request for shared rules and regulations, and courage among leaders to enact coercive top-down leadership to handle conflicts and trade-offs. We conclude that polycentric transformative leadership is by default polysemic and will require multiple leadership roles at different scales changing over time.
The Paris Agreement places states' nationally determined contributions (NDCs) at the center of global climate politics. While previous research on the NDC has provided important suggestions for enhanced legitimacy and effectiveness of global climate governance, I examine the NDC not in terms of its content, but as an instrument for governing climate conduct in the post-Paris regime. By analyzing state submissions to post-Paris NDC negotiations, I identify five functions of the NDC: Progress Tracker, Trust-Builder, Influencer, Differentiator, and Gatekeeper. While the first three functions are informed by a techno-managerial rationality that posits effective climate action as a project of increased information-sharing, the last two highlight underlying political struggles of responsibility and fairness which are not necessearily solvable through intensified collaboration. I argue that these diverging views on the function of the NDC will become increasingly prominent as we move toward the first round of the global stocktake in 2023.
Investigations of the interconnectedness of climate change with human societies require profound analysis of relations among humans and between humans and nature, and the integration of insights from various academic fields. An intersectional approach, developed within critical feminist theory, is advantageous. An intersectional analysis of climate change illuminates how different individuals and groups relate differently to climate change, due to their situatedness in power structures based on context-specific and dynamic social categorisations. Intersectionality sketches out a pathway that stays clear of traps of essentialisation, enabling solidarity and agency across and beyond social categories. It can illustrate how power structures and categorisations may be reinforced, but also challenged and renegotiated, in realities of climate change. We engage with intersectionality as a tool for critical thinking, and provide a set of questions that may serve as sensitisers for intersectional analyses on climate change.
Non-state actors are increasingly participating in international climate diplomacy. The tactics employed by diverse civil society agents to influence climate policymaking are radicalizing through the adoption of more confrontational language. Activist groups have been seeking opportunities to influence policymakers regarding the rules related to transparency, public participation and accountability in the Kyoto Protocols Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). By scrutinizing efforts of three environmental NGOs (ENGOs) - Climate Action Network, Center for International Environmental Law and Carbon Market Watch - the analysis concentrates on what tactical shifts have occurred in the framing positions and approaches of these activists during the 1997-2015 period. After several years of legal advocacy, expertise and/or critique in an effort to reform input legitimacy of CDM governance, the selected ENGOs have recently drifted away from narratives of green governmentality and ecological modernization and, instead, radicalized their rhetorical tactics by turning to a human rights perspective under the umbrella of climate justice.
This article examines the role the UNFCCC plays in a polycentric climate regime complex. Through an extended questionnaire survey at the UN Climate Conferences in Warsaw (2013), Lima (2014) and Paris (2015), we study what government delegates and non-state observers see as the main purpose of UN climate summitry and their roles therein. Only a minority of these actors attend UN Climate Conferences to actively influence the outcome of the intergovernmental negotiation process. Instead, most come to these meetings to network, build interpersonal relationships, learn from each other and foster a sense of community across scales of difference. The ability of the UNFCCC to bring together different actors across time and space, to perform multiple policy tasks, has become one of its notable strengths and is an important facilitative practice that holds the polycentric regime complex together.
We propose that populism is a storytelling performance that involves a charismatic truth-teller and a populist narrative frame. Populist narratives are sensemaking devices that guide people in areas of contestation, uncertainty and complexity where decisions cannot solely rely on rational and formal processes. Populist truth-tellers apply a particular narrative frame that pits people against the elite when interpreting complex problems such as climate change. The aim of this article is one of theory generating, using the cases of Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg to illustrate the idea of populism as storytelling. While their climate change stories are very different, both share an approach that relies on the truth-telling character of their hero, applying the same populist narrative frame. These findings add to our understanding of the role emotions and conflicts play in the struggles to make sense of climate change based on particular interests or political agendas.
This article utilizes a leadership perspective to analyze the ambiguous outcome of the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen. By considering follower perspectives, using unique survey data to empirically identify the leading actors in the climate negotiations, and examining the goals, strategies, and interplay of the different leadership forms of all the main leadership candidates, we are able to give a fuller picture of the importance of leadership in international negotiations and what role leadership played at the COP-15 conference. In addition to the insights generated concerning the dynamics that led to the Copenhagen Accord, the article contributes to the leadership scholarship by illustrating the importance of an analytical framework that incorporates the demand side of leadership, the supply side of leadership, the interplay of leadership visions and forms, and the fit between these elements. We conclude by discussing the implications that our findings hold for future UNFCCC climate negotiations.
Efforts to predict the future habitability of Earth are examined in three interrelated IGBP and IHDP projects: Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE), Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC), and the Global Land Project (GLP). Drawing upon project documentation and research plans from 1986 to 2012, and 10 interviews with researchers involved in project design and implementation, we trace how these projects have represented the problem of global change in the modelling of ecosystem and land-use dynamics. The imagining of global change was recalibrated as project participants brought more aspects of natural and human life into their computations. A top-down gaze informed by atmospheric physics and predictable cause–effect relationships gave way to a more complex Anthropocene imaginary dominated by non-linearity and less predictable thresholds and pathways. Given intrinsic links between ways of representing and knowing a phenomenon and ways of acting upon it so as to transform it, qualitative change in how the Earth System is ‘rendered problematic’ may imply changes for the practices of environmental science and governance.