Strategic Niche Management and Transition Management have been promoted as useful avenues to pursue in order to achieve both specific product or process changes and system transformation by focusing on technology development through evolutionary and co-evolutionary processes, guided by government and relevant stakeholders. However, these processes are acknowledged to require decades to achieve their intended changes, a timeframe that is too long to adequately address many of the environmental and social issues we are facing. An approach that involves incumbents and does not consider targets that look beyond reasonably foreseeable technology is likely to advance a model where incumbents evolve rather than being replaced or displaced. Sustainable development requires both disruptive technological and institutional changes, the latter including stringent regulation, integration beyond coordination of disparate goals, and changes in incentives to enable new voices to contribute to integrated systems and solutions. This paper outlines options for a strong governmental role in setting future sustainability goals and the pathways for achieving them.

Every country is a polluter and a victim of anthropogenic climate change. Inextricably linked, every greenhouse gas emitted from every corner of the world changes the atmospheric composition of the climate system. Viewing the climate change problem from this lens, every person from every country must play its part in mitigating and adapting to climate change. And every country is a developing country, in the sense of universality as conveyed by “Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (2030 Agenda). Goal 13 of the 2030 Agenda specifically recognises the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as the primary forum of global climate governance. However, progress for legally binding quantified emissions reductions limitations (QERLs) mitigation targets under the UNFCCC-style multilateralism framework has yet to produce an effective response to the threat of global warming. The gap between currently pledged QERLs trajectories and global emissions levels consistent with limiting global warming to 2oC Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures remains large. It is therefore not surprising that a growing number of minilateralism-style proposals (e.g. climate clubs) have emerged in the literature as a way forward to promote QERLs actions in the post 2015 Paris Climate Summit era. This paper explores how climate clubs could potentially assist in catalysing greater international cooperation for effective QERLs actions. The paper then specifically investigates how the Alliance of Small Island Developing States (AOSIS) could assist in pioneering emerging international cooperation efforts to establish climate clubs to fast track QERLs actions. What makes AOSIS’s epic quest to be a member of the international climate clubs movement so important is the question of whether it can help navigate the international community towards using climate minilaterism-style clubs to complement UNFCCC-style multilaterism in the post 2015 Paris Climate Summit era.

A major cornerstone on the way to low-carbon sustainable development on a global scale will be a swift and effective implementation of all countries' INDCs submitted to the UNFCCC prior to Paris. However, doing so will require transforming development pathways away from currently pervasive carbon lock- ins. This can only be successful if countries take a systemic view on their development agendas, and link mitigation, adaptation and other developmental priorities together for a coherent overarching sustainable development strategy. The ownership for this process needs to be with the countries themselves as such strategies touch fundamentally upon national policy-making and implementation. At the same time, developing countries have access to bi- and multilateral financial and technical cooperation. To enable a systemic, country-led perspective, development cooperation needs to shift its paradigms away from currently prevalent project-level interventions. A truly innovative and transformational shift with the objective of pursuing a low-carbon and climate resilient society needs to open up space for experimentation as new ways of doing things need to be put into practice. Experiments will not always be successful, but foster learning on a national as well as an international level on pitfalls and solutions in new approaches to low-carbon sustainable development. Not least, there needs to be a renewed focus on programmatic approaches that link various topical domains for a country-led process, and a critical look at development work that is "doomed to succeed". Our article draws from systems theory, development studies and recent work on transitions studies and transformational change in the international domain. It links up different theoretical concepts with practical approaches in order to outline a future development agenda that will be owned by developing countries and supported non-invasively by bi- and multilateral development cooperation to foster low-carbon development pathways that are urgently needed to solve the climate crisis.

After two weeks of intense negotiations at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21) in December 2015 in Paris - the 196 Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreed on the COP Decisions and Paris Agreement. The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, described the Paris Agreement as a ‘monumental triumph for people and our planet1’. The Paris agreement is a return to the ‘pledge and review’ approach of the early days of global climate policy – middle ground between national pledges for climate action within a global architecture of review and collaboration. For the last twenty years, international climate change policy has been focused on the search for a centrally negotiated multilateral climate treaty with all countries as signatories. Yet since its inception, adapting the top-down multilateral treaty model to the challenge of climate change has been a Sisyphean task. The new approach has broken a deadlock and created a sense of optimism – but trust and legitimacy in the regime still needs to be built to ensure performance. The devil is the detail – right balance between top-down measures and bottom-up flexibility are needed for specific challenges related to ensuring equity, mobilizing finance, driving technological change and ensuring climate resilient development. In this paper we enroll theoretical insights from the work of Elinor Ostrom on polycentric governance, to see how a durable, hybrid climate regime could emerge out of the Paris Agreement and facilitate equitable and ambitious climate outcomes. The paper is divided into four sections: we first examine the road to Paris –the lessons from the last thirty years of climate policy for the future regime; next we review theory – what are the theoretical insights from the work of Elinor Ostrom on polycentric governance; we examine how the ‘hybrid’ architecture of the new regime might play out in dealing with specific issues: setting ambition, ensuring differentiation, legal form, mitigation and adaptation; and lastly weanalyze the way forward – building trust and legitimacy and encouraging the ‘ground swell’ of actors.

Alongside intergovernmental climate change negotiations, a groundswell of climate actions by cities, regions, businesses, investors, and civil society groups has emerged. These transnational actors seek to address mitigation and adaptation to climate change; independently, with each other and with governments and international organizations. Many have welcomed transnational climate initiatives as a crucial addition to the formal climate regime, contributing to a growing momentum to act on climate change. However, critics have raised concerns about whether transnational actors are genuinely interested in mitigation and adaptation, or whether they are they are representing business-as-usual as clean and green. Moreover, are transnational climate initiatives appropriately targeted to address needs of both developed and developing countries; do they exacerbate imbalances in global climate governance between the global North and South? This paper explores the multifaceted relation between developing countries and transnational climate governance. It discusses developing country engagement on the basis of their political support for transnational initiatives, their leadership of, and participation in transnational climate initiatives, and the implementation and performance of such initiatives from the perspective of the global South.

The paper in a nutshell: In this paper, we present the normative concept of green industrial policy, which we define as encompassing any policy measure aimed at aligning the structure of a country’s economy with the needs of sustainable development within established planetary boundaries. We elaborate on why we need green industrial policy, how it differs from conventional industrial policy, why it is faced with significantly bigger challenges, and how these can be met. What and how we produce and consume is largely shaped by markets. However, markets fail to solve many of the environmental challenges we are facing. Therefore, we need governments to intervene, thus reclaiming the primacy of public policy in setting and implementing societal objectives. While safeguarding the sustainability of human life on our planet makes green industrial policy a highly normative undertaking, the economic case for green industrial policy is strong as well – the success stories of such ‘green’ frontrunners as Germany and Denmark demonstrate the competitiveness potential of the new technologies. However, as shown by decades of discussion on industrial policy, government intervention almost invariably brings about risks of political capture and government failure. Green industrial policy is thus not only governed by ethical norms, but also by politics. The risks of failure are magnified by the urgency and scale of today’s global environmental challenges, requiring particularly bold, comprehensive and well-orchestrated government intervention under high uncertainty. By highlighting lessons learned from practical cases of both success and failure, we show how these risks can be, and have been, managed. In particular, we submit that a broad- based social vision and contract need to be forged – supported by change coalitions and coupled with policy process safeguards, openness to policy learning, and an alignment of green industrial policies with market mechanisms.

Climate change is one of the priority issues on the current sustainability agenda and a malign type of problem (Gupta, 2010) with various conflicting interests that requires a collaborative solution. Public-private partnerships are a specific form of transformative governance as they provide linkages to more benign issues and therefore increase the problem solving capacity of the overall governance system. Three modalities of public-private partnerships are identified in this paper: instrumental, institutional and regime, characterized by specific inputs to climate governance and hence requiring different approaches to measuring their effectiveness. For instance, climate partnerships perceived from the instrumental perspective are frequently evaluated in terms of fulfilling the target or functions, while studies of the institutional modality of partnerships rely on assessment criteria derived from organizational science, which are mainly concerned with organisational capacities and operational accountability. Finally, studies on the overall climate regime (as a form of meta- partnership) are often linked to questions of legitimacy and accountability. The paper analyses different approaches to measuring effectiveness of climate partnerships and proposes an assessment framework addressing variations of climate partnerships contributions within identified modalities. The proposed framework is based on three effectiveness standards, which allow assessing each modality of partnerships from various analytical perspectives established in conjunction with the type of partnership contribution, i.e. goal attainment, accountability, legitimacy. The study also provides comparison across the modalities in an attempt to understand competitive advantages of each modality and provide insights on which climate partnership modality delivers more tangible results for tackling climate change issues.

Transformation is complex and multi-level governance the admittance of this fact. Our paper presents the lessons learnt from a number of projects, which were / are meant to foster fruitful dialogue and transformative learning among a variety of actors. The projects are united by local climate action as the chosen political arena, our assumption that a level playing field or ‘middle ground’ is needed, and questions such as: How to build effective coordination structures between horizontal and vertical lines? How to facilitate common but differentiated learning? And how to measure and monitor the ‘fruitfulness’ of such dialogue? In trying to answer these questions we draw on applied research from transformative governance projects in Europe, Asia and Africa. One example given is the V-LED project, which will – in the context of the post 2015 agenda, the implementation of the Sendai Framework of Action, the adoption of the SDGs, and ‘après Paris’ – promote platforms for exchange on local climate action in four countries with very different political systems: communist Vietnam, post-apartheid South Africa, Kenya and the Philippines. Our research aims at understanding the coordination mechanisms that may lead to the emergence of dialogue, learning and eventually climate action in multi- level governance systems.

In recent years, several scholars of world politics have observed a relocation of authority in different issue areas of global policy-making. This development appears to be particularly evident in the field of global climate politics where a number of authors have highlighted the gradual loss of authority by national governments and the emergence of new spheres of authority dominated by actors other than the nation-state. In fact, due to the existence of a regulatory gap in this policy domain, various new governance arrangements have emerged which work simultaneously at different levels (some top-down and others bottom-up) to cope with the problem of climate change. However, despite several broader descriptions and mapping exercises, we have little systematic knowledge about their workings, let alone their impact on political-administrative systems. Given these shortcomings, in this paper we explore how (and how far) different types of globally operating governance arrangements have caused changes in the distribution of authority within national governments and their public administration. We will focus on two stylized governance arrangements: one that operates bottom-up (i.e. Transnational City Networks, TCNs) and another that operates top-down (i.e. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, REDD+). Departing from our hypotheses that the former is likely to lead to more decentralization and the latter to more centralization of environmental policy making, we will present some preliminary findings from our case studies in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa.

This paper examines the determinants of climate related disasters and attempts to estimate the presence of adaptive capacity in terms of per capita income and population density elasticities. We find evidence of adaptive capacity in a “weak” form both in terms of income and population density elasticities over our entire sample. That is, damages are in fact increasing with income and population, but less than proportionally. There is also evidence of countries improving their adaptive capacity over the long run, but of maladaptation occurring in the short run. Repeating the analysis splitting the sample by per-capita income levels, we find that higher income countries show adaptive capacity in a “strong form”, i.e. damages decrease with GDP, while lower income countries highlight exactly the opposite behavior. Finally, using Granger causality tests for panel data, we find evidence of increase in GDP per capita Granger causing climate related damages for lower income countries, but not in higher income countries.

The rise of sub-national actors in global climate governance underscores the need for clear alignment between these efforts and their national counterparts. As these sub-national climate actions are filling gaps in mitigation, adaptation, and financing, among other functions, a critical question is how these efforts complement or overlap with national climate pledges. This consideration is particularly important in the context of the Paris Agreement’s mandate for fiveyear review cycles, where national governments will be asked to demonstrate progress towards climate mitigation goals and increase their ambition. In this paper, we argue that alignment – both vertically between multiple jurisdictions and horizontally with external networks and actors – is critical to clarifying climate actions between multiple levels of actors and to maximizing mitigation potential. We use nine case studies to demonstrate the varying degrees and modes of vertical integration between subnational and national climate actors. We find that the case studies embody different styles of vertical alignment, and exhibit significant variation in the degree and direction of vertical alignment within each of these modes. We also find that many case studies rely on horizontally- aligned international networks and coalitions to fill gaps in financial resources or technical support. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate that an additional 1 gigaton carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) in 2020 can be achieved in these nine case studies through stronger alignment that makes it possible to scale sub-national climate actions to the national level. These findings suggest there may be a missed opportunity to realize greater mitigation potential by fostering stronger vertical alignment, and enhancing coordination between horizontal networks of climate action and national governments.