Climate governance at the crossroads: experimenting with a global response after Kyoto

摘要

Year after year, thousands of government officials from more than 190 countries come together to discuss and negotiate a new multilateral climate agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The snail's pace at which these negotiations proceed is largely out of step with increasing calls from the climate science community for urgent and drastic greenhouse gas emission reductions. This has led to a sense of disenchantment among observers, especially following the disappointing 2009 Copenhagen climate conference. As he makes clear in the preface, Matthew Hoffmann was one of those observers. However, as Hoffmann argues throughout the remainder of the book, this failure of 'megamultilateralism' to produce fair and effective outcomes does not mean that one needs to give up hope. Instead, he shows that a multitude of 'governance experiments' has emerged in recent years that, altogether, could ensure that climate action is undertaken even in the absence of significant multilateral progress.