B2 - Dynamics of Climate Governance: Norms, Contestation, and Policies

The next few years of climate governance-in-the-making are critical: observing them closely allows us to identify and assess key drivers of long-term social trends towards or away from decarbonization, which form – individually and through their interaction at different governance scales – the backdrop of possible and plausible scenarios of future climate governance.

The Paris agreement departs from the Kyoto Protocol’s state-centered, top-down approach. It attempts to overcome the fragmentation of current climate governance through an architecture that relies on the global guiding norm of “keeping warming below 2°C”, and enables a universal and voluntary bottom-up process based on the cyclical submission and review of freely determined climate policy proposals by states – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – and other public and private entities.

The effectiveness of this process will crucially depend on the practice of the upcoming global review-resubmission cycles of the Paris agreement (2018-20 and 2023-25) and the local implementation of NDCs.

The project addresses both. It will focus on the following key drivers:

• The (in)capacity of the UNFCCC to align the expectations and preferences of heterogeneous actors
• The effects of regional norm conflicts and contestations on energy security and climate justice
• The social and political dynamics of policy-instruments that shape NDC formulation and implementation.

Assessing these drivers and their interplay across scales will enable us to identify plausible dynamics of climate governance which will be a necessary prerequisite for separating plausible from possible climate futures.

Chairs: Stefan Aykut (UHH), Grischa Perino (UHH), Antje Wiener (UHH)