Governance responses from the international climate regime have been widely critiqued. But fresh research is revealing that ‘new’ and more dynamic forms of governing are appearing in alternative domains, producing a more polycentric pattern. Some analysts believe that these ‘new’ forms will fill gaps in the regime, but this optimism is based on untested assumptions about their diffusion and performance. We conclude that the advent of more polycentric governance does offer new opportunities to govern climate change, but based on existing empirical research it is far too early to judge whether hopes about the performance of the ‘new’ forms are well founded. More time and vastly more coordinated research efforts are needed to comprehend their full potential; time that is in very short supply in governing climate change

This is an introductory paper to a special issue on climate governance entrepreneurship, where entrepreneurship is understood as acts performed by actors seeking to ‘punch above their weight’. By contrast, actors who are merely doing their job are not ‘entrepreneurs’. In order to understand climate policy and governance, we need to learn more about the factors that condition variance in entrepreneurial activity, strategies and success. In this introduction, we present a comprehensive review of the literature on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship in policy in governance, with special attention to the recent upsurge in studies of climate governance entrepreneurship. We distinguish two types of entrepreneurship: (1) acts aimed at enhancing governance influence by altering the distribution of authority and information; and (2) acts aimed at altering or diffusing norms and cognitive frameworks, worldviews or institutional logics. The contributions in this special issue offer valuable insights into how personal motivations, policy windows, international trends, cultural-institutional traditions and the distribution of structural power influence entrepreneurship. However, more work is needed – not least as regards whether actors that seek change are more active and/or more successful as entrepreneurs compared to those that defend the status quo, and whether there is more successful entrepreneurship in public or in private arenas of governance.

This article presents the case of a policy invention where various kinds of entrepreneurship and a window of opportunity played important roles. In 2008 the EU adopted a new Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) policy with an inventive funding instrument at its core: the NER 300 fund, based on revenues from the auctioning of emissions trading allowances. Thus far, the literature on policy entrepreneurs has focused more on success factors that enable particular persons to be especially influential than on the defining characteristics of entrepreneurship. We contribute to the literature on entrepreneurship and windows of opportunity by distinguishing two entrepreneurial techniques -framing and procedural engineering -and two categories of commitment -'tortoise' and carpe diem. We conclude that 'tortoises' who contributed to creating the broad and general climate policy window paved the way for issue-specific carpe diemers who promoted the more specific NER 300 policy invention. Furthermore, we distinguish and discuss four different entrepreneurship mechanisms that may influence policy invention processes.