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

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In this article, we pursue the objective of empirically testing the extent to which changes in environmental policy outputs can explain changes in environmental impacts. Previously, systematic testing of this relationship was hampered by the lack of a compelling measurement of changes in regulatory policy outputs. To remedy this, we present a novel approach to the measurement of events of regulatory output change. We illustrate our concept by employing data on changes in clean air regulations in 24 advanced democracies from 1976 to 2003. In a next step, we explore the extent to which changes in clean air regulations can account for changes in air pollutant emissions. The empirical analysis suggests that changes in clean air regulations cannot be unconditionally associated with changing intensities of air pollutant emission. We deem these results to have far-reaching implications for the study of regulatory policy change.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels and industry increased by 2.2% per year on average between 2005 and 2015 1. Global emissions need to peak and decline rapidly to limit climate change to well below two degrees Celsius of warming 2,3 , one of the goals of the Paris Agreement 4. Untangling the reasons underlying recent changes in emissions trajectories is critical to guide efforts to attain those goals. Here we analyse the drivers of decreasing CO2 emissions in a group of 18 industrial countries that have decarbonized over the period 2005-2015. We show that within this group, the displacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy and decreases in energy use explain decreasing CO2 emissions. However the decrease in energy use can be explained at least in part by a lower growth in GDP. Correlation analysis suggests that policies on renewable energy are supporting emissions reductions and displacing fossil fuels in these 18 countries, but not elsewhere, and that policies on energy efficiency are supporting lower energy use in these 18 countries as well as more widely. Overall, the evidence shows that efforts to reduce emissions are underway in many countries, but they need to be maintained and enhanced by more stringent policy actions to support a global peak in emissions followed by global emissions reductions in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement 3 .

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2015 form a universal and integrated policy agenda to be realized over the next 15 years. One of the targets is the attainment of policy coherence for sustainable development, which requires the individual goals to become interlinked. This article's main research interest lies in assessing how national governments and their competent ministries interpret and strive to implement the target of policy coherence for sustainable development. Drawing on the Voluntary National Reviews submitted in 2016 and 2017 by six countries, this study shows that at the national level, the links among the different goals and the idea of policy integration are subject to divergent interpretations. The differences observed do not stem from the interlinkages of the SDGs as defined by the United Nations, neither do they result from different levels of income or degree of political centralization. Instead, the respective domestic policy‐making processes are likely to explain the implementation strategies adopted by the individual states. For example, the implementation approach adopted by the government of Turkey suggests that path‐dependency is critical, whereas the Colombian approach consists of defining new policy measures and institutional arrangements.

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This article analyzes the impact of economic voting in federal elections for the German parliament. It combines theories of coalition politics and cabinet decision making—like prime ministerial government, collective cabinet decision making and ministerial discretion—with theoretical approaches on voting behavior to test which cabinet actor voters reward for improved economic conditions. The empirical results, which are based on data from German national election studies from 1987–2009, show that the party of the chancellor (and, thus, the strongest coalition party) benefits most from a positive evaluation of economic policy outcomes. There is, however, no consistent empirical evidence that the coalition parties collectively benefit from perceived positive economic performance. Therefore the findings demonstrate that economic voting occurs in German parliamentary elections, but is targeted specifically toward the chancellor's party.