On Melting Summits: The Limitations of Field-Configuring Events as Catalysts of Change in Transnational Climate Policy

Abstract

Although field-configuring events have been highlighted as catalysts of institutional change, scholars still know little about the specific conditions that allow such change to occur. Using data from a longitudinal study of United Nations climate conferences, we analyze how regular and high-stakes events in an event series interacted in producing and preventing institutional change in the transnational climate policy field. We uncover variations in event structures, processes, and outcomes that explain why climate conferences have not led to effective solutions to combat human-induced global warming. Results in particular highlight that growing field complexity and issue multiplication compromise the change potential of a field-configuring event series in favor of field maintenance. Over time, diverse actors find event participation useful for their own purposes, but their activity is not connected to the institutions at the center of the issue-based field. In discussing how events configuring a field are purposefully staged and enacted but also influenced by developments in the field, our study contributes to a more complete understanding of field-configuring events, particularly in contested transnational policy arenas. The worst-case scenario for me is that climate becomes a second World Trade Organization. Copenhagen, for me, is a very clear deadline that I think we need to meet. And I'm afraid that if we don't, then the process will begin to slip. And like in the trade negotiations, one deadline after the other will not be met, and we sort of become the little orchestra on the Titanic. (Y. de Boer, UNFCCC executive secretary, 2008 interview) Less than two years after he made the above statement, the United Nation's (UN's) climate chief Yvo de Boer resigned, taking the blame for the chaos and breakdown for which the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit will go down in history. After almost two decades of transnational policy efforts, the summit ended without the promised new binding agreement to fight global warming. It was one of a series of meetings of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty aiming at transnational solutions to stabilize "greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" (article 2, UNFCCC [United Nations, 1992]). A decisive early-1997-UNFCCC

Responsible Innovation and the Innovation of Responsibility: Governing Sustainable Development in a Globalized World

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Field or Fields? Building the Scaffolding for Cumulation of Research on Institutional Fields

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“…A simpler example concerns the boundary organization that governs the interactions between the open source software movement and the software industry (O'Mahony & Bechky, 2008). In bridging issue fields, representatives of two or more interacting fields or groups will comprise the field, frequently along with an agreed upon or formally appointed boundary organization (O'Mahony & Bechky, 2008), to focus on the issue, bridge diverse groups and coordinate issue-related activity across multiple fields, such as is the case with ISO and its 26000 standard (Helms, Oliver, & Webb, 2012), or multiple geographies in transnational policy fields (Schüssler, Rüling & Wittneben, 2014). Boundaries tend to be formalized and often managed by the boundary organization.…”

Platforming for Path-Breaking? The Case of Regional Electromobility Initiatives in Germany

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