The Empirical Realities of Polycentric Climate Governance: Introduction to the Special Issue

We build on research on polycentric climate governance and the strategic behavior of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to assess the factors that determine the partnership choices of climate NGOs. More precisely, we are interested in how these factors relate to the type of governance actors and the governance scale at which their partners operate. We concentrate on 195 NGOs based in twenty-one Latin American countries. Our hypotheses postulate that the perceived benefits are shaped by both country-level factors and NGO-specific factors. Our network analysis reveals that the NGOs have formed networks with different types of organizations, which are located at different scales of the polycentric governance system. The findings of our regression models show that these factors especially explain the governance scale at which the NGOs’ partners operate. The explanatory power of the models is lower for the types of actors with which the NGOs form partnerships, indicating the need for further theorizing.

Participating in Polycentric Climate Governance: The Partnership Choices of Latin American NGOs

Tosun,

Levario Saad,

Gutiérrez

2024

Unpacking Polycentric Climate Governance: Tracing the Evolution of Transnational Municipal Networks over Time

Kern,

Eckersley,

Kochskämper

et al. 2024

All governance systems are polycentric to some extent in that they comprise multiple actors with varying degrees of autonomy. However, there has been limited theorization as to how we might measure polycentricity, even though this could help us unpack networks and understand governance arrangements better. We present three dimensions of governance to conceptualize degrees of polycentricity—governance of networks (internal organization and management at the network level), governance by networks (their impacts at the membership level), and governance with networks (collaboration with other actors at the system level). We then trace the evolution of three transnational municipal networks (the Climate Alliance, Covenant of Mayors, and 100 Resilient Cities/Resilient Cities Network), which are located at different positions along the polycentric–monocentric spectrum. We examine how these networks have become more or less polycentric over time and highlight trade-offs between different dimensions of polycentric governance, most notably governance of and governance by.

Exploring the Role of Businesses in Polycentric Climate Governance with Large-N Data Sets

Tobin,

Duit,

Kelly

et al. 2024

Much existing empirical research on polycentric climate governance (PCG) systems examines small-N examples. In response, we aim to advance studies of PCG by exploring, and reflecting on, the use of large-N data sets for analyzing PCG. We use Python (a programming language) to create a novel data set from the United Nations’ Global Climate Action Portal. This method allows us to quantify key variables for 12,568 businesses located in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries: the number of businesses’ climate commitments, their progress toward meeting those commitments, and businesses’ memberships in “more polycentric” networks via transnational climate initiatives (TCIs). Our analysis of these data reveals that greater interconnectedness may strengthen climate policy performance, since businesses with memberships in TCIs more commonly achieved their commitments. Additional research using these data, and/or similar methods, could be conducted on climate governance and on other areas of international environmental governance, such as mining and oil production.