The Performance of the Climate-Energy Nexus

Abstract

The idea to produce a joint edited volume arose in early 2018. In June 2018, we could already discuss first draft chapters at a two-day workshop, which was kindly hosted by Harro van Asselt and Cleo Verkuijl at the Oxford branch of the Stockholm Environment Institute. The process of writing this book over the following year has been a stimulating, fruitful, and intense academic journey and conversation, which has cut across and bridged different scholarly fields such as international relations, environmental politics, law, geography, and environmental sciences. We presented our revised book chapters in a panel organized at the annual meeting of International Studies Association (ISA) in Toronto in March 2019 and want to express our gratitude to our discussant Matt Hoffmann from the University of Toronto. He provided extremely useful and excellent feedback that helped us to enhance the contributions to this book during the final steps before the submission of our manuscript.

International organisations as ‘custodians’ of the sustainable development goals? Fragmentation and coordination in sustainability governance

“…One dependent variable in this research has been the degree of coordination between agencies, that is, the mutual adjustment of behaviour (Biermann & Koops, 2017, 20). Evidence suggests that a high degree of governance fragmentation often limits effective coordination among international actors (for an overview see F. Biermann et al, 2020), with numerous undesirable outcomes, from a lack of an overall vision (Barnett et al, 2007) to duplications and inconsistencies (Kanie, 2015), scattering of responsibilities, splintered efforts and limited information sharing (Holzscheiter et al, 2012), limitations in attracting funding (Keohane & Victor, 2011), limited pooling of resources (Nasiritousi et al, 2020), difficulties in assigning accountability (Ivanova & Roy, 2007), and limited governance capacity (Held & Young, 2013). The absence of a dominant actor with a managing role has been argued to result in 'counter-productive politicization of coordination efforts' among agencies competing for leadership (Holzscheiter et al, 2012, p. 71).…”

“…In the end, how institutional fragmentation and coordination relate to each other also depends on the types of linkages between actors (Keohane & Victor, 2011) and their interactions (Oberthür & Gehring, 2006). The desirable governance outcomes that some also attach to fragmentation (Acharya, 2016; Keohane & Victor, 2011; Nasiritousi et al, 2020) are often conditional on such links. There are examples of international organisations that have mutually adjusted their policies without direct interaction (Oberthür & Gehring, 2006).…”