Research Project

Carbon Governance Arrangements and the Nation State

The Reconfiguration of Public Authority

Due to the difficulties among nation-states in adopting effective means of implementation to cope with climate change, a plethora of new "governance experiments" has emerged in the past few years. Some of them are targeting activities or units which are contributing enormously to global carbon dioxide emissions, like deforestation or megacities.

So far, little systematic knowledge exists about how these governance arrangements work and what their impacts on the political-administrative systems are. Given these shortcomings, this research project sets out to explore how (and how far) different types of globally operating governance arrangements have caused changes in the distribution of public authority within nation-states.

We will focus on

(1) C40 as an example of Transnational City Networks (TCNs) that operates bottom-up

(2) REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) that operates top-down.

Research Questions and Hypotheses

We aspire to gain practical insights on the following questions, informing scholars, practitioners and policy-makers alike:

(1) How do the various new climate arrangements reconfigure public authority in developing countries?

(2) What are the consequences of the reconfiguration of public authority in terms of actual policy outcomes?

The hypotheses that guide our research are that in the in the field of environmental policy-making

(1) The top-down governance arrangement (REDD+) generates a trend towards more centralized decision-making while

(2) The bottom-up governance arrangement (TCNs/C40) strengthens decentralization efforts.

Case Studies

We will conduct field research in the following countries:

India, Brazil, South-Africa, Indonesia