Editing IPCC:AR6/SR15/Chapter-4 (section)

==== 4.4.1.2 International governance ====

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International treaties help strengthen policy implementation, providing a medium- and long-term vision (Obergassel et al., 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r833|833]]</sup> . International climate governance is organized via many mechanisms, including international organizations, treaties and conventions, for example, UNFCCC, the Paris Agreement and the Montreal Protocol. Other multilateral and bilateral agreements, such as trade agreements, also have a bearing on climate change.

There are significant differences between global mitigation and adaptation governance frames. Mitigation tends to be global by its nature and based on the principle of the climate system as a global commons (Ostrom et al., 1999) <sup>[[#fn:r834|834]]</sup> . Adaptation has traditionally been viewed as a local process, involving local authorities, communities, and stakeholders (Khan, 2013; Preston et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r835|835]]</sup> , although it is now recognized to be a multi-scaled, multi-actor process that transcends scales from local and sub-national to national and international (Mimura et al., 2014; UNEP, 2017a) <sup>[[#fn:r836|836]]</sup> . National governments provide a central pivot for coordination, planning, determining policy priorities and distributing resources. National governments are accountable to the international community through international agreements. Yet, many of the impacts of climate change are transboundary, so that bilateral and multilateral cooperation are needed (Nalau et al., 2015; Donner et al., 2016; Magnan and Ribera, 2016; Tilleard and Ford, 2016; Lesnikowski et al., 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r837|837]]</sup> . The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol demonstrates that a global environmental agreement facilitating common but differentiated responsibilities is possible (Sharadin, 2018) <sup>[[#fn:r838|838]]</sup> . This was operationalized by developed countries acting first, with developing countries following and benefiting from leap-frogging the trial-and-error stages of innovative technology development.

Work on international climate governance has focused on the nature of ‘climate regimes’ and coordinating the action of nation-states (Aykut, 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r839|839]]</sup> organized around a diverse set of instruments: (i) binding limits allocated by principles of historical responsibility and equity, (ii) carbon prices, emissions quotas, (iii) pledges and review of policies and measures or (iv) a combination of these options (Stavins, 1988; Grubb, 1990; Pizer, 2002; Newell and Pizer, 2003) <sup>[[#fn:r840|840]]</sup> .

Literature on the Kyoto Protocol provides two important insights for the 1.5°C transition: the challenge of agreeing on rules to allocate emissions quotas (Shukla, 2005; Caney, 2012; Winkler et al., 2013; Gupta, 2014; Méjean et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r841|841]]</sup> and a climate-centric vision (Shukla, 2005; BASIC experts, 2011) <sup>[[#fn:r842|842]]</sup> , separated from development issues which drove resistance from many developing nations (Roberts and Parks, 2006) <sup>[[#fn:r843|843]]</sup> . For the former, a burden-sharing approach led to an adversarial process among nations to decide who should be allocated ‘how much’ of the remainder of the emissions budget (Caney, 2014; Ohndorf et al., 2015; Roser et al., 2015; Giménez-Gómez et al., 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r844|844]]</sup> . Industry group lobbying further contributed to reducing space for manoeuvre of some major emitting nations (Newell and Paterson, 1998; Levy and Egan, 2003; Dunlap and McCright, 2011; Michaelowa, 2013; Geels, 2014) <sup>[[#fn:r845|845]]</sup> .

Given the political unwillingness to continue with the Kyoto Protocol approach a new approach was introduced in the Copenhagen Accord, the Cancun Agreements, and finally in the Paris Agreement. The transition to 1.5°C requires carbon neutrality and thus going beyond the traditional framing of climate as a ‘tragedy of the commons’ to be addressed via cost-optimal allocation rules, which demonstrated a low probability of enabling a transition to 1.5°C-consistent pathways (Patt, 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r846|846]]</sup> . The Paris Agreement, built on a ‘pledge and review’ system, is thought be more effective in securing trust (Dagnet et al., 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r847|847]]</sup> and enables effective monitoring and timely reporting on national actions (including adaptation), allowing for international scrutiny and persistent efforts of civil society and non-state actors to encourage action in both national and international contexts (Allan and Hadden, 2017; Bäckstrand and Kuyper, 2017; Höhne et al., 2017; Lesnikowski et al., 2017; Maor et al., 2017; UNEP, 2017a) <sup>[[#fn:r848|848]]</sup> , with some limitations (Nieto et al., 2018) <sup>[[#fn:r849|849]]</sup> .

The paradigm shift enabled at Cancun succeeded by focusing on the objective of ‘equitable access to sustainable development’ (Hourcade et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r850|850]]</sup> . The use of ‘pledge and review’ now underpins the Paris Agreement. This consolidates multiple attempts to define a governance approach that relies on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and on means for a ‘facilitative model’ (Bodansky and Diringer, 2014) <sup>[[#fn:r851|851]]</sup> to reinforce them. This enables a regular, iterative, review of NDCs allowing countries to set their own ambitions  after a global stocktake and more flexible, experimental forms of climate governance, which may provide room for higher ambition and be consistent with the needs of governing for a rapid transition to close the emission gap (Clémençon, 2016; Falkner, 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r852|852]]</sup> (Cross-Chapter Box 11 in this chapter). Beyond a general consensus on the necessity of measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) mechanisms as a key element of a climate regime (Ford et al., 2015b; van Asselt et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r853|853]]</sup> , some authors emphasize different governance approaches to implement the Paris Agreement. Through the new proposed sustainable development mechanism in Article 6, the Paris Agreement allows the space to harness the lowest cost mitigation options worldwide. This may incentivize policymakers to enhance mitigation ambition by speeding up climate action as part of a ‘climate regime complex’ (Keohane and Victor, 2011) <sup>[[#fn:r854|854]]</sup> of loosely interrelated global governance institutions. In the Paris Agreement, the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ (CBDR-RC) principle could be expanded and revisited under a ‘sharing the pie’ paradigm (Ji and Sha, 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r855|855]]</sup> as a tool to open innovation processes towards alternative development pathways (Chapter 5).

COP 16 in Cancun was also the first time in the UNFCCC that adaptation was recognized to have similar priority as mitigation. The Paris Agreement recognizes the importance of adaptation action and cooperation to enhance such action. Chung Tiam Fook (2017) <sup>[[#fn:r856|856]]</sup> and Lesnikowski et al. (2017) <sup>[[#fn:r857|857]]</sup> suggest that the Paris Agreement is explicit about multilevel adaptation governance, outlines stronger transparency mechanisms, links adaptation to development and climate justice, and is therefore suggestive of greater inclusiveness of non-state voices and the broader contexts of social change.

1.5°C-consistent pathways require further exploration of conditions of trust and reciprocity amongst nation states (Schelling, 1991; Ostrom and Walker, 2005) <sup>[[#fn:r858|858]]</sup> . Some authors (Colman et al., 2011; Courtois et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r859|859]]</sup>

suggest a departure from the vision of actors acting individually in the pursuit of self-interest to that of iterated games with actors interacting over time showing that reciprocity, with occasional forgiveness and initial good faith, can lead to win-win outcomes and to cooperation as a stable strategy (Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981) <sup>[[#fn:r860|860]]</sup> .

Regional cooperation plays an important role in the context of global governance. Literature on climate regimes has only started exploring innovative governance arrangements, including coalitions of transnational actors including state, market and non-state actors (Bulkeley et al., 2012; Hovi et al., 2016; Hagen et al., 2017; Hermwille et al., 2017; Roelfsema et al., 2018) <sup>[[#fn:r861|861]]</sup> and groupings of countries, as a complement to the UNFCCC (Abbott and Snidal, 2009; Biermann, 2010; Zelli, 2011; Nordhaus, 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r862|862]]</sup> . Climate action requires multilevel governance from the local and community level to national, regional and international levels. Box 4.1 shows the role of sub-national authorities (e.g., regions and provinces) in facilitating urban climate action, while Box 4.2 shows that climate governance can be organized across hydrological as well as political units.

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