This year (2015) marks the 21st formal anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and in December a new climate treaty is expected to be reached. Yet, the UNFCCC has not been successful in setting the world on a path to meet a target to prevent temperatures rising by more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels1. Meanwhile, other forums, such as the G20 and subnational forums, have increasingly become sites of climate change initiatives2, 3, 4, 5, 6. There has, however, so far been no systematic evaluation of what forums climate change policymakers and practitioners perceive to be needed to effectively tackle climate change. Drawing on survey data from two recent UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP), we show that there exists an overall preference for state-led, multilateral forums. However, preferences starkly diverge between respondents from different geographical regions and no clear alternative to the UNFCCC emerges. Our results highlight difficulties in coordinating global climate policy in a highly fragmented governance landscape.
International efforts to tackle the challenges posed by climate change have in the past two decades centred on multilateral negotiations under the UNFCCC. Several scholars note, however, that the international negotiations under the UNFCCC have produced diminishing returns over time7. This has generated discussions about whether multilateralism should be abandoned in favour of minilateralism8, along with suggestions to shift the negotiations to other smaller and more flexible forums9. Critics of the current multilateral approach argue that it is too cumbersome, as the decision-making process of the UNFCCC relies on finding consensus among its 195 parties10, 11. David Victor11, for example, has argued that as only a dozen countries emit the majority of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, a club such as the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) would present a good candidate for making progress on climate change. Others, however, maintain that minilateral clubs such as the MEF, G8 and the Asia-Pacific Partnership are not necessarily more effective than the UNFCCC, lack the legitimacy of the UN climate process6, and do not primarily focus on significantly increasing mitigation ambition5.
A related discussion concerns the architecture of climate change governance. Thus far the main efforts to respond to climate change have been state-led, focusing on building a universal regime through a legally binding multilateral agreement in a so-called top-down approach. Proponents of this architecture maintain that a strong, centralized regime is necessary for ensuring effective and fair outcomes12, 13. Critics, however, argue that a bottom-up approach, favouring more national and non-state initiatives, would provide a more effective response14, 15, 16. A range of subnational and transnational initiatives, such as the C40 network of major cities and the CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), have shown that other actors can take ambitious steps when national governments resist strong targets and timetables3. This, however, increases the fragmentation of climate change governance17. Fragmented institutions, in turn, complicate policy coordination18 and raise questions about the legitimacy and effectiveness of hybrid governance arrangements (mix of state and non-state actors; ref. 19). The pledge-and-review system emerging since the Copenhagen Accord has moved climate governance towards a bottom-up approach, with implications for the catalytic role of the UNFCCC (ref. 13).
A pertinent question is whether there are other forums than the UNFCCC that could effectively tackle climate change? This study presents results from 922 valid responses from the International Negotiations Survey distributed to participants at two consecutive UNFCCC COPs (2013 and 2014). The question analysed reads: ‘What other forums outside the UNFCCC are, in your view, important for effectively tackling climate change?’ (see Methods for details). This data is presented to examine how a range of climate change policymakers and practitioners perceive the importance of forums outside the UNFCCC in terms of scales (Table 1), issue-areas (Table 2) and whether the forums are led by governments or other actors (Supplementary Table 1). These results are compared across six world geographical regions and between governmental and non-governmental (NGO) respondents.
Table 1: Percentage of all COP 19/20 respondents indicating forums operating at different scales and with different terms of membership divided into governmental and NGO representatives.
Survey methods are increasingly used to examine preferences of, and activities performed by, different actors participating in the COPs of the UNFCCC in situ or by distributing surveys based on the List of Participants25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33.
The data used in this study was obtained through a questionnaire distributed through the International Negotiations Survey (INS) (http://www.internationalnegotiationssurvey.se) to 1,500 participants at UNFCCC COP 19 in Warsaw and COP 20 in Lima. The INS has previously been used to study various aspects of climate change, such as leading actors27, effective solutions to climate change28, nationally appropriate mitigation actions (NAMAs; ref. 29), preferences for conceptual or proportional historical responsibility30, the roles of non-state actors in climate change governance31, criticism of the pledge-and-review system32, and expectations on corporate climate action33. The surveys were distributed in person at the UNFCCC COP venues, an operating environment that hampers random sampling. Quota sampling was instead used to select a strategic sample of the two most important categories of COP participants: members of party delegations, such as negotiators and representatives of government agencies (henceforth ‘governmental’); and observers, that is, environmental, development, business and industry, and research and independent NGO respondents (henceforth, ‘non-governmental’ or NGO). Responses from the small categories Intergovernmental Organizations (IGO) and media representatives have been included in the non-governmental sample.
Roughly 40% of the 922 valid responses were from governmental (366) and 60% were from non-governmental (556) respondents, our sample under-represents governmental respondents in comparison to the composition of the frame population in COP 19 and COP 20, comprising approximately 47% governmental and 53% non-governmental34, 35. The sample contains fewer media and intergovernmental representatives than the frame population. In terms of geographical representation (UNFCCC Secretariat, unpublished data), the sample overall corresponds well with participation from the six world regions; with a slight over-representation of African Group and Latin American government representatives in comparison to government representatives from European and North American countries. Percentages are available from the corresponding author on request.
The question that is analysed here reads: ‘What other forums outside the UNFCCC are, in your view, important for effectively tackling climate change? Please provide examples:’. Respondents were asked to indicate in free text which forum or forums they believed to be important for tackling climate change.
As the UNFCCC is a node for intergovernmental collaboration on climate change and attracts actors that work with climate change issues at different levels34, 35, 36, our sample captures expert views on other forums and provides a starting point for exploring preferences for involving other institutions beyond the UNFCCC to a greater extent in climate change governance. However, given that our survey respondents are participants of a UNFCCC COP, a strong bias in favour of other UN forums in the responses is expected.
Survey responses were first categorized based on types of forums, such as UN forums, other IGO forums, climate clubs and initiatives, Regional forums, National forums, and Local forums. This analysis enriches the current understanding by shedding light on what types of other forums climate change policymakers and practitioners identify. Next, the data is used to investigate three pertinent dimensions of such forums. First, at what scales are these effective forums primarily perceived to operate (Table 1)? This enables examination of the multilateralism–minilateralism discussion. In terms of scale, responses were grouped into the following categories: multilateral forums, that is, forums with near universal state membership, subdivided into UN or other Intergovernmental agencies (UN IGO and Other IGO)—please note that this is different from the more common definition of multilateralism as collaboration between three or more states; minilateral forums, that is, groupings with select state membership, such as climate and economic clubs like the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate and G8; Regional forums such as the EU and the African Union; Bilateral, National, and Local forums. The No scale category refers to responses where scale cannot be discerned, such as businesses and forests.
Second, what issue-areas do these forums primarily address? This illuminates whether effective climate change responses require collaboration outside the climate realm—that is, do respondents acknowledge other climate, environmental, economic or social forums (Table 2)? Five categories of issue-areas for the forums outside the UNFCCC were formed: climate, environmental forums, economic forums, social forums and general forums. Three subcategories of environmental forums are also presented here: atmosphere, biodiversity, and other environmental issues. The Not spec category refers to those forums where issue-area cannot be discerned, such as communities and general high-level political forums.
Third, are these forums led primarily by governments or are other actors more frequently involved? To examine who is leading these forums, data was categorized according to: state-led forums, IGO-led forums, hybrid forums (that is, a mix of state and non-state actors), non-state-led forums, and Not specified (Supplementary Table 1). These patterns are compared across the six world geographical regions and between governmental and non-governmental respondents.
To detect trends over time, values are reported for the All governmental and All NGO categories in Tables 1 and 2 and Supplementary Table 1. We compensated for variations in world region sample sizes at the two COPs by multiplying COP 19 responses with the shares of the COP 20 sample.
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