Polycentric Climate Governance

Discussion

Thomas Hale:

"Noting the inadequacies of the multilateral process to manage climate change, the late Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom has called for a system of polycentric climate governance in which a plurality of ‘bottom-up’ actions are used address the problem (Ostrom 2009). Can such a system offer a new model? A vast number of cities, companies and civil society groups are indeed taking voluntary action to move ahead where the multilateral process has not. These initiatives have extraordinary mitigation potential. Globally, cities account for 70 percent of total emissions (UN-HABITAT 2011), and many are taking action to reduce emissions. Even in countries like the United States, where Congress has blocked national action, city and state commitments cover nearly half of US emissions (Lutsey and Sperling 2008). The world’s largest 500 companies produce 3.6 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year (Carbon Disclosure Project 2013).

Consider a few examples:

• The C40, a network of 58 megacities that account for 18 percent of global GDP and 1 in 12 people in the world, are taking a variety of actions to address climate change.

• The Carbon Disclosure Project is a voluntary reporting protocol for companies to track and disclose their carbon footprint to investors. While this merely brings transparency to companies’ operations, the project represents institutional investors worth nearly $87 trillion and so wields significant influence.

• The Global Gas Flaring Reduction Initiative, sponsored by the World Bank, helps oil companies to reduce the methane gas flaring produced by oil drilling. Companies participate on a voluntary basis, but benefit from the technical expertise and economies of the World Bank and its corporate partners.

• The United Nations Global Compact’s ‘Caring for Climate’ initiative asks companies to make voluntary pledges to reduce carbon emissions and to report on their progress towards achieving those reductions.

Efforts by scholars to track these initiatives have revealed about 75 different programmes at the transnational level, including thousands of participants (Hale and Roger 2013). But there are no doubt thousands of purely domestic initiatives that complement these transnational efforts. A key challenge is therefore to map the current extent of these initiatives, as a first step to assessing their potential to reach a higher level of scope and ambition."

(https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/halehdr14pdf.pdf)