Climate Governance

The research project focuses on ways of addressing institutional interactions in global environmental governance. The central research question of this research project is: How can legal techniques and political mechanisms contribute to managing interactions between international agreements on climate change, so as to minimise conflicts between these agreements and enhance synergies between them?

The research project aims to place the climate regime within the debates on the institutional interactions in global environmental governance and the fragmentation of international law. In order to address the central research question, the project has the following three objectives:

1. To analyse how the diversity in global climate governance, and subsequent interactions between different international agreements have affected the development of norms in these agreements. The proposed research will focus on three of the most pertinent institutional interactions in global climate governance, and identify the similarities and differences between them. These cases concern interactions between the climate and trade regimes; between the climate and biodiversity regimes; and between the climate regime and other governance arrangements focused on climate and energy.
2. To assess the legal techniques and political mechanisms for dealing with the diversity in global climate governance and interactions between international agreements on climate change. The identification and analysis of institutional interactions is but a first step in achieving the more ambitious objective of conceiving of means of dealing with interactions. Hence, the second research objective focuses on the advantages and drawbacks of different options for managing institutional interactions in terms of effectiveness and feasibility.
3. To provide policy and research recommendations, and to disseminate the conceptual and empirical findings of the research project. The third research objective integrates the empirical and conceptual findings by indicating how political and legal approaches in managing interactions could complement each other in the case of global climate governance. Furthermore, it includes the dissemination of the key findings of the research in the scientific community in various disciplines and amongst policy-makers through publications and presentations, as well as the identification of avenues for further inquiry.