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Studies grounded in regime theory have examined the effectiveness of "minilateral" climate change forums that have emerged outside of the UN climate process. However, there are no detailed studies of the legitimacy of these forums or of the impacts of their legitimacy on effectiveness and governance potential. Adopting the lens of legitimacy, we analyze the reasons for the formation of minilateral climate change forums and their recent role in global climate governance. We use Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and Vihma's analytical framework for international institutions to examine three minilateral climate forums: the Asia-Pacific Partnership, the Major Economies Meetings, and the G8 climate process. These forums have significant deficits in their source-based, process-based, and outcome-based legitimacy, particularly when compared to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. If assessed purely on grounds of effectiveness, the minilateral forums might be easily dismissed as peripheral to the UN climate process. However, they play important roles by providing sites for powerful countries to shape the assumptions and expectations of global climate governance. Thus, the observed institutional fragmentation allows key states to use minilateral forums to shape the architecture of global climate governance.

AbstractAs the multilateral climate transparency mechanism increasingly blurs the differentiation between developed and developing countries, it catalyses international pressure on the latter to adopt more ambitious mitigation policies and stringent reporting. This article delves into the relationship between the International Consultation and Analysis (ICA), a climate transparency mechanism under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the mitigation policies of emerging economies, namely Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and Mexico. Using the conceptual framework of reflexive capacity, we explore how the ICA enhances the ability of these countries' governments to recognize, reflect upon, and respond to demands for mitigation information. Our research draws on interviews with key government officials, UNFCCC personnel, and experts involved in the ICA process, participant observation, and extensive analysis of primary documents including the Biennial Update Reports, Technical Analysis Synthesis Reports, and countryspecific submissions. The findings demonstrate that the ICA fosters the enhancement of government actors' reflexive capacities by furthering their understanding of transparency's significance, advancing their technical reporting expertise, and subjecting individual country performance to scrutiny. Such capacities not only lead to improvements in domestic practices related to the generation and disclosure of mitigation-related information but also empower these countries to assert their entitlement to differentiated responsibilities in the face of increasing demands for mitigation and reporting. The enhanced reflexive capacity and heightened scrutiny are anticipated to play pivotal role in facilitating the development of more ambitious mitigation policies and more effective climate transparency mechanisms at both domestic and global levels.

AbstractThe international norms that are developed as tools of global governance can be placed on a continuum from traditional "hard law" treaties to the vaguest and voluntary "soft law." In this article we develop an analytical framework for comparing norms on different positions along the continuum, thus for comparing international hard and soft law. We root the framework in both the rationalist and the constructivist paradigms of international relations by focusing on two overarching evaluative criteria: effectiveness and legitimacy. These broad concepts are divided into smaller building blocks encompassing mechanisms through which norms can exert influence; for example, by changing material incentives, identities, and building capacity, and by contributing to building source‐based, procedural, and substantive legitimacy. We illustrate the applicability of the framework with three norm processes of varying degrees of "softness" in global climate governance.

AbstractThe structural elements of global environmental governance are notoriously difficult to change and align with the needs of a rapidly deteriorating earth system. This, however, only increases the need to focus on the role of agency in this context. This paper does so by taking stock of what we know about agency in relation to International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) and suggests directions for future research. We contribute a conceptual framework to enable the mapping of research on agency related to IEAs and advance more systematic study of agency in this context. The framework differentiates between the negotiation of IEAs, their implementation and outcomes, and includes agency-related and context-related drivers of agency in these processes. We subsequently review articles published between 2003 and 2020 in the journal International Environmental Agreements (as one of the few journals exclusively focusing on IEAs) dealing with actors' agency and analyse how these articles address agency in the context of IEAs. We conclude firstly by identifying avenues for how further research can fill important gaps, including a need for increased transparency on the methods and theories used in articles, and more comparative research particularly on agency dynamics in implementation; and secondly by highlighting important pointers for policy-makers including the need to re-evaluate the role of national sovereignty and address the forces that counteract equality and justice. Key lessons include the need to improve global south countries' capacity to influence IEA negotiations (input legitimacy), the central role of public and peer pressure on countries to implement commitments, the impact of multilevel governance dynamics and the importance of ensuring that IEAs benefit local communities (output legitimacy).

AbstractGlobal collaborations across level, domain, and sector boundaries are on the rise. This article analyses policy entrepreneurship for the establishment of the Global Alliance for Climate‐Smart Agriculture (GACSA), a global multi‐actor collaboration to address climate change and foster food security and development. We explore policy entrepreneurship as a process embedded within specific contexts. To that end we focus on the strategizing process, consisting of conditions, activities, and implications. Through a congruence case study based on interviews, documents, survey, and observation we find that: (1) accommodating a varied global community requires flexibility and adaptability from entrepreneurs towards a dynamic and changing environment; (2) the variety of actors constituting GACSA compromises vigour of the collaboration, and confuses the meaning of CSA; (3) whereas collective entrepreneurship is often depicted as joint operation of multiple actors, it might also be characterized by conflicting activities and/or successive involvement; (4) policy entrepreneurship is useful to establish collaborations, but its role is temporary. Entrepreneurs must therefore be sensitive to their potential obsoleteness and withdraw at the right moment. Our results show that policy entrepreneurship is a useful lens to study global policy processes, while providing guidelines to inspire and support practitioners to engage with global policy processes.