Normative Climate Clubs: A New Tool for Global Climate Governance

Abstract

We are on a "highway to climate hell" despite decades of international climate negotiations, according to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Scholarly and political attention has turned to climate clubs as a new governance tool to increase climate ambition (Hovi et al., 2017; Unger et al., 2020; Falkner et al., 2021; Koppenborg, forthcoming). However, scholarship on climate clubs suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity (Falkner et al., 2021) and the growing number of normative climate clubs, such as the Global Methane Pledge and The Climate Club, suffer from a lack of empirical assessment (Unger et al., 2020). This paper asks: What is the nature and role of normative climate clubs in global climate governance? Answering this question contributes to closing the research gap by mapping the current landscape of 39 existing normative climate clubs and clarifying the concept based on this comprehensive empirical assessment. This paper conducts the first-ever comprehensive mapping of normative climate clubs. While the database is an empirical contribution in itself, visualizing and discussing the collected data in light of scholarly debates about club membership, legitimacy, club goods, relationship with UNFCCC and functions within global climate governance further increases our understanding of normative clubs and their role in global climate politics. Preliminary findings show that membership is dominated by European and English-speaking countries as well as Latin and South American countries while the world largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases, China, is largely absent. Even though normative climate clubs have existed for two decades, the vast majority was created after 2015, the year of the historic Paris climate agreement. About 80 percent refer to the Paris Agreement in their stated objectives, making them institutional arrangements that seek to reinforce and implement the historic climate treaty. Turning to the sectors in which normative clubs are active, the majority made an energy-related commitment, followed by the transport sector and ambition under the Paris Agreement. In the Energy-PPG lecture Series talk, the author will present these and many more findings from this ongoing research.