Diffusion of Innovative Climate Governance Mechanisms via the Bureaucratic Route? The Case of Clean Energy Ministerial

Not least the failure to reach a substantive global climate agreement at COP15 gave a push to the development of alternative forms of transnational climate governance. Recently, the club approach has attracted scholarly attention as a strategy to solve the global collective action problem (Falkner 2016; Keohane & Victor 2016; Nordhaus 2015). Climate clubs are groups of international actors that cooperate on activities relating to climate change (Hovi et al. 2016). So far, they mainly fulfill two governance functions: information-sharing and capacity-building (Weischer et al. 2012). An example is Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) which was initiated by then-U.S. Secretary of Energy Chu during COP15. Uniting the three „antagonistic camps“ (Brenton 2013) of global climate politics, CEM countries account for 82 % of global CO2 emissions and 90 % of investments in clean energy. So far, extant research has not provided an assessment of the role of climate clubs in transnational policy diffusion. Therefore, we build on theoretical contributions to transnational governance (e.g., Jordan & Huitema 2014) and recent developments in policy diffusion research (e.g., Tosun & Croissant 2016) to address a number of empirical questions: first, what are the sources of (i.e., motivations and rationales behind) climate clubs and what roles do national bureaucracies play in a country’s decision to participate in clubs? Second, what are the determinants of their diffusion, and to what extent do they provide anchors for the diffusion of other (policy and technology) innovations? And third, do they make a difference in terms of CO2 mitigation? These are the research questions we address in this paper.