Legitimate and Effective? Comparing Stakeholder Perceptions of Five Key Climate and Energy Governance Institutions

Climate security risks are increasing as the world struggles to take decisive action on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. While there has been a proliferation of global institutions in the areas of climate and energy governance in recent years, whether they are successful in mitigating climate security risks remains to be seen. To achieve their objectives, global governance institutions need to be both legitimate and effective and must gain acceptability and credibility amongst the communities that they seek to govern. The aim of this paper is to understand how international institutions operating in a fragmented governance landscape, where multiple actors work on the same issue-area without overarching coordination, are perceived by key stakeholders in terms of legitimacy and effectiveness. Based on semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire answered by energy and climate experts from different world regions, the paper examines common understandings of what makes an institution legitimate and/or effective and how these understandings diverge amongst policy-makers and key groups of stakeholders from different countries. It further examines perceptions of trade-offs between different dimensions of input and output legitimacy. Theoretically, the paper will unpack the meaning of legitimacy and effectiveness in a fragmented global climate and energy order. Empirically, using mixed-methods, the paper offers an assessment of legitimacy and effectiveness of a set of climate and energy governance institutions with different but overlapping mandates (the Clean Energy Ministerial, International Energy Agency, International Renewable Energy Agency, Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). This paper thus provides societally-relevant insights to the literature on legitimacy and effectiveness, with implications for how to strengthen climate and energy governance.