A Climate Movement Beyond COPs? How Civil Society Can Act Transnationally in the Context of the New Global Environmental Governance

Continuous globalisation has fuelled a persistent academic interest in a ‘global civil society’ that can organize the expression of society’s values and interests in the ‘global public sphere’, thereby addressing global problems and defining the polity of society. However, with the weakening of multilateralism, the infrastructure upon which the traditional model of global civil society was built appears to be crumbling. The climate change movement (CCM) presents one of the most striking and urgent examples. Previous research has shown that waning trust in a multilateral answer to climate change has motivated many in the CCM to abandon their traditional focus on UN climate summits, and to rely increasingly on decentralized actions and organizing. This shift has remained understudied. An important emerging question is how a decentralized CCM can remain globally coordinated in such a way that it can offer an answer to the global problem of climate change. This paper draws on interviews, observations and document analyses around and after the COP21 climate summit to outline some of the main efforts to construct a new globality for the CCM beyond COPs. It then draws on existing literature on transnational social movements to evaluate their potential. It concludes by outlining several analytical pathways to empirically evaluate these processes as they continue to unfold.