Club Governance for Climate Protection: the G20, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and the Under2 Coalition

International climate policy is increasingly shaped by alternative forms of governance, with bottom‐up, dispersed and multilevel characteristics. Actors such as ‘climate clubs’ have the potential to address the global challenge of climate change beyond the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. While originally climate clubs were seen as a way of achieving climate action quicker and more effectively than the UNFCCC, more recently their role has been seen in the function of preparing and orchestrating climate policy rather than reducing emissions directly. In spite of its conceptual proliferation, literature on climate clubs stops short in examining practical evidence and conducting analyses beyond categorization and labeling of climate clubs. Climate clubs’ role in the international climate policy architecture, the nature of their contribution and their interconnections remain opaque. In our paper, we aim at shedding some light on this situation with a comparative perspective on three specific governance initiatives that act on different governance levels: The G20, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) and the Under2 Coalition. What contribution do these club-like initiatives make to global climate governance and how does it relate to existing structures such as the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC process? Our paper applies central aspects of clubs research, namely membership, public goods, and the provision of additional benefits as an analytical framework. Overall, we find that these clubs, though highly diverse in their origin and membership, make a similar contribution to international climate governance. Their largest contribution lies in preparing emissions reductions through raising awareness, orchestrating different actors and actions, and establishing a large technical cooperation network. They complement the UNFCCC and especially the Paris Agreement. Members are part of these clubs because their benefits go beyond climate change mitigation.