Institutionalizing climate change mitigation in the global South

The paper develops an analytical framework for analyzing the processes and conditions relating to the political institutionalization of climate change mitigation in the field of energy. While the literature has witnessed the emergence of climate governance experiments and described the need for societal low-carbon transformations, the (global) environmental politics literature still knows very little about what conditions might help to close the gap between governance experiments and long-term low-carbon transformations. We argue that political institutionalization – i.e. the process of developing and/or changing formal and informal rules (including organizations) – is the missing link in bridging this gap. Hence, the paper’s objective is to explain why the political institutionalization of climate change mitigation advances at different speeds, and why in some instances there has been little progress or even a reversal of past achievements. In our view, institutionalist approaches from various theoretical traditions (rational-choice, sociological and historical) allow us to develop hypotheses and explore relevant mechanisms. The paper’s focus is of theoretical relevance, as we investigate the necessary and sufficient conditions for the (non-) change of domestic political institutionalization in the field of global policy-making, borrowing from the literature on structure (i.e. geography, markets, political-administrative set-up, and normative orders), agency (state and non-state leadership), and multi-level politics (i.e. inter-/transnational and domestic politics). Empirically, the paper will present some preliminary evidence from a recent research project. We will review some of the processes through which climate change mitigation gradually becomes institutionalized within the energy sectors of four democratic, decentralized emerging economies in the global South, which all have high GHG emissions (Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa).