More Than Talking Shops: Informal International Organizations in the Global Climate Regime Complex

This paper examines the governance outputs of “global governance clubs” on climate mitigation and the energy transition between 2015 and 2024. Building on studies of informal international organizations (IOs), I define global governance clubs, such as the Group of Twenty (G20) Summit, as informal IOs that address a broad range of global governance challenges, including climate change, maintain a relatively fixed number of member states, and function without independent secretariats. To measure the governance contributions and limitations of global governance clubs in global climate governance, I compare selected high-emitting countries’ nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement with their sectoral climate commitments made through two informal IOs: the G20 and the East Asia Summit (EAS). A systematic analysis of the climate commitments of China, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States across 13 climate mitigation related sectors reveals the complexity of interactions between formal and informal IOs. My findings suggest that global governance clubs have served as more than bargaining clubs, as the existing climate club literature suggests. These two global governance clubs demonstrate capacities to deliver material benefits to their members. They mostly reiterate, sometimes enhance, but occasionally challenge norms and activities surrounding climate mitigation established at core formal IO: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In short, global governance clubs are mostly complementary to, but sometimes in tension with, the climate policy commitments made under the Paris Agreement within the UNFCCC framework. To explore the conditions under which high-emitting countries make complementary or conflicting climate commitments in global governance clubs, I focus on their sectoral climate commitments in transport, technology development and transfer, and methane reduction. I use qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), word embeddings, and in-depth single-case and comparative case studies, drawing on both textual data and first-hand evidence from elite interviews and participant observation. I engage with existing literature on regime complexes, the comparative political economy of energy, multilateral negotiation management, and role theory. Specifically, I identify when one or more of three conditions plays a determining role in explaining a high-emitting country’s climate commitment discrepancies across its NDC and global governance club commitments. These conditions include a high-emitting country’s domestic energy transition readiness, member states’ modes of interaction within the club, and the summit host country’s political leadership. This paper deepens the understanding of governance effectiveness of regime complexes by examining interactions between formal and informal IOs and contributes to the literature on the political utility of club-like governance arrangements.