ABSTRACT
What role does the state play in contemporary climate politics and governance? This is a question that has been brought to the fore in the wake of the 2009 UN climate conference in Copenhagen, and that also informs many of the chapters in this volume. The demonstrated inability of the state system to offer a long-term response to the rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases prior to and during the infamous Copenhagen conference did not only bring about a crisis in confidence for UN climate diplomacy (cf. Victor 2011). It also prompted many scholars of international relations to look ‘beyond the state’ for more effective forms of global climate governance. Today there is an abundant literature that investigates the diverse ways by which non-state or sub-state actors and networks such as environmental NGOs, corporations, and city networks contribute to public rule-setting and steering (Okereke et al.2009). By drawing attention to the rise of hybrid, non-hierarchical and network-like modes of governing across political scales, work in this field has challenged the assumption that the state is the sole, or even principal, agent of climate politics and governance. As non-state actors shoulder an increasing number of governance functions in the climate domain, we have learned that the institutional locus for authority and governance has changed.
