ABSTRACT
Climate change is increasingly recognized as one of the most pressing and defining political challenges of our time. This chapter provides some background to the rise of climate change as a political issue and introduces some of the key governance challenges that we explore in the book around acceleration (the speed of action), system change (the depth of change across sectors, economies, and inequalities), and connection (governing across multiple systems and dealing with climate alongside other Sustainable Development Goals pertaining to food, energy, biodiversity, and oceans, for example). The chapter considers why conventional accounts of international cooperation and efforts to address the issue often fail to provide a sufficient account of the contemporary landscape of climate governance. We then develop an approach which goes beyond conventional accounts of global governance to help us to understand why, how, and by whom climate change is being governed, and with what consequences.
