Multi‐level Climate Governance: The global system and selected sub‐systems

T HE PARIS AGREEMENT (UNFCCC, 2015) HAS INTRODUCED A NEW GLOBAL CLIMATE GOVERNANCE APPROACH, WHICH REFLECTS A SHIFT towards interest-driven, opportunity-based and more voluntary actions by combining bottom-up with top-down elements (Falkner, 2016). Interactive learning and experimentation at different levels of global governance have become highly important, and these complex global interactions are increasingly regarded not as obstacles but as opportunities for innovation and interactive learning (Sovacool, 2011). Global climate governance relates not only to the legal system of the climate regime but also to various public and private initiatives at different scales and across sectors. Scholars studying the complex multi-actor and multi-sector characteristics of the system have therefore begun to conceptualize global multi-level climate governance as an opportunity structure for the generation and diffusion of climate-related innovation. The topic of this special issues is climate governance within a multi-level and multi-sectoral global system. The work argues that global climate governance today aims essentially to activate the dynamic potential of each level of the global governance system, the level of world regions as well as the level of provinces and local communities. Horizontal peer-to-peer learning between countries, cities and regions, as well as vertical up-scaling of best practice, has created a dynamic of change. The cross-sectoral approach has become important as far as the mobilizing of economic interests (e.g. in the construction sector) and the use of co-benefits is concerned. This special issue intends to offer a better understanding of the nature and variety of, and linkages between, initiatives taken and governance functions delivered within the broader ‘climate governance landscape’ (Betsill et al., 2015). It analyses various climate governance activities in the European Union (EU), India and China through a systemic perspective. The EU may be regarded as the strongest regional sub-system of the global system, although the BRICS countries of China and India play a comparable role, as countries both with a similar scope and with explicit multi-level climate policy activities. The systematic dimension of global climate governance is described in the introductory article ‘Multi-level climate governance as a global system’ by Martin Jänicke. The author analyses the potential of the global climate governance system, which is characterized by a multiplicity of access points and incentives for innovation and interactive learning. It is regarded as a ‘multi-impulse-system’, where the sum of even weak impulses from different parts of the system can play the role of a strong instrument. The global multi-level climate governance structure is also characterized by a specific global knowledge base and a global policy arena, allowing for climate-related agenda-setting and the mobilization of interests at each level. It is taken as an opportunity structure for ambitious innovation-based climate strategies based on interactive lesson-drawing from best practice. The lesson to be learned at all levels of the system is the potential for economic co-benefits related to the socio-technical system of clean-energy innovation and the global clean-energy market. The following article, ‘The EU system of multi-level climate governance’, by Martin Jänicke and Rainer Quitzow provides an overview of the regional structure of the global climate governance system. The authors understand the EU as a system where ‘multi-level reinforcement’ has been observed several times and which can be considered as a leader by example in global climate governance. They point to the fact that the EU has the world’s highest share of green electricity and since 1990 has made the largest reduction to its greenhouse gas emissions. They attribute the EU’s relatively successful performance in climate and energy governance to two main factors: (1) multi-level reinforcement and (2) the mobilization of economic interests at different levels of governance through low-carbon industrial policy. While the multi-impulse system has fostered