Transnational Climate Change Networks: New Forms of Authority or Mobilization Mechanisms to Secure Consent?

Details

Global interdependence and loss of trust in the state are challenging the state-based authority that has traditionally governed environmental protection. This is evidenced by the limited institutional capacity and legitimacy such authority offers in providing effective global climate change solutions. However, diverse and adaptive systems of climate governance are emerging and gaining the authority to create policy through state-based (public), market-based (private), and people-based (moral) actors networking transnationally.

The study will focus on two aspects of the urban interactive governance that re-lates to the political and institutional constraints imposed on cities:

1. the role of urban areas within complex transnational Networks
2. the importance of vertical interaction through ‘multilevel governance’.

The research will employ a multiple-case study approach with embedded design, enabling across-case and within-case analysis. An embedded case study design involves multiple units of analysis at different levels (units and subunits).

There will be three different levels of analysis identified for the case studies, comprising:

1. cities
2. policy sectors
3. network organizations.

Cities are thus the units of analysis at one level (the ‘total system’), with the policy sectors and network organizational actors being the subunits (‘intermediate units’) beneath the cities. Cases as mainly the cities of Hong Kong and Singapore.

The results of the project will provide the basis for a set of recommendations for policy makers on the urban, regional and global level in regard to improved systems of climate policy.