Cities Towards Global Climate Governance: How the Practices of City Diplomacy Foster Hybrid Multilateralism

One of the effects of globalization is the increasing number of transnational ties that central governments not only ceased to control but also ceased to participate in; therefore, in recent decades, cities have been increasingly motivated to respond to international issues and initiate various contacts with foreign economic, cultural, and political centres. This article examines practices of city diplomacy in light of the current climate crisis. Albeit cities could be in conflict with their central government, they are executing the global climate agenda. Nonetheless, how do we frame cities’ autonomous activities in the global governance agenda? The article seeks to determine whether the framework of hybrid multilateralism is the niche for cities to assume the role of the central government in defending common global values such as preservation of the environment when the state fails to do so. Based on a dataset consisting of various subnational initiatives responding to climate change, we suggest a remarkable growth in the pledges to the international climate agreements’ commitments involving many subnational actors. Through these pledges, cities enter the international negotiations with various partners under hybrid policy architecture. Cities hold an enormous potential to influence the global conversation on climate change agenda. Furthermore, we conclude that cities are taking on the states’ role in global issues when they identify the inadequacy of the central governments’ action. Their conflict position forces them to carry out autonomous activities and fosters the new phenomenon of hybrid multilateralism.

Inequity in International Climate Change Negotiations

The adoption of international climate agreements requires thorough negotiation between parties. This study aims to analyse the inequities between developed and developing countries in climate negotiations. This was done through a scrutiny of the main stages of these negotiations from the Rio Conference to the advent of the Paris Agreement. Our analysis has shown pervasive inequities along the climate negotiations over time. The UNFCCC made a qualitative separation between developed and developing countries in the principle of common but differentiated responsibility. Furthermore, the Kyoto Protocol emphasized this with the commitment of developed countries to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5%. The Kyoto Protocol by introducing flexibility mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) contributed to increase inequalities. The Paris Agreement has increased inequity by requesting each country to submit nationally determined contributions (NDCs) even though the global emission of developing countries remains very low. The negotiation style of developing countries is mostly limited to compromise and accommodation to the desires of the powerful states, as is the case in most international cooperation. The reality of the climate change negotiations mirrors the inequalities between developed and developing nations.

On implementation of Russia's obligations under the Paris agreement: Institutional, legal, international, and methodological aspects, problems and prospects for Russia's economy development

Subject. The article investigates the problems related to the implementation of Russia's obligations under the Paris Agreement. Objectives. The aim is to examine the possibilities of implementing Russia's obligations under the Paris Agreement, analyze institutional, legal, international, political and methodological aspects of fulfilling these obligations, identify problems and prospects for realizing the interests of Russian exporters in international markets, and opportunities for the development of economic and innovative potential, including the analysis of implementing the national climate doctrines in the field of greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Methods. The study employs methods of institutional, comparative, graphical, and statistical analysis, and methods of systematization and classification. Results. I established the degree of development of the institutional and legal framework for implementing climate agreements, characterized their international and political aspects, classified methodological problems of decision-making and performance of decarbonization programs, proved the need to renew production assets, and demonstrated the nature of implementation of national climate doctrines stimulating the development of innovations. Conclusions. The process of building the institutional and legal framework for regulating climate relations is not completed yet. A number of methodological problems hinder the achievement of fairness and objectivity of economic and political decision-making at the global and regional levels. The paper establishes a critical level of ageing the production capacities of Russian enterprises, and offers conditions and promising directions of the Russian economy development during energy transition.

A Race to Save Everything

This chapter describes the origins of cryoactivism, a term the author coined to describe environmental activism to protect the world’s cryosphere (its frozen surfaces). It provides examples of how people around the world are adapting to climate change and helping protect, restore, and even create glaciers. The chapter also focuses on mitigation actions that people, governments, organizations, commerce, and industry can take to confront the causes of anthropogenic climate change, including passing laws to protect glaciers, but more importantly, taking actions to reduce emissions of super pollutants (such as methane, black carbon, tropospheric ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons) that can achieve significant global cooling results in the near term. The chapter also reviews the key global climate agreements such as the Paris Agreement.

Climate agenda on the eve of COP-26: experience of Latin America

The newest world history has been marked by economic crises, environmental disasters an increase in intrastate and interstate armed conflicts, as well as an escalating confrontation in the field of energy resources. Among these risks, environmental problems such as global warming, sea level rise, soil erosion and shortages of food and fossil fuels have become unprecedentedly visible. This article focuses on a new climate agenda in the light of COP-26, taking place in Glasgow, and the regional experience of Latin America in confronting climate threats and adapting to climate changes since the ratification of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The authors consider the main international climate instruments, as well as those achievements on the way to greening national economies, which were undertaken by the LAC states within the mechanisms of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Since the ratification of the Paris Agreement, every Latin American state has made progress in implementing the environmental agenda and developing legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change. The conclusion highlights the need for broad state participation on the base of proven instruments for solving major environmental problems, further developing early warning systems and consistent implementation of the planned action plans to reduce the risk of disasters and their consequences. Primary importance is attached to interstate dialogue to tackle the environmental challenges, commitment to the responsible fulfillment of international climate agreements and further development of international framework in the field of environmental law. Joint initiatives among the states of the region are expected to have significant effect on reducing emissions of these gases. Moreover, the market-based instruments proposed by the Paris Agreement are known to be an important complement to the ongoing efforts to comply with the overall UNFCCC climate agenda.

Are We Satisfying the Right Conditions for the Mobility Transition? A Review and Evaluation of the Dutch Urban Mobility Policies

Global climate agreements call for action and an integrated perspective on mobility, energy and overall consumption. Municipalities in dense, urban areas are challenged with facilitating this transition with limited space and energy resources, and with future uncertainties. One important aspect of the transition is the adoption of electric vehicles, which includes the adequate design of charging infrastructure. Another important goal is a modal shift in transportation. This study investigated over 80 urban mobility policy measures that are in the policy roadmap of two of the largest municipalities of the Netherlands. This analysis consists of an inventory of policy measures, an evaluation of their environmental effects and conceptualizations of the policy objectives and conditions within the mobility transitions. The findings reveal that the two municipalities have similarities in means, there is still little anticipation of future technology and policy conditions could be further satisfied by introducing tailored measures for specific user groups.

Dynamic climate clubs: On the effectiveness of incentives in global climate agreements

A proposal to combat free riding in international climate agreements is the establishment of a climate club—a coalition of countries in a structure to encourage high levels of participation. Empirical models of climate clubs in the early stages relied on the analysis of single-period coalition formation. The earlier results suggested that there were limits to the potential strength of clubs and that it would be difficult to have deep abatement strategies in the club framework. The current study extends the single-period approach to many periods and develops an approach analyzing “supportable policies” to analyze multiperiod clubs. The major element of the present study is the interaction between club effectiveness and rapid technological change. Neither alone will produce incentive-compatible policies that can attain the ambitious objectives of international climate policy. The trade sanctions without rapid technological decarbonization will be too costly to produce deep abatement; similarly, rapid technological decarbonization by itself will not induce deep abatement because of country free riding. However, the two together can achieve international climate objectives.

Eliciting Fairness in N-Player Network Games through Degree-Based Role Assignment

From social contracts to climate agreements, individuals engage in groups that must collectively reach decisions with varying levels of equality and fairness. These dilemmas also pervade distributed artificial intelligence, in domains such as automated negotiation, conflict resolution, or resource allocation, which aim to engineer self-organized group behaviors. As evidenced by the well-known Ultimatum Game, where a Proposer has to divide a resource with a Responder, payoff-maximizing outcomes are frequently at odds with fairness. Eliciting equality in populations of self-regarding agents requires judicious interventions. Here, we use knowledge about agents’ social networks to implement fairness mechanisms, in the context of Multiplayer Ultimatum Games. We focus on network-based role assignment and show that attributing the role of Proposer to low-connected nodes increases the fairness levels in a population. We evaluate the effectiveness of low-degree Proposer assignment considering networks with different average connectivities, group sizes, and group voting rules when accepting proposals (e.g., majority or unanimity). We further show that low-degree Proposer assignment is efficient, in optimizing not only individuals’ offers but also the average payoff level in the population. Finally, we show that stricter voting rules (i.e., imposing an accepting consensus as a requirement for collectives to accept a proposal) attenuate the unfairness that results from situations where high-degree nodes (hubs) play as Proposers. Our results suggest new routes to use role assignment and voting mechanisms to prevent unfair behaviors from spreading on complex networks.

Sanctions and international interaction improve cooperation to avert climate change

Imposing sanctions on noncompliant parties to international agreements is often advocated as a remedy for international cooperation failure, notably in climate agreements. We provide an experimental test of this conjecture in a collective-risk social dilemma simulating the effort to avoid catastrophic climate change. We involve groups of participants from two cultural areas that were shown to achieve different levels of cooperation nationally when peer-level sanctions were available. Here we show that, while this result still holds nationally, international interaction backed by sanctions is overall beneficial. Cooperation by low cooperator groups increases in comparison with national cooperation and converges to the cooperation levels of high cooperation groups. While such an increase is small without sanctions, it becomes sizable when sanctions are imposed. Revealing or hiding counterparts’ nationality does not affect results. Our study supports the proposal to use sanctions to support international cooperation to avert collective risk such as climate change.

Sanctions and international interaction improve cooperation to avert climate change

Imposing sanctions on noncompliant parties to international agreements is often advocated as a remedy for international cooperation failure, notably in climate agreements. We provide an experimental test of this conjecture in a collective-risk social dilemma simulating the effort to avoid catastrophic climate change. We involve groups of participants from two cultural areas that were shown to achieve different levels of cooperation nationally when peer-level sanctions were available. Here we show that, while this result still holds nationally, international interaction backed by sanctions is overall beneficial. Cooperation by low cooperator groups increases significantly in comparison with national cooperation and converges to the cooperation levels of high cooperation groups. While the increase is only marginally significant without sanctions, it becomes sizable when sanctions are imposed. When sanctions are available, individuals are willing to cooperate above the level that would maximize expected payoffs. Revealing or hiding counterparts’ nationality does not affect results.