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Central to this special issue is the notion that the methods and conceptual tools of comparative politics can improve our understanding of global climate change politics. Building on recent advancements in the field of comparative environmental politics, the special issues offers a more comprehensive treatment of climate change politics in developed countries, emerging economies and least developed countries. In this introduction, I distil the key features of comparative politics, advocate for the more rigorous application of comparative methods in climate politics scholarship and highlight three groups of political factors--institutions, interests and ideas--that hold considerable promise in explaining climate change politics at the domestic level. The introduction concludes with an appeal to (re)think how international and domestic politics interact. Examples drawn from the articles assembled for this special issue are used to substantiate the claims made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of global climate governance have focused increasingly on alternative venues to the UN climate regime, with much attention focusing on the growth of transnational climate governance. This article considers the phenomenon of bilateral intergovernmental climate cooperation. It seeks to understand the development of EU-China and EU-India climate cooperation as possible instances of diffusion of ideas, policies, and institutions. While Chinese and Indian climate policies should be understood as primarily domestic developments, there is some limited evidence of diffusion from the EU to China. Domestic factors in China and India--particularly the degree of fit between externally promoted and pre-existing domestic ideas and frames and the underlying material conditions driving these frames--help to explain the variation between the two cases with respect to observed patterns of diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers carbon footprints as a form of climate governance. Drawing on science studies to consider the contingent nature of calculative devices and governmentality studies to examine the intrinsic relationship between how problems are framed and remedied, this article advances two arguments. First, it argues that efforts to define and deploy carbon footprints contributed to a conceptual shift in emissions accounting, from a narrower metric focused on emissions from fossil fuel and electricity use--Carbon Footprint 1.0--to a more expansive metric that includes emissions embodied in consumption and trade--Carbon Footprint 2.0. Second, this article argues that these approaches to carbon footprints at the individual level have intersected with broader discussions about allocating emissions responsibilities and examining mitigation strategies at the national and international levels, offering alternative grounds for assigning responsibility for climate-change mitigation and expanding the range of policy options available for addressing emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on global governance has focused either on theoretical accounts of the overall phenomenon or on empirical studies of distinct institutions that serve to solve particular governance challenges. In this article we analyze instead "governance architectures," defined as the overarching system of public and private institutions, principles, norms, regulations, decision-making procedures and organizations that are valid or active in a given issue area of world politics. We focus on one aspect that is turning into a major source of concern for scholars and policy-makers alike: the "fragmentation" of governance architectures in important policy domains. The article offers a typology of different degrees of fragmentation, which we describe as synergistic, cooperative, and conflictive fragmentation. We then systematically assess alternative hypotheses over the relative advantages and disadvantages of different degrees of fragmentation. We argue that moderate degrees of fragmentation may entail both significant costs and benefits, while higher degrees of fragmentation are likely to decrease the overall performance of a governance architecture. The article concludes with policy options on how high degrees of fragmentation could be reduced. Fragmentation is prevalent in particular in the current governance of climate change, which we have hence chosen as illustration for our discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a climate policy architecture that would be conducive to wide participation and successful compliance. Compliance in particular is an aspect of climate policy that has been under-specified in current proposals for an architecture for climate policy. Although admittedly a successful regime would have to satisfy a number of criteria, including environmental goals, dynamic efficiency and cost-effectiveness, any agreement would have to be implemented and enforced. The focus here is both on how to construct a regime that is environmentally effective, and on how to reduce problems of compliance and leakage. Other criteria will be considered in the proposal, such as cost-effectiveness and how to facilitate the negotiation process, but the primary focus will be on participation and compliance. The main argument is that a climate agreement based on both emissions targets and policies and measures is the most conducive to maximum participation and a successful compliance mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The governance of climate change has traditionally been conceived as an issue of international co-operation and considered through the lens of regime analysis. Increasingly, scholars of global governance have highlighted the multiple parallel initiatives involving a range of actors at different levels of governance through which this issue is being addressed. In this paper, we argue that this phenomenon warrants a re-engagement with some of the conceptual cornerstones of international studies. We highlight the conceptual challenges posed by the increasing involvement of non-nation-state actors (NNSAs) in the governance of climate change and explore the potential for drawing from alternative theoretical traditions to address these challenges. Specifically, the paper combines insights from neo-Gramscian and governmentality perspectives as a means of providing the critical space required to generate deeper understanding of: (a) the nature of power in global governance; (b) the relationship between public and private authority; (c) the dynamics between structure and agency; and (d) the rationalities and practices of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]