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Scholars and policymakers working on non-state climate action have tended to focus on functional considerations, largely neglecting questions of ideology. This article brings them into the spotlight by investigating how ideology affects climate action initiatives. Based on a new database of 389 projects associated with reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, the article examines how ideology affects project design and partnering. A quantitative analysis and four case studies of projects in Colombia and Peru show how environmental ideology shapes the preferences of project developers for project designs and partners. Two mechanisms that underlie this are also derived. The findings show how a focus on ideology can help open the black box of climate action initiatives and explain their substantive variation. They also offer insights into the ideological implications of the transnationalization of climate governance. Non-state climate action at once entrenches the neoliberal ideological status quo of climate politics and offers critical ideologies a foothold. This poses risks for the future effectiveness and legitimacy of non-state climate action and should be considered in the design of the emerging institutional architecture that supports it. This article also sets a platform for and outlines the contours of a future research agenda on ideology in climate action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the assumption that the boundaries of state versus non-state and public versus private can readily be drawn. It argues that the roles of actors — as state or non-state — and the forms of authority — public or private — are not pre-given but are forged through the process of governing. Drawing on neo-Gramscian and governmentality perspectives, it suggests that a more dynamic account of the state can offer a more nuanced means of analysing the process of governing global environmental affairs. In order to understand this process and the outcomes of governing climate change, we argue that analysis should focus on the hegemonic projects and programmes through which the objects and subjects of governing are constituted and contested, and through which the form and nature of the state and authority are accomplished. We suggest that this is a process achieved and held in place through ‘forging alignment’ between diverse social and material entities in order to achieve the ‘right disposition of things’ through which the will to govern climate change can be realized (Murray Li, 2007a). We illustrate this argument by examining the governing of climate change in two global cities, London and Los Angeles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]