Policy Vacuums and Institutional Voids in Global Climate Governance

Climate change poses severe threats to ecosystems, human security, and the sustainability of current social-economic systems. Adapting to, and stemming further acceleration of, climate change requires governance systems that match the problem’s scale and complexity, along with unprecedented levels of cooperation and collective action at all levels of human organizing - including negotiating and adopting policies, instruments, frameworks, initiatives and regulations. Despite the historic international agreement reached by 196 countries in Paris in 2015, and despite the many initiatives at local and regional, individual and organizational levels, by public, private and civil society actors, climate change as a global issue arena suffers from institutional failures and institutional voids, namely the absence of coherent institutional agreements on enforceable international rules that influence the climate performance of nations, primary actors in the international climate regime. Our paper investigates how s...