Book Review Essay
Power and Authority in Global
Climate Governance
(cid:129)
Hamish van der Ven
Bulkeley, Harriet. 2016. Accomplishing Climate Governance. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Ciplet, David, J. Timmons Roberts, and Mizan R. Khan. 2015. Power in a Warming World:
The New Global Politics of Climate Change and the Remaking of Environmental Inequality.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hickmann, Thomas. 2016. Rethinking Authority in Global Climate Governance: How
Transnational Climate Initiatives Relate to the International Climate Regime. Abingdon, UK:
Routledge.
The 2015 UNEP Emissions Gap Report summarizes the challenge posed by
climate change in a single, colorful infographic (UNEP 2015). A gray line on
the graph shows projected greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions rising toward a
four-degree global temperature increase by 2100 under a baseline scenario.
Farther below this, a decidedly cheerier blue line charts a pathway toward the
globally agreed-upon two-degree temperature increase. Between the two lines
lies the titular emissions gap. When portrayed visually in this way, the dilemma
posed by climate change appears both apolitical and technical in nature. One
may be forgiven for thinking that wedging the emissions gap is simply a matter
of adding up enough win-win technological solutions to hit the specified num-
ber of GHG reductions.
Yet the benign imagery of the emissions gap belies the inherently political
nature of climate change. Finding the reductions necessary to wedge the gap will
create both winners and losers at multiple scales. Developing countries face
constraints on their pathways to economic development as wealthier countries
increasingly ask them to leave fossil fuels and forests in the ground. Developed
countries are being asked to pay billions of dollars in transfer payments for
mitigation and adaptation efforts in the developing world. The fossil fuel indus-
try’s very survival is threatened, and the fate of the burgeoning clean technology
industry remains far from secure. Western environmental NGOs campaign for
Global Environmental Politics 16:4, November 2016, doi:10.1162/GLEP_r_00381
© 2016 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
130
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Hamish van der Ven
(cid:129) 131
the preservation of diminishing tropical forests, while indigenous groups in-
creasingly assert their land rights. All parties in this colossal struggle exert power
to pursue their interests, yet the fundamental nature of “power” remains a hotly
contested subject in the climate governance literature.
Three recent books wade into this broader debate about power and author-
ity in global climate governance. Each wrestles with questions that are at once
broadly relevant to global governance and particularly salient to climate change.
What is power? Through what mechanisms does it operate? Who has it? Is the
nexus of power shifting? How can a focus on power and authority in global
climate governance explain the current state of the regime complex for climate
change (Keohane and Victor 2011)? Finally, what implications do the answers
to these questions hold for the study and practice of global climate governance?
The books largely concur that power is more dynamic and multifaceted than it
has previously been conceptualized in the international relations literature, but
they disagree on the proper boundaries for the study of climate governance and
how best to chart a pathway forward.
In Accomplishing Climate Governance, Harriet Bulkeley takes umbrage with
how climate change has been conceptualized by practitioners and social scien-
tists as an objective problem that requires solving. This conception, she notes,
leads to a field of study where “issues of power and inequality are subsumed by
more practical considerations of how to design appropriate institutional, market
or behavioral responses” (p. 2). As with the emissions gap infographic mentioned
above, Bulkeley is deeply suspicious of attempts to mask power and politics in
climate governance. She astutely notes that governing is not a matter of imple-
menting solutions to predefined problems, but also encompasses the “constitu-
tion and configuration of what should be governed and what it means to
govern in tandem” (11). Hence, the central research question that guides her book
is: how does climate change come to be constituted as requiring intervention?
Bulkeley addresses this question by investigating climate governance by
means of six loosely connected climate interventions in the UK, ranging from
the actions of multinational corporations to community-based initiatives. Her
analysis is rooted in poststructural theories, and draws particularly on the work
of Michel Foucault and the conceptual repertoire of governmentality to ask how
climate governance is accomplished. Bulkeley establishes early in the book that
power and governance are intertwined. Governing is “the orchestration of dis-
tinct modes of power” (3), and Bulkeley seeks to explore the workings, politics,
and geographies of its operation. While power comes in multiple guises, includ-
ing violence, control, and domination, she observes that such forms play a mar-
ginal role in climate governance. By contrast, forms of governing—authorized
practices of rule and conduct—are everywhere. Power is generated through
the process of governing climate change and by establishing sets of relationships
between things. The generation of power and authority, in turn, reconfigures the
climate problem in relation to those entities that are party to its assemblage. In
this way, multinational corporations define and address the problem of climate
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132 (cid:129) Power and Authority in Global Climate Governance
change in different ways than community organizations. The power relations
generated through the act of governance have far-reaching impacts for how
scholars, policy-makers, and individuals think and act about climate change.
Bulkeley’s work is provocative in the sense that it prompts readers to adopt
a different starting point in thinking about climate change. She convincingly
argues that we must first consider how climate change is conceptualized as a
problem before we can fully understand why some solutions come to dominate
others. The book suggests that power, and consequently politics, can be found
in the most mundane activities, and not just in international climate nego-
tiations. Her work therefore implies a radical rethinking of the research agenda
for climate governance. Social scientists, she argues, must look well beyond the
conventional sources of power and authority in the international system if they
hope to reach a full understanding of climate governance. Skeptics may justi-
fiably wonder whether this sets too broad a task, but Bulkeley deserves credit
for critically interrogating the disproportionate focus on international negotia-
tions in the existing climate governance literature.
International negotiations are in the foreground of David Ciplet, J. Timmons
Roberts, and Mizan R. Khan’s Power in a Warming World. The book starts with the
observation that the multilateral response to climate change is both inadequate
and inequitable. Existing multilateral agreements leave us well short of the glob-
ally agreed-upon two-degree target and do little to avert the fate of the world’s
poorest countries, which stand to suffer disproportionately from the negative
impacts of climate change. Given this bleak condition, the authors ask: how did
we how did we get to this point, and is there any way out?
Power is at the center of their explanation for why global climate gov-
ernance is presently inadequate, and it informs their prescription for moving
toward a brighter future. They challenge narrow conceptualizations of power
in either material or coercive terms. Instead, they adopt a political economic
view of power relations, drawing particularly on the works of Antonio Gramsci
and the concept of hegemony to argue that power is frequently exercised
through noncoercive and legitimate means. For example, both state and non-
state actors act strategically to construct, solidify, and leverage shared ideas of
what is socially acceptable, thereby advancing some solutions to climate change
(e.g., market mechanisms) and precluding others. Importantly, power (as con-
ceived in the book) is rooted in a specific historical and institutional context.
Thus, which actors hold power at any point in time is conditioned by the current
economic order, geopolitics, ecological conditions, and capabilities of trans-
national civil society, among other factors.
Adopting a broader conceptualization of power corrects what the authors
see as a tendency to view climate governance as impeded by a simple North-
South divide, wherein the North holds all the power and the South holds none.
This portrayal, they suggest, is at odds with the current complexity of multi-
lateral climate negotiations, in which both hemispheres are presently divided into
multiple negotiating blocks. They convincingly argue that the old North-South
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Hamish van der Ven
(cid:129) 133
power divide has undergone fundamental transformations since the Copenhagen
round of climate talks in 2009. The apparent failings of the neoliberal economic
order revealed by the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of China coupled with the
waning power of the United States, the increasing visibility of ecological disasters
in the West, and the transnationalization of civil society have altered power
relations in global climate negotiations. While the resulting world order has
not yet produced the coalitions necessary to create an adequate and equitable
solution to climate change, the realization that power structures are not fixed
and immutable offers some cause for optimism.
Power, therefore, does not preclude the possibility of a positive end to the
climate crisis. It does, however, suggest that major structural shifts will have to
occur to create the broader conditions necessary for the powerful to take action.
Climate change-related disasters can certainly help shift the balance of power
(as the authors illustrate with reference to Superstorm Sandy). More impor-
tantly, structural shifts are contingent on the presence of “strong, strategic and
unco-optable social movements” (230). Three processes need to occur to facil-
itate these kinds of social movements. First, mainstream advocacy-focused
NGOs need to link grassroots social activism to their legislative efforts. Second,
civil society groups must successfully construct counterhegemonic “Baptist-
bootlegger” coalitions across historically divided constituencies. And third, these
same groups must link social movement actions spatially across the globe.
The authors’ stated objective is to create “a useful framework to under-
stand the roots of this political crisis as a tool to help identify pathways for-
ward” (xiii). The book succeeds in describing the crisis, but it leaves some
further work to be done in charting a path forward. As with other works in
the Neo-Gramscian tradition (e.g., Klein 2014), the authors argue that social
movements are the solution for reconfiguring power relations. However, the
book offers few new insights into how such movements are fomented. Of
the three processes the authors outline for creating robust social movements,
the second (creating coalitions across historically divided constituencies) ap-
pears the most challenging. Convincing workers in the fossil fuel industry to
unite under the same banner as environmental groups is no small feat. Apart
from the oft-invoked examples of the World Social Forum and People’s Climate
March, the authors present few examples of what these types of diverse, counter-
hegemonic movements look like in practice. Some further insight into how
Baptist-bootlegger coalitions can be deliberately formed would have strength-
ened the book’s practical relevance.
In Rethinking Authority in Global Climate Governance, Thomas Hickmann
asks how emergent forms of transnational climate governance, particularly
those initiated by sub- and nonstate actors, relate to the international climate
regime. Hickmann offers three hypotheses regarding this question, which he
somewhat confusingly terms “conceptual assumptions,” even though they are
explicitly framed as “conjectured relationships.” He hypothesizes that trans-
national climate governance will either conflict with, complement, or depend
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134 (cid:129) Power and Authority in Global Climate Governance
on the international climate regime for authority. He investigates these hypoth-
eses through comparative case studies of the ICLEI Local Governments for Sus-
tainability Network, the gold standard for carbon offsets, and the greenhouse
gas protocol.
Hickmann’s conceptualization of authority closely resembles the concep-
tualization of power offered in Ciplet, Roberts, and Khan’s book. He defines
authority as “the legitimate problem-solving and decision-making capacity of an
actor that is voluntarily accepted and recognized by others” (39). The distinction
between power and authority is that the former relies on coercion while the latter
does not. In this sense, Hickmann is equally interested in the question of who has
power in global climate governance, even if the language of power is largely absent
from his text.
The book’s central finding is that all three cases of transnational climate
governance are highly dependent on the multilateral regime for funding, struc-
ture, or governing authority. Hickmann finds no evidence of competition for
authority between nonstate or subnational initiatives and state-centric ones. A
central conclusion is therefore that “changing patterns of authority in world
politics cannot be conceptualized as a zero-sum game, in which the emergence
of authoritative structures beyond central governments and international insti-
tutions equals a loss of authority at the expense of state-based forms of gover-
nance” (12). Instead, Hickmann suggests that the proliferation of transnational
climate governance is better conceived as a “reconfiguration of authority” (190)
across various actors and multiple levels of decision-making.
Hickmann’s book provides fresh empirical evidence of the increasing
dispersion of power and authority outside the interstate realm, yet readers may
justifiably wonder whether the book breaks new ground. All but the most ardent
neorealists have long since acknowledged that multiple sources of political author-
ity operate outside the state. Moreover, Jessica Green’s (2013) book previously
established that private authority can arise independent of the relative waxing
or waning of the state. While Hickmann’s book certainly bolsters these claims,
it does not quite deliver the “rethinking” of authority promised in the book’s title.
Apart from its individual contribution, Hickmann’s book is notable for
how it further develops themes addressed in the other two books. Specifically,
all three suggest a growing consensus on the nature of power and authority in
climate governance. The authors agree that climate governance is inherently
political. Climate change is not a technological problem that can be addressed
exclusively through win-win solutions. Rather, climate governance involves pol-
itics, and therefore the application of power in pursuit of specific agendas and
interests. Power in all three books is conceptualized as both dynamic and multi-
faceted. It extends well beyond the use of coercive force, and is often rooted in
legitimate authority, however such authority is constructed. Power can be ob-
served operating at multiple scales and is equally present in state-centric and
nonstate contexts. In both domains, the distribution of power is in a constant
state of flux and is conditioned by endogenous and exogenous variables. The
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Hamish van der Ven
(cid:129) 135
authors agree that no single actor or group of actors is “powerful” in an innate
and timeless manner.
Notwithstanding their consensus on power, the three books chart vastly
different courses forward in the study and practice of climate governance.
Whereas Bulkeley sees the research agenda on climate governance as properly
extending to multiple sites and domains—“from the corridors of power to the
power of vacuum cleaners” (155)—the remaining authors maintain that a focus
on international negotiations remains appropriate, even as the international
negotiations affect and are affected by social movements and transnational cli-
mate initiatives. The authors are also split on the centrality of multilateral pro-
cesses to efforts to address climate change. Bulkeley argues that “rather than
investing so much of our climate resolve in the international domain, we can
instead further its circulation through the geographically dispersed and yet con-
nected sites and arenas through which climate governance is already taking
place” (168). By contrast, Ciplet et al. argue that “no other level of solution is
able to do what global interstate negotiations can, which is to assemble in a
mutually agreed-on process the legal representatives of the people of the world
to agree on binding commitments to a problem facing all of humanity” (16).
Hickmann would likely critique the idea that resolve and energy must be in-
vested in one domain or the other as a false dichotomy, and counter that the
efforts at different scales are interwoven and mutually reinforcing. Little can be
gained by arguing that one of the authors is more correct than the others. All
support their positions convincingly. Rather, the broader contribution of these
three books is in providing a comprehensive conceptualization of power in
global climate governance and drawing clear lines of debate about how climate
governance should be studied and practiced by future scholars and practitioners.
References
Green, Jessica. 2013. Rethinking Private Authority: Agents and Entrepreneurs in Global
Environmental Governance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Keohane, Robert O., and David G. Victor. 2011. The Regime Complex for Climate
Change. Perspectives on Politics 9 (1): 7–23.
Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon &
Schuster.
UNEP. 2015. Emissions Gap Report 2015—Executive Summary. Available at http://bit.ly/
1kzcjSk, accessed January 12, 2016.
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