The New Power Politics of Global Climate Governance

Two key features link the contributions of this volume. First, their underlying assumption is that major powers are the central actors in determining global environmental politics. This differentiates this publication from the mainstream global governance literature and its underlying non-hierarchical approach to international affairs. Second, while much of the related literatures unwittingly translates political animosities between ‘the’ North and ‘the’ South into analytical dividing lines, which, in turn, produces few deeper insights into the complex challenge of climate change politics, this book puts considerable weight on the assessment of, and implications of, the approaches both of rising and established major powers for global climate norms. One key argument of this volume is that today’s geopolitics are about who gets how much in the fiercely competitive race over the available ‘carbon space’. The volume concludes that prudently balancing power in the new century requires a fair sharing of burden among the existing and emerging powers. In light of such burden-sharing, pluralistic domestic politics as well as diverging normative beliefs and worldviews require consideration of different conditions, even if historical legacies of the industrialised world have increasingly been put into question as a political argument by the United States. – A brief summary of the key results of the UNFCCC’s COP 2015 in Paris and a theoretical examination thereof precedes the main chapters. This new introduction confirms the decisive role of the major powers and provides several policy suggestions. This book was previously published as a special issue ofClimate Policy.

Maximilian Terhalle is Senior Lecturer (tenured) of Politics and Global Studies at Winchester University, UK.Before joining the University of Winchester, Maximilian taught and conducted research at Yale, Columbia, Cornell and Oxford Universities between 2007 and 2012. From 2012 to 2015, he worked at Potsdam, Berlin, Jena and Hagen Universities in Germany. At the latter, he served as the Acting Chair of International Politics in 2015. Maximilian received his DPhil from the University of Bonn (Germany) and two Master degrees from the Universities of London and Bonn. For 2016-2017, Maximilian has been invited by the London School of Economics as Senior Fellow in the Centre for International Studies.

Charlotte Streck is director of Climate Focus an international advisory company on climate policy with offices in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bogota, Washington DC. Before founding Climate Focus in 2004, Charlotte served for five years as Senior Counsel with The World Bank in Washington, DC. Trained as biologist and lawyer in Germany and Spain, she serves as a climate change and environmental advisor to numerous governments, private companies, foundations, and non-for-profit organizations. Charlotte holds a Juris Doctor and PhD in environmental law from Humboldt University in Berlin, a Master in Biological Science from Regensburg. She has edited four books and published more than 100 articles, commentaries and reports.