Global Climate Governance after Paris: Setting the Stage for Experimentation?

The 2015 Paris Agreement signals a new approach to global climate governance, in not only following a “pledge-and-review” approach to national action, but also in supporting climate action by non-state actors. This chapter examines how far this new approach can be deemed to be experimentalist by focusing on four elements drawn from the global experimentalist governance literature, namely: the setting of framework goals and metrics in an open, participatory process involving a broad group of stakeholders; decentralised implementation; distributed monitoring and reporting; and ongoing evaluation and revision of the goals and metrics in the light of experience. It concludes that the post-Paris climate governance architecture does display some of these elements. However, it suggests that this may mean either that climate governance eventually starts to resemble global experimentalist governance, or that the latter represents a type of lowest-common-denominator governance, where the outcomes are largely dependent on what nation states and non-state actors are willing to pledge. This finding calls for more attention to be paid to: the potential and underlying premises of the post-Paris model; power dynamics; the prevailing ontology (top-down or bottom-up); and the role of coordination.