The paper starts with a puzzle. Given our knowledge of the the drivers of climate change, no rational scheme of global environmental governance would have devised the UNFCCC. Its shortcomings and limited domain are well known - excluding shipping, aviation and above all trade. As regime theorists would acknowledge, this particular regime was the product of a political process of issue area definition that determined its institutional path more than 20 years ago. This paper seeks to examine the framings of the climate problem that lay behind this definition and contrast them with the hypothetical alternatives that were available. It is argued that conceptualisation of the climate problem has changed, particularly in relation to the energy- security nexus and that this has major implications for the 'fragmented' state of international climate governance.
