Climate Change Governance

Climate change is expected to have serious impacts on societies throughout the world. They are facing three key challenges: 1) limiting the magnitude of climate change, through for example reducing greenhouse gas emissions, transforming energy production or reforestation; 2) developing and implementing adjustments to adapt to the effects of climate change, through for example enhancing dykes or changing spatial planning; 3) and increasing the adaptive capacity of society to deal with (unexpected) future changes through broader processes of societal change . Much of the climate change literature is dominated by natural or engineering science. However, climate change is not only a technical issue but above all a demanding matter of governance stretching from the global to the local scale. Because of the high stakes and many uncertainties surrounding climate change, it has been called a “wicked problem par excellence”. Therefore it faces all the usual difficulties and hindrances as well as opportunities associated with wicked problems. On top of that, climate change poses some specific, particularly demanding governance challenges like: - controversies due to important uncertainties about the nature climate risks and the effectiveness of solutions; - multilevel and fragmented policy context as various levels and policy sectors (energy supply, forestry, water management, spatial planning, infrastructure and agriculture) are involved; - diverse interests and logics (short-term versus long-term, shareholder versus societal value, efficiency versus legitimation, etc.); - asymmetric interdependencies between developing countries responsible for most of the emissions leading to climate change, and developing countries suffer most from the effects; - time scale misfits because short-term interventions based on a long-term vision demand a specific commitment by taxpayers and politicians, particularly in times of austerity. This section aims to bring together a series of panels focusing on the governance of climate change.