Climate clubs and their relevance within the paris agreement

Abstract

As diplomatic crisis threatened to overwhelm the negotiations for an international regime on climate change, certain new theoretical climate policy models began to gain a foothold in international debate. Hypotheses for smaller scale negotiations based upon a reduced number of actors, as well as the idea of ‘minilateral’ clubs of cooperating countries taking the lead in acting against climate change, quickly spread among scholars and policy makers, leading several commentators to view them as possible ‘last stance’ solutions in case the international climate negotiations failed. The Paris Agreement breakthrough, hailed by most as the ultimate victory of ‘multilateralism’, eventually overtook any minilateral ambition, at least concerning the climate bargaining process. Nevertheless, the high degree of uncertainty surrounding the implementation of the Paris Agreement’s ambitious objectives may represent a window of opportunity for a specific category of ‘minilateral’ models, known as ‘transformational clubs’, to find their own significant space within the new international climate regime. While describing the general characteristics of climate clubs and the specific features of ‘transformational clubs’, this Chapter discusses to what extent these latter may effectively play a role in the future developments of the international debate on climate change.