CLICCS
The Excellence Cluster Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CLICCS) explores climate change with broad expertise, establishing a long-term program spanning from basic research on climate dynamics and climate-related social dynamics to the transdisciplinary exploration of human–environment interactions. CLICCS investigates how the climate changes and how society changes with it, thereby feeding back on climate. Understanding these changes, including how societies adapt, will enable us to assess with far greater confidence than before the range of imaginable climate futures. In taking on this challenge, CLICCS is guided by the overarching question: "Which climate futures are possible and which are plausible?"
Within this broad framework, the B2 Project Dynamics of climate governance: norms, contestation, and policies centers on climate governance-in-the-making after the entry into force of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change. It starts from the assumption that the next few years of will be critical: observing them closely allows us to identify and assess key drivers of long-term social trends towards or away from decarbonization, which form – individually and through their interaction at different governance scales – the backdrop of possible and plausible scenarios of future climate governance. The Paris agreement attempts to overcome the fragmentation of current climate governance through an architecture that relies on the global guiding norm of “keeping warming below 2°C”, and enables a universal and voluntary bottom-up process based on the cyclical submission and review of freely determined climate policy proposals by states – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – and other public and private entities. The effectiveness of this process will crucially depend on the practice of the upcoming global review-resubmission cycles of the Paris agreement and the local implementation of NDCs. The project addresses both by focusing on (1) the (in)capacity of the UNFCCC to align actors’ expectations and preferences; (2) regional norm conflicts and contestations on energy security and climate justice; (3) and the social and political dynamics of policy-instruments and national and European contexts.
More on CLICCS B2.