Contested Climate Justice in the Arctic and West Asia and North Africa (WANA) (Part of CliCCS)

The next few years of climate governance-in-the-making are 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 departs from the Kyoto Protocol’s state-centered, top-down approach. It 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 (2018-20 and 2023-25) and the local implementation of NDCs.

The project addresses both. It will focus on the following key drivers:

• The (in)capacity of the UNFCCC to align the expectations and preferences of heterogeneous actors
• The effects of regional norm conflicts and contestations on energy security and climate justice
• The social and political dynamics of policy-instruments that shape NDC formulation and implementation.

Assessing these drivers and their interplay across scales will enable us to identify plausible dynamics of climate governance which will be a necessary prerequisite for separating plausible from possible climate futures.

Chairs: Stefan Aykut (UHH), Grischa Perino (UHH), Antje Wiener (UHH)
Further information about project B2 can be found here.

A first workshop, organized by project group B2 took place at the CGG on February 6, 2019. The leading researches took rounds in introducing their research agendas and after a short report on the Climate Conference in Katowice further planning on research within the Cluster of Excellence was conducted.

Further information about CLiCCS, participating researchers and institutions can be found on the project's flyer and official website.

For information about job announcements within the project “Dynamics of Climate Governance", please check the clusters website. Announcements for different positions will appear gradually.