Conceptualizing Climate Governance Chukwumerije Okereke, Harriet Bulkeley, and Heike Schroeder

Conceptualizing Climate Governance

Beyond the International Regime
•
Chukwumerije Okereke, Harriet Bulkeley, and
Heike Schroeder*

Introduction
The increasing visibility and inºuence of non-nation-state actors (NNSAs)1 in
global climate politics continues to pose important theoretical challenges for
how we conceptualize and understand the nature of global governance. There
has been an explosion of parallel initiatives by NNSAs aimed at reducing emis-
sions of greenhouse gases.2 These activities, which are broadening climate gov-
ernance “beyond” the realms of the international climate regime, have crucial
implications for climate governance.3 First, such initiatives may have a material
impact on the performance of the regime as they offer means through which
nation-states might achieve international goals. Second, they may achieve
emission reductions independently of the performance of the evolving climate
regime based on their own principles, rules, norms and procedures. Third,
through seeking to govern climate change in their own right, such initiatives
and practices signiªcantly affect how we conceptualize and understand the na-
ture of global climate governance.
It is this last issue to which we turn in this paper. We suggest that whilst re-

* Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the 2007 Amsterdam Conference on the Human
Dimensions of Global Environmental Change and at the annual meeting of the International
Studies Association, in San Francisco, in 2008. We thank the participants in these conferences
and Diana Liverman, Alex Haxeltine, Heather Lovell, Karin Bäckstrand, Frank Biermann, Peter
Newell, Fariborz Zelli, Andrew Jordan, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for Global En-
vironmental Politics for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
1. By NNSAs we mean all actors operating at local, regional, national and international levels that
are not nation-states. They include, for example, cities, corporations and offset organizations.
2. See Auer 2000; Betsill and Bulkeley 2004, 2006; Betsill and Corell 2001; Gulbrandsen and
Andresen 2004; and Newell 2000.
3. By the international climate regime, hereafter referred to as “the regime,” we mean the explicit
and implicit principles, rules, norms and procedures enshrined in the United Nations Frame-
work Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), its Kyoto Protocol and related legal docu-
ments. Here, governance “beyond” the regime does not necessarily mean governance without
the regime. Rather, in focusing on governance “beyond” the regime, we are seeking to under-
stand how a range of actors other than national governments may be conducting climate gover-
nance either within the regime or in parallel initiatives which are based on other principles,
rules, norms and procedures, such as voluntary carbon offsetting.

Global Environmental Politics 9:1, February 2009

© 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

58
 Chukwumerije Okereke, Harriet Bulkeley, and Heike Schroeder • 59

gime approaches and the global governance literature provide interesting in-
sights, a number of critical aspects of the governing of climate change beyond
the regime remain “out of the reach” and in some cases clearly incompatible
with the basic ontological assumptions of these existing approaches. We suggest
that there are four areas in which the need to develop a more robust conceptual
understanding of the global governance of climate change beyond the regime is
particularly pressing. These four areas are (1) the nature of power in global gov-
ernance, (2) the relationship between public and private authority, (3) the dy-
namics between structure and agency; and (4) the rationalities and actual pro-
cesses of governance. Here, we highlight how insights from governmentality and
neo-Gramscian theories can enrich and advance our understanding in these
critical areas for theorizing global environmental governance. As efforts to neg-
otiate a post-2012 climate agreement get under way, there is urgent need to
address the theoretical challenges associated with a changing global order. In
conclusion, we consider the implications of our analysis for such a research
agenda.

From International Regimes to Global Governance and Beyond

The vast majority of research concerning the governance of climate change has
focused on the development of the international climate regime and its imple-
mentation.4 However, the dominant regime approach, i.e. neoliberal institu-
tionalism, has recently attracted considerable criticisms as a means of explain-
ing global climate politics. Here, the main points of contention are: the pre-
eminent status of the nation-state; the “black box” nature of the state; and that
the international and domestic arenas are easily differentiated and strongly de-
marcated.5
In seeking to address these gaps and to provide a better explanation of the
complex process of climate governance beyond the international regime, schol-
ars have drawn from a range of theoretical traditions, two of which would seem
to be the most notable—constructivism and global governance. Scholars writing
under the label constructivism have recently worked to set this approach apart
by insistently emphasizing important differences in the ontological assump-
tions and the critical insights it brings to the understanding of international pol-
itics. For example Risse-Kappen,6 Bernstein7 and Wapner8 have sought to pro-
vide accounts of climate politics that offer valuable insights on the governance
of climate change beyond the regime and in particular the involvement of
NNSAs in this process. But despite the utility of these endeavors, constructiv-
4. See Biermann 2005; Dessai and Schipper 2003; Grubb and Yamin 2001; Paterson 1996a;
Rowlands 1995; Sterk and Wittneben 2006; and Yamin and Depledge 2004.
5. See Bulkeley and Betsill 2003; Newell 2000; Paterson 1996b; Paterson, Humphreys, and
Pettiford 2003; and Stokke 1997.
6. Risse-Kappen 1995.
7. Bernstein 2001.
8. Wapner 1996.
60 • Conceptualizing Climate Governance

ism’s engagement with the theoretical implications of the governance of climate

change outside of the realm of rule-based international politics and involve-
ment of NNSAs in this process remains incidental, indirect and marginal. The
main reason is quite simply because by far the chief preoccupation of con-
structivist theorists is to highlight the “the role of collectively held or ‘inter-
subjective’ ideas and understandings on social life.”9 Hence, even leading
constructivist scholars now grant that in order to generate more speciªc expla-
nations and broader predictions of political change, constructivism, much like
rational choice theory, needs to be “coupled with a more speciªc understanding
of who the relevant actors are, what they want, and what the content of social struc-
tures might be.”10
The other perspective that has gained popularity as a means of under-
standing global climate politics is the global governance approach.11 Although
not all accounts of this hugely variant literature provide a counterpoint to the
state-centered regime approach, the recent proliferation of a body of work on
global governance can be seen as an attempt to address the lapses in the regime
approach and hence to conceptualize governance “beyond” the regime.12 Here,
“governance” refers to the numerous activities which are signiªcant both in es-
tablishing international rules and in shaping policy through “on-the-ground”
implementation even when some of such activities originate from actors that,
technically speaking, “are not endowed with formal authority.”13 Usually in-
cluded in this group of actors are international organizations, global social
movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), transnational scientiªc
networks, business organizations, multinational corporations and other forms
of private authority.14 The governance perspective thus provides the conceptual
space to interrogate how such actors might be involved in governing beyond the
formal structures of government. Hence, rather than focusing solely on interna-
tional climate institutions, such as the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol, the gov-
ernance approach would “refer to all purposeful mechanisms and measures
aimed at steering social systems towards preventing, mitigating, or adapting to
the risks posed by climate change.”15 However, the focus of this literature on the
“changing roles and power of states and nonstate actors”16 has three consequent
problems. The ªrst concerns the relationship between the state and NNSAs.
With attention focused on the nature of the actors involved, the basis on which

9. Finnemore and Sikkink 2001, 392.

10. Finnemore and Sikkink 2001, 393: Our italics.
11. We note that it is rather unsatisfactory to use the term “global governance” to describe both a
phenomenon in world politics and the theoretical approach used to analyze it, but as this is
commonly done we do not break with that convention here.
12. See Weiss 2000, 795; Rosenau 1997; 2000; Ruggie 1998; 2004, Stokke 1997; and Wapner 1997.
13. Rosenau 1992, 6.
14. Dingwerth and Pattberg 2006, 189; and O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte, and Williams 2000.
15. Jagers and Stripple 2003, 385.
16. Sending and Neumann 2006, 654.
 Chukwumerije Okereke, Harriet Bulkeley, and Heike Schroeder • 61

NNSAs can be regarded as “governors,” and crucially the extent to which they
have “critical independence”17 from the state, is rarely examined.18 Given this
oversight, it follows that the validity of the claim in the dominant narrative that
states are losing power to NNSAs remains unclear. Second, and related, Sending
and Neumann suggest that in deªning authority as “the capacity to generate
compliance,”19 studies in global governance “inadvertently perpetuate the very
state-centric framework that they seek to transcend.”20 Without an alternative
account of power and authority, conceptualizing governance “beyond” the re-
gime becomes tautologically tied to the structures and mechanisms of inter-
state governance. Finally, as Sending and Neumann21 also point out, a focus on
the actors involved with global governance means that there is a virtual lack of
attention to the processes of governing. Therefore, whilst scholarship on gover-
nance is on the rise, the theorization of governance beyond the regime is essen-
tially stuck in a conceptual impasse.

Moving Beyond the Conceptual Impasse

In order to take the debate forward, we argue that the study of global climate
governance requires an engagement with theoretical perspectives that can open
up the taken-for-granted ground concerning who and what is involved in “gov-
ernance.” We suggest that this means renewed attention to issues concerning
the nature of power, relations between state and NNSAs, structure and agency,
and how governing as a process takes place. In addressing these core issues, we
have found two perspectives—those of the neo-Gramscian and Foucauldian
schools of thought—particularly productive. Both approaches suggest that there
is signiªcant scope for opening up the “black boxes” of global environmental
governance—power, the state/nonstate divide, structure and agency, and the
process of governing—in order to enrich our understanding of how governance
beyond the regime takes place. Yet, it is important when drawing from these two
different theories to stress that our aim is not to integrate them or to build a new
theoretical perspective. Indeed, we are deeply aware that there are signiªcant
differences in the ontological premise of the two perspectives that would make
any attempt to integrate them hugely difªcult. As noted from the outset, the
objective is the far less ambitious project of specifying how aspects of the two
theories might help us to identify, think more critically about and, ultimately,
deepen our understanding of the conceptual issues involved in the governance
of climate change beyond the regime. The ªrst of the issues we discuss is the na-
ture of power.

17. Barry and Eckersley 2005, 3.

18. Hunold and Dryzek 2005.
19. Rosenau 2000, 188.
20. Sending and Neumann 2006, 188.
21. Sending and Neumann 2006, 188.
62 • Conceptualizing Climate Governance

The Nature of Power

The concept of power is critical to conceptualizing governance but rarely re-
ceives explicit attention in relation to global environmental governance.22 The
focus of the neoliberal functionalist approach on characterizing the regime in
collective action terms has meant that the overriding emphasis has been on
showing “the role of international regimes in helping states to realize common
interests”23 rather than on the analysis of how power is implicated in the pro-
cess. To the extent that power is evident in the regime, it derives either from mil-
itary might or economic clout and is held by state actors.
Constructivist authors have challenged this approach, highlighting the
role of ideas and values in shaping the nature and terms of debate, implicitly ac-
knowledging that knowledge is a form of power.24 Likewise, writers on global
governance have drawn attention to the multitude of actors who exert different
kinds of impact in addressing global environmental problems. Nonetheless, in
both approaches the state is still seen to have the ultimate (sovereign) authority
and much of the account is couched in terms of the roles of other groups of ac-
tors in inºuencing state actors rather than in being “governors” in their own
right.25 Moreover, these approaches assume an account of power that is “terri-
torially bounded” and “equated with the nation state”26 and which regards
power in “zero-sum” terms so that one actor’s gain is another’s loss. In the main,
then, power is conceived in distributional terms—who gets what, when and
how.27 In some other accounts,28 power is seen as “shared” between actors, or as
residing in multiple locations. These moves to consider power in multiple and
relational terms have signiªcant potential for conceptualizing climate gover-
nance beyond the regime, but to date their implications have rarely been ex-
plored. Here, we suggest that neo-Gramscian and Foucauldian concepts can
provide some critical insight, sharing as they do a sense of power as constitutive,
“having to do with the organisation of society, state and market.”29
First, we turn to the multiple nature of power. A key thrust of the govern-
mentality perspective is Foucault’s analytical distinction between sovereignty
and government as different forms of power. For Foucault, sovereignty speaks to
the power and functions of the state concerned with control over territory and

22. Of course classical readings in neorealism are more or less power theories with the central con-
tention being that “the distribution of power resources among actors strongly affects both the
prospects for effective regimes to emerge and persist in an issue-area” (Hasenclever, Mayer, and
Rittberger 1997, 3–4). However, on these accounts, power was essentially equated with military
might. This was later expanded in response to critiques to include economic power. A strand of
the functionalist critique of neorealism continues to allude to the inadequacy of a bi-modal ac-
count of power.
23. Hasenclever, Mayer, and Rittberger 1997, 4.
24. Ruggie 1998; Risse 2002; and Wendt 1999.
25. See Auer 2000; and Betsill and Bulkeley 2004.
26. Betsill and Bulkeley 2006, 146.
27. Lipschutz 2005, 751.
28. Jagers and Stripple 2003; and Risse 2002.
29. Lipschutz 2005, 751.
 Chukwumerije Okereke, Harriet Bulkeley, and Heike Schroeder • 63

the use of sanctions and the rule of law as means of enforcement. In contrast,
government speaks to the totality of “the speciªc mechanisms, techniques, and
procedures which political authorities deploy to realize and enact their pro-
grammes.”30 Government is thus “an indirect form of rule that acts explicitly on
populations rather than territory.”31 In Foucault’s words, it is “The ensemble
formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reºections, the calcula-
tions, and tactics, that allow the exercise of this speciªc, albeit complex, form of
power.”32 Likewise, the neo-Gramscian approach draws attention to how knowl-
edge and power are co-constituted in order to leverage speciªc actors, policies
and practices and ultimately privilege a particular rationality in the governance
of social order.
This conception seems vital in any serious attempt to understand not just
the ways in which state actors seek to inºuence policies through the more tradi-
tional means of power, but also the manifold ways in which the sheer complex-
ity of the climate system and the politics surrounding its management serves to
open the space for other autonomous actors as well as different ideas and ratio-
nalities to compete for leverage in the process of climate governance at both do-
mestic and international levels. For example, the general preference for market
mechanisms such as emissions trading and the Clean Development Mechanism
(CDM) (as opposed to traditional command and control management meth-
ods) as the means of tackling climate change could very well be regarded as evi-
dence of the dominance of a particular rationality of government and social or-
der.33 This is not to say, however, that other “mentalities” of climate change rule
are not also signiªcant. The proliferation of different governing arrangements
and initiatives for the urban governance of climate change lies largely outside of
an approach based on market mechanisms. Further, within the workings of he-
gemony as a form of power, neo-Gramscian thought suggests that there may be
multiple ways through which various actors may be deploying their respective
strategic capacities in order to inºuence climate policy that might lie outside of
traditional distributive accounts of power. In this context, there is a need to ex-
plore the extent to which the views from some quarters may be privileged sim-
ply because such actors have either acquired “expert status” or recognition for
being proactive about climate change action. Conversely, there is a need also to
be sensitive to the possibility that some critical views may be dismissed simply
because the proponents do not have reputation for being in favor of strong ac-
tion on climate change.
Moreover, even within the broad policy of emissions trading as agreed by
governments, there are still countless ways through which various agents—state
and nonstate alike—could function to inºuence the more substantive policies,
shape the direction of the policy and ultimately determine not just the effective-

30. MacKinnon 2000, 295; see also Dean 1999.

31. Thompson 2005, 324.
32. Foucault 1991, 102.
33. Okereke 2008, 168–186.
64 • Conceptualizing Climate Governance

ness of the policy but also the winners and losers in the game. This can be seen,
for example, in the various debates around the issue of technologies, processes
and instruments for emission measurements, initial allocation of quotas, car-
bon accounting, the scope of emissions to be covered, the appropriate metrics
to be used, what sectors and companies should be included in trading, whether
and at what time to retire emission credits, etc. Indeed, for Foucauldians, in or-
der to govern from a distance, governmental rationalities and dominant dis-
courses need to be made “practical” in the form of governmental technologies.
It is, in particular, this “technical aspect of government . . . [which] has often
been neglected in . . . traditional analyses of political power.”34
Second, we consider the notion of power as relational. Rather than seeing
power as residing permanently with, or as a unique characteristic of, speciªed
entities, Gramsci conceptualizes power in terms of the “conªguration of forces
relative to each other and to adversaries.”35 In this view, power derives from so-
cial identities as much as it arises from structural forces.36 Thus, power is
broadly “implicated in the constitutions of the conditions of interaction”
among the different forces within a given social order.37 For Foucauldians, gov-
ernment as a form of power also involves the organization of society into forms
and functions that enhance the welfare of the population and individual liberty
without eroding the ability of the state to exercise socio-political control.
In other words, the political freedom and agency of the citizenry is “consid-
ered both as an end and as a means of governing.”38 However, while in a neo-
Gramscian analysis power is exercised through hegemony (indicating a con-
scious effort to ensure control by the ruling elite), for Foucauldians it involves
the use of tactics and techniques consistent with the wider changes in political
and socio-economic realms to steer conduct.39 In other words, the neo-
Gramscian account advances a structural and socially constructed account of
power whilst the governmentality perspective inclines to a dispersed, or what
Barnett and Duval40 call “productive” form of power. The account is dispersed in
the sense that Foucauldians are less impressed by “macro” accounts of power
but rather emphasize that power is produced “through a series of relations that
take place at the micro-level during social interactions.”41 Here, it is maintained
that even when power might be conceived as ºowing from the center, its exact
form remains ethnographic and can thus only be described in terms of the pre-
vailing local social context and relations.42 Despite differences, however, both
accounts direct our attention away from conventional distributive matters to a
consideration of how power is constituted in and through social relations.

34. Rose-Redwood 2006, 473.

35. Levy and Newell 2005, 51.
36. Jessop 2002a; Jessop 2002b.
37. Isaac 1987, 74–75; quoted in Lee 1995, 148.
38. Sending and Neumann 2006, 656; cf. Peters 2001, 76.
39. See Dean 1999; Foucault 1991, 95; and Sending and Neumann 2006.
40. Barnett and Duvall 2005.
41. Edkins 2007, 92.
42. Uitermark 2005; and Walker 1999.
 Chukwumerije Okereke, Harriet Bulkeley, and Heike Schroeder • 65

This acknowledgement of the multiple and relational nature of power by

both perspectives offers interesting space for a better account of climate gover-
nance beyond the regime. The utility of this conception is that, ªrst, it allows
one to escape the temptation to perpetually ascribe actors with certain measures
of power in the analysis of climate governance and the prediction of political
outcomes. Rather, it allows sensitivity to the multiple socio-political factors and
dynamics that might serve to confer actors with varying measures of power at
different stages in the development of both national and international climate
governance systems.43 Second, it allows for sensitivity to the possibility that “un-
equal power relations and conºicting interests may exist”44 even where different
actors or groups of actors claim that they are working in consensus. And, third,
recognizing the relational nature of power enables one to recognize that the
inºuence of actors is not simply a matter of where they stand in terms of speciªc
climate policies and programs but also about where they stand in relation to
other relevant actors. For example, local NGOs may have little clout in relation
to their country’s ministry ofªcials and members of delegation at international
climate conferences in inºuencing the process. However, teamed up with inter-
national NGOs, for example under the umbrella of the Climate Action Network
(CAN), their positions published by international reporting services are very
much taken note of by state ofªcials.45 This implies, in other words, that a
proper understanding of the location of power lies in a thorough reading of the
alignments and matrices of the key elements or forces that animate or oppose a
given a socio-political and economic order. Levy and Newell explain this ac-
count of power in terms of a game of chess. Here, “power lies not just in playing
the pieces, but in the conªguration of forces relative to each other and to adver-
saries, and each set of moves and countermoves opens up new ªssures and pres-
ents fresh possibilities to price open the seams of the historical bloc.”46 In short,
by highlighting the relational and multiple forms of power, both approaches
provide signiªcant resources for rethinking the nature of power in global envi-
ronmental governance, with signiªcant implications, in particular, for the rela-
tion between state and NNSAs, to which we turn below.

The Nature of Public and Private Authority

One of the most signiªcant aspects of global climate politics is the wide range
and unique nature of entities whose activities play an important part in deliver-
ing results and meeting the objectives that are set at the international level. The
process of governing climate change has resulted not just in the participation of
a wide range of actors—from individuals through local communities to transna-
tional organizations—but in the emergence of relatively novel governance ar-
rangements at all levels of social organization. Such novel governance arrange-

43. See Okereke 2008.

44. Lee 1995, 148.
45. See Schroeder 2003, 111.
46. Levy and Newell 2005, 50.
66 • Conceptualizing Climate Governance

ments include coalitions of sub-national governments like the UK-based

Transition Towns, public-private partnerships like Climate VISION, transna-
tional networks like the Cities for Climate Protection program, and private ar-
rangements as seen in the workings of many voluntary offset schemes such as
those run by ªrms like Climate Care.47 The increasing visibility of these actors
has forced many regime scholars to be increasingly sanguine about the role of
actors other than central governments in steering international environmental
arrangements.48 Moreover, the global governance literature has consistently
pointed to the signiªcance of agency below and above the level of the state.
However, for the most part, both approaches still focus on international institu-
tions and nation-states as the primary areas of governance with little consider-
ation given to how this phenomenon challenges the underlying precepts of
studies of global environmental politics.
We suggest that there are two issues here which are central to understand-
ing governance beyond the regime. First, this phenomenon brings into question
the very nature of the state and how it achieves outcomes. Second, and related,
it raises questions about the boundary between public and private authority.
Pattberg alludes to this when he points out that many of the initiatives for cli-
mate governance which bring businesses, civil society and central governments
together in one arrangement combine logics that have normally been assumed
to be separate in traditional accounts of global governance. These initiatives, he
argues, “transcend state-centred, territorial-based forms of politics, thereby es-
tablishing new spaces of transnational organizations next to international
norms.”49 Similarly, Betsill and Bulkeley, with particular reference to the role of
transnational municipal networks, argue that the increasing signiªcance of
these initiatives pose serious challenges to “traditional analytical divisions be-
tween international and domestic politics, between local, national and global
scales, and between states and non-state actors.”50 Here, we suggest that insights
from neo-Gramscian and Foucauldian thought can help us excavate these issues
and consider the implications for how governing beyond the regime takes place.
Turning ªrst to the issue of the state and how it is conceived, in main-
stream accounts of international regimes and the recent global governance liter-
ature the state is mainly treated as a “black box,”51 a homogenous, sovereign en-
tity which is the repository of power on the global stage. Neo-Gramscian and
Foucauldian thinking requires that we critically consider the very nature of the
state. Gramscian writings recognize that the state is a far more complex and less
bounded entity than is suggested by either regime analysis or a global gover-
nance approach. In this account the state is conceived “not [as] a static institu-

47. See Bäckstrand and Lövbrand 2006; Benner et al. 2004; Betsill and Bulkeley 2004; 2006;
Bulkeley and Betsill 2003; Pattberg 2005; and Yanacopulos 2005.
48. See Keohane and Nye 2001; and Vogler 2003.
49. Pattberg 2005.
50. Betsill and Bulkeley 2006.
51. Stokke 1997, 29.
 Chukwumerije Okereke, Harriet Bulkeley, and Heike Schroeder • 67

tion but a dynamic system of strategic selectivity.”52 The lack of a deªned

boundary between state and society is evident in the Gramscian concept of he-
gemony. For Gramsci, hegemony is successfully established when a dominant
class is able to link its interests with those of the subordinate classes in the pur-
suit of a social order that reproduces its own dominant position.53 Accordingly,
the successful establishment of hegemony implies that the ruling class need not
enforce discipline by coercion but rather that hegemonic stability is rooted in
consensus as manifested in the everyday operation of the institutions of civil society.54
This is possible because many within the subordinate classes have come to ac-
cept the hegemonic project as their own even though in critical terms the proj-
ect serves to reproduce the dominance of the ruling elite. It is in reference to this
highly dialectical relationship between the state and civil society that Levy and
Newell describe them as “different aspects of the same order.”55 The politics of
climate change bring out these elements very clearly both in terms of the reli-
ance of Annex 1 states on a range of NNSA actors to meet their emission reduc-
tion targets and also in the way that developing countries have come to embrace
market mechanisms like emissions trading and carbon offsets as credible means
of achieving sustainability even though they ultimately serve to reinforce the
material dominance of the developed countries.56
Similarly, in Foucauldian terms, government is understood not as the co-
ercive apparatus of the state per se but rather as the sum of the processes and ac-
tivities “aiming to shape, guide, or affect the conduct of some person or per-
sons”57 or what Foucault58 terms the “conduct of conduct.” This allows for
“government” in the plural, so that there are a plurality of governing agencies
and authorities, of aspects of behavior to be governed, or norms invoked, of
purposes sought, and of effects, outcomes and consequences.”59 Governmen-
tality is, therefore, not a practice conªned to the state, but one which can be un-
dertaken by both nation-state and non-nation-state actors.60 For example,
through taking a governmentality approach Bryant61 suggests that NNSAs have
been enrolled into the practices of neoliberalism in ways that are deeply ambiv-
alent. Lipschutz makes a similar argument, concluding that global civil society
is “almost fully internalised within the system of governmentality that consti-

52. Jessop 1990, 221; 2002b, 463.

53. Gramsci 1971, 1181; and Cox 1983.
54. It is important to note that in Gramscian framework consensus does not mean harmony or ac-
tive agreement; rather, it simply implies absence of active resistance.
55. Levy and Newell 2005, 52.
56. See Bachram 2004.
57. Gordon 1991, 2.
58. Foucault 2000, 341.
59. Dean 1999, cited in Bryant 2002, 268.
60. In practice it is the case that more often than not scholars have sought to examine govern-
mentality as a means through which state-based authorities operate. See Gordon 1991; and
MacKinnon 2000.
61. Bryant 2002.
68 • Conceptualizing Climate Governance

tutes and subjectiªes it, yet which the civil society presumes to contest, regulate
and modify through its projects.”62
The important point is that both approaches help us to see that the state is
intricately interwoven with society. This issue of the state, and how it accom-
plishes governing, is critically tied to the boundary between public and private
authority. Once the “black box” is removed from around the state, then what
constitutes the “nongovernmental” or “private” sphere becomes more problem-
atic. In other words, where the “state” as a formal institution may be bounded,
its power and inºuence, and the ways in which it accomplishes governance
tasks, reach beyond the public sphere into the realms of private authority and
civil society. This could in turn lead to more serious questions about the ade-
quacy or otherwise of current institutions for climate governance which limits
emission reduction quotas to national governments. Already there has been a
series of proposals which suggest that corporations or industrial sectors should
be allocated targets in a post-2012 climate regime.63 On the other hand, a critical
implication of this characterization is that the rise of parallel initiatives operat-
ing beyond the regime is not necessarily a sign of a loss of power by states as
most global governance approaches tend to suggest, but rather that they indi-
cate a different means of getting governing done—through private authority
and different parts of the state. As Sending and Neumann argue, “the ascen-
dance of nonstate actors in shaping and carrying out global governance func-
tions is not an instance of transfer of power from the state to nonstate actors, or
a matter of the changing sources of, or institutional locus for authority. Rather it
is an expression of a change in governmentality”64 where civil society is ren-
dered both an object and the subject of governing. In other words, governing be-
yond the state does not necessarily entail governing without the state. What is,
therefore, needed now in order to more thoroughly understand the politics of
climate change is a series of theoretically sensitive, empirical investigations that
can articulate implications of current and possibly future initiatives for the au-
thority of the state and the series of actors on which the state now seems to rely
in order to dispense its traditional functions of governance.

The Relationship between Structure and Agency

The third conceptual topic that requires more detailed attention in conceptual-
izing climate governance beyond the regime is the relationship between struc-
ture and agency. Here, we use structure very broadly to include both the overall
structural architecture and the individual rules, norms and principles that shape
global politics. This would include, on the meta level, the current structure of

62. Lipschutz 2005, 15.

63. See Sterk and Wittneben 2006.
64. Sending and Neuman 2006, 658.
 Chukwumerije Okereke, Harriet Bulkeley, and Heike Schroeder • 69

the world in the form of nation-states. Other levels could include the interna-
tional regime level, including institutions like the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol,
Global Environment Fund (GEF), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
as well as the broader workings of the international economic institutions. We
suggest that the ways in which public and private authority are conªgured, and
the relations between them, are shaped by structural constraints at multiple lev-
els and that these structural constraints work to privilege some actors, ideas and
policies over and above contending alternatives in relation to national and in-
ternational climate governance.
Existing theories of regimes do not generally give attention to the role of
structure in international cooperation for the environment. This has to do in
part with the focus on state actors and in particular the assumption of theoreti-
cal equality among states.65 The pervasive assumption, mostly evident in the
neoliberal institutionalist variant of regime analysis, is that all actors have a rela-
tively equal ability to inºuence and mutually beneªt from the process of inter-
national cooperation.66 Similarly, except for some critical versions, existing the-
ories of global governance and constructivism take the structure as given and
merely attempt to map the role of various actors and intersubjective ideas re-
spectively within the existing institutional arrangements. Here again, these ap-
proaches could be supplemented by drawing upon various aspects of the neo-
Gramscian and governmentality perspectives.
Gramscian thought contributes to our understanding by emphasizing that
although structures do not deªne outcomes, they do deªne the potential range
of alternative strategies from which different agents can choose. According to
Giddens, structure does not exist “independent of the knowledge that agents
have about what they do in their day-to-day activity.”67 Structural embedded-
ness varies; the deeper the structure, the more difªcult it is not only to trace the
human interactions that resulted in these structures but to also bring about
change.68 Bieler and Morton further suggest that such “macro level” structures
can still be changed but “only if it is realized that a particular structure is the re-
sult of human interaction in the past and not an objective ‘given.’”69 The per-
spective indicates as well that structures may also be transformed by agency over
time and thus avoids the element of determinism usually associated with classi-
cal Marxian philosophy. Agency is thus located in structure, but not determined
by it. In other words, social interaction is structurally conditioned but not struc-
turally determined.70 For example, the notion that climate change is a foreign
policy issue is being challenged by the breadth and depth of NNSA activities

65. Klein 1974; Waltz 1979.

66. See, for example, Young 1989, 199.
67. Giddens 1984, 26 in Bieler and Morton 2001, 8.
68. Bieler and Morton 2001, 26.
69. Bieler and Morton 2001, 27.
70. Archer 1995, 90, in Bieler and Morton 2001, 27–28.
70 • Conceptualizing Climate Governance

and collaborations. It is in this sense that the historicist neo-Gramscian perspec-

tives contribute to understanding, conceptualization and possibly change by at-
tempting to unmask the apparent objective status of existing predominantly
neoliberal structures.
Such insights also lead to an emphasis not only on the variations in the
nature of NNSAs but also on the asymmetrical inºuence such agents may ac-
quire depending on their alignments with the historical bloc and the position
they occupy within the existing structure.71 It is, of course, clear that while Shell,
Friends of the Earth, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development,
and the Association of Indigenous Communities are all NNSAs, they do not
command the same power in inºuencing global climate policies either within
or beyond the realms of the international regime. Through different forms of
authority and inºuence they may, however, be able to shape the ways in which
states seek to govern climate change, and undertake means for governing cli-
mate protection in their own right. At the same time, neo-Gramscian writings
recognize that hegemony exhibits a certain level of contingency and instability.
The approach, as Levy and Newell put it, stresses the point that the “economic
and ideational realms evolve in dialectical tension generating underlying fault
lines and contradictions.”72 The dynamic structure of the social system means
that even entities that ordinarily occupy weak positions within the existing
structure can still leverage and exert signiªcant inºuence through the use of
well-timed effective strategies. For Foucauldians, on the other hand, the engage-
ment with agency is less about strategies and social struggles and more about
the role of the self and individual actors. Here, attention is on “how subjects
and subjectivities are formed and how different modes of calculation emerge
and become institutionalized.”73
Overall, we argue that attention to the relationship between structure and
agency and in particular the effect of the dominant neoliberal political eco-
nomic framework is required in order to establish the limits and capabilities of
not just NNSAs as a distinctive group-type of actors, but also the different types
of actors that are often lumped together in this category. The international cli-
mate negotiations are currently faced with the daunting question of how to re-
duce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing coun-
tries. Given the principle of sovereignty, countries will not forego the proªts
they have yet to make from the natural resources within their territorial bound-
aries. The problem will need to be addressed through the market, enabling the
private sector to come up with innovative, and possibly far-reaching, ap-
proaches. For example, London-based Canopy Capital has bought rights to the
ecosystem services (storing carbon, producing rainfall for agriculture, etc.) pro-
duced by a rainforest reserve in Guyana on the assumption that ecosystem ser-

71. See Harvey 1996; Liverman 2006; and Okereke 2008.

72. Levy and Newell 2005, 50.
73. Uitermark 2005, 138.
 Chukwumerije Okereke, Harriet Bulkeley, and Heike Schroeder • 71

vices will not remain priceless in the future. Attention to the structure-agency
dynamics is also crucial in order to determine their governance capacity which
in turn is vital in theorizing climate change governance beyond the regime. At
the same time, it should be recognized, drawing on the governmentality per-
spective, that through the very act of governing, the reach and effect of domi-
nant narratives and structures can be questioned and reworked.

Governance as a Process
Scholars interested in issues of global environmental governance have shown a
peculiar lack of curiosity for exploring the actual dynamics of governance—the
hows of governing. For the most part, regime approaches are concerned with the
question of identifying which factors are most important in determining the in-
cidence, stability and effectiveness of regimes. Indeed, the classiªcation of the
three basic variants of the regime approach (neorealism, functionalism and
constructivism) is principally based on how this question is answered. Simi-
larly, the ultimate focus of global governance approaches has been on tracking
the types and identities of actors as well as the degree to which power ºows
from one actor to another and the consequent implications for issues such as le-
gitimacy and accountability. The result of focusing on the process of regime de-
velopment, on the one hand, and tracking the process of institutionalization of
political authority on the other hand, is that thinking on the actual modalities
of governance has been largely ignored.
Governmentality is a perspective which focuses explicitly on such pro-
cesses. Indeed the notion of governmentality was coined in order to capture the
“socio-political functions and processes of governance.”74 Accordingly, a global
governmentality perspective, unlike other accounts of global governance, allows
the analyst to engage with how governing is accomplished in practical and tech-
nical terms. In focusing on these processes, governmentality approaches are
concerned with two related phenomena—the rationalities and the technologies
of government. Governmental rationalities “deªne both the objects (what
should be governed) and nature (how they should be governed) of government,
in effect rendering reality governable through the collecting and framing of
knowledge.”75 Governmental technologies “both make rationalities ‘visible’ and
permit their extension through time and space.”76 Two forms of governmental
technology are seen to be critical to the operation of “advanced liberal govern-
ment.”77 The ªrst are the “technologies of performance,” which seek to deter-
mine what counts as relevant knowledge and provokes action on the ground,
for example through targets, monitoring, audit processes and so on. The second
are “technologies of agency,” which seek to determine the nature of “the sub-

74. Sending and Neumann 2006, 651.

75. Bulkeley, Watson, and Hudson 2007.
76. Murdoch 2000, 505.
77. Dean 1999; Haahr 2004; and Raco and Imrie 2000.
72 • Conceptualizing Climate Governance

ject” and its participation in processes of governing, and include different forms
of participation and partnership as well as infrastructures and materials through
which action is created and sustained. For example, Oels argues that “an ad-
vanced liberal government of climate change mobilizes actors in the business
sector, the non-proªt sector and governments at all levels to engage in ‘partner-
ships’ to contribute in their own ways to mitigating climate change, thereby
turning climate change into a matter of concern and responsibility for all these
actors.”78 In this manner, such technologies serve to propagate and disseminate
governmental rationalities. However, a key feature of the governmentality litera-
ture is the emphasis that governmental technologies do not merely reºect any
given rationality, but are central to actively deªning “the domains which are to
be governed.”79 This means that “forms of political authority and subjectivity
are not determined outside of the particular rationalities and technologies of
government, but are actively created and mobilized through this process.”80 The
rationalities and technologies of government which come to shape the roles of
actors and policy instruments can be illustrated by considering the processes in-
volved in constructing and regulating what counts as a carbon offset. In turn,
these processes rework what the effective and legitimate governance of climate
change might entail.

Conclusion
In this article, we have suggested that current approaches to the theorization of
the governing of global environmental problems have reached a conceptual im-
passe. We have argued that in order to address this impasse, four conceptual is-
sues merit particular attention. We identiªed these as: the nature of power and
authority in the global arena; the nature of private and public authority; the dy-
namics between structure and agency; and the actual practice and processes of
governance. We have suggested that governmentality and neo-Gramscian per-
spectives provide interesting insights into these four domains which can enable
a more critical engagement with the nature of governance beyond the interna-
tional regime.
A critical starting point is that these approaches generate an understanding
of power that is radically different from those implied in the prevailing accounts
of regime analysis and global governance. Rather than seeing power in distribu-
tive, zero-sum terms, they demonstrate that power is multiple and relational.
Together they show that power is constituted through social relations as well as
a function of the speciªc alignment of social structural forces at any given time.
Moreover, they indicate that there is a distinct difference between sovereignty as
a form of power and governmentality as a form of power which speaks to the to-

78. Oels 2006, 199

79. Murdoch 2000, 513.
80. Raco 2003; and Bulkeley, Watson, and Hudson 2007.
 Chukwumerije Okereke, Harriet Bulkeley, and Heike Schroeder • 73

tality of the rationalities, techniques, mechanisms and procedures utilized by

political authorities in a bid to enact and realize their goals.81 Subscribing to
non-sovereign, multiple and relational conceptions of power automatically
opens the space for a critical exploration of how agencies beyond the regime
might be using various positions, tactics and practices other than governmental
coercion to inºuence both national and international climate politics. The
power to govern climate change is then not only a matter of whose interests and
inºuences come to dominate the international regime and its implementation,
but also of the multiple ways in which actors within and outside the regime de-
ploy strategic capacities, create alternative “mentalities” of rule, and render the
issue of climate change “practical.” This suggests that our analytic gaze has to
shift from explicit power struggles over who gets what, how and when, to con-
sider alternative means through which power is exercised to constitute the right
disposition of things for climate governance.
Insights from neo-Gramscian and governmentality approaches also gener-
ate an understanding of the state that is radically different from the “black box”
conceptualization implied in prevailing accounts. By substituting our idea of
the state as a bounded institution, a single homogenous entity, with a more
complex one whereby ruling elites, dominant classes and civil society relate dia-
lectically in ways that give rise to multiple centers of calculation, we are able to
transcend the state versus nonstate dichotomy and to focus on the actual pro-
cesses of governance and the logics which underpin them. At the same time, un-
derstanding the state as a site of strategic selectivity,82 coupled with a realization
of the multiple nature of power, suggests that the claim of the diffusion of
power from states to nonstates should be approached with some caution.
Rather it is possible to consider the possibility that the role of NNSAs is critically
shaped by state actors and vice versa. Rather than seeking an a priori distinction
between state and nonstate actors, this insight suggests that in seeking to build
our understanding of the politics of climate change we need to pay particular at-
tention to the relation between state and nonstate actors, and the ways in which
roles and responsibilities are ascribed.
It is in this context that the wider social and political economic structures
within which these actors operate emerge as a signiªcant factor. We have argued
that both the meta and the micro structural components of society combine to
determine the conditions of interaction between and within states and NNSAs,
and to limit the possibility for governing within and beyond the regime. What is
and is not considered an acceptable response to climate change is in part deter-
mined by particular hegemonies or governmentalities concerning the nature of
the climate change problem. At the same time, while existing structures play
crucial roles in determining outcomes, our argument is that Foucauldian and
Gramscian perspectives provide insights into how actors work to alter the con-

81. MacKinnon 2000, 295.

82. Jessop 1990, 2002b.
74 • Conceptualizing Climate Governance

tours of existing structures. This invites a focus on the actual process and dy-
namics of governance in order to allow scholars to examine how various agen-
cies are using different practical techniques to leverage their positions in the
multiple arenas/centers of global climate governance. As we have argued, the
question of how climate change is governed is not merely an interesting empiri-
cal matter, but has signiªcant consequences for the ways in which we conceptu-
alize structure and agency, the state and power. Together, we suggest, the critical
scrutiny of these concepts which we have advanced in this article has the poten-
tial to enable a more thorough understanding of the agents, processes and prac-
tices of governing of climate change, and of its potential to make a difference to
the global climate.

References
Archer, Margaret. 1995. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Auer, Matthew R. 2000. Who Participates in Global Environmental Governance? Partial
Answers from International Relations Theory. Policy Sciences 33 (2):155–180.
Bachram, Heidi. 2004. Climate Fraud and Carbon Colonialism: The New Trade in
Greenhouse Gases. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 15 (4): 5–20.
Bäckstrand, Karin, and Eva Lövbrand. 2006. Planting Trees to Mitigate Climate Change:
Contested Discourses of Ecological Modernization, Green Governmentality and
Civic Environmentalism. Global Environmental Politics 6 (1): 50–75.
Barnett, Michael, and Raymond Duvall, eds. 2005. Power in Global Governance. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barry, John, and Robyn Eckersley. 2005. An Introduction to Reinstating the State. In The
State and Global Ecological Crisis, edited by John Barry and Robyn Eckersley, x–xv.
Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Benner, Thorsten, Reinicke Wolfgang H., and Witte Jan Martin. 2004.
Multisectoral Networks in Global Governance: Towards a Pluralistic System of Ac-
countability. Government and Opposition 39 (2): 191–210.
Bernstein, Steven F. 2001. The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism. New York: Colum-
bia University Press.
Betsill, Michele M. 2006. Cities and the Multilevel Governance of Global Climate
Change. Global Governance 12 (2): 141–159.
Betsill, Michele M., and Elisabeth Corell. 2001. NGO Inºuence in International Environ-
mental Negotiations: A Framework for Analysis. Global Environmental Politics 1 (4):
65–85.
Betsill, Michele M., and Harriet Bulkeley. 2004. Transnational Networks and Global En-
vironmental Governance: The Cities for Climate Protection Program. International
Studies Quarterly 48 (2): 471–493.
Bieler, Andreas, and Adam D. Morton. 2001. The Gordian Knot of Agency-Structure in
International Relations: A Neo-Gramscian Perspective. European Journal of Interna-
tional Relations 7 (1): 5–35.
Biermann, Frank. 2005. Between USA and the South: Strategic Choices for European Cli-
mate Policy. Climate Policy 5 (3): 273–290.
 Chukwumerije Okereke, Harriet Bulkeley, and Heike Schroeder • 75

Bryant, Raymond L. 2002. Non-governmental Organizations and Governmentality:

‘Consuming’ Biodiversity and Indigenous People in the Philippines. Political
Studies 50 (2): 268–292.
Bulkeley, Harriet, and Michele M. Betsill. 2003. Cities and Climate Change: Urban
Sustainability and Global Environmental Governance. London: Routledge.
Bulkeley, Harriet, Matt Watson, and Ray Hudson. 2007. Modes of Governing Municipal
Waste. Environment and Planning A 39 (11): 2733–2753.
Cox, W. Robert. 1983. Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in
Methods. Millennium 12 (2): 162–175.
Dean, Mitchell. 1999. Governmentality, Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage.
Dessai Suraje, and Emma Lisa Schipper. 2003. The Marrakech Accords to the Kyoto Pro-
tocol: Analysis and Future Prospects. Global Environmental Change 13 (2): 149–
153.
Dingwerth, Klaus, and Philipp Pattberg. 2006. Global Governance as a Perspective on
World Politics. Global Governance 12 (2): 185–203.
Edkins, Jenny. 2007. Poststructuralism. In International Relations Theory for the Twenty-First
Century: An Introduction, edited by Martin Grifªths, 88–98. London: Routledge.
Finnemore, Martha and Sikkink, Kathryn. 2001. Taking Stock: The Constructivist Re-
search Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics. Annual Review
of Political Science 4: 391–416.
Foucault, Michel. [1982] 2000. The Subject and Power. In Power: Essential Works of
Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 3, edited by James Faubion, 326–348. London: Penguin.
———. 1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, 87–104. London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf.
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuralism.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gordon, Colin. 1991. Governmental Rationality: An Introduction. In The Foucault’s Effect:
Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter
Miller, 1–51. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith eds, and trans.). New York: International Publishers.
Grubb, Michael, and Farhana Yamin. 2001. Climatic Collapse at The Hague: What hap-
pened, why, and where do we go from here? International Affairs 77 (2): 261–276.
Gulbrandsen, Lars H., and Steinar Andresen. 2004. NGO Inºuence in the Implementa-
tion of the Kyoto Protocol: Compliance, Flexibility Mechanisms and sinks. Global
Environmental Politics 4 (4): 54–75.
Haahr, Jens Henrik. 2004. Open Co-ordination as Advanced Liberal Government. Journal
of European Public Policy 11 (2): 209–230.
Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing.
Hasenclever, Andreas, Peter Mayer, and Volker Rittberger. 1997. Theories of International
Regimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hunold, Christian, and John Dryzek. 2005. Green Political Strategy and the State: Com-
bining Political Theory and Comparative History. In The State and the Global Ecolog-
ical Crisis, edited by John Barry and Robyn Eckersley, 77–95. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
76 • Conceptualizing Climate Governance

Isaac Jeffrey C. 1987. Power and the Marxist Theory: A Realist View. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
Jagers, Sverker C., and Johannes Stripple. 2003. Climate Governance beyond the State.
Global Governance 9 (3): 385–399.
Jessop, Bob. 1990. State Theory: Putting the Capitalist States in its Place. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
———. 2002a. The Future of the Capitalist State. London: Polity.
———. 2002b. Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Urban Governance: A State-Theoretical
Perspective. Antipode 34 (3): 452–472.
Keohane, Robert O., and Joseph S. Nye. 2001. Power and Interdependence. 3rd edition. New
York: Person Publishers.
Klein, Robert A. 1974. Sovereign Equality among States: The History of an Idea. Toronto,
ON: University of Toronto Press.
Lee, Kelly. 1995. A neo-Gramscian Approach to International Organization: An Ex-
panded Analysis of Current Reforms to UN Development Activities. In Boundaries
in Question: New Directions in International Relations, edited by John Macmillan and
Andrew Linklater, 144–62. London: Pinter Press.
Levy, David L., and Newell, Peter J., eds. 2005. The Business of Global Environmental Gover-
nance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lipschutz, Ronald. 2005. Power, Politics and Global Civil Society. Millennium 33 (3):
747–769.
Liverman, Diana. 2006. Conventions of Climate Change: Constructions of Danger and
the Dispossession of the Atmosphere, presentation in the Narratives of Climate
Change Plenary Session, Royal Geographical Society Conference, August 2006.
MacKinnon, Danny. 2000. Managerialism, Governmentality and the State: A Neo-
Foucauldian Approach to Local Economic Governance. Political Geography 19 (3):
293–314.
Murdoch, Jonathan. 2000. Space against Time: Competing Rationalities in Planning for
Housing. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 25 (4): 503–519.
Newell, Peter. 2000. Climate Change: Non-State Actors and the Politics of the Greenhouse.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O’Brien, Robert, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte, and Marc Williams. 2000. Con-
testing Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Move-
ments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Oels, Angela. 2006. Rendering Climate Change Governable: From Biopower to Advanced
Liberal Government? Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning 7 (3): 185–207.
Okereke, Chukwumerije. 2008. Global Justice and Neoliberal Environmental Governance.
London: Routledge.
Paterson, Matthew. 1996a. Global Warming and Global Politics. London: Routledge.
———. 1996b. IR Theory: Neo-realism, neo-institutionalism and the Climate Conven-
tion. In The Environment and International Relations, John Vogler and Mark F. Imber,
64–83. London: Routledge.
Paterson, Matthew, David Humphreys, and Lloyd Pettiford. 2003. Conceptualising
Global Environmental Governance: From Interstate Regimes to Counter-
Hegemonic Struggles. Global Environmental Politics 3 (2): 1–8.
Pattberg, Philipp. 2005. The Institutionalization of Private Governance: How Business
and Nonproªt Organizations Agree on Transnational Rules. Governance 18 (4):
589–610.
 Chukwumerije Okereke, Harriet Bulkeley, and Heike Schroeder • 77

Peters, Michael. 2001. Poststructuralism, Marxism, and Neoliberalism. New York: Rowman
& Littleªeld Publishers.
Raco, Mike. 2003. Governmentality, Subject-Building and the Discourses and Practices of
Devolution in the UK. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (1): 75–
95.
Raco, Mike, and Rob Imrie. 2000. Governmentality and Rights and Responsibilities in
Urban Policy. Environment and Planning A 32 (12): 2187–2204.
Risse, Thomas. 2002. Transnational Actors and World Politics. In Handbook of Interna-
tional Relations, edited by Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse and Beth A. Simmons,
255–274. London: Sage.
Risse-Kappen, Thomas, ed. 1995. Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International
Institutions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rosenau, James. 1992. Governance, Order and Change in World Politics. In Governance
without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, edited by James Rosenau
and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, 1–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1997. Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent
World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2000. Change, Complexity and Governance in a Globalizing Space. In Debating
Governance, edited by Jon Pierre, 167–200. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rose-Redwood, Reuben. 2006. Governmentality, Geography and the Geo-Coded World.
Progress in Human Geography 30 (4): 469–486.
Rowlands, Ian H. 1995. The Politics of Global Atmospheric Change. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Ruggie, John G. 1998. What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and
the Social Constructivist Challenge. International Organization 52 (4): 855–885.
———. 2004. Reconstituting the Global Public Domain—Issues, Actors and Practices.
European Journal of International Relations 10 (4): 499–531.
Schroeder, Heike. 2003. From Dusk to Dawn: Climate Change Policy in Japan. Ph.D.
Dissertation, Free University of Berlin.
Sending, Ole Jacob, and Iver B. Neumann. 2006. Governance to Governmentality: Ana-
lysing NGOs, States, and Power. International Studies Quarterly 50 (3): 651–672.
Sterk Wolfgang, and Bettina Wittneben. 2006. Enhancing the Clean Development Mech-
anism Through Sectoral Approaches: Deªnitions, Applications and Ways Forward.
International Environmental Agreements 6 (3): 271–287.
Stokke, Olav Schram. 1997. Regimes as Governance System. In Global Governance: Draw-
ing Insights from the Environmental Experience, edited by Oran Young, 27–63. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thompson Nicola. 2005. Inter-institutional Relations in the Governance of England’s
National Parks: A Governmentality Perspective. Journal of Rural Studies 21 (3): 323–
334.
Uitermark, Justus. 2005. The Genesis and Evolution of Urban Policy: A Confrontation of
Regulationist and Governmentality Approaches. Political Geography 24 (2): 137–
163.
Vogler, John. 2003. Taking Institutions Seriously: How Regimes can be Relevant to Multi-
level Environmental Governance. Global Environmental Politics 3 (2): 25–39.
Walker, R. B. J. 1999. Forum: The Hierarchicalization of Political Community. Review of
International Studies 25 (1): 151–156.
Waltz, Kenneth. 1979. Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
78 • Conceptualizing Climate Governance

Wapner, Paul. 1996. Environmental Activism and World Civic Culture. Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press.
———. 1997. Governance in Global Civil Society. In Global Governance: Drawing Insights
from the Environmental Experience, edited by Oran Young, 65–84. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Weiss, Thomas G. 2000. Governance, Good Governance and Global Governance: Con-
ceptual and Actual Challenges. Third World Quarterly 21 (5): 795–814.
Wendt, Alexander. 1999. Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Yamin, Farhana, and Joanna Depledge. 2004. The International Climate Change Regime: A
Guide to Rules, Institutions and Procedures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yanacopulos, Helen. 2005. The Strategies that Bind: NGO Coalition and their Inºuence.
Global Networks 5 (1): 93–110.
Young, Oran. 1989 International Cooperation: Building Regimes for Natural Resources and the
Environment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.