Non- and sub-state climate action after Paris: From a facilitative regime to a contested governance landscape

The Paris Agreement marks a significant milestone in international climate politics. With its adoption, Parties call for non- and sub-state actors to contribute to the global climate agenda and close the emissions gap left by states. Such a facilitative setting embraces non-state climate action through joint efforts, synergies, and different modes of collaboration. At the same time, non-state actors have always played a critical and confrontational role in international climate governance. Based on a systematic literature review, we identify and critically assess the role of non-state climate action in a facilitative post-Paris climate governance regime. We thereby highlight three constitutive themes, namely different state-non-state relations, competing level of ambition, and a variety of knowledge foundations. We substantiate these themes, derived from an inductive analysis of existing literature, with illustrative examples and propose three paradigmatic non-state actor roles in post-Paris climate governance on a continuum between compliance and critique. We thereby highlight four particular threats of a facilitative setting, namely substitution of state action, co-optation, tokenism, and depoliticization. Future research should not limit itself to an effective integration of NSSAs into a facilitative climate regime, but also engage with the merits of contestation. This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance