Responding to Climate Change: Governance and Social Action beyond Kyoto

It has become an accepted wisdom within academic circles and policy discourse that climate change is a global problem in need of global solutions. More than a decade after the formation of the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol was ratiaed by a sufacient number of states to come into effect in February 2005. Strenuous international negotiations have led to the development of important structures and processes to govern reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Many, however, consider the progress made as grindingly slow and, in the light of scientiac evidence about the rate of change in the global atmosphere and recommendations for the need to reduce emissions by at least 60 percent over the next afty years, inadequate. In the absence of more effective international action, and cognizant of the big task ahead, alternative attempts at climate change governance and social action have emerged. These approaches recognize that international agreements—if implemented—provide only a partial means through which the mitigation of climate change can be directed, and in turn are reliant on actions in a variety of arenas and at different scales to be effectively implemented. They also increasingly recognize the need to respond to and plan for the impacts of climate change, thus opening up new arenas and linkages between science and policy. This special issue of Global Environmental Politics seeks to move beyond the framework of the international political processes within which the climate change issue is frequently discussed to illuminate how climate protection is sought across a myriad of different sites. In seeking to understand responses to climate change, we are interested in “the processes that create the conditions for ordered rule and collective action within the political realm”1—that is those processes which take place within formalized arenas of government/governance