Over the past decades, global climate governance has expanded rapidly in scientific understanding, policy instruments, and international institutional arrangements. Yet despite this sustained accumulation of knowledge and governance capacity, the global climate system has not exhibited a clear trajectory toward long-term stability. Instead, systemic risks associated with climate change continue to intensify and propagate across economic, political, and social domains (IPCC, 2003; Lenton et al., 2019). This paper argues that this persistent gap between governance effort and system-level outcomes cannot be adequately explained by insufficient commitment, coordination failures, or technological delay alone. Rather, it reflects a deeper mischaracterization of the problem itself. By re-examining climate governance at a more fundamental structural level (L0), this paper shows that under the prevailing global development structure—characterized by growth-dependent economic systems, sovereign competition, and pronounced temporal mismatches—long-term climate stability does not constitute a naturally attainable system state. Instead, it can only be sustained as a transient condition under continuous external intervention. Consequently, climate governance should not be framed as a project aimed at achieving a stable and sustainable end-state. It must instead be reconceptualized as the construction of governance structures capable of maintaining functional integrity, social capacity, and institutional credibility under conditions of persistent and unavoidable instability. This shift from sustainability to resilience provides a more realistic foundation for understanding climate governance, systemic risk management, and the structural preconditions of long-term peace (Holling, 1973; Folke, 2006).
Wangius (2026) studied this question.