Effective governance of transnational adaptation initiatives

Adis Dzebo ()
Additional contact information
Adis Dzebo: Stockholm Environment Institute

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 2019, vol. 19, issue 4, No 6, 447-466

Abstract: Abstract Transnational climate governance has mainly been preoccupied with climate change mitigation, both in practice and as studied in academic literature. However, transnationally governed adaptation initiatives are emerging and increasing in scale. This paper analyses the effectiveness of transnational adaptation initiatives as a particular knowledge gap in this changing evolving governance landscape. Based on a new dataset of 40 initiatives that are governing adaptation across borders and that include non-state actors, it offers an overview assessment. It asks: do transnational adaptation initiatives achieve their stated goals and objectives, and which factors explain their ability to contribute to effective climate change adaptation? Drawing on transnational climate and sustainable development governance literature, an analytical framework is developed to assess to what extent ‘actors’, ‘process’, ‘institutional design’ and ‘context’ can explain effective outcomes. The assessment found that while almost two-thirds of the initiatives were highly effective in achieving goals and objectives by producing outputs, only one-third were highly effective in achieving outcomes, in the sense of leading to substantial change in behaviour of target groups. Where initiatives are effective, the main factors determining success are strong leadership and orchestration, good process management and staff resources, a focus on standard-setting and service provision rather than knowledge transfer, a high level of institutionalisation through binding rules for partners, and good coordination with international regimes. Perhaps less expected in view of the voluntary involvement of actors in transnational adaptation initiatives, initiatives based on ‘hard’ functions (i.e. standard-setting and service provision as opposed to knowledge transfer) and binding rules for partners were found to be more effective.

Keywords: Transnational governance; Adaptation; Non-state actors; Effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10784-019-09445-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ieaple:v:19:y:2019:i:4:d:10.1007_s10784-019-09445-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10784

DOI: 10.1007/s10784-019-09445-8

Access Statistics for this article

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics is currently edited by Joyeeta Gupta

More articles in International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().