Since the mid-1990s, the aim of keeping climate change within 2 °C has become firmly entrenched in policy discourses. In the past few years, the likelihood of achieving it has been increasingly called into question. The debate around what to do with a target that seems less and less achievable...

The European Union (EU) has sought to lead the world in the adoption of ambitious climate change mitigation targets and policies. In an attempt to characterize and broadly explain the resulting pattern of EU climate governance, scholars have employed the term “multi-level reinforcement.”...

In this paper, we seek to contribute to the debate concerning the emergence of a 'new realism' in transport planning in the UK, through an examination of the development of Local Transport Plans. After describing the background to these policy changes, we consider how one central tenet of the...

With this paper we explore the potential of committees in parliamentary systems of government to influence environmental public policy making. We draw on delegation theory to argue that parliamentary committees are crucial ex post mechanisms used by the legislature (the principal) to monitor...

Despite the fact that mainstreaming of climate change into existing EU sectoral policies is a key aim, empirical knowledge of how it works in practice remains scarce. With this paper we explore the degree to which climate considerations are taken into account in the implementation of one of the...

Appraisal -- defined here to include a variety of ex ante techniques and procedures that seek to predict and evaluate the consequences of certain human actions -- has been afforded an increasingly important role in environmental policy. We argue in this paper, however, that both the nature of...

United Nations climate change conferences have attracted an increasing number and range of observer participants, often outnumbering national delegates. The interactions between the formal and informal spaces of climate governance at the Conference of the Parties (COP) are explored by...