The adoption of the Warsaw mechanism on loss and damage has again highlighted the North-South divide in the part of the UNFCCC negotiations dealing with international climate finance. Current estimates put required funding from rich countries at 50 to 100 billion Euros per year to induce...

Powerful political actors in the international system quite frequently adopt unilateral policies whose implications extend beyond their respective borders. Examples include financial market regulation as well as taxation, trade and environmental policies. They do so to avoid lowest...

Global environmental governance is widely regarded as suffering from process- and outcome-related shortcomings, above all problems with transparency, representation, and problem-solving capacity. These problems, whether presumed or real, have negative implications for popular legitimacy of...

Conventional wisdom holds that the state of the economy has a strong impact on citizens' appetite for environmental policies, including climate policy. Assuming median voter preferences prevail, periods of economic prosperity are likely to be conducive, and economic downturns are likely to be...

Numerous scholars and policy advisors have in the past few years called for “climate clubs” – small groups of countries moving ahead in climate policy outside the UNFCCC, and empirical examples for such “minilateral” organizations include the now defunct Asia-Pacific Partnership and...