International climate negotiations reached a turning point in 2009. The fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was anticipated as a pivotal event in the global response to climate change.1 The negotiations, however, failed to meet the self-imposed objective of reaching agreement on a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol. Instead of a new, binding international agreement, the negotiations produced the Copenhagen Consensus, a voluntary, country-driven approach based on the accretion of voluntary national mitigation and financial commitments.2 As the primary state-oriented pathway towards global climate governance,3 the Copenhagen Consensus may offer a means of sidestepping the international collective action problem. In so doing, though, this new country-driven approach simply shifts the burden of producing collective action to the domestic arena. The key question, therefore, is whether states are up to the task.4
This coordination challenge is common to...