Increasingly, a variety of substate and nonstate actors perform authoritative functions in world politics that previously rested solely with national governments and international institutions. Filling regulatory gaps through governance arrangements beyond central governments has been particularly evident in the field of global climate policy-making. This has led numerous authors to speak of an increasing shift of authority away from state-based forms of regulations to more decentralised, transnational institutions.
In Rethinking Authority in Global Climate Governance, Thomas Hickmann joins this discussion. He convincingly makes the case that while transnational initiatives launched by different types of substate and nonstate actors have acquired important forms of rule-making authority in global climate politics, their development by no means signifies a weakening of the intergovernmental level. To the contrary, in light of their limited operational capacities, newly emerging transnational governance arrangements require a solid international regulatory framework negotiated by nation-states to effectively tackle climate...