The 21st meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris faced two particular challenges: the growth of civil society participation in the negotiations, and significant security concerns following the terrorist attacks on the city two weeks prior to the start of the negotiations. This report reflects on the impacts of these two challenges through an overview of civil society participation at the COP, highlighting the implications for the accountability of the negotiations.

High-profile environmental summits like the recent Paris climate conference (COP 21) offer an opportunity to incorporate real-world, timely issues into teaching and learning about global environmental governance. Using COP 21 as an example, this Forum article summarizes the ways that contemporary environmental summits can be incorporated into university-level education, providing content and context to help address the challenges of interdisciplinary sustainability education. Faculty members have incorporated COP-21-related content in ways ranging from traditional lectures and discussions to field trips, which have contributed to a broad range of course content and learning goals. However, the challenges of including environmental summits in educational settings include knowledge-based, normative, and structural barriers. While environmental summits can be an effective way to incorporate knowledge of global environmental governance into interdisciplinary education, more resources, experimentation, and extensions beyond climate change are needed.

The 2015 Paris Climate summit consolidated the transition of the climate regime from a “regulatory” to a “catalytic and facilitative” model. A key component of this shift was the intergovernmental regime’s embrace of climate action by sub- and nonstate actors. Although a groundswell of transnational climate action has been growing over time, the Paris Agreement seeks to bring this phenomenon into the heart of the new climate regime. This forum article describes that transition and considers its implications.

This forum provides commentary on five accountability articles in this issue. In response to those pieces, it advances the argument that the study of accountability through the framework proposed by Kramarz and Park (and demonstrated by the empirical articles) can uncover key political dynamics that drive the design of global environmental governance initiatives. The utility of the practical application of accountability measures to ensure good design, rather than proper implementation, is less clear. Using the framework to study accountability does, however, provide an opening for debates over initiative design that may lead to improvements in global environmental governance outcomes.

As the latest iteration of leveraging private resources to protect and sustain our natural resources, the environmental impact bond (EIB) reflects the growing trend in sustainable development that makes financing available to projects based on the verifiable results of an intervention. These new instruments in global environmental governance are not actually bonds but pay-for-success contracts, in which the risk of success is shouldered by the investor, and financial savings, pegged to the intervention outcome, are prioritized. This examination of EIBs through the lens of accountability aims to elicit debate on some areas of concern and consideration for the design and implementation of outcome-based financing for global environmental governance, including the prioritizing of private over public accountabilities and potential perverse incentives these instruments create. As both public and private accountability goals are evident in EIB, this governance tool runs the risk of exacerbating the paradox of increased accountability but decreased environmental gains.