The Role Of Climate Clubs In The Transformation Of Global Climate Governance Regimes

The club theory is a new perspective and a creative path to study the transformation of global climate governance regimes.In addition to the UN-led "United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change"(hereinafter referred to as the UNFCCC)system,climate clubs based on reforming existing mechanisms or creating de novo ones,such as the G20 and the Clean Energy Ministerial,emerge in an endless stream.Climate clubs also play an important role in promoting the transformation of global climate governance regimes.The traditional research path of public goods on climate governance has not systematically included the club theory.Therefore,it fails to well explain the characteristics and functions of smaller-scale cooperation mechanisms outside the UNFCCC or to fully understand how these mechanisms motivate members to conduct efficient climate cooperation,which strongly impact on the transformation of global climate governance regimes to cope with the increasingly severe climate crisis.This paper intends to start from the theory of global public goods,select the club theory as an important theoretical analysis perspective,take climate clubs as the research objects,and use the comparative research and case studies as the main research methods to solve the core problem:in three aspects of the global climate governance regimes(issue structures,participation models and operational principles)and compared with climate governance pure public goods,what are the characteristics of the three types of climate clubs and how they succeed in promoting the transformation of the regimes.The global climate governance regimes,taken as a whole,have undergone a transformation from a "single-center" mechanism with the UNFCCC as the core to a"weak-center" Regime Complex with fragmented and multiple mechanisms.Specifically,the regimes have converted mainly in three aspects:from overall-planning and domain-specific issue structures to decomposing and synergistic ones;from statebased and single-form participation models to multiple-subject and extensive-network ones;from controlled and global-scale operational principles to voluntary and regionalscale ones.According to the club theory and combined with the triple analysis of the transformation of global climate governance regimes,the paper has shown that three types of climate clubs have the advantage in dealing with the free-rider problem of climate governance pure public goods and promoting the whole transformation of the regimes.Issue-linking climate clubs not only adopt the method of "decomposition and refinement" to spur pragmatic international cooperation in specific areas closely related to climate change,but also the approach of "cross-cutting governance" to advance the synergistic effect.Minority-cohesion climate clubs with a striking feature of "small group" give priority to in-depth climate cooperation among key countries and "active"countries,which reach the basis of interdependent conditional commitments through"minilateral" negotiations.Meanwhile,the excludable benefits and examples of successful governance diversify and deepen the participation.Regional-joint climate clubs that take region as the key governance unit,provide innovative climate governance practices with regional characteristics,voluntary participation of members,and easy coordination of concerns,so as to realize regional and multi-level operation.