This book set out to make sense of the lack of proper response to climate change – focusing on what has gone wrong, what has gone right and what might change now that the Paris Agreement has been ratified. In order to achieve these aims, the book conducted a cosmopolitan assessment of the multilateral and transnational climate change response and in doing so endeavoured to make sense of the ‘big picture’ of climate change (mis)management and the injustices that come along with it. This endeavour has allowed the book to demonstrate that the theory of climate justice can be applied to evaluate the practice of climate change governance. In other words, the book has demonstrated that the gap between theory and practice can be bridged. Although there is more work to be done, the bridging of climate justice and climate governance has allowed for a comprehensive normative understanding of the climate change response and provided new insights into the governance of climate change. These insights can underwrite future research and ultimately help to bring about a more just global response to climate change, because they have provided a common denominator from which to begin suggesting reform. The Conclusion of this book therefore focuses on the lessons that can be learned from the bridging of theory and practice.

More specifically, the Conclusion will focus on how transnational and multilateral responses compare, and what policy recommendations can be made on the basis of this comparison. As was briefly explained in the previous chapter, multilateral and transnational actors face very similar problems, including the ongoing struggle to lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the rate required, the entrenched favouring of mitigation over adaptation, the pervasive exclusion of less developed countries from decision-making processes and the incessant failure to change the behaviour of responsible actors. These shared problems imply that including transnational climate change actors in multilateral processes, which the post-Paris Agreement regime is moving towards, may not be a simple or straightforward improvement of the climate change response. The Conclusion will therefore consider whether the direction the post-Paris regime is heading in might be a hindrance to a just response to the climate change problem, rather than a help. First, the Conclusion will provide a brief summary of what the cosmopolitan assessment of multilateral and transnational climate change governance has revealed about the lack of proper response to climate change.