In recent years there has been a proliferation of international institutions that address climate change and energy governance, not least in the field of renewable energy. Given scarce resources, policy-makers need to prioritize which institutions to engage with. Central to this choice are considerations of the institutions’ legitimacy. The aim of this chapter is to understand how the legitimacy of international institutions is perceived under conditions of institutional complexity – i.e. in a context, where multiple actors work on the same issue area without overarching coordination. A questionnaire-based study examines common understandings of what makes an institution legitimate and how these understandings diverge amongst policy-makers and key stakeholder groups from different countries. Theoretically, the chapter unpacks the meaning of legitimacy under institutional complexity. Empirically, based on mixed methods, the chapter offers an assessment of legitimacy of a set of climate and energy governance institutions with different but overlapping mandates (the Clean Energy Ministerial, International Energy Agency, International Renewable Energy Agency, Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). This chapter thus provides societally-relevant insights to the literature on legitimacy, with implications for how to strengthen climate and energy governance.

The introduction first explains the rationale and theoretical and empirical contributions of the edited volume. The book seeks to address a considerable gap in knowledge of the nature of the relationship between institutions governing the climate-energy nexus in a multilevel context. In particular, there is scant research on consequences on the legitimacy and effectiveness of governance arrangements and the climate-energy nexus as a whole. For an in-depth analysis of institutional complexity in the nexus, we selected three policy fields as case studies: renewable energy, fossil fuel subsidy reform, and carbon pricing. We made this choice since the three cases represent urgent and major components of the climate-energy nexus, since they vary considerably in the number and mix of institutions that govern them at the international level, and since they differ in their positioning within the climate-energy nexus – with carbon pricing primarily a climate change issue, renewable energy lying at the core of energy governance, and fossil fuel subsidy reform falling in between. The chapter concludes with an outline of the ccontributions to the book, structured along the volume’s three parts on mapping (I) coherence and management (II), and legitimacy and effectiveness (III).

Negotiating Civil War has sought to provide a rounded, nuanced, portrait of the emergence of the Civil War Regime, leveraging the explanatory capacity of carefully selected theoretical propositions derived from mainstream IR research traditions. The following discussion assesses the extent to which this endeavour has been successful, and identifies wider lessons that can be derived. The first section sets out the key findings from the case studies and the examination overall. The second section sets Negotiating Civil War in the context of related bodies of research and considers scholarly and practical implications. The final section draws the volume to a close.

The introduction sets out the empirical puzzle at the heart of the study, contrasting the historical regulation of international armed conflict with the absence of regulation in respect of non-international armed conflict. This is followed by an overview of Negotiating Civil War and the book’s key findings. A closing discussion sets Negotiating Civil War in the context of broader, related literature.

Decarbonizing our energy systems is required for a sustainable future, and an uptake of renewable energy plays a central role in this trajectory. Nevertheless, the growth rate of renewables is too slow to meet either the ‘substantial increase’ as intended by Sustainable Development Goal 7, or the two degrees target set by the Paris Agreement. The institutional complex of global renewable energy governance is currently occupied by 46 public, private, and multi-stakeholder institutions, with different characteristics and priorities. Can such a complex governance system provide greater effectiveness for the global energy transition? As a first step in answering this question, this chapter examines coherence and management across the sub-field of renewable energy, and among three selected multi-stakeholder partnerships in further detail. The study builds on an analysis of institutional constellations, a qualitative review of official documents, and semi-structured interviews with climate and energy governance stakeholders and experts. The chapter finds that the renewable energy sub-field is marked by coordination, but simultaneously questions if it requires more than that to iron out existing controversies, trade-offs and potential conflicts. The research results therewith facilitate future performance assessments of global renewable energy governance, and help identify opportunities to enhance its effectiveness.

Chapter 5 examines the negotiation of paragraphs (c) and (e) of Article 8(2) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The chapter provides a brief historical background before setting out the key turning points in the negotiation of these clauses. As in preceding chapters, the negotiations are considered from the perspectives of key actors: in this case, the ‘Like-Minded Group’, the P5 (particularly the USA, UK and France), the Non-Aligned Movement, and prominent civil society participants (e.g. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, FIDH). The chapter underlines that while like-minded and NGO moral authority and technical expertise played a large part in persuading wavering delegations, the internal armed conflict provisions closely reflect the preferences of the Western P3 as well as the post-Cold War liberal Zeitgeist.

In this chapter I discuss the responsibility of international organizations for human rights violations as a matter of substantive law. The central rules concerning the attribution of conduct to international organizations are analyzed, as are the relevant rules on indirect responsibility (complicity). Four potential sources of human rights obligations for international organizations are also identified: the constitutions and secondary law of the organizations themselves, treaty law, customary law, and general principles of law.

International institutions established to promote carbon pricing and carbon markets (including carbon taxation, emissions trading and offsets) constitute a rapidly growing alphabet soup of acronyms straddling the boundaries between public and private organisations. All institutions within the carbon pricing sub-field subscribe to the norm that climate change should be addressed through placing a price on emissions. The various institutions perform different roles. While several of the private institutions set standards and commitments regulating how private actors should trade emission allowances and offset emissions, public and hybrid institutions tend to play information dissemination and networking roles focused on supporting political decisions to implement carbon pricing and to link carbon markets. The carbon pricing sub-field is characterised by coordination or co-existence, with significant attempts to establish a division of labour, and only little outright competition or conflict. Focusing on the interlinkages between the UNFCCC and the World Bank institutions that address carbon pricing, we found that also the relationships between these two particular sides are characterised by close coordination. This coordination is informed by cognitive and normative interaction mechanisms, while differences between both sides are managed in a bottom-up, incremental manner.