The most widely read and influential component of the IPCC’s practice of writing is the summary for policymakers (SPM), where the key messages of the underlying report are presented in short sentences and figures to facilitate travel into the media, ministers’ speeches and UNFCCC negotiations. The aim of this chapter is to describe the politics of approval. The chapter begins the historical emergence of this practice and documents the tactics and strategies available to co-chairs, authors and delegates to influence the final outcome. Documenting participation in the authorship and approval of the SPM again illuminates the asymmetries revealed in previous chapters, but also highlights the growing presence of some developing countries in the process. This is evident in the content that has initiated some of the greatest struggle – the categorisation of developing versus developed countries. This account reveals that the forces structuring the final stage of the IPCC’s practice of writing originate in the broader global struggle to determine the meaning of climate change and continue after the approval, only now with a new SPM to substantiate national positions in the negotiation of the collective response.

I open the book with the political struggle that took place between parties at COP24, over whether the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C should be noted or welcomed. This provides the context for exploring the IPCC as a central site in and producer of climate politics. In the chapter, I take the reader back to where this study began, with the question, who has the power to define climate change for collective response and what constitutes this power? The answer the book offers is the practice of writing. The actors, activities and forms of authority framework provides the analytical framework for exploring the asymmetries in power to effect how climate change is written. This approach has developed from interviews, observation and extensive data collection from IPCC documentation. The resulting book takes the reader on a journey into the intricate details of writing an assessment, the social order through which it is written and how climate change is known and acted upon through the process.

In the concluding chapter, I look back at the question I began with and the answer I found in the practice of writing. I re-visit accounts of science and politics and describe the three sides to this relationship that I observed in the IPCC. I identify sites within the UNFCCC that have been designed to bring climate science and climate politics closer together, such as in the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement. While this brings accountability against the approved knowledge base, it is likely to further increase the political pressure on the IPCC as an organisation and as a practice for writing climate change. From the IPCC’s location in global climate politics, I move inward to the actors, activities and forms of authority that constitute and shape this practice of writing. The book reveals the importance of looking beyond scientific and political forms of authority and describes why the TSUs matter as actors that have the potential to uphold or challenge the scientific order of relations. I explore the implications of science as a site of politics, the global asymmetries in the knowledge economy, and their effects on participation for the design of new intergovernmental assessment bodies, which from the outset must design for meaningful participation by all in these critical sites of agreement-making.

The aim of this chapter is to reconceptualise climate politics as a struggle to name the problem and thereby determine how it is known and acted upon. I suggest that underpinning the visible elements of contestation over the reality of climate change, who is responsible and by how much, is a struggle over order – the distribution of economic, social and political resources and the values that organise it as such. Describing the politics of climate change as a field of activity orientated around determining the meaning of the problem enables me to situate the IPCC centrally within this struggle as the key site in producing international assessments of the issue. The IPCC’s role in establishing collective interest in climate change and the knowledge base for action has generated the structures and forces in which the IPCC as an organisation and method for producing authoritative ways to know climate change has emerged, which in the book, I identify as the IPCC’s practice of and for writing climate change.

Energy technologies are ‘the combination of hardware, techniques, skills, methods and processes’ involved in ‘producing, transforming, storing, transporting and using energy’. The IEA database captures over 500 mature and immature ‘clean energy’ technologies worldwide that contribute to achieving the goal of net-zero emissions. This chapter will show that international economic law is applicable to government interventions in even the early stages of technology development. For example, State-imposed R&D investment obligations may be banned by IIA provisions on performance requirements, and public incentives for R&D may be disciplined by WTO subsidy rules. Once commercialized, green technologies can reach foreign markets due to international trade and technology transfers that fall within the scope of international economic rules. Reducing trade barriers to environmental goods and services could give a further boost to the international movement of energy-related green technologies. While the importance of green technology transfers between countries is widely recognized, trade and investment rules must be consulted when imposing technology transfer measures.

Using a dynamic version of the principal–agent model this chapter develops a theoretical framework for an international bureaucracy’s influence on the delegation of responsibilities by the organization’s member states. It argues that this influence is reinforced by external resource flows that both directly and indirectly strengthen the role of the bureaucracy. The chapter uses the case of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to test the hypotheses since its major resource flows have been driven solely by a private market for emissions credits, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Between 2006 and 2013 when CDM revenues formed a significant share of the secretariat’s budget, rule-setting was increasingly dominated by the secretariat. When the crash of prices for CDM credits from 2012 onward reduced the secretariat’s revenues and projects to assess, secretariat-led rule-setting intensified. This approach was used to “buy time” in which secretariat leaders were hoping for a recovery of the CDM market. But when this recovery did not materialize, the secretariat started to lay off support staff and implicitly tried to reorient CDM resources for support of the Paris Agreement negotiations and implementation of national mitigation action.

Focusing on three initiatives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat – the Momentum for Change Initiative, the Lima–Paris Action Agenda, and the Non-state Actor Zone for Climate Action – this chapter studies how an international environmental bureaucracy can evolve from a low-key and servant-like secretariat to an actor in its own right. It argues that international environmental secretariats increasingly take on the role of an orchestrator that seeks to shape policy outcomes through changing the behavior of others. Using orchestration as a conceptual lens, the chapter identifies new types of influence of international bureaucracies. The forms of influence that the UNFCCC Secretariat exerts include in particular (i) awareness-raising, (ii) norm-building, and (iii) mobilization. This new way of how soft power is deployed underscores the increasingly proactive role of the UNFCCC Secretariat. The chapter concludes that the UNFCCC Secretariat is currently “loosening its straitjacket” by gradually expanding its original mandate and spectrum of activity. It is no longer a passive bystander but has adopted new roles and functions in the global endeavor to cope with climate change.

International secretariats have increasingly turned toward orchestration as a mode of governance. This chapter analyzes the normative dimensions associated with orchestration, such as democratic values related to participation, accountability, transparency, and deliberation. It argues that orchestration as an indirect mode of governance muddles who should be held accountable for which actions, to which set of standards, and which agents have the right to demand said accountability. Orchestrators need to ensure that their own actions, and those of intermediaries, are democratically legitimated by affected stakeholders. The chapter applies this argument to orchestration by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat. While previous research on orchestration of the UNFCCC has predominantly focused on effectiveness nonstate action, this chapter shows how and why nonstate climate action requires democratic legitimation. It concludes by discussing the intrinsic and instrumental importance of evaluating orchestration through a democratic legitimacy lens and the implications for international secretariats.

This chapter is a practical guide for navigating international environmental conferences, focusing on what there is to these events beyond the negotiations. It sensitizes readers to the existence and specificities of conference spaces and practices such as side events, the corridors, and civil society protests, first touching upon spaces within conference venues before zooming out to consider how conferences manifest outside and beyond their dedicated venue. Building on this scene-setting, the chapter outlines the distinction between using the various conference spaces as sites for data collection and treating them as research objects in their own right. It especially underscores the need for comparative research across processes, notably by providing novel insights on the side-event phenomenon. The chapter makes explicit much of the implicit knowledge that enables seasoned participants to smoothly navigate these events and aims to stimulate scholarship that advances our understanding of the multifaceted nature of these conferences and their constitutive parts.

Research on the interaction between climate science and policy has pointed to the production of so-called ‘boundary objects’ as one way in which the IPCC has influenced climate policymaking and broader climate discourses. By providing a common framework that enables interaction across social worlds, while still allowing more localised use by different groups of actors, such objects have been key in bringing together climate science and policy, in turn shaping the trajectory of both. This chapter reviews several concepts that have been analysed as boundary objects — such as the concept of climate sensitivity and the 2 °C and 1.5 °C targets — and explains how they have been productive of new science/policy relations. It also points to new challenges for the IPCC as climate policy development moves towards implementation and increases demand for more ‘solution-oriented’ knowledge.

IPCC reports are not produced by scientific experts disconnected from policy. They are produced within a political framework. The governmental endorsement of IPCC reports is a key element of the perceived success of the organisation. In particular, the approval of the Summaries for Policymakers makes the Member States of the IPCC active participants in the assessment process and creates ownership of their content. At first sight, the involvement of governments in the IPCC reveals a genuine exercise of co-production between science and politics. It is expected to make the reports more legitimate and policy relevant. Yet a closer look at the practices through which governmental ownership of IPCC reports is produced shows that governments may in some cases contribute to making them policy irrelevant.

How have states coordinated their response to protecting the environment? This chapter outlines the major features of international environmental law, beginning with a brief history of global environmental governance.  We begin with a broad outline of the major environmental conferences, culminating in the architecture of climate change governance. While climate change is a focus of this chapter, we also highlight some of the other major environmental achievements related to protecting the marine environment, regulating atmospheric pollutants, and preserving biodiversity.  Core environmental law principles are detailed and illustrated with prominent cases for clarity.  The final sections examine the intersections between human rights, armed conflict, and the environment, concluding with a discussion of the impact of corporations on the global environment and the responsibilities they might bear for restoring it.

With sea levels rising and small island developing states feeling the impacts of climate change, migration due to inhospitable conditions or the submergence of island nations is becoming more of a pressing issue. There is a clear gap in the legal protection, or lack thereof, that will be afforded to climate-displaced persons. This chapter delves into the third of a triple injustice against island nations and their people by focusing on an expected third wave of forced migration caused by climate change. The chapter (1) explores the issues that island nations will face because of either becoming uninhabitable or submerged, with a particular focus on matters arising under the Law of the Sea Convention; (2) examines the current efforts and missed opportunities within the UNFCCC process and outside, including both national and international efforts; and (3) finally, makes recommendations on how this gap for legal protection can be addressed. Throughout this chapter, it reveals the unfairness of some burdens placed on SIDS to addressed climate-induced displacement and the fact that the lethargy in addressing the protection gaps presents a frightening uncertain future for island nations and its people.

Richard Kinley provides an account from the vantage point of the UNFCCC Secretariat, where he served as Deputy Executive Secretary from 2006 to 2017. First, he describes the role of the “Climate Change Secretariat” in supporting the intergovernmental process with coordination, communication, and information sharing. Second, Kinley recounts the Secretariat’s work in preparing COP 21, emphasizing how an effective and collegial collaboration between the Secretariat and the French Presidency in the years leading up to Paris helped set the stage for a successful conference. Kinley also discusses how to maintain a “party-driven process”, the role of the Secretariat in managing the negotiating text, and how to handle the challenges of meeting schedules and logistics. Third, he analyzes how the Secretariat managed the intergovernmental process during the Paris Conference in 2015, combining a discussion of procedural solutions and tools, such as the “Comité de Paris”, with a detailed and dramatic account of how member states managed to go from a situation where “everything was on the table”, to identify a compromise solution that could be adopted by the plenary.

The forward-looking significance of the 2015 Paris Agreement is explored in the context of the global ecological crisis and its local manifestations. The agreement is considered as an experimentalist treaty that depends upon overarching goals, autonomous actors and iterative learning processes. It originated in efforts by UNFCCC parties, enabled by the EU, to find a way to make collective progress on climate change in the absence of a global ‘hegemon’, while being bedevilled by issues surrounding power, competition and willingness to pay. The implications of the global mitigation (temperature) and adaptation (process) goals are explored, and the systems established for attempting and reporting on them are explained. The design and content of the rest of the book are outlined.