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The Paris Agreement created an institutionalized role for non-state actors through voluntary cooperation. Many international NGOs (INGOs) are particularly active in these "Paris partnerships," often working with multinational corporations to reduce emissions and promote decarbonization. Though there is ample work on both the effectiveness of the Paris partnerships and on the role of INGOs in the global climate regime, much of this work focuses "outward" – on how INGOs contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation, or influence norms, discourse and policy. Yet, there is considerably less work that focuses "inward" – examining who INGOs work with in order to achieve their policy goals. This paper provides a descriptive analysis of key INGOs in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process, as a first step in a larger research agenda to understand the incentives and opportunities that drive INGO behavior. Specifically, it uses network analysis to identify the "climate establishment" – which I define as the insider INGOs working within the multilateral process and with large corporations to influence rulemaking, soft law and firm behavior. Measures of network centrality demonstrate that two INGOs – WWF and the World Resources Institute – are by far, the most authoritative members of the climate establishment. They participate in the largest number of partnerships, and have "important" friends, as measured by eigenvector centrality. The data also indicate that the climate establishment sees carbon pricing as a key strategy, and it often cooperates with banks that are large funders of fossil fuel projects. The descriptive analysis of the climate establishment and its partners raises important questions for future research about why INGOs choose to partner with F100 companies, and how such cooperation might influence INGO behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research and development (R&D) investments foster green innovation, which is key to decarbonize the energy system and attain long-term climate goals. In this paper, we link three integrated assessment models that possess a macroeconomic framework—WITCH, MERGE-ETL, and GEM-E3—with the bottom-up technology-rich energy system model TIAM-ECN, in order to quantitatively explore how investments in R&D can support deep decarbonization pathways. We take advantage of the endogenous technological learning feature of the first three models to derive R&D-induced capital cost reductions for strategic clusters of low-carbon technologies: solar energy, on- and offshore wind energy, carbon capture and storage, advanced fuels, and batteries for electric vehicles. We examine scenarios with different assumptions on CO2 mitigation and R&D policy. These assumptions are harmonized among our four models, and capital cost reductions driven by R&D are exogenously incorporated in TIAM-ECN, which enables a detailed assessment of the required energy transition. Our results show that the stringency of climate change mitigation policy remains the key factor influencing the diffusion of low-carbon technologies, while R&D can support mitigation goals and influence the contribution of different types of technologies. If implemented effectively and without worldwide barriers to knowledge spill-overs, R&D facilitates the deployment of mature technologies such as solar, wind, and electric vehicles, and enables lower overall energy system costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]