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This paper reviews the national environmental agenda of Arab countries in the Middle East and Africa in an attempt to determine coherence of local efforts with the international environmental commitments these countries have made by signing and ratifying the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework and Convention on Climate Change. The paper succinctly summarizes the impacts of climate change on the countries of the region and the responses of individual countries to the eminent environmental threats. Using country specific data, the paper identifies the mitigation and adaptation measures that individual governments communicated in their initial Nationally Determined Contributions to combat climate change and support concomitantly the realization of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals pertinent to climate impacts. Furthermore, this paper evaluates the overall environmental commitment and performance of the Arab countries and compares them to the average global performance. The findings indicate that most of the Arab countries are heading toward severe water shortages due to deteriorating water supply and growing water demand. The paper concludes that the Arab countries, individually and collectively embrace the Paris Agreement and engage in necessary measures to combat and/or adapt to climate change. Furthermore, the paper presents supporting evidence to show that the Arab countries are at par with the rest of the world when dealing with climate change issues.

Contributions to the climate governance literature have highlighted the importance of recognizing its new polycentric nature, which includes roles for non-state and subnational actors in climate change mitigation and in leadership for climate action. Yet, the literature is missing a normative cartography—that is, a mapping of the distribution of moral duties in the real world—which is tailored to a context of polycentric governance. This paper answers the question: how can moral duties be distributed in a context of polycentric climate governance such as to diminish the problem of non-compliance? This implies the following question: do duties change in situations of non-compliance in a context of polycentric governance, and if so how? Acknowledging polycentric governance is the key to an effective distribution of moral duties, as it allows for a more accurate mapping of non-state and subnational actors’ duties in leading the charge against climate change. Correspondingly, a normative cartography fitted to this context will be instrumental in showing how morally informed climate governance can diminish the problem of non-compliance. This paper focusses on the distribution of moral duties in a context of polycentric governance as a contributing factor to inducing agents to act according to the collective goal. It argues that a more fine-grained distribution of climate duties, tailored to polycentric climate governance, contributes to addressing the problem of non-compliance.

This paper analyzes the formation of country coalitions in the context of international negotiations on climate change mitigation and simulates the emergence of an equilibrium solution in this game-theoretic framework, while accounting for the interplay with external influences. Coalition formation is gauged through clustering analysis on multiple factors including natural, economic, and social factors, RCPs, and other aspects. Projected emission is found to be the main determinant in forming coalitions, and the USA, EU, China + India, and the rest of the world constitute the four-coalition configuration that is stable across different scenarios. Under this base configuration, the Regional Integrated Climate-Economy model for Coalition Game model is implemented to assess the sensitivity of equilibrium solutions to parameter uncertainties, sanctions on non-mitigation, and adjustments in coalition composition. The main conclusion of the game simulations is that no coalition would adopt a mitigation strategy at the Nash equilibrium if no penalty is in place. The Nash equilibrium remains stable even when the climatic and economic parameters are disturbed. As an alternative to the conventional game, an external sanction is imposed on coalitions that choose not to mitigate climate change; in this scenario, climate change mitigation propagates across coalitions according to various sanction levels. The paper also shows that a social welfare compensation between two coalitions may alter the equilibrium game strategy depending on whether the compensation outweighs the welfare loss from mitigation.

Emerging climate change regimes, such as the mechanism for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), are increasingly aiming to engage developing countries such as those in Africa, in sustainable development through carbon markets. The contribution of African countries to global climate negotiations determines how compatible the negotiated rules could be with the existing socioeconomic and policy circumstances of African countries. The aim of this paper is to explore the agency of Africa (African States) in the global climate change negotiations and discuss possible implications for implementing these rules using REDD+ as a case study. Drawing on document analysis and semi-structured expert interviews, our findings suggest that although African countries are extensively involved in the implementation of REDD+ interventions, the continent has a weak agency on the design of the global REDD+ architecture. This weak agency results from a number of factors including the inability of African countries to send large and diverse delegations to the negotiations as well lack of capacity to generate and transmit research evidence to the global platform. African countries also perceive themselves as victims of climate change who should be eligible for support rather than sources of technological solutions. Again, Africa’s position is fragmented across negotiation coalitions which weakens the continent's collective influence on the REDD+ agenda. This paper discusses a number of implementation deficits which could result from this weak agency. These include concerns about implementation capacity and a potential lack of coherence between REDD+ rules and existing policies in African countries. These findings call for a rethink of pathways to enhancing Africa’s strategies in engaging in multilateral climate change negotiations, especially if climate change regimes specifically targeted at developing countries are to be effective.

This paper investigates the process of coalition formation for issue-specific coalitions. I use the Alliance of Small Island States and the Coalition for Rainforest Nations as case studies to inductively create a framework on coalition formation. This framework is tested against two coalitions, both advocating for mountain issues in the UN climate negotiations. These two coalitions differ in the type of coalition sought, the strategies deployed thus far, and the type of support they have received, including the role of non-state actors. The framework helps identify significant gaps in the efforts of the two coalitions, including capturing the most salient link between climate change and mountains, translating technical input into negotiating positions, and identifying the most appropriate form of the coalition and forum to pursue these interests. In doing so, this paper provides insights into the limits of linking issues to the climate change agenda (“climate bandwagoning”), issue proliferation and its implications for coalition management for actors like the Group of 77 and China, and the nature of multi-scalar interactions in regime complexes.