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What kinds of national climate institutions can solve the governance challenges that the Paris Agreement devolves to them? This article identifies three stages of climate institutions in Brazil, a major emitter of greenhouse gases through deforestation that managed to reduce such emissions for nearly a decade. It shows that a narrow definition of climate institutions that seeks purpose-built state institutions fails to capture important dynamics there, and that such institutions have little direct impact on outcomes. In Brazil's political landscape, national presidents exercise a decisive influence on their climate ambitions and capacities. However, positive and negative feedback loops also brought some effective climate action from the layering of climate purposes into existing institutions, as well as through non-traditional institutions like private governance arrangements for agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) play an increasingly prominent role in global climate negotiations. Climate governance spotlights burden-sharing arrangements, asking countries to take on potentially costly actions to resolve a global problem, even as the benefits are generally indivisible public goods. This article examines the BASIC countries' own Joint Statements and their individual and collective submissions to multilateral climate negotiations to identify the rationalist and principle d arguments they have made about the climate burden-sharing requirements that developed countries, developing countries, and they themselves should face in global climate governance. It argues that their expectations for their own role are particularly unclear, with greater national action than international commitments to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing the changing role of the emerging powers in global climate change negotiations, with special attention to Brazil, we ask why they have agreed to voluntary reductions at home without formalising those commitments in ways that might persuade other large emitters to make similar binding commitments. We argue that for very large emitters, the climate issue does not evince the ‘global commons’ logic often attributed to it. Instead, since their actions can directly affect climate outcomes alone or in small groupings, large emitters are more responsive to domestic cost-benefit calculations, making international commitments based on shifting interest group pressures at home. In Brazil, a coalition of ‘Baptists and bootleggers’ found principled and interest-driven reasons to support new climate commitments after 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines how states organize themselves internally to address climate change. Topics covered include the definitional categories for climate institutions, the ways that states address three core climate governance challenges, including through coordination, building consensus, and strategy development, and the ways that institutions and national political contexts influence and shape each other.