Oikopolut

Governance systems are increasingly evaluated for their effectiveness and legitimacy. Global environmental governance and its multitude of hard and soft law institutions is no exception. The goal of the project is to understand the differences in legitimacy and effectiveness of hard and soft law in global environmental governance and how these differences play out in national governance in developed vs. developing countries.

Theory dictates that global soft law should be less effective to influence the behaviour of States compared to global hard law. Normative discourses on legitimacy call for more participation in global environmental governance processes and more equity in their outcome. In the emerging global governance of energy and climate there are many initiatives including directly ‘competing’ hard and soft laws which open for comparative analysis. Developed and developing countries have very different positions in these two issues due to significant divergence in, for example: the role of their energy sectors as drivers of environmental change, the socio-economic trade-offs they need to address in energy policy, what is expected of them from global climate governance now and in the future, and in their capacity to formulate their own priorities and influence global institutions.

The goal of the project is to understand the differences in legitimacy and effectiveness of hard and soft law in global environmental governance and how these differences play out in national governance in developed vs. developing countries. Three sub-objectives break down this goal:

• The first sub-objective is to develop a theoretical framework for comparing the effectiveness of global hard and soft law through analysis of relevant theoretical approaches.
• The second sub-objective is to develop a normative framework to analyze different aspects of legitimacy in both process and outcome of global environmental governance through analysis of normative theory and political discourses.
• The third sub-objective is to test the theoretical and normative frameworks on a set of parallel institutions, hard and soft law, in the energy-climate sphere and draw conclusions on their performance in both effectiveness and legitimacy terms for developed vs. developing countries.

This will be done first through a detailed empirical analysis of a number of institutions of varying degree of ‘hardness’: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol and its Clean Development Mechanism, the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate; the World Summit on Sustainable Development and its Partnerships, the Commission on Sustainable Development, the Bonn Renewables Conference series and the Johannesburg Renewable Energy Coalition, and the G8 process on energy and climate change. Secondly, four targeted national ase studies (Finland, Norway, Thailand and Laos), will be carried out of these six institutions at the national level.

The results of this project will contribute to the understanding of an increasingly complex situation for the development of global institutions where global goals, national priorities and local livelihoods need to be mutually reinforcing.

Further information:

> Finland Futures Research Centre