The Evaluation of Polycentric Climate Governance
Polycentric climate governance holds enormous promise, but to unleash its full force, policy evaluation needs a stronger role in it. This book develops Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom's important work by offering fresh perspectives from cutting-edge thinking on climate governance and policy evaluation. Driven by theoretical innovation and empirical exploration, this book not only argues for a stronger connection between polycentric climate governance and practices of evaluation, but also demonstrates the key value of doing so with a real-world, empirical test in the polycentric setting of the European Union. This book offers a crucial step to take climate governance to the next level. It will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in climate governance, as well as practitioners who seek to enhance climate action, which is needed to avoid a climate catastrophe and to identify a pathway towards the 1.5° Celsius target in the Paris Agreement.
- Offers a new perspective on how to enhance polycentric climate governance with policy evaluation, bringing together disconnected thinking on polycentric climate governance and policy evaluation and developing new synergies to drive climate governance
- Provides a novel, theory-driven empirical exploration of climate policy evaluation in the polycentric setting of the European Union, gauging theoretical development against empirical realities and offering concrete ways of developing climate policy evaluation practice going forward
- Draws on insights from multiple disciplines and schools of thought to advance climate governance, combining approaches from political science, evaluation studies, geography and others to develop new perspectives on climate governance
Endorsements
This important book brings together solid empirical material and novel theoretical insight into the role of evaluation in climate governance. I find it of great interest for evaluation research and practice, and for analyses of the emerging polycentric patterns of climate governance.' Mikael Hildén, Finnish Environment Institute
'Evaluating public policies is analytically demanding, which is the reason why the most compelling studies concentrate on one or a few cases. Jonas Schoenefeld demonstrates with this well designed and executed study that rigorous and yet comprehensive evaluation is possible. He also contributes to the growing body of research on polycentric climate governance by making the case that it is necessary to identify its concrete empirical implications and to subject them to an analysis of how they deliver on their theoretically derived promise in the real world.' Jale Tosun, University of Heidelberg