The Long Road to Paris: The History of the Global Climate Change Regime

By Julia Kreienkamp, UCL Global Governance Institute.

The adoption of the 2015 Paris Agreement has been widely celebrated as a historic achievement. It enshrines a new logic of global cooperation, representing a decisive shift away from the top-down regulatory approach that had previously underpinned the international climate change regime. This shift can best be understood in light of the historical evolution of the legal and institutional framework for global collaborative climate action. This policy brief provides a comprehensive overview of the development of the global climate change regime. It documents how climate change – initially a purely scientific concern – gradually entered the wider international public and political debate, leading to the establishment of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the adoption of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and, eventually, the Paris Agreement. It focuses primarily on multilateral negotiations under the UNFCCC while also highlighting the growing role of non-state actors in the post-Paris era of hybrid global climate governance.

The full policy brief is available here: The Long Road to Paris: The History of the Global Climate Change Regime [PDF]