THE CLIMATE CHANGE CHALLENGE

At one level the climate change challenge is very simple: Levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere have increased significantly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and this is causing Earth's temperature to rise rapidly. The challenge is therefore to reduce CO2 emissions in order to stabilise or reverse this warming process. While simple in theory, the climate change challenge represents arguably the defining socio-political challenge of the twenty-first century. This is reflected in the unnerving titles of a number of leading texts on the topic, such as Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2007), Alastair McIntosh's Hell and High Water (2008) and Clive Hamilton's Requiem for a Species (2010). The UK attracted worldwide interest and acclaim with the passing of ambitious and statutory targets for carbon reductions under the Climate Change Act 2008, but whether this political rhetoric and legislative activity has been matched by meaningful action on the ground is a question this book seeks to explore. Recent political history would suggest we should not be optimistic. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has illustrated in great detail, two decades of climate change mitigation policies have generally failed to curb global greenhouse gas emissions. And yet evidence of political failure makes the UK's decision to adopt such ambitious and visible targets even more significant. Success could offer useful lessons for other countries to follow; failure and the climate change challenge becomes couched in ever more cataclysmic language.

One of the paradoxes of the climate change challenge, however, is that although there is a huge amount of technical and scientific data available (and an equally sizable body of research on the debate between the 'believers' and 'deniers'), there is less scholarship on the governance of climate mitigation strategies. 'Governance' in this sense is used in the broadest terms to embrace not only institutional structures but also the social dimensions (in terms of lifestyles, customs, rituals, modes of living, etc.) and the political dimensions (in terms of the impact of the electoral cycle, the dysfunctions of democracy, etc.) and how these shape the capacity of local, regional, national and supra-national governments or associations to respond to the climate change challenge. It is for exactly this reason that this book focuses on the gover