Climate change governance is becoming more polycentric. From the global to the municipal level, an unprecedented number of actors are addressing climate change. But will polycentric governance generate significant emissions reductions? What brings disperse action together to build cumulative outcomes capable of limiting climate change to well below two degrees of warming? How will actors in different institutions and jurisdictions be able to learn from one another and thereby generate significant governance synergies? These important questions relate directly to the vexed question of policy evaluation, an underappreciated, but potentially highly consequential element of polycentric climate governance. In spite of substantial growth of evaluation activity and theorization, its role in assessing and possibly improving climate governance has been insufficiently explored. This chapter introduces the book, which tackles this challenge head-on by developing new, cutting edge theory and then conducting an empirical test in the context of the European Union, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Polycentric governance and evaluation literatures remain disconnected, as they have emerged from separate scholarly communities. This high level of fragmentation significantly impedes necessary theoretical development in order to leverage the synergies that emerge from a combination of the two perspectives. This chapter begins this work, by first assessing polycentric governance as an emerging theory, and then distilling three core, foundational ideas from it, namely that governance centers can and do self-organize, that context matters for governance and that there are interactions between governance centers. Drawing on thinking on monitoring in polycentric governance literatures, the chapter then reveals how these three foundational ideas connect to thinking in policy evaluation literatures, which had also addressed evaluation actors, context as well as, to a lesser degree, how evaluation may be a carrier of insights between different governance centers. The exploration of these ideas demonstrates that evaluation has great theoretical potential to enable polycentric climate governance by potentially linking the efforts of state and non-state organizations.

Policy evaluation has great potential to enhance polycentric climate governance, but that potential has not yet been fully realized. This concluding chapter draws together the key contributions of the book, which not only emerge from significant theoretical development, but also from a novel empirical analysis that is the first to investigate policy evaluation in the polycentric setting of the EU, as well as in Germany and in the United Kingdom. Future research should further explore causal drivers of the emergence of policy evaluation in polycentric governance systems, and unpack the actual use of knowledge in policy-making, a difficult, but necessary area of inquiry going forward. Additional aspects of polycentric governance theory, such as the role of evaluation in building trust and generating linkages between different actors, should also be explored. The collective research and climate governance endeavor will continue—this book has offered some new directions in which the journey may advance.

Following the theoretical rationale for a role of policy evaluation in polycentric climate governance, what can be said about its actual role in light of theoretical expectations? The empirical data show that the theoretical expectations play out insofar as the elements that were hypothesized do exist in the context of the EU, Germany and in the EU, namely that both self-organized and non-self organized evaluation exist. The collective action dilemmas that feature at the very core of polycentric governance theorizing also materialize through evaluation, pointing to a significant role of the state, while non-state actors also contribute. Lesson-drawing may thus emerge as a function of evaluation, but the full theoretical potential of evaluation has not yet been realised, given the various deficiencies that both state-funded as well as society-funded evaluations contain.

The introduction lays out the scope and structure of the edited volume, discussing key themes and opportunities for further investigation.

This chapter addresses some foundational questions relating to corporate human rights accountability and clarifies the context in which different accountability regimes are embedded, paying particular attention to the rise of polycentric transnational governance in what has been called a post-Westphalian world order. The chapter distinguishes between domestic and international, private and public, and hard and soft law approaches to holding companies accountable. Particular attention is given to soft accountability mechanisms. The chapter looks at certification and labeling systems for conscious consumers, the rise of socially responsible investment or so-called ESG investment, and the effectiveness of NGO “naming and shaming” campaigns.

This chapter turns to consider questions of scale by interrogating the multilayered system of governance that REDD+ envisions, as established through the allocation of forest resource rights to diverse social actors at the local, national and international levels. It reads debates about carbon rights in REDD+ alongside broader trends relating to natural resource governance, common property regimes (CPRs) and community resource management to show how frameworks for the allocation of layered, or nested, rights in the forest carbon economy is another legal technology through which authority over land is transferred to international actors and away from people who live in and around forested areas.

This chapter introduces the governance of the frontiers, with a special focus on cybersecurity and Internet governance, by first exploring the application of commons principles to these unique environments. This examination begins by defining key concepts such as “commons,” “pseudo commons,” “public goods,” “club goods,” and “common-pool resources,” before moving on to analyze commons governance through the lens of the economics, political science, and legal literatures. Specifically, the chapter discusses the applicability of law and economics concepts such as property rights, use rights, and transaction costs to the traditional global commons (including the deep seabed, Antarctica, outer space, and the atmosphere) as well as to cyberspace. The evolution of sovereignty in these areas is also summarized with a particular emphasis on how cyberspace is distinct from other commons spaces and what that portends for management. Finally, the field of polycentric institutional analysis is introduced along with its application to cyberspace. It is the purview of Chapter 1 to provide an introduction both to the primary characteristics involved in the governance of the managed and unmanaged global commons and to how these concepts apply (and do not apply) to cyberspace.

This chapter summarizes the key arguments in the book. The chapter explains why a specific children’s rights focus is granted within the broader business and human rights debates and seeks to move beyond legal fiction to situate businesses as children’s rights duty-bearers. The chapter summarizes the arguments and analysis on how children and their rights are treated within existing normative frameworks on business and human rights. The legalization of business duties and norms specifically related to children’s rights within that context are sketched out. Insights from the four case illustrations are used in refining and defining the need for a forward-looking proposal on duty-bearing, which concludes the chapter.

This chapter lays out the cornerstones of polycentric governance in business and human rights, including the attribution and distribution of obligations and the attribution and distribution of responsibility. The chapter distinguishes primary norms relating to duty-bearing (obligations) from secondary norms (responsibility for business-related wrongdoing). The chapter contains a forward-looking proposal (de lege ferenda) to form the basis of the normative building blocks of a polycentric governance model for responsibility resulting from business-related wrongdoings.