Double dividend? Transnational initiatives and governance innovation for climate change and biodiversity

Abstract

Growing recognition of the need to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss together is leading to shifts in the global environmental governance landscape such that these two traditionally separate domains are increasingly interlinked. This process is taking place not at the level of the international policy regimes but rather through the work of transnational governance initiatives (TGIs) that connect state and non-state actors and which form an increasingly formalized part of the hybrid regime complexes through which global environmental governance is conducted. Central to these dynamics are ‘nature-based solutions’, interventions designed to work with nature to achieve multiple sustainability goals. In this paper, we demonstrate the ways in which TGIs frame and implement nature-based solutions. We show how this is leading to an evolution in market and asset-based responses to addressing these twin challenges and consider the wider consequences for how we understand what effective responses to the interlinked problems of climate and biodiversity entail.