Public-private Partnership In Global Climate Governance

Climate change is one of the signature issues in the current global governance agenda. During the valid period of the Kyoto Protocol, there are countries denying, quitting or breaking promises of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions. However, in places where there are no binding obligations for carbon mitigation, there are voluntary climate governance practices. This dissertation examines “Who are providing climate public goods, and how they could make it sustainable?”During the process of climate governance, manners of collective cooperation are changing according to the times. Facing the challenge of the approaching “green industrial revolution”, human beings need unprecedentedly innovative ways to resolve the conflicts between economic growth and sustainable development. A dual‐track governance paradigm emerges in the global governance—one is bottom‐up, the other top‐down, and actors in this paradigm are demonstrating polycentricity and dynamic features of the public and private. In the bottom‐up institutional changes track, public‐private partnerships (PPPs), including public goods marketalization mechanisms, are created and experimented, actively managing the relations between actors through microcosmic financing initiatives, and are thus called indusive institutional changes mechanisms. The PPPs perspective with an interdisciplinary crossing between international relations (IR) and management, is greatly promoting the problem‐solving of global public goods provision and the upgrading of anarchic cultures of the international society.On the basis of that assumption, this dissertation hypothesizes that equilibrium of public‐private partnerships (PPPs) is the key for sustainable provisions of public goods. Innovative actions aiming at breaking away public governance dilemma can bring benefits scales large enough to overshade the negative losses of free‐riding, so projects of public provision problem‐solving are often carried out in a peer‐production way. Different from hierarchical production in firms and incentive production in markets, peer production is oriented in innovation of concepts and methods, with numerous persons coordinating with each other to accomplish projects goals with potential additional values. Sustainability of that voluntariness requires fair allocation of benefits and effective compensation mechanisms, in which public actors fully absorb private actors’ R&D outcomes, and provide managerial platform reducing costs for the private with public policies and governance mechanisms. PPPs are effective in consolidating standards of equilibrium of public‐private cooperations, so as to build capacities of actors in an operational way, improving the maturity of public governance.This dissertation verifies that hypothesis by taking the construction of carbon market and local climate governance practices of the U.S. and China as examples.