What drives engagement in the Clean Energy Ministerial? An assessment of domestic-level factors

ABSTRACT

This study concentrates on the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) as one of several high-level global forums on climate change governance. The CEM can be conceptualised as a ‘polycentric’ organisation in which its members collaborate on a wide range of issues concerning the clean energy transition. Can we identify a set of domestic-level variables that explain the member states’ participation across different CEM initiatives? And can we identify clusters of CEM initiatives for which the same set of domestic-level variables provide robust explanations? Theoretically, we concentrate on domestic factors and how these explain engagement patterns in high-level global forums. Our findings for 12 initiatives show that there is no single domestic factor that explains engagement levels equally well for all CEM initiatives. Our overarching finding is that the domestic determinants of engagement vary across the initiatives, suggesting that future research should attend more closely to their specific features.

KEYWORDS:

• Clean energy transition
• climate change governance
• domestic factors
• ministers
• ministries
• polycentricity

Acknowledgements

We thank Elin Lerum Boasson, Michaël Tatham, Sofia Sacks, and Jakob Skovgaard as well as three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. Frederick Bachmann, Jan-Hendrik Blass, Mona Rouhandeh, and Franziska Scholl deserve credit for research assistance. We are particularly grateful to Rui Luo for a series of instructive and inspiring meetings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This section is largely based on information provided by the CEM's website (http://www.cleanenergyministerial.org/) and the website of the IEA (https://www.iea.org/news/clean-energy-ministerial-secretariat-finds-new-home-at-the-iea) as well as information obtained from a series of interviews with a former staff member of the CEM Secretariat conducted from March to August 2021.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jale Tosun

Jale Tosun is Professor of Political Science at Heidelberg University and a deputy director of the Heidelberg Center for the Environment.

Adrian Rinscheid

Adrian Rinscheid is an International Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the University of St. Gallen