While regionalism is highly relevant in many policy fields today, regional idiosyncrasies have been poorly understood in the literature on multilateral climate governance. This article explores regional ideas in climate governance by comparing the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Council of Baltic Sea States (CBSS). As international climate governance has institutionalised a normative compromise of liberal environmentalism since the 1990s, the article further assesses ideational challenges to this compromise. It examines how these ideas have evolved over time and explains variation between the organisations through the advent of new knowledge. Relying on qualitative content analysis, the article finds that both CARICOM and CBSS have supported and reproduced liberal environmentalism in the past. More recently, CARICOM has started to connect climate change with notions of survival and justice, implicitly challenging liberal environmentalism, while CBSS remains situated within established discourses of sustainable development. The article then argues that the availability of new knowledge from both scientific as well as experiential sources explains the evolution of ideas in regional organisations. Problem definitions of climate change evolve within regional organisations when officials gain access to new scientific data and are able to combine or confirm them with experience from their day-to-day work.
Policy Implications
- Climate change means different things for different regional organisations. While for some, like the Caribbean Community, climate change is a question of life and death, others connect it mostly to economic policy, like the Council of Baltic Sea States.
- It follows that successful climate policy needs to take into account divergent regional experiences with climate change. Acknowledging these differences is key in both understanding regional climate governance as well as enabling climate action.
- Regional organisations can change their conceptualisation of climate change when new knowledge becomes available. Scientific data are as crucial in this process as anecdotal experiences in officials' daily work.
- The liberal project in international relations may lose some legitimacy in the Global South if it fails to account for these regional experiences. Climate change has become an existential problem in some regions of the world, like the Caribbean, and needs to be treated as such.
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