Dr. Florentine Koppenborg organized and chaired the panel ‘Climate Clubs: A New Tool for Effective Climate Governance’ at the 2025 ECPR conference in Thessaloniki. Recent years witnessed a proliferation of club-like arrangements in climate governance, such as the Global Methane Pledge and the Climate Club. Normative climate clubs, including the two examples mentioned, encompass a growing number of cases that lack empirical assessment. At the same time, [c]onfusion regarding the nature of climate clubs” (Falkner et al., 2021, p.1) hinders debates about clubs’ role in and contribution to global climate governance. This panel addressed the dual gap of limited empirics and conceptual confusion.
Florentine Koppenborg presented her work-in-progress on "Normative Climate Clubs: Mapping and Discussing Core Features,” the first-ever comprehensive mapping of normative climate clubs, an important empirical contribution. For a total of 41 cases, the manuscript visualized and discusses collected data in light of scholarly debates about clubs and (a) their relationship vis-á-vis climate negotiations, (b) membership size and composition, (c) sectoral focus, (d) member benefits, and (e) monitoring and reporting. Doing so increases our understanding of the practical role assumed by normative clubs in global climate politics.
For more details, see https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PanelDetails/15889
