This research seeks to illustrate and examine the role of expert knowledge and discursive practices in global climate governance with constructivist approaches including Epistemic Communities, Frame Analysis, and Discursive Institutionalism. The development of two policy approaches is analyzed: the ‘pledge and review’ and the ‘carbon budget’. The activities of epistemic communities and the discourses on the two policy ideas by key non-state policy actors are analyzed to gain insights on the policy dynamics. The research delivered several key findings: firstly, there are abundant qualified epistemic community inputs for both policy ideas. Secondly, constructivist approaches are valuable to policy studies due to their ability to explore how the non-state actors sought to influenc...[ Read more ]

This research seeks to illustrate and examine the role of expert knowledge and discursive practices in global climate governance with constructivist approaches including Epistemic Communities, Frame Analysis, and Discursive Institutionalism. The development of two policy approaches is analyzed: the ‘pledge and review’ and the ‘carbon budget’. The activities of epistemic communities and the discourses on the two policy ideas by key non-state policy actors are analyzed to gain insights on the policy dynamics. The research delivered several key findings: firstly, there are abundant qualified epistemic community inputs for both policy ideas. Secondly, constructivist approaches are valuable to policy studies due to their ability to explore how the non-state actors sought to influence policies in the incubation phase. Thirdly, the relative success of pledge and review over carbon budget can be partially attributed to three factors: (1) the divergence of carbon budget into three ‘frames’ – Fairness, Global Target and Risk; (2) the dominant ecomodernist and ‘Bottom-up governance’ framing that prevailed in Paris; and, (3) the compatibility between Carbon Budget and the two-degree discourse. Lastly, the concept of carbon budget, while not explicitly written in the Paris Agreement, still has concurrent implications for climate governance: on one hand it gains traction as a tool for the ‘global stocktake exercise’; on the other hand it leads to legitimate challenges of Paris agreement, displayed in the recent discourse of United States on the fairness of the agreement.