Global climate governance: rising trend of translateral cooperation

The transformation from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement has been analyzed by international relations scholars, international law, and transnational governance theory. The international relations literature looks at the climate regime from a perspective of power distribution, state interests, institutions, and multilateral negotiations. International law theory focuses on legal analysis and design of international climate agreements. The transnational governance literature examines the participation of transnational actors at different levels of governance. However, each of these theories overlooks a bilateral trend of cooperation in a multilateral setting that arises as part of the construction or reconstruction of the international regime. Why do national and subnational public actors in global climate governance cooperate bilaterally when multilateral cooperation already exists? What type of bilateral cooperative agreements do these actors prefer, and why? Using qualitative methods, combining content analysis subsequent interviews, this research empirically demonstrates the role and importance of bilateral transatlantic cooperation and informal agreements between national and subnational actors in global climate governance. Using the EU-US case study, this research identifies a diagonal dimension of interaction between states and transnational actors. It introduces and defines the terms “translateral cooperation” and “translateral agreements” in the new climate regime.