Governing clean development: A framework for analysis

This paper constructs a framework for understanding and explaining the governance of clean development in order to generate insights about who is governing clean development, by what means, for whom and how effectively. Understanding key governance dimensions is critical to appreciating the extent to which and the ways in which flows of public and private investment into the developing world can be harnessed to the goals of clean development, principally in the area of energy. The governance structures and decision-making processes of CD ‘providers’ and ‘recipients’ may provide important clues as to why the governance of CD ‘from above’, produces such diverse and uneven outcomes once mediated and translated by forms of ‘governance’ from below, principally at the national level in the first instance. Such a framework usefully highlights governance gaps and blind-spots, issues of policy coherence and coordination and the distributional consequences of existing patterns of CD governance. This provides the basis for assessing the social and environmental effectiveness of existing initiatives in this area as well as identifying areas for future reform.