EROSION OF CLIMATE MULTILATERALISM: FROM A UNIVERSAL REGIME TO A LOCALIZED REGULATORY LOGIC

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Researchers can use the concept of taxonomic multiplicity to analyze the evolution of climate governance and regulatory fragmentation.

🏢実務担当者:Practitioners can gain insights into the strategic challenges of navigating multiple sustainability taxonomies and regulatory regimes.

🏛政策担当者:Policymakers should consider the structural implications of localized regulatory logic on global coordination and the effectiveness of multilateral commitments.

The purpose of the study is to conceptualize the erosion of the universal climate regulatory regime as a process of structural replacement of the universal regulatory logic by a localized one and to theoretically substantiate the concept of taxonomic multiplicity as a structural phenomenon of contemporary climate policy. The article argues that the transformation of the global climate regime during the decade following the adoption of the Paris Agreement cannot be adequately explained through categories of institutional weakness or insufficient political will. Instead, it should be interpreted as a systemic replacement of the universal regulatory logic by a localized one, within which climate policy functions according to the rationality of economic competition and redistribution of gains rather than collective coordination. The research methodology relies on structural-logical analysis, comparative method, conceptual differentiation, typological analysis, and theoretical generalization.The study demonstrates that the Paris Agreement formally retains its status as the central instrument of the global climate regime, while the practical implementation of climate policy increasingly shifts to the space of national and regional policies, including the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism of the European Union, the European Union Emissions Trading System, the Inflation Reduction Act of the United States, and the dual carbon control mechanism of the People's Republic of China. These parallel regulatory spaces do not aggregate into a universal system but instead reproduce competing architectures of sustainable activity classification, green finance eligibility, and cross-border carbon accounting. It is established that the coexistence of more than two dozen sustainability taxonomies is not a temporary dysfunction but a structural characteristic of the new regulatory order. The scientific novelty lies in developing a theoretical framework that interprets the proliferation of sustainability taxonomies and the deliberate ambiguity of key terminological categories as structural features of the new regulatory environment rather than as technical problems of harmonization. On this basis, the article advances the concept of taxonomic multiplicity and formulates the central paradox of the contemporary climate regulatory order as a persistent gap between the declarative level of multilateral commitments and the operational level of their implementation.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.30838/ep.212.184-192first seen 2026-06-05 04:52:54