Top-Down Vs. Bottom-Up: A Comparative Study of Governance Models in Climate Change Mitigation

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

🔬研究者:Provides a comparative framework for analyzing climate governance models, useful for policy research.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need for multi-level governance approaches, informing policy design that integrates top-down and bottom-up actions.

Two governance logics compete for dominance in climate mitigation policy today. One is top down: binding or quasi binding international agreement, negotiated by states and enforced, in theory, through treaty mechanisms. The other is bottom up: voluntary, decentralized action by cities, communities, and non state actors who do not wait for a treaty to move first. This study puts the two side by side through a comparative case analysis, the UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement architecture on the top down side, local and community climate initiatives, including networks like C40 Cities and ICLEI, on the bottom up side. Using Elinor Ostrom's polycentric governance theory as a lens, the paper asks how each model structures authority, accountability, and implementation capacity, and where each one fails to live up to its own goals. Drawing on UNFCCC synthesis reports, peer reviewed policy studies, empirical work on subnational climate networks, and comparative climate litigation evidence, the paper finds that the top down model buys legitimacy, universality, and a shared accounting framework, but pays for it with a chronic implementation and ambition gap, a direct consequence of its voluntary, consensus driven design. The bottom up model, meanwhile, offers experimentation, contextual legitimacy, and faster iteration, but struggles with fragmentation, uneven capacity across regions, and limited impact once measured against global targets. Neither model, the paper argues, is sufficient on its own. What the polycentric literature has been saying for over a decade, that the real task is linking scales together rather than picking one, still holds up as both the empirical trend and the better normative path forward.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21508652first seen 2026-08-12 04:44:19 · last seen 2026-08-13 04:55:41