LIST OF PANELS

We are inviting scholar to submit papers that outline new research pathways to study relational structures of climate change policy-making - e.g. papers that investigate the poly-centric nature of a specific policy subsystem, the patterns of particular discourse, and/or the structures of advocacy coalitions within such a policy network.

States, regions, cities, citizen groups and corporations around the globe are under pressure to respond to evidence that climatic conditions are changing. There is no one centre of decision making or one shared understanding about the cause and consequences of the observed change but several, which constantly evolve across time and space.Climate policy and governance is a phenomenon that has attracted much attention in recent years across various social science traditions. In this context researchers started to investigate actor constellations, discourse and advocacy coalitions within a specific policy network as well as its fluent poly-centric nature to explain changes in local, domestic or international responses to climate change.The majority of scholars relies on formal institutional arrangements and do not give enough consideration to informal relational patters shaping perceptions in decision situations and resources exchange in such situations. Other studies adopt a micro-level focus and tend to describe only a narrow perspective of utility oriented decision-making and fail to take into consideration the multiple characteristics of political interaction. The proposed panel will introduce and critically reflect on recent developments in the field to construct and validate cumulative knowledge of the evolution of specific climate change policy networks and relational attributes of coalitions, actor constellations, and discourse configurations that are contained within.