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The Evaluation of Polycentric Climate Governance, by Jonas J. Schoenefeld Cambridge University Press, 2023, 350 pp, £105 hb, US$ 135 ebk ISBN 9781316511244 hb, 9781009059381 ebk
Is climate policy working? This basic question is at the heart of the field of climate policy evaluation. The question is also at the core of The Evaluation of Polycentric Climate Governance, a new book by Jonas Schoenefeld. As Schoenefeld reveals, this simple question gives rise to a plethora of other questions: Who actually evaluates climate policy? Who pays for these evaluations? What do they cover (and what is left out)? What criteria and methods are employed in the evaluations? In his book, Schoenefeld engages with these – and other – questions by connecting scholarship on policy evaluation to insights from the literature on polycentric governance.
Building on Elinor and Vincent Ostrom's pioneering work on local governments and common pool resources, the concepts of polycentricity and polycentric governance have become fashionable in various bodies of literature that seek to shed light on areas of governance, with a multiplicity of actors, levels, and instruments. This includes scholarship on transnational environmental law,1 and on climate law and governance.2 However, some of this literature is marked by conceptual fuzziness and inconsistency, with scholars using terms such as ‘polycentricity’ in various descriptive, analytical, and normative ways.3
Schoenefeld does not fall into this trap. He demonstrates meaningful engagement with the literature on polycentric governance, and helpfully unpacks the concept itself. Schoenefeld points to the more-than-semantic distinction between ‘polycentricity’, which he refers to as a ‘descriptor to indicate the apparent structure of governance activities’, and ‘polycentrism’ (or ‘polycentric governance’), which in his view ‘describes “a system or theory having or proposing many centres or focal points”’ (p. 5). In other words,...