Implementation of a Climate Policy Monitoring System in Brazil: Political Challenges for Coordination on Multilevel Governance Arrangements^*

After the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, a new architecture of international climate governance gradually emerged in the Paris Agreement establishing a division of roles for climate governance: states, which are formal members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), set goals and incentives, while non-party actors’ action conditioned implementation. As the UNFCCC framework remained state-based, less attention has been given to how non-party actors interact with national governments to enable multilevel governance arrangements for implementing climate policies. This work contributes to filling this gap by investigating the unsuccessful Brazilian initiative to implement a monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) system, part of the UNFCCC framework, led by the Federal Climate Articulation Group (NAFC, in Portuguese). The NAFC was a venue for subnational participation within the governance structures of federal climate policy, whereas non-state actors provided technical knowledge. We consider the MRV system to be a public policy instrument and non-party actors to be border agents supporting capacity building through the translation of technical issues into policy options. Based on qualitative analysis of documents and interviews, we found that such influence did not enable capacity building due to the limited decision-making power of federal agents, which led to the non-implementation of an MRV system.

National climate change policy; monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV; implementation; non-State actors; public policy