Event recap “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Challenges for Non-State Actors in Climate Governance”

Summary by Grace Lowes

Climate change is a global crisis that demands collaborative action across all sectors of society. While state governments traditionally dominate discussions on climate policy, non-state actors, including corporations, private landholders, educational institutions and municipalities, play an increasingly critical role. This dynamic shift formed the focus of the panel discussion Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Challenges for Non-State Actors to Contribute to Climate Governance.

The Role of Private Landholders

Professor Benjamin Richardson opened the discussion by focusing on private landholders, particularly in rural areas, and their potential contributions to nature conservation. Using his personal experience as a private landholder in Tasmania, Richardson highlighted the role of conservation covenants as legal agreements between landholders and governments designed to protect land with high ecological value. These covenants align with global biodiversity frameworks, like the Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which set targets to conserve 30% of land and oceans by 2030 (the “30×30” targets).

Richardson emphasized that engaging private landholders is essential for achieving biodiversity goals in countries like Australia, where 60% of the land is privately owned. Even in Canada, where only 11% of land is privately-owned, privately-owned land often houses critical species and ecosystems. However, Richardson outlined significant barriers to the widespread adoption of conservation covenants, including economic priorities, rigid frameworks, and challenges in adapting to climate change.

Corporate Accountability in Climate Governance

Professor Hassan Ahmad shifted the focus to corporate accountability, highlighting corporations’ enormous role as greenhouse gas emitters. Ahmad identified three key challenges:

  1. Power Tensions: Corporations often wield massive amounts of resources and influence, complicating regulatory efforts as tension arises between the public and private sectors’ control over climate change efforts.
  2. False Analogies: Comparing corporate climate liability to past accountability efforts, such as litigation against tobacco companies, overlooks the centrality of fossil fuels and consumption to modern life.
  3. The Attribution Problem: Climate change affects and is contributed to by everyone, making it difficult to assign blame or enforce accountability.

Ahmad emphasized the need for legal and cultural shifts to reshape corporate behaviour, highlighting the importance of litigation and public pressure as tools for change.

The Role of Universities

Professor Konstantinos Koutouki highlighted the unique role of universities in fostering productive climate governance dialogues. Universities are influential spaces where future decision-makers, including policymakers, corporate leaders, and landholders, are shaped. However, as Koutouki noted, academic environments often house diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives on climate change.

Using examples from interdisciplinary projects, Koutouki advocated for balanced, inclusive dialogues that embrace nuanced middle-ground perspectives while avoiding polarizing extremes. This approach, she argued, is essential to fostering collaborative solutions and ensuring that universities remain at the forefront of climate governance innovation.

Cities as Key Actors in Climate Governance

Professor Christopher Waters addressed the role of cities in climate governance, describing climate change as fundamentally a “city problem.” With more than half the world’s population living in urban areas, cities consume 78% of global energy and produce over 60% of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, cities also hold significant potential to mitigate these impacts through transit networks, urban planning, and “city diplomacy,” where municipalities collaborate internationally to advance climate action.

Despite these efforts, Waters highlighted barriers such as cities’ lack of constitutional authority and the ineffectiveness of many climate emergency declarations, which often lack enforcement mechanisms. Waters called for cities to mainstream climate considerations into land use and transportation policies, emphasizing their pivotal role in driving meaningful change.

The Path Forward

While the panellists offered diverse perspectives, a common theme emerged: non-state actors are essential to addressing the climate crisis, but systemic changes are required to empower them.

This panel demonstrated that meeting the urgent challenges of climate change requires leveraging the strengths of governments, corporations, private landholders, municipalities, and universities and underscoring the interconnectedness of state and non-state actors in climate governance.

Recording