Oscar Widerberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 1487873 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Oscar Widerberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Oscar |
| FAMILY NAME | Widerberg |
| SIGNATURE | WIDERBERG O |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8088-3709 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 375 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Using ideal type theories of change for assessing the contribution of cooperative initiatives to global biodiversity governance
Enhancing the protection of biodiversity urgently requires transformative change. Next to efforts by national governments, international cooperative initiatives, involving subnational and non-state actors, are taking diverse actions to halt biodiversity loss. However, their impact and contribution to transformative change remain unclear. This article develops a novel framework for analysing contributions of diverse cooperative initiatives to an e…
Governing synergies and trade-offs between the SDGs: The potential and limitations for multistakeholderism in the context of prioritization
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are intended to be integrated and indivisible, requiring governance approaches able to account for synergies and tradeoffs in their implementation. However, while a growing body of literature discusses SDG interlinkages, it remains largely theoretical, and only a few offer empirical insights, most of which focus on the national or subnational level. This article shifts the focus to transnational, voluntary…
Dataset development in earth system governance: Learnings, stakes, and pathways for impact
The construction and use of datasets have become an important practice in Earth system governance research. By systematically cataloguing various outcomes, policy issues, actors, sites, and processes, datasets enhance the reliability, transparency, and replicability of research. Yet, despite growing interest, efforts to share data, integrate datasets, and develop common standards remain fragmented. This Perspective surveys various scholarly effor…
Governance through goals in action: How multi-stakeholder partnerships translate and connect the SDGs
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reflect a ‘governance through goals’ approach to earth system governance, which requires collaborative action through multi-stakeholder partnerships and tailored responses that address SDG interactions. This article focuses on goal-setting as a possible response to the SDGs. By bridging governance through goals and SDG interaction literature, we develop a two-dimensional framework to explore specificity (h…
A Cautionary Tale for Polycentric Climate Governance: Sweden’s Roles in Orchestrating Decarbonization
The Paris Agreement ushered in an era of climate governance underpinned by a polycentric theory of change, emphasizing experimentation, collaboration, and innovation while downplaying political contestation, power asymmetries, and the need for regulatory action by the state. This article explores the roles the state plays in polycentric climate governance, focusing on the tension between the regulatory state, where authorities set, monitor, and e…
Making Global Climate Action work for nature and people: Priorities for Race to Zero and Race to Resilience
There is increasing recognition in science and policy that the current nature and climate change crises are highly intertwined, and that these need to be jointly addressed. Within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Race to Zero (R2Z) and the Race to Resilience (R2R) campaigns foster climate action by cities, regions, businesses, investors, and civil society organizations for mitigation and adaptation. The camp…
Finding synergies and trade‐offs when linking biodiversity and climate change through cooperative initiatives
The causes and consequences of biodiversity loss and climate change are deeply intertwined. Hundreds of existing cooperative initiatives—gathering thousands of states, regions, cities, companies, civil society organisations and communities—are potentially bending the curve on biodiversity loss and tackling climate change simultaneously. More research is needed to understand if, how and under what conditions cooperative initiatives are delivering …
Polycentrism: How Governing Works Today
Multi-stakeholder partnerships for the SDGs: Is the “next generation” fit for purpose
Despite mixed results in the past, multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) are considered important governance instruments for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. This perspective discusses the ‘next generation’ of MSPs, comparing them to previous generations, and whether they can contribute to transformative change. The discussion is based on a first analysis of nearly 500 MSPs collected in the Transformative Partnership 2030 project, com…
Years of global climate change governance research: Taking stock and moving forward
Research on global climate change governance is no longer primarily concerned with the international legal regime, state practice and its outcomes, but rather scrutinizes the intricate interactions between the public and the private in governing climate change. This broad trend has also taken center stage within the pages of INEA. Two decades after its establishment, we sketch the main theoretical debates, conceptual innovations and empirical fin…
The potential of international cooperative initiatives to address key challenges of protected areas
Protected areas are frequently used as an important governance approach for biodiversity conservation. Even though the total area of protected areas has increased over time, the coverage, quality of management and effectiveness of these areas are still suboptimal. A large body of literature identifies four main challenges that limit the effectiveness of protected areas: lack of stakeholder participation, insufficient organisational capacity to en…
Climate Ambition and Sustainable Development for a New Decade: A Catalytic Framework
This paper examines the Global Climate Action Agenda (GCAA) and discusses options to improve sub‐ and non‐state involvement in post‐2020 climate governance. A framework that stimulates sub‐ and non‐state action is a necessary complement to national governmental action, as the latter falls short of achieving low‐carbon and climate‐resilient development as envisaged in the Paris Agreement. Applying design principles for an ideal‐type orchestration …
Global Sustainability Governance: Fragmented, orchestrated or polycentric
La présente contribution compare les structures institutionnelles dans trois domaines, à savoir le changement climatique, la filière bois et la pêche. L’étude mondiale de la gouvernance environnementale dans la tradition de l’institutionnalisme néolibéral a déplacé son attention des institutions individuelles vers des « ensembles de régimes », également appelés « architectures », « systèmes de gouvernance » ou « systèmes assemblés ». Des données …
Forum: Complex Systems and International Governance
This collection of essays brings together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, based on three continents, with different theoretical and methodological interests but all active on the topic of complex systems as applied to international relations. They investigate how complex systems have been and can be applied in practice and what differences it makes for the study of international affairs. Two important threads link all the contribu…
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat as an orchestrator in global climate policymaking
Scholars have recently devoted increasing attention to the role and function of international bureaucracies in global policymaking. Some of them contend that international public officials have gained significant political influence in various policy fields. Compared to other international bureaucracies, the political leeway of the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has been considered rather limited. Due to …
Exploring national and regional orchestration of non-state action for a < 1.5 °C world
The importance of actions by non-state and sub-national actors (e.g., companies and cities) is increasingly recognized, because current governmental commitments are insufficient to limit the increase of global temperatures to 1.5 °C. Orchestration, the alignment between ‘orchestrator’ (e.g., international organizations and governments) and ‘intermediaries’ (e.g., city networks and partnerships), could harness additional contributions by building …
The 'Black Box' problem of orchestration: How to evaluate the performance of the Lima-Paris Action Agenda
The Lima-Paris Action Agenda (LPAA), launched in 2014 to mobilize non-state and subnational climate action in the run-up to the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is conceptualized as an orchestration attempt where the French COP21 and Peruvian COP20 presidencies together with the United Nation Secretary General’s office and the UNFCCC Secretariat enlisted non-state and su…
Accountability Challenges in the Transnational Regime Complex for Climate Change
This article discusses challenges to accountability in the context of transnational climate governance. It argues that the emergence of a distinct transnational regime complex and the increasingly integrated structure of international and transnational climate governance create new challenges for using established analytical frameworks that rely on accountability regimes for individual actor types. Instead, studying accountability requires a syst…
The expanding field of cooperative initiatives for decarbonization: A review of five databases
Climate governance beyond the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC )—including countries, companies, civil society, and international organizations, forming cooperative initiatives—is increasingly framed as complementing, supporting, and even substituting the multilateral negotiations. Cooperative initiatives activating nonstate actors could help bridging the ‘ambition gap’ between governmental greenhouse gas mitigation …
Cities to the rescue? Assessing the performance of transnational municipal networks in global climate governance
Despite the proliferation and promise of subnational climate initiatives, the institutional architecture of transnational municipal networks (TMNs) is not well understood. With a view to close this research gap, the article empirically assesses the assumption that TMNs are a viable substitute for ambitious international action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It addresses the aggregate phenomenon in terms …
Transnational multistakeholder partnerships for sustainable development: Conditions for success
This perspective discusses nine conditions for enhancing the performance of multistakeholder partnerships for sustainable development. Such partnerships have become mainstream implementation mechanisms for attaining international sustainable development goals and are also frequently used in other adjacent policy domains such as climate change, health and biodiversity. While multistakeholder arrangements are widely perceived as a positive contribu…
Exploring the governance and politics of transformations towards sustainability
The notion of 'transformations towards sustainability' takes an increasingly central position in global sustainability research and policy discourse in recent years. Governance and politics are central to understanding and analysing transformations towards sustainability. However, despite receiving growing attention in recent years, the governance and politics aspects of transformations remain arguably under-developed in the global sustainability…
Reinvigorating International Climate Policy: A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Nonstate Action
As countries negotiate a new climate agreement for the United Nations climate conference in December 2015, a groundswell of climate actions is emerging as cities, regions, businesses and civil society groups act on mitigation and adaptation, independently, with each other and with national governments and international organizations. The Paris conference provides a historic opportunity to establish a framework to catalyse, support, and steer thes…
Theorising Global Environmental Governance: Key Findings and Future Questions
Global environmental governance in the Anthropocene is fundamentally different from older conceptions of environmental policy-making and sustainable development. Environmental problem-solving is no longer concerned with isolated problems, but rather with reorganising the overall relation between humans and natural systems. Empirically, this is reflected in the ever greater attention to questions of institutional interactions (e.g. between the iss…
Measuring the autonomous influence of an international bureaucracy: The Division for Sustainable Development
Exploring the governance and politics of transformations towards sustainability
The notion of 'transformations towards sustainability' takes an increasingly central position in global sustainability research and policy discourse in recent years. Governance and politics are central to understanding and analysing transformations towards sustainability. However, despite receiving growing attention in recent years, the governance and politics aspects of transformations remain arguably under-developed in the global sustainability…
Cities to the rescue? Assessing the performance of transnational municipal networks in global climate governance
Despite the proliferation and promise of subnational climate initiatives, the institutional architecture of transnational municipal networks (TMNs) is not well understood. With a view to close this research gap, the article empirically assesses the assumption that TMNs are a viable substitute for ambitious international action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It addresses the aggregate phenomenon in terms …
Accountability Challenges in the Transnational Regime Complex for Climate Change
This article discusses challenges to accountability in the context of transnational climate governance. It argues that the emergence of a distinct transnational regime complex and the increasingly integrated structure of international and transnational climate governance create new challenges for using established analytical frameworks that rely on accountability regimes for individual actor types. Instead, studying accountability requires a syst…
Theorising Global Environmental Governance: Key Findings and Future Questions
Global environmental governance in the Anthropocene is fundamentally different from older conceptions of environmental policy-making and sustainable development. Environmental problem-solving is no longer concerned with isolated problems, but rather with reorganising the overall relation between humans and natural systems. Empirically, this is reflected in the ever greater attention to questions of institutional interactions (e.g. between the iss…
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat as an orchestrator in global climate policymaking
Scholars have recently devoted increasing attention to the role and function of international bureaucracies in global policymaking. Some of them contend that international public officials have gained significant political influence in various policy fields. Compared to other international bureaucracies, the political leeway of the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has been considered rather limited. Due to …
Forum: Complex Systems and International Governance
This collection of essays brings together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, based on three continents, with different theoretical and methodological interests but all active on the topic of complex systems as applied to international relations. They investigate how complex systems have been and can be applied in practice and what differences it makes for the study of international affairs. Two important threads link all the contribu…
Transnational multistakeholder partnerships for sustainable development: Conditions for success
This perspective discusses nine conditions for enhancing the performance of multistakeholder partnerships for sustainable development. Such partnerships have become mainstream implementation mechanisms for attaining international sustainable development goals and are also frequently used in other adjacent policy domains such as climate change, health and biodiversity. While multistakeholder arrangements are widely perceived as a positive contribu…
Exploring national and regional orchestration of non-state action for a < 1.5 °C world
The importance of actions by non-state and sub-national actors (e.g., companies and cities) is increasingly recognized, because current governmental commitments are insufficient to limit the increase of global temperatures to 1.5 °C. Orchestration, the alignment between ‘orchestrator’ (e.g., international organizations and governments) and ‘intermediaries’ (e.g., city networks and partnerships), could harness additional contributions by building …
Multi-stakeholder partnerships for the SDGs: Is the “next generation” fit for purpose
Despite mixed results in the past, multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) are considered important governance instruments for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. This perspective discusses the ‘next generation’ of MSPs, comparing them to previous generations, and whether they can contribute to transformative change. The discussion is based on a first analysis of nearly 500 MSPs collected in the Transformative Partnership 2030 project, com…
The 'Black Box' problem of orchestration: How to evaluate the performance of the Lima-Paris Action Agenda
The Lima-Paris Action Agenda (LPAA), launched in 2014 to mobilize non-state and subnational climate action in the run-up to the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is conceptualized as an orchestration attempt where the French COP21 and Peruvian COP20 presidencies together with the United Nation Secretary General’s office and the UNFCCC Secretariat enlisted non-state and su…
Measuring the autonomous influence of an international bureaucracy: The Division for Sustainable Development
Governance through goals in action: How multi-stakeholder partnerships translate and connect the SDGs
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reflect a ‘governance through goals’ approach to earth system governance, which requires collaborative action through multi-stakeholder partnerships and tailored responses that address SDG interactions. This article focuses on goal-setting as a possible response to the SDGs. By bridging governance through goals and SDG interaction literature, we develop a two-dimensional framework to explore specificity (h…
Years of global climate change governance research: Taking stock and moving forward
Research on global climate change governance is no longer primarily concerned with the international legal regime, state practice and its outcomes, but rather scrutinizes the intricate interactions between the public and the private in governing climate change. This broad trend has also taken center stage within the pages of INEA. Two decades after its establishment, we sketch the main theoretical debates, conceptual innovations and empirical fin…
The potential of international cooperative initiatives to address key challenges of protected areas
Protected areas are frequently used as an important governance approach for biodiversity conservation. Even though the total area of protected areas has increased over time, the coverage, quality of management and effectiveness of these areas are still suboptimal. A large body of literature identifies four main challenges that limit the effectiveness of protected areas: lack of stakeholder participation, insufficient organisational capacity to en…
Measuring the autonomous influence of an international bureaucracy: The Division for Sustainable Development
Reinvigorating International Climate Policy: A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Nonstate Action
As countries negotiate a new climate agreement for the United Nations climate conference in December 2015, a groundswell of climate actions is emerging as cities, regions, businesses and civil society groups act on mitigation and adaptation, independently, with each other and with national governments and international organizations. The Paris conference provides a historic opportunity to establish a framework to catalyse, support, and steer thes…
Theorising Global Environmental Governance: Key Findings and Future Questions
Global environmental governance in the Anthropocene is fundamentally different from older conceptions of environmental policy-making and sustainable development. Environmental problem-solving is no longer concerned with isolated problems, but rather with reorganising the overall relation between humans and natural systems. Empirically, this is reflected in the ever greater attention to questions of institutional interactions (e.g. between the iss…
The expanding field of cooperative initiatives for decarbonization: A review of five databases
Climate governance beyond the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC )—including countries, companies, civil society, and international organizations, forming cooperative initiatives—is increasingly framed as complementing, supporting, and even substituting the multilateral negotiations. Cooperative initiatives activating nonstate actors could help bridging the ‘ambition gap’ between governmental greenhouse gas mitigation …
Cities to the rescue? Assessing the performance of transnational municipal networks in global climate governance
Despite the proliferation and promise of subnational climate initiatives, the institutional architecture of transnational municipal networks (TMNs) is not well understood. With a view to close this research gap, the article empirically assesses the assumption that TMNs are a viable substitute for ambitious international action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It addresses the aggregate phenomenon in terms …
Transnational multistakeholder partnerships for sustainable development: Conditions for success
This perspective discusses nine conditions for enhancing the performance of multistakeholder partnerships for sustainable development. Such partnerships have become mainstream implementation mechanisms for attaining international sustainable development goals and are also frequently used in other adjacent policy domains such as climate change, health and biodiversity. While multistakeholder arrangements are widely perceived as a positive contribu…
Exploring the governance and politics of transformations towards sustainability
The notion of 'transformations towards sustainability' takes an increasingly central position in global sustainability research and policy discourse in recent years. Governance and politics are central to understanding and analysing transformations towards sustainability. However, despite receiving growing attention in recent years, the governance and politics aspects of transformations remain arguably under-developed in the global sustainability…
The 'Black Box' problem of orchestration: How to evaluate the performance of the Lima-Paris Action Agenda
The Lima-Paris Action Agenda (LPAA), launched in 2014 to mobilize non-state and subnational climate action in the run-up to the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is conceptualized as an orchestration attempt where the French COP21 and Peruvian COP20 presidencies together with the United Nation Secretary General’s office and the UNFCCC Secretariat enlisted non-state and su…
Accountability Challenges in the Transnational Regime Complex for Climate Change
This article discusses challenges to accountability in the context of transnational climate governance. It argues that the emergence of a distinct transnational regime complex and the increasingly integrated structure of international and transnational climate governance create new challenges for using established analytical frameworks that rely on accountability regimes for individual actor types. Instead, studying accountability requires a syst…
Exploring national and regional orchestration of non-state action for a < 1.5 °C world
The importance of actions by non-state and sub-national actors (e.g., companies and cities) is increasingly recognized, because current governmental commitments are insufficient to limit the increase of global temperatures to 1.5 °C. Orchestration, the alignment between ‘orchestrator’ (e.g., international organizations and governments) and ‘intermediaries’ (e.g., city networks and partnerships), could harness additional contributions by building …
Forum: Complex Systems and International Governance
This collection of essays brings together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, based on three continents, with different theoretical and methodological interests but all active on the topic of complex systems as applied to international relations. They investigate how complex systems have been and can be applied in practice and what differences it makes for the study of international affairs. Two important threads link all the contribu…
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat as an orchestrator in global climate policymaking
Scholars have recently devoted increasing attention to the role and function of international bureaucracies in global policymaking. Some of them contend that international public officials have gained significant political influence in various policy fields. Compared to other international bureaucracies, the political leeway of the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has been considered rather limited. Due to …
Global Sustainability Governance: Fragmented, orchestrated or polycentric
La présente contribution compare les structures institutionnelles dans trois domaines, à savoir le changement climatique, la filière bois et la pêche. L’étude mondiale de la gouvernance environnementale dans la tradition de l’institutionnalisme néolibéral a déplacé son attention des institutions individuelles vers des « ensembles de régimes », également appelés « architectures », « systèmes de gouvernance » ou « systèmes assemblés ». Des données …
Climate Ambition and Sustainable Development for a New Decade: A Catalytic Framework
This paper examines the Global Climate Action Agenda (GCAA) and discusses options to improve sub‐ and non‐state involvement in post‐2020 climate governance. A framework that stimulates sub‐ and non‐state action is a necessary complement to national governmental action, as the latter falls short of achieving low‐carbon and climate‐resilient development as envisaged in the Paris Agreement. Applying design principles for an ideal‐type orchestration …
Years of global climate change governance research: Taking stock and moving forward
Research on global climate change governance is no longer primarily concerned with the international legal regime, state practice and its outcomes, but rather scrutinizes the intricate interactions between the public and the private in governing climate change. This broad trend has also taken center stage within the pages of INEA. Two decades after its establishment, we sketch the main theoretical debates, conceptual innovations and empirical fin…
The potential of international cooperative initiatives to address key challenges of protected areas
Protected areas are frequently used as an important governance approach for biodiversity conservation. Even though the total area of protected areas has increased over time, the coverage, quality of management and effectiveness of these areas are still suboptimal. A large body of literature identifies four main challenges that limit the effectiveness of protected areas: lack of stakeholder participation, insufficient organisational capacity to en…
Finding synergies and trade‐offs when linking biodiversity and climate change through cooperative initiatives
The causes and consequences of biodiversity loss and climate change are deeply intertwined. Hundreds of existing cooperative initiatives—gathering thousands of states, regions, cities, companies, civil society organisations and communities—are potentially bending the curve on biodiversity loss and tackling climate change simultaneously. More research is needed to understand if, how and under what conditions cooperative initiatives are delivering …
Polycentrism: How Governing Works Today
Multi-stakeholder partnerships for the SDGs: Is the “next generation” fit for purpose
Despite mixed results in the past, multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) are considered important governance instruments for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. This perspective discusses the ‘next generation’ of MSPs, comparing them to previous generations, and whether they can contribute to transformative change. The discussion is based on a first analysis of nearly 500 MSPs collected in the Transformative Partnership 2030 project, com…
A Cautionary Tale for Polycentric Climate Governance: Sweden’s Roles in Orchestrating Decarbonization
The Paris Agreement ushered in an era of climate governance underpinned by a polycentric theory of change, emphasizing experimentation, collaboration, and innovation while downplaying political contestation, power asymmetries, and the need for regulatory action by the state. This article explores the roles the state plays in polycentric climate governance, focusing on the tension between the regulatory state, where authorities set, monitor, and e…
Making Global Climate Action work for nature and people: Priorities for Race to Zero and Race to Resilience
There is increasing recognition in science and policy that the current nature and climate change crises are highly intertwined, and that these need to be jointly addressed. Within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Race to Zero (R2Z) and the Race to Resilience (R2R) campaigns foster climate action by cities, regions, businesses, investors, and civil society organizations for mitigation and adaptation. The camp…
Governance through goals in action: How multi-stakeholder partnerships translate and connect the SDGs
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reflect a ‘governance through goals’ approach to earth system governance, which requires collaborative action through multi-stakeholder partnerships and tailored responses that address SDG interactions. This article focuses on goal-setting as a possible response to the SDGs. By bridging governance through goals and SDG interaction literature, we develop a two-dimensional framework to explore specificity (h…
Using ideal type theories of change for assessing the contribution of cooperative initiatives to global biodiversity governance
Enhancing the protection of biodiversity urgently requires transformative change. Next to efforts by national governments, international cooperative initiatives, involving subnational and non-state actors, are taking diverse actions to halt biodiversity loss. However, their impact and contribution to transformative change remain unclear. This article develops a novel framework for analysing contributions of diverse cooperative initiatives to an e…
Governing synergies and trade-offs between the SDGs: The potential and limitations for multistakeholderism in the context of prioritization
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are intended to be integrated and indivisible, requiring governance approaches able to account for synergies and tradeoffs in their implementation. However, while a growing body of literature discusses SDG interlinkages, it remains largely theoretical, and only a few offer empirical insights, most of which focus on the national or subnational level. This article shifts the focus to transnational, voluntary…
Dataset development in earth system governance: Learnings, stakes, and pathways for impact
The construction and use of datasets have become an important practice in Earth system governance research. By systematically cataloguing various outcomes, policy issues, actors, sites, and processes, datasets enhance the reliability, transparency, and replicability of research. Yet, despite growing interest, efforts to share data, integrate datasets, and develop common standards remain fragmented. This Perspective surveys various scholarly effor…
Corporate governance (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · Sustainability and Climate Change Governance (17 works) · Economics (14 works) · Business (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Global governance (9 works) · Climate change (8 works) · Climate Change Policy and Economics (8 works) · Environmental resource management (8 works)