Multilateral negotiations on climate change have failed to solve the problem. But there’s good reason to keep up the charade.
Matthew J. Hoffmann
Associate professor, international relations, University of Toronto.
Matthew J. Hoffmann is an associate professor of international relations in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough and in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He teaches and pursues research on climate-change politics, global governance, multilateral treaty-making, and complex systems.
Hoffmann is the author of the recent book Climate Governance at the Crossroads: Experimenting with a Global Response after Kyoto from Oxford University Press (2011) which explores the growing phenomenon of climate-governance experiments. He also authored Ozone Depletion and Climate Change: Constructing a Global Response from the State University of New York Press (2005) and co-edited (with Alice Ba) the volume Contending Perspectives on Global Governance: Coherence, Contestation, and World-Order from Routledge (2005).
Why the Climate Negotiations Matter
Though any breakthrough in negotiations is unlikely, the multilateral meetings remain a pivotal space for the growth of innovative approaches to the coming climate crisis.
