This book aims to discuss the current and future design of the international climate regime especially from the legal and regulatory perspective. As a result of two conferences, the collection contains 16 chapters dividing the whole into three thematic parts. The first considers the implementation of the Kyoto protocol flexible mechanisms, the second focuses on case studies on individual states or regions, and the last discusses future prospects and the post-2012 phase in particular. Despite the promise of its title, the book is mainly about environmental law and much less about policy or governance.
In my judgement, the topic of the book is interesting, but for several obvious reasons the collection is heterogeneous, even to a critical extent. The writers are researchers, consultants and officials. The length of the individual articles varies between two and 24 pages and the internal architecture varies a lot between individual papers. The introduction given to climate change policy is short and rather general in nature. Further, and most critically, there is no concluding section.
With respect to technical affairs, a useful list of abbreviations is given. Indeed, the text is full of shortened forms of climate policy jargon, and thus a glossary briefly describing the terms included would have been useful.
Among the most profound pieces are those written by Joyeeta Gupta and Leonardo Massai. Based on the extensive expertise in climate change regimes, Gupta discusses the negotiating challenges facing developing countries and especially the role of China and India when it comes to accepting quantitative targets of emissions reduction. The chapter by Massai is a comprehensive picture of European climate policy, with the emphasis given to the European Climate Change Programme and the EU Emissions Trading Scheme.
The back cover informs readers that this book should be of interest to policy makers, academics, practitioners and laypersons. However, I think that even if several individual articles are expressive, the collection is unattractive to readers other than specialized professionals. Due to the uneven and complicated nature of the whole, laypersons and even professional people interested in climate policy may find this book relatively difficult to deal with. The Kyoto Protocol and Beyond is thus most useful for readers who know the Kyoto protocol framework well and are interested in specialized legal issues of implementation.
Overall, this book makes an interesting case for the importance of legal and institutional questions on climate policy implementation. However, it would have been desirable that the editors had put more effort to pulling the strands of the book together more coherently.
