The Paris Agreement has ushered in a new era for the global response to climate change. The international community and scholarly world came to understand that the problem of climate change did not fit with traditional and familiar top-down cooperation efforts. The change to a bottom-up, national policy-centered approach has generated a good deal of hope, but also uncertainty around the achievement of collective goals through decentralized actions. 

In this talk, Professor Matthew Hoffmann will propose a way to reorient thinking on the global response to climate change, focusing specifically on decarbonization goals.

Matthew Hoffmann is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and Co-Director of the Environmental Governance Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs. Professor Hoffmann has a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Engineering from Michigan Technological University and a Ph.D. in International Relations from the George Washington University.  His research and teaching interests include global governance, climate change politics, complexity theory, and international relations theory. In addition to a number of articles and book chapters on climate politics, carbon markets, and global governance, he is the author of Climate Governance at the Crossroads: Experimenting with a Global Response after Kyoto (Oxford University Press 2011), Ozone Depletion and Climate Change: Constructing a Global Response (SUNY Press 2005) and coeditor with Alice Ba of Contending Perspectives on Global Governance (Routledge 2005). He also is a coauthor on a collaborative book Transnational Climate Change Governance (Cambridge University Press 2014). His current research project, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, is Conceptualizing Policy Pathways to Decarbonization.  Professor Hoffmann is a Lead Faculty Member for the Earth System Governance network and Co-Editor of the journal Global Environmental Politics. He is also the chair of the board of directors for the Canadian NGO, Green Economy Canada and a member of the Sustainable Dialogs Canada network of scholars.