With increasing greenhouse gas emissions, we are embarked on an unprecedented experiment with an uncertain outcome for the future of the planet. The Kyoto Protocol serves as an initial step through 2012 to mitigate the threats posed by global climate change. A second step is needed, and policy-makers, scholars, business people, and environmentalists have begun debating the structure of the successor to the Kyoto agreement. Written by a team of leading scholars in economics, law, and international relations, this book contributes to this debate by examining the merits of six alternative international architectures for global climate policy. Architectures for Agreement offers the reader a uniquely wide-ranging menu of options for post-Kyoto climate policy, with a concern throughout to learn from past experience in order to maximize opportunities for future success in the real, 'second-best' world. It will be an essential reference for scholars, policy-makers, and students interested in climate policy.

'The Kyoto Protocol was at best an imperfect and incomplete first step toward an effective response to the enormously difficult problem of climate change, which is characterized by huge stakes, great uncertainties, global scope, and a time-scale measured in decades or centuries. In this important volume, Joseph Aldy, Robert Stavins, and a host of distinguished contributors provide a thoughtful exploration of a range of alternative post-Kyoto top-down and bottom-up regimes and their implications. This book should be read by everyone who takes climate change seriously as a policy problem.'

Richard Schmalensee - John C Head III Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management and Professor of Economics and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

'Architectures for Agreement is a genuinely interdisciplinary book that takes institutions and incentives seriously. Critically evaluating proposals for climate change policy that fail to take political realities into account, its authors put forward alternatives worthy of serious consideration and debate.'

Robert O. Keohane - Professor of International Affairs, Princeton University

'As diplomats and politicians around the world - from the G8 leaders to mayors of our larger cities - struggle to find a formula for a global regime that would successfully tackle the threat of climate change, what they need most is a clear and dispassionate descriptions of the pros and cons of the competing regimes being offered up to them. And that is exactly what they will find in this volume, as it first describes and then test the three basic approaches to the problem. As Lawrence Summers points out in the Foreword, what makes global warming so hard is that it requires international co-operation at a scale to which we are not accustomed. But by thoughtfully organizing the lucidly written contributions of some 20 distinguished contributors, Joseph Aldy and Robert Stavins, the editors, give us what they promise in the title , Architectures for Agreement.'

Frank Loy - Former Chief Climate Change Negotiator for the United States, 1998–2001