Governing climate change in a changing world

Abstract This commentary reflects on a longstanding interdisciplinary exchange across geography and political science, which has crystallised into the scholarship on climate governance. This debate has fundamentally shaped ideas on how climate change can be managed as a societal challenge and with what consequences. The analysis briefly maps the emergence of climate governance as a concept and its progressive embedding in climate policy discourse. Next, the discussion reflects on how the application of associated frameworks may become increasingly ‘stretched’, as theoretical toolkits travel far beyond the settings in which they were developed.