Exploring the Impact of Digital Global Governance through Affordance Theory: the Case of Climate Reporting

Abstract

The world is facing global challenges, which has led to international policy development such as the Paris Agreement (the United Nations climate agreement). An important element of the Paris Agreement is reporting. As digital technologies are used in reporting, this can be considered a case of digital global governance. Surprisingly, the global dimension of digital governance has received little attention from the academic community. Thus, theoretical and empirical understanding of digital global governance and how it responds to global challenges is needed. To address this, climate reporting to the United Nations, with Sweden as a case, has been studied. Reporting was chosen because of the significant role of embedded IT artefacts. Empirical data was analyzed with the lens of affordance theory. Findings suggest that IT artefacts and information in the reporting have affordances that enables monitoring, transparency, implementation of agreement, coordination & collaboration, analysis & visualization, and re-use of information.