This research project examines how individual states and key actors within them, international institutions and key non-state actors, perceive the challenges for climate change governance and their negotiating possibilities and options. This will enable the research team to gain a deeper understanding of the key obstacles to co-operation between states and means to overcome them. In particular, the researchers aim to develop new empirically grounded conceptions of the opportunities for climate change cooperation and governance, to identify new approaches to global policy and action and to map out the likely best paths for realising them. New forms of cooperation may well involve alliances of networks of non-state actors that in turn can shape state perceptions about the payoffs of co-operation and can influence the process of state coalition building on climate change. Beyond all else, the researchers aim to develop strategies that will increase levels of cooperation well past those predicted by the existing theory and practice of climate change governance, and in doing so, to make an important contribution to climate change policy analysis and action.