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Institutions are never completely static, and exist in a state of perpetual interplay between human behaviour and choices and wider foundational components of society such as economic systems and cultural values. Historical institutionalism is often associated with punctuated equilibrium models, which emerged early in institutional scholarship (Collier and Collier 1991, Thelen and Steinmo 1992). In these models, critical junctures break through stable social and political systems and established path dependent policies, creating the only opportunities for major institutional reform (Pierson 2004, pp. 134–135). These critical junctures are the points where analysis can reveal how and why institutional change occurs, although change does not always follow when a juncture opens (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007). Once a new policy or institutional design is chosen, a new equilibrium is established and it becomes progressively more difficult to deviate from this path (Mahoney 2000, p. 503). Critical juncture approaches have been criticised for an inability to deal adequately with observed institutional and policy change, and for lacking theoretical tools to explain when established paths are disrupted or broken (Hira and Hira 2000, Greener 2002, p. 164). Critical juncture models ‘tend to distinguish sharply between periods of institutional creation and periods of ‘stasis’’ (Thelen 2003, p. 19) and focus on exogenous, significant shocks as the junctures that stimulate change (Pierson 2004, p. 135), thereby ‘encouraging us to conceive of change as involving the “breakdown” of one set of institutions and its replacement with another’ (Mahoney and Thelen 2009, p. 7).

While some scholars have refined and clarified the critical junctures approach (Hogan 2006, Capoccia and Kelemen 2007), perspectives that consider that ‘most institutional change is incremental rather than totally reconstructive or destructive’ (Levi

1990, p. 415) and that junctures are ‘rarely so “critical” and often limited to a single policy domain’ (Hall 2016, p. 41) are more prominent now. Much historical institutionalist literature seeks to explain institutional change by identifying mechanisms that contribute to this incremental change over time, in a deliberate effort to go further than identifying path dependence and historical constraints on choices and institutional development when seeking to understand institutional influence in the political world (Thelen 1999, 2004, Streek and Thelen 2005a, Béland 2007, Mahoney and Thelen 2009).

As a relatively new institution with a treaty-based format that involves creation of new layers of policy every year, a model of institutional change that can account for incremental and internally-generated change is more applicable to the UNFCCC than a punctuated equilibrium model that requires significant and exogenous shocks to explain conditions where actors can re-shape the institution. Building on their earlier work (Streek and Thelen 2005b), Mahoney and Thelen (2009, pp. 15–16) delineate four types of gradual institutional change: displacement, or gradual removal of existing rules and introduction of new ones; layering, or amending existing rules or attaching new rules on top; drift, or the changing impact of existing rules due to shifts in the environment; and conversion, or the changed application or interpretation of existing rules driven by actors strategically manipulating institutional ambiguities. These mechanisms can help to illuminate how political contestation over small alterations or additions to institutional rule structures or their interpretation over time can gradually reshape international political and economic institutions, or accumulate and lead to more radical changes (Fioretos et al. 2016a, pp. 13– 14).

Historical institutionalists also draw attention to the effects of institutional design and development on the preferences of actors for retaining or changing institutional structures. Unlike rational choice perspectives in which the effects and advantages of institutional structures are discounted, historical institutionalists highlight ‘the extent to which people gain or lose access to the advantages (or disadvantages) they associate with past designs, including those that confer positions of privilege that translate into forms of enduring influence’, as a key factor in the calculations actors make when confronted with new realities and decisions over whether to facilitate incremental or more substantial institutional change (Fioretos 2011, pp. 373 & 376). In contrast to a rational choice perspective, where a marginal benefit will lead to a significant shift in preferences, historical institutionalism suggests that the accumulation of sufficient advantage to outweigh those lost from the ending of existing arrangements will be necessary to bring about institutional change (Fioretos 2011, p. 375).

Bringing these processes together, Thelen (2004, pp. 290–291) argues that, while institutions do ‘affect the interests and strategic options available to various groups’, institutions are not simply static and remain constantly open to challenge and political contestation, and ‘changes in the political coalitions on which they rest hold the key to understanding significant shifts over time in the form institutions take and the functions they perform’. Hall (2016) builds on this notion of coalitions, as mentioned previously, in this case arguing that while gradual ‘reform from above’ may well be continuous within institutions, a coalition of sufficient strength is required to bring about more significant institutional change. While this might involve gaining support for abandoning established policies and agreeing on reforms, Vatn (2015) suggests that existing institutional configurations and rules can suppress the ability of actors to articulate their interests and succeed in having them accepted as legitimate concerns or grounds for change within the political process. This is required to overcome the power held by actors or coalitions with a stake in preserving the advantage they gain from the prevailing institutional structure. This conception of interplay between small-scale changes that preserve actors’ positions within an institution, and the building up of discontent, legitimacy and momentum to overcome the power of established coalitions that have shaped the existing institutional structure, appears to be a much closer fit with the consistent North-South dynamics commonly associated with the UNFCCC. However, the micro-processes involved in the widespread stability and few instances of institutional change initially observable in the history of UNFCCC climate finance and the way institutional changes relate to and affect actors’ preferences remain in need of systematic examination.