Addressing the threat of climate change will ultimately require collective international action, coordinated at the global level. However the path to creating the necessary international political and economic framework to mobilize and govern such action remains unclear. Recent attempts at all-inclusive international negotiations have faced numerous national and international political roadblocks, and faith in the existing negotiation process itself is now waning. In response, multinational clubs, bilateral partnerships, and even emerging networks of policy and commercial entrepreneurs spanning the local through transnational levels, are now all developing and even implementing new approaches to addressing the climate challenge. Such ‘bottom-up’ climate governance innovations offer the promise of localized near-term action on the climate challenge that could incentivize and catalyze the broader international community to follow suit. But the potential for tensions between various emerging, uncoordinated and localized climate governance regimes also present a new global governance challenge—particularly as such tensions could further stymie the development of a comprehensive global climate framework. In this context, The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), Waterloo ON, Canada has decided to devote its annual conference (CIGI’10), scheduled for October 1-3, 2010, to exploring how action, across all levels of government and society, could be mobilized and coordinated to generate near-term progress towards realizing the core elements of the effective and equitable global framework on climate we know is needed. To accomplish this, our conference sets out an ambitious agenda of closed-door, Chatham House Rule discussions built around three themes: 1) understanding the key national and international political hurdles hindering the current ‘top-down’ global negotiations; 2) examining the potential of emerging climate action and policy at all levels of government and society, while considering the challenges inherent to the possibly consequent patchwork of climate regimes; and 3) exploring the international governance challenges of restructuring global negotiation mechanisms, building a better interface between climate science and policy, and preparing for emerging geoengineering possibilities. More information on the event will be available shortly.