What are states’ roles in global climate governance? How do they emerge, evolve, and interact with each other? Characterising states with roles is a commonly employed rhetoric which seeks to reflect both the performance of individual players whilst articulating the international community's impression towards them. Exploring the formation, dynamics and policy effects of states’ roles is thus crucial to the analysis of global climate governance. However, the corpus of academic literature on role theory still exhibits some substantial gaps in knowledge regarding role-induced conflicts. Targeting these gaps, this thesis critically engages with the underpinnings of states’ role conflicts and introduces a theoretical framework to analyse the formation, changing dynamics and interactions of states’ roles within international climate mitigation context.

Taking role conflict as the lynchpin connecting a range of diverse approaches (collective action, leadership theory, trade politics and market power theory), the thesis illuminates the integrated spectrum of role conflicts within the context of global climate governance, from agent to structure (introducing the Role Conflict Framework: role mismatch, role threshold, role rent-seeking and role contestation). The evolutionary dynamics between the four types of role conflict identified and elucidated herein demonstrate the little-understood complexity in resolving these issues as they grow from inventive problem to distribution dilemma, from procedural debate to production relations and status competition. The Role Conflict Framework uncovers not only conflictual scenarios, but also inherent conditions influencing the emergence, interaction and evolution of states’ roles. Further, this research examines the two-sided features of conflict in role studies; focusing on the critical nature of conflicts within and between states which bring in positive externalities that could benefit climate practices and global climate initiatives. Accordingly, the assumed negative correlation between states’ role conflict and governance effectiveness needs to be reconsidered.

The thesis derives theoretical, practical and policy insights on the formation and distribution of states’ roles as well as the logic underpinning states’ conflictual performances, providing a new and illuminating perspective in viewing and explaining states’ participation in global climate governance.