In person icon Global Climate Governance: What Can We Learn from the Paris Agreement’s First Ambition Cycle?

Abstract

For over three decades, global negotiations to contain dangerous climate change have been plagued by coordination problems, fear of free-riding, and the political infeasibility of a universal, legally binding global climate regime. Following the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, using inputs from governance scholarship, global decisionmakers agreed to set up a different kind of architecture. The 2015 Paris Agreement emphasized differentiated responsibility and rested on nationally-determined contributions which are pledged climate actions that together should eventually add up to reaching the agreements long-term goal – taming global temperature rise to 2 or desirably 1.5 degrees C. These nationally determined pledges were not expected to immediately add up, leaving an “ambition gap” between the goal and the projected impacts of currently pledged actions. As such, the PA implemented an “ambition cycle” – a 5-year cyclical pledge-and-review system, where NDCs are presented, discussed, summarized and then updated with increased individual and collective ambition. This process took the form of the Global Stocktake, its first phase culminating at the 2023 Conference of the Parties (COP) in Dubai. What are the results of the first ‘ambition cycle’? When the Paris Agreement’s pledge-and-review system was established, scholars and commentators focused on the soft governance potential of voluntary commitments, with universality of pledges and their transparency allowing for non-confrontational expert review (within the UNFCCC), implicit peer-pressure, and external pressure from non-parties (e.g. NGOs and domestic publics). These were hoped to lead to ‘ratcheting up’ of climate ambition over time. Have these hopes materialized? What can we already say about the process, the change in ambition of the different NDCs, and of the understanding of ‘ambition’ itself? This panel invites papers that reflect on these themes central to global climate governance.

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