The Elusive Global Governance of Climate Change: Comparing Nationally Determined Contributions

The international community has been working on a response to the existential threat of climate change that would be adopted and implemented widely enough to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" (UNFCCC 1992, Art 2). Policymakers have recently shifted away from the convention-protocol system, which had involved attempts to formulate and impose legally binding obligations on states, to embrace a bottom-up approach in which states determine their own commitments. This system of soft governance is embodied in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the Paris Agreement (2016). Given that NDCs with self-determined commitments and weak to non-existent monitoring and enforcement mechanisms is presently the main approach of the international community to addressing climate change, we require greater understanding of what NDCs mean to the states that submit them. Drawing on several areas of scholarship in national and international governance, we examine distinct ways of conceiving of NDCs. Firstly, NDCs may be thought of as commitments to the international community and/or domestic actors. Second, they may embody states’ negotiating positions in an ongoing process of national and international interactions. Third, drawing on scholarship on the emergence of soft law and policy transfer, NDCs may be conceived of as states’ attempts to coordinate with and influence policymaking in other jurisdictions. Fourth, NDCs may be purely symbolic rituals that are designed to protect present and future governments’ autonomy while appearing to address the problem. Any particular way of defining NDCs may be more applicable to some governments than to others, and different definitions may apply to different aspects of the same NDCs to at least some extent. We develop a measurement procedure based on the observable implications of these distinct ways of conceiving of NDCs and apply it to a sample of the NDCs that are currently available (114 at time of writing). This measurement procedure draws insights from a range of studies that involve human coding of political texts, including national election programs of political parties, national government coalition agreements, national legislation and international treaties. Part of the procedure involves the development of a framework of themes and subthemes that captures the universe of discourse on the global governance of climate change. This allows us to compare systematically the emphasis that different states place on the broad themes of mitigation and adaptation, as well as more detailed subthemes. We categorize the different ways in which NDCs frame overarching issues such as the differentiation of responsibilities between developed and developing countries. Our measurement procedure also identifies specific pledges, which are verifiable commitments to take specific actions or bring about specific outcomes. Finally, we draw on previous research on delegation in national laws and international treaties to systematically code the discretion and ambiguity contained in NDCs. This theoretically informed measurement procedure allows us to compare different states’ NDCs systematically and to derive inferences about the conditions under which different ways of conceiving of these documents are most applicable.