The ‘Powering Past Coal Alliance’: A Global Prohibition Regime in Formation?

Any meaningful climate policy includes a transition away from coal. This does not just mean refraining from building new coal-fired power plants but also the early retirement of existing coal capacity, which can lead trillions of lost revenue (IEA, 2017). Recently, the UK and Canada launched the ‘Powering Past Coal Alliance’ (PPCA), a coalition of governments, organisations and businesses seeking to accelerate the phase-out of coal by 2050. Yet, most of the countries that have signed the PPCA charter do not burn coal in large quantities. Some, like Belgium, do not even burn coal at all. This raises two important questions. First, why do countries join the PPCA? And, second, how effective could this initiative be at inducing domestic policy changes, both in the signatory states and beyond? We hypothesize that states join the PPCA because they have announced and implemented domestic reforms, rather than the other way around. Posturing and reputational effects thus largely explain why countries join the club. However, we also conjecture that the Alliance can function as a sort of external commitment device that locks in a domestic political consensus to move away from coal. Finally, we expect the normative pressure on outsiders to remain small, even if the club grows larger, given the domestic political economy of coal. To scrutinize these conjectures, we study the characteristics and motivations of the countries that have joined the initiative. In addition, we look at other ‘global prohibition regimes’ (Nadelmann, 1990)—the Minamata Convention that phases out mercury, for example, or the Kigali Protocol that phases out HFCs—to see if we can draw lessons for coal and the PPCA.