Pathways to Carbon Neutrality: What Role for Coalitions and Climate Alliances?

While the adoption of the Paris Agreement has provided a basis for collective climate action, the world is far from on track to hold global warming well below 2 °C. The recent COP25 meeting, held in Madrid in December 2019, showed once again the limitations of the UNFCCC process. Both researchers and practitioners have pointed out that cooperation among smaller groups of political actors could accelerate ongoing transitions and help fulfil the objectives of the Paris Agreement (see e.g. Samans 2018; IRENA 2019). In particular, the degree of transformation needed requires much deeper forms of international collaboration than the shallow forms that the world has seen so far. Recent studies show that by creating cooperative platforms for climate action, different actors can be induced to work together to arrive at more ambitious climate commitments (Bernstein and Hoffmann 2018, Chan et al. 2018). In recent years we have seen an increase in coalitions bringing together ambitious and pioneering countries and cities aiming to achieve an accelerated transformation, e.g. the Climate Ambition Alliance and Carbon Neutrality Coalition. Yet we know little about the capabilities and prospects for such coalitions to achieve actual decarbonization. Drawing on the literature on clubs and a new dataset, this paper pursues an in-depth analysis of these coalitions to understand the political aspects behind forming and advancing an agenda toward decarbonization amongst a set of relatively ambitious actors. The paper examines the mechanisms for formation of coalitions, how they work internally, their functions as well as their potential for reducing emissions. Thereby the paper provides a timely contribution to the debate about the need for deeper forms of international collaboration in order to mitigate climate change, and addresses a gap in the literature on the politics of climate coalitions.