Negotiating the Rulebook of the Paris Agreement: The Politics of Transparency of Climate Change Adaptation

The Paris Agreement established an “Enhanced Transparency Framework” (ETF) in order to assess whether countries are adhering to their national pledges. Whilst the original transparency arrangements under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have dealt almost exclusively with greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation, the ETF also covers climate change adaptation, i.e. adjustments in human systems in response to experienced and expected climate impacts. Progress in mitigation can be assessed through universal global metrics like avoided tons of GHG emissions, but adaptation is more context-specific and does not have a global reference metric. These material differences affect the rationale for transparency, the comparability across countries, and the ways in which transparency may lead to improved outcomes. To date, literature on transparency in climate governance has not addressed what transparency of adaptation means while literature on the politics of adaptation has largely concentrated on matters of finance. The politics of transparency of adaptation and how they shaped the 2018 Paris Rulebook have not yet been explored. Based on multi-year participant observation during the UNFCCC negotiation sessions, this paper tracks the evolution of the negotiation texts on transparency of adaptation in the Paris Rulebook and explores the politics behind different positions. It finds that transparency arrangements on adaptation have been shaped by a combination of material and political factors with some of the latter being tied to underlying conflicts on burden sharing and differentiation. These findings confirm that transparency is itself a contested political terrain rather than a technical matter. The paper concludes by exploring what the resulting rules mean for transparency as a governance mechanism under the Paris Agreement and how they may affect the global stocktake on collective progress on climate change adaptation.