Focal Points, Forum Shopping and Credible Commitments: The Regulation of HFC Gases between the Kyoto- and Montreal Protocols

When governments regulate new and emerging issues, they usually operate through focal points, that is, institutions that are widely recognized to exert authority over such issues. Focal points facilitate collective action by contributing to the convergence of actor expectations; they provide social scripts; and their pre-existing rule frameworks make them relatively efficient at regulating new and emerging issues that fall within their jurisdiction. Collective action through non-focal points thus creates a puzzle for institutionalist theory: why do states choose to act through institutions that do not hold jurisdiction over an issue; do not provide established social scripts; and do not offer efficiency gains? This paper analyzes the case of international hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) regulation. HFCs are an industrial gas that came into widespread commercial use after the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer mandated the phase-out of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). While not an ozone-depleting substances, HFCs are greenhouse gases and thus contribute to global warming. Responding to drastic increases in global HFC emissions, in 2016, governments instituted the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol in order to phase-down global consumption. Thus, rather than operating through the international climate regime, particularly the Kyoto Protocol, governments chose to regulate a greenhouse gas under the international ozone regime. Theoretically, we draw on the literatures on forum shopping, regime shifting and non-regimes. Using a mixed-methods design that combines a case-based approach with large-scale text mining of negotiation records, we find that the shift from a focal- to a non-focal point primarily results from institution-specific differences in the credibility of commitments: with the impending shift towards Nationally-Determined Contributions under the Paris climate agreement weakening the prospects of ambitious and collective long-term action on HFCs, the Montreal Protocol offered a non-focal point setting designed for credible and sector-specific long-term commitments. We conclude with a theoretical discussion on the relevance of credible commitments for state behaviour in fragmented, multi-institutional governance architectures.