Exploring the problem structure of policy making: Collective action and distributive conflict in enhancing NDCs under the Paris Agreement

Climate change mitigation has been described, first and foremost, as a collective action problem where the main constraint on effective climate policy making is free-riding concerns between countries. Yet, the bottom-up structure of the Paris Agreement has spurred an uptick in research that criticizes this conventional collective action account for lacking empirical basis. The ‘distributive conflict’ perspective argues that governments’ climate policy is formed, chiefly, by conflicts between pro- and anti-climate reform interests within countries. I conduct a comparative case study of the five states that submitted enhanced nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement in 2022: Australia, Norway, Singapore, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, representing varying NDC ambition levels. Using Aklin and Mildenberger’s empirical prediction set (2020) for testing the merits of the two theories on policy making episodes, I study the state’s perceptions of climate policy making by examining how the two theories manifest in states’ statements on their updated NDCs. Conducting a content analysis on the countries’ High-level national statements to the COPs, and on government press releases on the domestic level from 2021 and 2022, I find that the countries invoke a mix of collective action and distributive conflict sentiment as drivers and barriers to their climate policy making. Attempting to say something about the scope conditions for the two theories, I find that i) collective action sentiment is more frequent in the international level statements than in the domestic level statements, ii) that the two democratic countries of this study invoke distributive conflict sentiment more frequently than the autocracies do and iii) that collective action sentiment is more frequent in 2022 than in 2021. This suggest that the problem structure of climate policy making may be changing with changing scope conditions, which could have implications for the design of international climate agreements.