The Aspirational Politics of Global Net Zero

A growing body of scholarly literature and policy rhetoric refers to ‘Net Zero’ greenhouse gas emissions (and the related concept of ‘carbon neutrality’) as an international norm that has diffused. This article contests these claims; it puts forward an argument that Global Net Zero is best understood as an ‘aspiration’ based on recent conceptual work by Martha Finnemore and Michelle Jurkovich. Norms refer to standards of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity – a definition that Global Net Zero does not currently meet. While Net Zero targets have certainly proliferated among national governments, and there is a wide number of private sector Net Zero pledges, there is little political consensus on what Net Zero actually means for governance activities and what constitutes a ‘fair share’ of the burden. Moreover, most of the literature has failed to recognize an essential component of the norm definition: no specifically identified actors are held accountable for achieving Net Zero or adopting Net Zero-aligned behavior. Aspirations in global politics are lofty goals achieved over time requiring imaginative thinking. This article therefore argues that Net Zero is better understood as an aspiration, both for scholars working to understand the proliferation of Net Zero commitments in public and private governance and for policymakers seeking to achieve Global Net Zero. The conceptual analysis in this paper first shows why Net Zero should not be understood as an international norm, reviewing the empirical record to show that governments and corporations that are not credibly on track to achieve Net Zero do not face social sanctions we should expect to find for norm violation. It then shows that candidate norms, such as guidelines for Net Zero emissions commitments from international standard-setting bodies, are in their infancy, have not been widely adopted to date, and leave significant gaps regarding which actors with which identities are actually responsible for achieving Global Net Zero. The article shows how understanding Net Zero as an aspiration allows scholars and policymakers to think through the risks of aspirational politics identified by Finnemore and Jurkovich – including, in this case, greenwashing. The article then explains how Global Net Zero complicates and expands the burgeoning aspirational politics research program. It contends that Net Zero is a promising empirical field for fruitful theoretical development on aspiration in world politics. Crucial to the extant understanding of aspiration is that political actors are not actually held accountable for achieving aspirational goals; any progress towards the goal will be rewarded, confounding traditional rationalist expectations of international commitments. Net Zero, however, is certainly an aspirational goal, but not meeting it will surely trigger strong adverse reactions against a range of political actors as future generations are condemned to a world of more than 2 degrees C warming above pre-industrial levels.