Equity/efficiency dilemmas: when theoretical frameworks for climate mitigation create distributional conflicts

Climate action is confronted with major distributional conflicts that are a source of inaction. A telling example is the yellow vest crisis in France following the increase in the carbon ecotax in 2019. This social crisis has blocked the increase in the carbon price signal, which is a prerequisite for the instrument's environmental effectiveness. We study these paralyzing distributive conflicts from the angle of dilemmas between the environmental efficiency and equity stakes of climate policy instruments. Our aim is to examine the origins of these equity/effectiveness dilemmas in climate policy instruments and the means of overcoming them. This paper questions the theoretical frameworks that drives instrumental logics. It begins by identifying the theoretical frameworks used to frame the problem of climate change mitigation, to justify the choice of public policy instruments and to describe the equity issues at stake. To this end, we analyze the IPCC reports from 1990 to 2022 to highlight the theoretical frameworks and concepts underlying the choice of policy instruments for climate change mitigation. This first phase of research leads us to identify that climate change mitigation is framed in the IPCC reports as a "collective action problem around a common resource". This framing implies three main hypotheses: value-producing individual actions; the sum of which leads to the overexploitation or degradation of a resource; with heterogeneous production functions between actors. We show that this set of hypotheses forces individualized modes of action, generating a coupling between the distribution of emissions and the distribution of wealth within the actors concerned. Fixing a distribution of emissions implies a different distribution of values due to the heterogeneity hypothesis, and vice-versa. Therefore, this coupling appears as a source for equity/ effectiveness dilemmas. To show that a different framing is possible, we draw on an ancient rule of solidarity from maritime law dating back more than 2500 years, the internationally recognized general average rule. We show that framing climate action as rescue action in the face of a common peril allows us to recognize a key interdependence of climate action: one person's action saves others. This new frame makes it possible to design instruments that can manage both the distribution of emissions and that of wealth, hence opening a path to theoretically avoid equity/ effectiveness dilemmas. This article contributes to an emerging literature in global environmental politics that critiques the influence of the tragedy of the commons (Brown et al., 2019; Cashore & Bernstein, 2022), the collective action problem and the free rider (Aklin & Mildenberger, 2020) as a frame for mitigation policy instruments. We show that all these concepts refer to the same initial set of hypotheses for climate mitigation, and that they structure not only the logic of effective mitigation, but also that of the equity of mitigation action. We also show that this framing implies dilemmas between effectiveness and equity concerns that might be escaped with other framings. This paper thus identifies a source of conflict in climate action in the very theoretical frameworks that drive climate policies.