Aspirational politics to solve the climate crisis? Empirical evidence on the effects of lofty goals and imaginaries

The interconnected and complex nature of climate change is currently being addressed through a global landscape of states and non-state actors with conflicting interests, insufficient commitments, and lacking accountability. In turn, the current politics that are supposed to address/ generate solutions for the climate crisis can be described as messy, leading to insufficient progress. Political science scholars Martha Finnemore and Michelle Jurkovich (2020) have problematized the subpar performance by highlighting the role of aspirations in current politics. Their conceptualization of aspirational politics highlights how stakeholders rely on change over time, lofty goals that are tall but vaguely formulated, and that address transformation through imagination. The role of these lofty goals and long-term agendas is to mobilize stakeholders and facilitate agreement, however they are detached from accountability mechanisms and run the risk of not facilitating actual change. To comprehend the impact of aspirational politics there is a need to move beyond the conceptualization of aspirational politics and empirically assess its effects. To what extent are lofty goals translated into concrete, effective solutions? What challenges are associated with implementing lofty goals? To this end, we identify a set of four multi-stakeholder partnerships that aim to mitigate climate change in connection with simultaneous sustainability challenges through lofty goals, allowing for a much-needed in-depth study of ongoing efforts. We critically examine how they pronounce their imaginaries of climate change, their decision-making procedures and their implementation strategies using qualitative content analysis and semi-structured interviews with their partners. The focus on multi-stakeholder partnerships is motivated by their expected role in facilitating the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goal 13 on Climate Action. Furthermore, by the fact that they govern within the realm of soft law without the same responsibilities or capabilities as the state. By investigating these partnerships, we demonstrate what type of effects aspirational politics generate at the output level, and whether this varies across different multi-stakeholder partnerships. In turn, we make an empirical contribution to the literature on climate commitments and environmental governance through aspirations at large, while also highlighting opportunities and challenges that emerge from navigating efforts built on aspirations. Based on the results we propose research avenues for assessing the impact of the effects goals beyond the output level and provide lessons for future generations of multi-stakeholder partnerships.