From Competition to Complementarity: Evidence from 41 Climate Clubs on How They Align with the Paris Agreement

With the world on a "highway to climate hell" (Guterres, 2024) despite decades of negotiations, attention increasingly turns to climate clubs as governance tools to enhance climate ambition and close the mitigation gap under the Paris Agreement. However, a deeper understanding of normative climate clubs' contribution to curbing climate change has been impeded by limited empirical research, particularly regarding their relationship to the UNFCCC (Falkner, Nasiritousi, and Reischl 2022; Koppenborg, 2025). To address this knowledge gap, this paper analyzes 41 normative climate club cases, asking: What role do normative climate clubs play in global climate governance? The paper develops a framework encompassing three dimensions: how they relate to existing climate treaties (Biermann et al., 2009), whether they build momentum for global agreement as so-called ‘building blocks’ (Stewart et al., 2013), and how they contribute to Paris implementation. Applying this framework to the normative climate club landscape yields three key empirical contributions. First, 95 percent of cases align with Paris Agreement goals, including clubs that previously challenged the Kyoto Protocol. This demonstrates an evolution toward complementarity between climate clubs and multilateral treaties. Second, many normative clubs are launched by COP hosts, with some collaborating with UN High-Level Climate Champions to build momentum under Paris. This reveals that actors shaping multilateral negotiations internally are simultaneously creating external yet complementary mechanisms to mobilize action outside formal negotiation schedules. Third, some clubs actively adapt to the UNFCCC calendar by publishing monitoring reports before COPs (similar to NGO progress reports), scheduling member meetings as COP side events, and collaborating with COP presidencies on aligned initiatives. The paper concludes by identifying future research directions, particularly examining how the UN and international organizations incubate climate clubs that complement the Paris Agreement, and assessing the long-term effectiveness of this evolving club-treaty relationship in accelerating climate action.