Project
The Pulling Power of the Paris Agreement
The Paris Agreement provides the international framework for all countries’ climate policy. While it is a legal agreement, there are no provisions in the agreement to ‘force’ countries to take ambitious actions. The PULLP project seeks to assess the conditions under which it is more or less likely that the Paris Agreement will in fact make states to take on ever more ambitious climate action, most importantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, by studying both the international process and what countries do at home in response to that process.
Introduction
The impacts of climate change are already felt in many parts of the world and every measure of mitigating it by reducing emissions and improving natures’ uptake of carbon will reduce suffering for both humans and nature. The Paris Agreement is designed to help countries collectively to limit climate change as close to 1.5C degrees as possible. But while the Paris Agreement is an international law it looks nothing like a law as we know it in domestic contexts. Every country can decide if and how much the law applies to them and if a country ignores its obligations they cannot be punished. And yet, much is expected of the Agreement and it is very plausible that it does influence countries’ actions – but how and how much?
Description
The PULLP project zooms in in on the so-called "pledge and review" mechanism at the heart of the Paris Agreement, whereby states are obliged to commit to a certain level of emissions cuts through NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) and subsequently be subject to review by their peers (other states) about whether they have succeeded in doing so. However, the Paris Agreement has no provisions to force or compel states to reduce emissions and relies exclusively on what states themselves commit to. The Paris Agreement is thus a case of "soft" global governance that we also find in other issue-areas, such as human rights and development assistance. There is some indication that such "voluntary" governance mechanisms can be effective in changing state behavior, but there is little systematic research on it. The project combines quantitative data analysis on changing pledges and ambition levels with process tracing, document analysis and participant observation to identify how pledge and review affects state behavior, the variation in how states treats pledge and review, and the role of non-state actors in exerting pressure on state behavior.