Climate clubs: politically feasible and desirable?

The idea of a stringent climate club, once the reserve of academic debates, is quickly gaining ground in international policy circles. This reflects dissatisfaction with the multilateral UNFCCC process, but also hope that a minilateral club could increase climate policy ambition, reinvigorate the Paris Agreement process, and make future emissions pledges stick. With the Biden Presidency renewing the US commitment toward climate action and the European Green Deal proposal for carbon border tariffs, some are advocating the creation of a transatlantic climate club. What could a club approach hope to achieve, and what do we know about its political feasibility and desirability? In this article, we seek conceptual clarification by establishing a typology of different club models; we inject a greater sense of political realism into current debates on the feasibility of these models; and we consider their legitimacy in the context of international climate cooperation. Key policy insights Knowledge gaps and confusion regarding the nature of climate clubs hold back debates about what intergovernmental clubs can contribute to international climate policy. Club design matters: existing club models vary in terms of the proposed size, purpose, operational principles, legal strength, and relationship to the UNFCCC. Clubs focused on normative commitments face low barriers to establishment. They lack legal strength but can help raise policy ambition. Clubs aimed at negotiating targets and measures can increase bargaining efficiency, but struggle to deal with equity and distributional conflicts. Clubs seeking to change incentives via club benefits and sanctions face the highest hurdles to implementation. Their promise to tackle free-riding remains untested and difficult to achieve. Climate clubs face an international legitimacy deficit. Any club proposal needs to consider how to add to, and not distract from, the multilateral climate regime

Three decades of climate mitigation: why haven't we bent the global emissions curve?

Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve. However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Synthesizing the various impediments to mitigation reveals how delivering on the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement now requires an urgent and unprecedented transformation away from today's carbon- and energy-intensive development paradigm

Climate negotiators’ and scientists’ assessments of the climate negotiations

Climate negotiation outcomes are difficult to evaluate objectively because there are no clear reference scenarios. Subjective assessments from those directly involved in the negotiations are particularly important, as this may influence strategy and future negotiation participation. Here we analyze the perceived success of the climate negotiations in a sample of more than 600 experts involved in international climate policy. Respondents were pessimistic when asked for specific assessments of the current approach centered on voluntary pledges, but were more optimistic when asked for general assessments of the outcomes and usefulness of the climate negotiations. Individuals who are more involved in the negotiation process tended to be more optimistic, especially in terms of general assessments. Our results indicate that two reinforcing effects are at work: a high degree of involvement changes individuals’ perceptions and more optimistic individuals are more inclined to remain involved in the negotiations

Building Authority and Legitimacy in Transnational Climate Change Governance : Evidence from the Governors’ Climate and Forest Task Force

Transnational climate change initiatives have increased in number and relevance within the global climate change regime. Despite being largely welcomed, there are concerns about their ability to deliver ambitious climate action and about their democratic legitimacy. This paper disentangles the nature of both authority and legitimacy of a specific form of transnational networks, transgovernmental networks of subnational governments. It then investigates how a major transgovernmental initiative focusing on tropical forests, the Governors Climate and Forest Task Force, attempts to command authority and to build and maintain its legitimacy. The paper illustrates the particular challenges faced by initiatives formed primarily by jurisdictions from the Global South. Three major trade-offs related to authority and legitimacy dimensions are identified: first, the difficulty of balancing the need for increased representation with performance on ambitious climate goals; second, the need to deliver effectiveness while ensuring transparency of governance processes; and third, the limited ability to leverage formal authority of members to deliver climate action in local jurisdictions, while depending on external funds from the Global North.Peer reviewe

Transparency and Its Discontents: How IO Transparency Influences Domestic Resistance to Government Reforms

How do international organizations influence domestic transparency? Studies typically contend that in order to be instrumental in promoting good government institutions, international organizations have to embody these norms in their own work. International organizations (IOs) have recently implemented a number of reforms to open up certain official documents and proceedings to public access. These reforms are generally expected to promote support for transparency in member countries. We suggest that one important and overlooked condition determines the ability of international organizations to meet these expectations: the quality of IO decision making, defined as its effectiveness, predictability and fairness. The paper develops these ideas theoretically and presents a study on how these reforms influence perceptions of the merits and drawbacks of transparency among senior government officials in environmental ministries, involved in projects seeking finance through the Clean Development Mechanisms and the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol

Does Corruption Cause Aid Fatigue?

Does corruption reduce support for foreign aid? General explanations for aid fatigue, such as meagre development results and the perception that taxpayers’ money is being wasted fail to solve what we call the aid-corruption paradox, namely that the need for foreign aid is often the greatest in corrupt environments. Corruption can be seen as an external impediment on the effectiveness of aid, but also as an internal and important target of aid-driven efforts to improve governments. This paper explores the influence of corruption on support for foreign aid and conditions under which corruption causes aid fatigue. Building on studies of the motives for foreign aid and the social acceptability of corruption, we suggest that the relationship between corruption and aid fatigue substantially depends on fundamental beliefs about the role of foreign aid. The analysis builds on data from the 2009 Eurobarometer survey. Our findings have implications for understanding the consequences of the remarkable increase in exposure of corruption in recent years, efforts to tackle global environmental challenges, and fundamental relationships between corruption and aid legitimacy

Towards Better Governments? A Theoretical Framework for the Influence of International Organizations

Although international organizations are typically seen as important actors promoting better government institutions and reducing corruption, there are few comprehensive analysis of how they promote such changes. This paper develops a theoretical framework that traces the roots of IO success or failure to factors that are internal to the strategies that they employ. We suggest that the tools used by international organizations to promote quality of government can be categorized into four groups: Inter-state competitive pressures; conditions on economic assistance; interaction with transnational actors; and the enlargement of international communities. In contrast to accounts that trace the roots of IO success or failure in member states to domestic particularities, such as the amount of domestic resistance to government reforms, we argue that the mechanisms themselves have a number of shortcomings that reduce their effectiveness. Six such factors are identified: imprecise data, market pressures, contested policy advice, incomplete internalization and lack of mainstreaming of norms by international organizations and member states, and low priority of quality of government issues. The paper thereby offers an explanation for why numerous empirical studies fail to find a positive correlation between IO measures and better government institutions

Why Pay Bribes? Collective Action and Anticorruption Efforts

This paper suggests that the effectiveness of current anticorruption policy suffers from a focus on the scale of the corruption problem instead of type of corruption that is to be fought. I make a distinction between need and greed corruption. Contrary to the most commonly used distinctions this distinction focuses on the basic motivation for paying a bribe, and whether the bribe is used to gain services that citizens are legally entitled to or not. Greed corruption is used to gain advantages that citizens are not legally entitled to, build on collusion rather than extortion and can thereby remain invisible and unobtrusive. In greed corruption societies the costs of corruption are divided between a large number of actors and the negative effects of corruption on economic and democratic performance are delayed and diffuse. I subsequently use this distinction to develop three propositions about the relationship between corruption and institutional trust, and the effects of anticorruption policy. Using both cross country data and a case study of a low corruption context, I suggests a) That greed corruption can coexist with high institutional trust, and that it thereby may not follow the expected, and often confirmed, negative relationship between corruption and institutional trust b) That greed corruption may not produce civic engagement against corruption and c) That increased transparency may not produce the expected benefits in low need corruption contexts, since it can disproportionally alter expectations about the entrenchment of corruption in a society. In other words, the paper suggest that the balance between need and greed corruption in a society determines the effectiveness of traditional policy measures derived from the logic of principal agent theory, such as societal accountability and transparency, and that the relevance of collective action theory to understand the effects of anticorruption efforts can be extended to contexts where the overall level of corruption is low