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Abstract
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which serve as the primary feature of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which serve as a vital instrumental of the UNFCCC’s Paris Agreement, have clear synergies. Both are focused, in part, on responding to challenges presented to human well-being. There are good practical reasons to integrate development efforts with a comprehensive response to climate change. However, at least in their current form, these two policy instruments are ill-suited to this task. Where SDGs are focused on supporting considerations of human flourishing to which policy needs to respond, NDCs, in their current form, are dependent on the determinations of the nations that generate them. I conclude that the best means of integrating these two policy initiatives require moving past the subjective foundations of NDCs.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I am grateful to Idil Boran for detailed discussion and helpful references regarding various conceptions of harm.
2. Registry available at http://unfccc.int/focus/ndc_registry/items/9433.php
3. These NDCs can be helpfully compared using the NDC explorer (https://klimalog.die-gdi.de/ndc) created by German Development Institute, SEI, and other partners in coordination with the UNFCCC.
4. The effort to develop a set of guidelines, what is called the rulebook for the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC Citation2018a), remains an effort to provide a more cohesive set of guidelines for nations as they assemble and revise their NDCs. However, the rulebook as it has been developed as of this writing, remains, and seems extremely likely to remain remarkably discretionary and suggestive. This should be expected as the Rulebook was largely developed in response to the same pressures that made the Paris Agreement itself so discretionary.
5. Of course there may well be consequences for violating one’s NDCs. As NDCs are publicly expressed other countries might doubt the sincerity of other commitments made by a country that wantonly violates its commitments, even when there is no direct or explicit enforcement mechanism. It might be remarkably difficult for a country that violates their NDC to be taken seriously in their other commitments. The difference is akin to the contrast between someone who makes a promise to oneself, and breaks it, and someone who loudly and publicly makes commitments regarding their own course of action, and then fails to live up to those commitments. One is less likely to believe the second sort of actor will follow through on commitments made.
6. For the philosophical roots of this distinction, see the related discussion of agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons in Nagel (Citation1970), Parfit (Citation1984), Pettit (Citation1987), Postema (Citation1995). Note that other philosophical accounts of agent dependency, particularly in the case of agent relative reasons, need not be voluntary – see Scheffler (Citation1982). On a more formal characterization of agent-relative reasons, agent-relative reasons have “essential pronominal backreference” (Ridge Citation2005, 35). The idea is that such reasons only count as reasons in virtue of their tie to whoever or whatever that pronoun refers to. The reason to keep a commitment made is only a reason to the one who made it. The reason to give priority to one’s children is only relevant to the particular parents of those children. These voluntaristic and particularistic features of agent-relative reasons can come apart, as these examples make clear. But in the cases under consideration here, the two features coincide.
7. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this objection.
8. We might put the point even more starkly: our climate change policies, as with our sustainable development policies, should be responsive more to our science than our preferences. In the aftermath of several nations’ tacit rejection of the IPCC special report on the consequences of climate change (IPCC Citation2018), this has never been more apparent.
9. The author gratefully acknowledges the help of Idil Boran, Andrew Light, Gwynne Taraska, Gregor Schmieg, Eric Palmer, and two anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this paper was presented at Leuphana University where the audience provided invaluable comments.