Understanding pledge and review: learning from analogies to the Paris Agreement review mechanisms

ABSTRACT

This article draws lessons for the effectiveness of the Paris Agreement’s pledge and review mechanisms from the performance of comparable review mechanisms established under other international treaties. The article employs systematic evidence synthesis methods to review the existing literature on international review mechanisms in the human rights, trade, labour, and monetary policy fields and identifies six common factors influencing their performance. Applying these findings to the Paris Agreement, the analysis finds that its review mechanisms incorporate many of these factors. In particular, they combine both expert and peer review, allow for repeated interaction and capacity building, and facilitate the regular and transparent provision of information. The comparative analysis also highlights two major deficiencies of the Paris Agreement: the absence of procedures to assess the adequacy of national pledges and actions taken to implement them, and resource constraints in carrying out a complex and arduous review process. Active engagement of non-state actors with review mechanisms is identified as a potential remedy to these shortcomings. However, the overall experience of other regimes suggests that, on their own, review mechanisms provide few incentives for states to undertake significant policy changes. Rather, the political context of each regime conditions the performance of review mechanisms. We therefore conclude that the Paris Agreement’s review mechanisms alone are unlikely to bring about the necessary ratcheting up of climate policy ambitions.

Key policy insights

• Review mechanism performance relies on six factors that are common across international agreements: the ability of the mechanism to solicit accurate information, the involvement of experts and state peers in the review process, the ability to ensure repeated interaction, the institutional capacity to carry out the review, the transparency of the review process and its outputs, and the salience and practicality of the outcomes produced by the review.

• The Paris Agreement’s strengths lie in its rules designed to facilitate the transparent provision of information, the inclusion of both expert and peer review, its facilitation of repeated interaction and in providing support to build the reporting capacities of states.

• The Paris Agreement severely restricts the salience and practicality of its review outcomes by prohibiting an assessment of the adequacy of national pledges.

• It remains uncertain whether the UNFCCC secretariat’s capacity and resources will suffice to carry out the arduous review task.

KEYWORDS:

• Paris Agreement
• UNFCCC
• pledge and review
• international review mechanisms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The transparency framework is set out in Article 13 of the Paris Agreement, the stocktake in Article 14, and the compliance committee in Article 15 (UNFCCC, 2015c).

2 For a list of all submitted NDCs, see UNFCCC (2022).

3 NSAs comprise not only non-governmental organizations (NGOs) but also businesses and regional- and city-level governments.

4 Also known as bi- and multi-lateral surveillance.

5 We group these treaty bodies into one mechanism as they follow an identical process, despite their different subject matter. The full list of committees is as follows:

1. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD)

2. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR)

3. Human Rights Committee (CCPR)

4. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)

5. Committee against Torture (CAT)

6. Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC)

7. Committee on Migrant Workers (CMW)

8. Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture (SPT)

9. Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)

10. Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED).

6 This includes the Committee of Experts on the Application of Standards and the Conference Committee on the Application of Standards.

7 The Enhanced Transparency Framework Expert Group shall serve the Convention beginning January 1st, 2023. They have yet to be nominated (Paragraph 10 Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement, 2018).

8 It is not yet certain how such a collective review will be carried out without reviewing individual state ambition. For more information see Milkoreit and Haapala (2019).

9 Further examples include Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conferences, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) National Legislation Project, Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS) Development of Resources Periodic Review, and Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) peer review. See footnote #3 in Pew Center on Global Climate Change (2010) for more review mechanisms. Our preliminary searches could only find two relevant papers for UNCAC and none for the others.

10 For example, papers have looked at the role of transfers and technical support in enabling the success of the Montreal Protocol (Chan et al., 2018), reviewed financial incentives in the protocol as a possibility in climate negotiations (Kemp, 2016), highlighted the different cost-benefit structures between the ozone and climate problems (Keohane & Oppenheimer, 2016), and highlighted the different foci on technology and its substitutability between the climate and ozone regimes (Puig et al., 2018). Although these studies offer valuable insights into the climate regime in their analysis of the mechanisms of the ozone regime, we turn our focus to those regimes not yet studied in the climate or environmental contexts with the intention of providing novel insights and promoting comparative analyses across different subject areas in multiple global international review regimes.

11 For a more detailed description of the Paris Agreement’s review mechanisms, see Section Four. To offer comparative insights, Appendix Two provides a detailed account of the five review mechanisms we study.

12 We base this on a review of regime documents detailing the mechanisms (UNFCCC, 2018, 2015c, 2015b; World Trade Organisation, 1994; United Nations Human Rights Council, 2020; UNOHCHR, 2012; International Labour Standards Department, 2019).

13 See the methods section in the Appendix for more detail.

14 See https://www.roses-reporting.com/. We did not carry out a critical appraisal of the documents we identified. We found that many documents do not explicitly define their methods but nonetheless offer relevant insights, such as Laird and Valdés (2012) and Redondo E (2008): neither paper presents an explicit methodology but both offer relevant retrospective assessments, largely based on regime documents, of their respective review mechanisms. Weighing these insights based on a critical appraisal of the methods used would therefore restrict our findings.

15 For details on the performance of each review mechanism studied, see Supplementary Material - Appendix Two.

16 The Treaty Bodies committees established a process of engaging with NSAs after they were established by the UNOHCHR, indicating that such engagement could also be undertaken by committees established by the Paris Agreement’s review mechanisms at a later date; see OHCHR (2020a, 2020b, 2020c).

17 The Compliance Committee convened twice in 2020 and is in the process of developing general provisions to guide its work, which could include engagement with NSAs (UNFCCC, 2020a).

18 Reporting requirements differed for Annex I and Non-Annex I countries. Nevertheless, since 2014, all countries have been required to submit biennial reports, with national communications due every four years (UNFCCC, 1998).

19 IMF: $US1,186 million (International Monetary Fund 2020b); UNFCCC: US$203 million, converted from €172 million (UNFCCC, 2020).

20 For a study of perceived obstacles and options involving climate policies, see Kornek et al. (2020).

21 See footnote 18.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Heinrich Böll Stiftung: [Grant Number: P136672 PhD Scholarship].