Hardening and softening of multilateral climate governance towards the Paris Agreement

ABSTRACT

This article assesses the evolving ‘stringency’ of multilateral climate mitigation governance towards the 2015 Paris Agreement. To do so, we systematically distinguish four key dimensions of hard/soft governance: (1) formal legal status; (2) the nature of the obligations (procedural-substantive); (3) prescriptiveness and precision; and (4) implementation review and response. We find that the governance approach of the Paris Agreement is significantly softer than the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but harder than the 2010 Cancun Agreements under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. As a result, the Paris Agreement has had a differentiated effect on the stringency of governance. On the one side, it has softened climate governance for countries that are parties to the Kyoto Protocol, most notably the European Union. On the other side, it has hardened the international governance framework for developing countries and industrialised countries that are not subject to the Kyoto Protocol, including the US, Japan, Canada, and Russia. The shifting climate geopolitics of the twenty-first century helps us understand this development.

KEYWORDS:

• UNFCCC
• climate governance
• Kyoto Protocol
• Cancun Agreements
• Copenhagen Accord
• compliance
• transparency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sebastian Oberthür is professor of environment and sustainable development at the Institute for European Studies of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and professor of environmental policy and law at the University of Eastern Finland. His research focuses on international and European climate, environmental and energy governance.

Lisanne Groen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Open University of the Netherlands. She is also a senior associate researcher at the Institute for European Studies of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her main research interests are international and EU climate change policy, with a focus on adaptation, mitigation and technology transfer.

Notes

1 All UNFCCC COP decisions referred to in this article can be accessed at: https://unfccc.int/decisions.

Additional information

Funding

This article has been prepared in the context of the Jean Monnet Network “Governing the EU’s Climate and Energy Transition in Turbulent Times” (GOVTRAN— www.govtran.eu) with the support of the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.