Governing through the nationally determined contribution (NDC): five functions to steer states’ climate conduct

ABSTRACT

The Paris Agreement places states’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs) at the center of global climate politics. While previous research on the NDC has provided important suggestions for enhanced legitimacy and effectiveness of global climate governance, I examine the NDC not in terms of its content, but as an instrument for governing climate conduct in the post-Paris regime. By analyzing state submissions to post-Paris NDC negotiations, I identify five functions of the NDC: Progress Tracker, Trust-Builder, Influencer, Differentiator, and Gatekeeper. While the first three functions are informed by a techno-managerial rationality that posits effective climate action as a project of increased information-sharing, the last two highlight underlying political struggles of responsibility and fairness which are not necessarily solvable through intensified collaboration. I argue that these diverging views on the function of the NDC will become increasingly prominent as we move toward the first round of the global stocktake in 2023.

KEYWORDS:

• Paris Agreement
• governmentality
• global governance
• climate politics

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The nationally determined contribution (NDC) as a governing instrument: a critical engagement

Nationally determined contributions (NDCs) as a governance instrument – accounting for politics, negotiation progress, and related mechanisms under the Paris Agreement

1 Introduction

The Paris Agreement places states’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs) at the center of global climate politics. Through periodical revision or update to reflect increasing ambition, the NDCs outline the current mitigation and adaptation actions states intend to implement to ‘strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty’ (UNFCCC 2015, Art. 2). Based on ideas of complementarity (pledge A will add to, rather than compete with, pledge B) and pragmatism (all parties do what they deem feasible), the NDC design epitomizes the idea of a world in flux where networked solutions based on partnerships and voluntary commitments prevail. The ‘hybrid’ design of the Paris Agreement is, arguably, a well-crafted tool for and the inevitable response to the decentralized, polycentric landscape of global climate politics in the 21^st century (Bäckstrand et al. 2017). In this context, the Paris Agreement is represented as the hub through which action is to be ‘catalyzed’ over the present decade (Held and Roger 2018, Hale 2020).

The NDC has proved fertile ground for research on global climate politics. Scholars have calculated the aggregated emission reductions pledged in the NDCs, pointing to the road ahead in terms of aligning with pathways toward the well below 2°C or 1.5°C temperature goals of the Paris Agreement (Höhne et al. 2016, 2018, Rogelj et al. 2016), explored how topics such as human rights or equity are attended to in NDCs (Winkler et al. 2018), identified the climate policy discourses employed by states to delineate the political problem of climate change (Tobin et al. 2018, Jernnäs and Linnér 2019, Mills‐novoa and Liverman 2019), and explored the governance mechanisms through which states envision their NDCs to be implemented (Jernnäs et al. 2019). In addition to such overarching studies, different constellations of NDCs have been subject to analysis to examine, for instance, major emitters’, the G20’s, BRIC countries’ or individual states’ contributions (den Elzen et al. 2019). The NDCs have also been approached from a sectoral perspective, studying the pledges made in relation to, e.g. energy or land-use change (Forsell et al. 2016, Vandyck et al. 2016).

While the NDC design initially seems to converge with a previously identified turn toward soft and networked modes of governing, I argue that what is interesting here are the seemingly paradoxical narratives and practices all made to fit under the Paris regime: national determination is countered with international review; encouragements of diverse and disperse initiatives are accompanied by an apparent need to quantify, calculate, and aggregate; and stories of worldwide momentum in climate action are contrasted with reports on the alarming ‘emissions gap.’ Embedded in these paradoxes lies a negotiation of the appropriate purpose and scope of the global effort to address climate change. Defining the appropriate format, scope, and application of the NDC implies a work of boundary-making where ideas about international climate policy are articulated and negotiated (Mills‐novoa and Liverman 2019). In such boundary-making, stories of the global order are assembled and contested through which we make sense of global climate governance. In relation to the Paris Agreement, global governance studies offer one such story: in this increasingly complex, polycentric world where the state is no longer the sole governor, governing through different forms of networks made up of a variety of actors will prove more efficient (Walters 2004). The NDC, in this regard, represents a dynamic tool through which such networks of climate actors can be sought, and action can be catalyzed. What global governance literature largely misses, however, is an explicit focus on the power relations intrinsic to different modes of governing (Walters 2004, Lövbrand and Stripple 2014).

In this study, I seek to bring analytical clarity to the rationalities that inform governing under the Paris Agreement. Taking a step back, the NDC is examined not in terms of its content on sectoral coverage, quantified emission reduction targets, or problem descriptions, but as an instrument for governing climate conduct in the post-Paris regime. Hence, it will be referred to as ‘the NDC’ to denote the focus on the NDC as an instrument for governing, rather than examining its contents. Inspired by Foucauldian governmentality studies, I employ a notion of government as the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Foucault 2008, p. 186) which here implies turning attention to the multiple ways the NDC works to govern behavior. Specifically, I explore how governing climate change through the NDC is envisioned by states and which effects are produced from this mode of governing in terms of shaping the idea of appropriate climate conduct. I ask what purpose(s) the NDC has, and through which techniques that purpose is thought to be achieved. The analysis is based on an analysis of post-Paris negotiations on the format, scope, and design of the NDC under the Ad Hoc Working Programme on the Paris Agreement (APA) agenda item 3. The empirical material consists of 64 state submissions (representing either individual states or groups of states) to the APA agenda item 3 negotiations over the seven sessions held in 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Moving on, the paper first contextualizes the NDC by tracing its emergence in the UNFCCC context. The following section discusses contemporary ideas on the global effort to address climate change, including orchestration, polycentrism, and catalytic regimes, and argues for the insights that governmentality studies can contribute to the analysis of post-Paris climate governance. Third, the research design, including the collection and analysis of the empirical material, is described and discussed. Fourth, the results are presented, pointing to five functions of the NDC as a governing instrument. Last, the study’s results are discussed, arguing that the different functions reflect different governing rationalities which will become increasingly prominent as we move toward the first round of the global stocktake in 2023.

2 The Paris Agreement design

While the Paris Agreement institutionalized the NDC as the central instrument for achieving the stipulated targets, the idea of a pledge-based system was not found in Paris. As early as in the initial negotiations on the formation of a Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1991, proposals were made for a design built on states’ pledges, but were discarded in favor of a targets-and-timetables design (Mintzer and Leonard 1994). The US withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 and the refusal of several other major emitters to commit to a second Kyoto commitment period is commonly seen as the deathblow to a ‘top-down’ approach to climate collaboration (Kuyper et al. 2018). The continued difficulties in reaching an agreement on future international climate action in the first decade of the 21^st century further emphasizes the reluctancy of states to commit to top-down agreements. The agreement design cannot, however, be held solely responsible for the inability of states to adopt a new agreement in Copenhagen in 2009. Several scholars have dug into the core points of diffraction, arguing that differentiation both within and between groups of developed and developing countries lay ground for the failed Copenhagen conference (Christoff 2010, Rayner 2010). The Copenhagen Accord, which was drafted and taken note of during COP15 in Copenhagen, proposes a pledge-based system whereby developed states ‘commit to implement individually or jointly the quantified economy-wide emissions targets for 2020, to be submitted in the format given in Appendix I,’ asking states to present their 2020 emission reductions in comparison to a base year of their choice. The Accord further states that developing countries ‘will implement mitigation actions’ to be submitted to the UNFCCC, and subsequently reported in their biennial national communications (2009). COP19 in Warsaw placed this pledge-based system ‘at the heart of the future agreement’ by asking states to prepare their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions to be submitted ahead of or in conjunction with COP21 in Paris 2015 (Maljean-Dubois 2016, p. 152).

While the submission of NDCs to the Paris Agreement is legally binding, the design and implementation of the climate actions stipulated therein are, due to their nationally determined nature, largely left for states to determine. Article 4.3 of the Paris Agreement gives some direction by asserting that Parties ‘shall prepare, communicate and maintain successive nationally determined contributions that it intends to achieve,’ and that parties ‘shall pursue domestic mitigation measures, with the aim of achieving the objectives in such contributions.’ To the end of assuring the implementation of climate actions toward the achievement of the Paris Agreement goals, several mechanisms are established, including the quinquennial global stocktake and the enhanced transparency framework. The former refers to the periodical review of implementation to ‘assess the collective progress towards achieving the purpose of this Agreement and its long-term goal’ (Art. 14.1), while the latter aims to ‘build mutual trust and confidence and to promote effective implementation’ (Art. 13.1). These features – part of what has been called the Paris Agreement’s ‘ambition cycle’ – work through a logic of transparency, as opposed to legal bindingness, to promote sufficient ambition among states (Rajamani and Bodansky 2019).

2.1 Drawing out the details: negotiating the NDC post-Paris

When the applause had fallen silent in the Le Bourget Conference Center in Paris in 2015, it was apparent that a lot of work lay ahead. While parties and observers hailed the historical achievement of adopting an agreement containing commitments for all countries, for the Paris Agreement to be operationalized the details needed to be more closely specified. To do this, the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement (APA) was established, mandated to draw up what eventually came to be called the ‘Paris Rulebook,’ with the aim of adopting it at the first meeting of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting to the Paris Agreement (CMA1) in 2018. Part of the APA’s mandate from Paris was the task of developing ‘further guidance in relation to the mitigation section of decision 1/CP.21’ – meaning further guidance regarding the NDC – referred to as APA agenda item 3. The work centered on three issues: features of the NDC (item 3(a)), information to facilitate clarity, transparency, and understanding of the NDC (item 3(b)), and accounting for NDCs (item 3(c)) (FCCC Decision 2015). The APA met seven times throughout 2016–2018, discussing – among other things, and in addition to item 3 above – guidance on adaptation communications and modalities for the enhanced transparency framework and the global stocktake.

From the outset, it became apparent that while agreeing on the Paris Agreement was by no means an uncomplicated matter, detailing the operationalization of the NDC proved at least equally arduous and evoked many of the traditional lines of divergence among parties. For instance, what is the appropriate balance between national determination and enabling tracking of collective progress toward the Paris targets? And how should differentiation be applied to developed and developing countries’ obligations? Striking the right balance between international guidance and national determination in the guidelines on NDC format and content, determining the common time frame(s) for submission of new and enhanced NDCs and their relationship to other parts of the NDC cycle, and deciding on the details for the operationalization of the global stocktake are examples of issues that have consumed negotiators’ and observers’ energy in the Paris aftermath (Dimitrov et al. 2019, Hermwille et al. 2019). The Paris Rulebook was largely agreed upon at COP24 in Katowice in 2018, but several issues were still under consideration in the negotiating rooms at subsequent COPs, indicating the continuous difficulties of agreeing on the appropriate interpretation of the agreements made in Paris.

3 Governing climate change post-Paris

The NDC design should be understood in light of a broader turn toward soft and networked solutions in global environmental governance, evident, for instance, in the surge of partnership-based policy solutions at the 2002 Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development (Death 2011) and in efforts to govern through goals embodied in the Sustainable Development Goals (Kanie and Biermann 2017). Responding to the ‘fragmented’ (Biermann et al. 2009) or ‘polycentric’ (Jordan et al. 2015) landscape of contemporary climate governance can be argued to necessitate orchestrated governing efforts based on coordination and goal-setting rather than coercive measures (Abbott 2018). The Paris Agreement is, in this context, represented as a result of these efforts and can, according to Hale (2020), be understood as a ‘catalytic institution’ based on cycles of goal-setting, review, and learning. Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, research on post-Paris climate governance has engaged with questions about how those catalytic or facilitative characteristics of the Paris Agreement can be harnessed to mobilize increasingly ambitious action (Held and Roger 2018, Hale 2020), and ways to more systematically engage, map, and assess nonstate climate action (Hermwille 2018, Hsu et al. 2019). With their emphasis on the need to study a multiplicity of processes and activities of governance rather than assuming that authority lies with conventional institutions, global governance studies can fruitfully engage in discussions on the seemingly ever-growing web of governance networks through which both state and nonstate actors are encouraged to act on climate change. What global governance-inspired studies lack, however, is an explicit focus on power relations (Walters 2004). In accentuating coordination and partnering, political antagonisms risk being subverted. This paper employs ideas from Foucauldian governmentality studies to argue that governing is not about simply bringing order to a problem, but about bringing about a specific type of order that produces certain effects (Foucault 1991, Larner and Walters 2004). As such, governing is not and cannot ever be a neutral activity of ‘dealing’ with a predetermined problem, but is always intertwined in constructing the boundaries of appropriate spheres for action and defining legitimate political actors. From this perspective, global governance studies represent a particular governing rationality that stresses the possibility of – and need for – coordination and partnership.

In this context, it is intriguing to ask how governing through the NDC is envisioned and which effects are produced from this mode of governing. To explore these questions, I examine how states articulate ideas on governing through the NDC, seeking to illuminate the rationalities that inform those ideas and the types of interventions they make possible. By extending the notion of government from a conventional view of governmental steering through mechanisms such as laws to examining the ‘conduct of conduct,’ Foucault’s governmentality studies encourage an analytics of government that asks which rationalities inform a particular mode of governing, which technologies are employed to intervene in conduct, and what effects this mode of governing has in terms of the subject positions it enables and constrains (Miller and Rose 2008, Dean 2010). While governmentality is not and should not be approached as a coherent method (Walters 2012), it provides analytical tools with the help of which it is possible to pose questions that are often overlooked in other accounts of climate governance (Bulkeley 2016). In this way, this study’s line of inquiry follows in the footsteps of critical policy studies and especially those that have productively employed a governmentality lens to examine the rationalities at work in various spheres of global climate governance (e.g. Lövbrand and Stripple 2012, Oels 2012, Paterson and Stripple 2012). By turning attention to the systematic ways of knowing that underpin any attempt to govern, governmentality studies enable a study that puts power relations at the center by analyzing how governing through the NDC shapes the idea of appropriate climate conduct.

4 Methods and materials

The analysis was guided by two questions: i) What purpose(s) does the NDC have?; and ii) Through which techniques is that purpose thought to be achieved? Through these questions, I interrogated states’ ideas about the appropriate functions of the NDC as a governing instrument, how those functions are justified, and the potential presence of lines of contestation. While much has been written on the process leading up to Paris, including the emergence and eventual institutionalization of a pledge-and-review design (Falkner 2016, Keohane and Oppenheimer 2016), less has been written on the NDC based on the continued work and negotiations in the years following COP21. By examining post-2015 negotiation material, this study offers an empirically grounded analysis of how the NDC design is concretized and operationalized.

The analysis is made up of state submissions to the post-Paris negotiations under APA agenda item 3¹ on further guidance on the NDC, totaling 64 submissions from states or groups of states (Table 1). The state submissions were submitted in advance of or at any of the seven APA meetings organized during 2016–2018, and represent opportunities for states (or groups of states) to present and argue for their views on issues on the negotiating table, such as the appropriate purpose and scope of further guidance on the NDC.

Table 1. Empirical material included in the analysis.

APA session	Submissions	Details
APA 1–2 (Nov 2016)	18 submissions pre-APA 1–2	10 individual state submissions 8 submissions on behalf of state groups
APA 1–3 (May 2017)	23 submissions pre-APA 1–3	14 individual state submissions 9 submissions on behalf of state groups
APA 1–4 (Nov 2017)	20 submissions pre-APA 1–4 2 submissions at APA 1–4	11 individual state submissions 9 submissions on behalf of state groups 2 individual state submissions
APA 1–5 (May 2018)	1 submission pre-APA 1–5	1 submission on behalf of a state group
Total	64 submissions by individual states or state groups

The analysis proceeded in three steps. First, I imported the empirical material to the computer software NVivo 12, which is a tool to aid textual analysis. All materials were read and coded manually, employing an inductive approach. This means that the identified themes (called ‘nodes’ in NVivo) were created during the coding process. NVivo 12 was, in this respect, used as an organizational tool that enables overview, back-tracing, and double-checking the analysis (Bazeley 2006). The first coding phase identified seven nodes, each representing different purposes of the NDC articulated by states in the empirical material. In the second step, I dug deeper into these seven nodes, aiming to pinpoint the specific purposes of the NDC as well as ideas on how that purpose was to be achieved (Table 2). The third step entailed an overview and synthesis of the analysis, which aimed to identify potential overlaps in the identified purposes and draw out the five core functions as identified in the analysis.

Table 2. Examples of step 2 in-depth analysis and specification of nodes identified in step 1.

Node (step 1)	Specific purpose	How to achieve purpose
Ensure public trust	Ensure public trust in the Paris Agreement, states’ climate actions	Clearly communicate how states intend to act on climate change
	Mobilize nonstate actors as implementers and investors	Clearly communicate strategies for planning and implementing NDCs, e.g. processes, policies, regulations, responsible governance bodies
Demonstrate differentiation	Make it clear that developed countries take their responsibility	Demonstrate leadership in NDC formulation (e.g. level of detail, scope of NDC)
	Place reasonable expectations on developing countries	Respect countries’ different capacities (in reporting, monitoring, etc.); allow flexibility for developing countries to choose which guidance to apply; retain space for meeting development priorities

It was not my intention to identify a single rationality informing governing through the NDC. Rather, outlining potentially complementary or contradictory arguments invoked to justify or oppose this mode of governing climate change post-Paris is part of the purpose of the study, and is viewed as an interesting and important finding that can contribute to broadening ongoing debates on appropriate climate action. Similarly, I did not seek to quantify the influence of particular ideas on governing. While previous research has identified patterns of states’ ideas on how climate change can be defined and addressed through the NDC (Tobin et al. 2018, Jernnäs and Linnér 2019, Jernnäs et al. 2019, Mills‐novoa and Liverman 2019), this study explores how the NDC is thought to function as an instrument for conducting conduct post-Paris. It is also important to note that the Paris Agreement and the negotiations held under APA contain several additional elements that are related to the NDC in different ways, and which could constitute empirical basis for further analyses of the operationalization of the Paris Agreement, most notably the enhanced transparency framework and the global stocktake. For this study, centering on the negotiations on further guidance on the NDC did, however, allow for insights on how states portray the appropriate purposes and functions of the NDC as a governing instrument.

5 NDC functions

The Paris Agreement entailed a break with previous models for creating a multilateral response to climate change (Held and Roger 2018). This new model posits the NDC as the principal instrument for governing climate change post-Paris. This study examines the ideas that states articulate regarding the NDC as a governing instrument, including its purposes, ends, and functions. The analysis shows that states principally envision five functions for the NDC as a governing instrument (Figure 1). These include the NDC as a Progress Tracker, Trust-Builder, Influencer, Differentiator, and Gatekeeper. A closer examination shows, however, that these functions are envisioned in different ways and that diametrically opposite functions are articulated at times, which points to continuous contestation regarding the appropriate scope and purpose of the NDC as a governing instrument.

Figure 1. Functions of the NDC, as identified in state submissions to NDC negotiations under APA agenda item 3.

5.1 Progress tracker

The potential to use the NDC to track progress is clearly stipulated in the empirical material. The specific scope and purpose of such tracking differs, however, and can be divided into two themes: assessment of collective progress and assessment of individual progress. First, some parties point to the need to understand the estimated effect of the NDCs in relation to the achievement of the Paris goals. Here, providing sufficient information to allow for aggregation of states’ pledges and, in turn, enable comparison to emission pathways is central. Proponents argue that this requires transparency regarding the methods and metrics used by states to draft their NDCs, as well as at least partly common NDC characteristics: ‘In order to assess collective progress towards the long-term temperature goal, including for the global stocktake, [it] is necessary to periodically calculate the collective emissions impact of Parties’ NDCs. For this reason, the guidance [on NDCs] should clarify that the ability to aggregate NDCs is important for the overall effectiveness of the Paris Agreement.’ (Canada pre-APA 1–4). Aggregation of NDC effects is also deemed important, as it ‘will facilitate the compilation, synthesis and analysis necessary to serve as an input to other elements of the Paris Agreement, particularly the Enhanced Transparency Framework and the Global stock take’ (Argentina, Brazil & Uruguay pre-APA 1–4). These statements align with the last years’ many efforts to assess the aggregate effect of NDCs in terms of emission reductions, as has been seen in research literature (e.g. Fujimori et al. 2016, Rogelj et al. 2016), reports (UNEP 2020), and the NDC synthesis reports drafted by the UNFCCC at the request of parties (UNFCCC 2015, 2016, 2021).

Second, some argue that it is vital to enable understanding of the implementation and achievement of states’ NDCs. For this to be possible, it is important that NDCs can be quantified: ‘Quantification of mitigation contributions is essential to assess the collective efforts towards the long-term goal. Furthermore, it can help Parties to evaluate the effectiveness of contributions and related policies domestically, and enables tracking progress towards the NDC.’ (EIG² pre-APA 1–2). For some, tracking progress towards NDC achievement seeks to enhance understanding of how countries are living up to their pledges, constructing the NDC as a part of providing evidence of country efforts. To enable ‘visibility of the country’s achievement as it progresses […] guidance on NDCs (developed under Article 4) should facilitate understanding what countries’ contributions are and how they will demonstrate (measure) achievement’ (New Zealand pre-APA 1–3). The NDC can thus function as a benchmark against which individual country progress can be measured. For this to be realized, it is deemed important that ‘national arrangements are in place to track mitigation progress and [that parties] strive to progressively improve reporting and accounting over time’ (Canada pre-APA 1–2).

The potential of the NDC to function as a progress tracker is, however, contested: several parties clearly state that the purpose of the NDC should not be to enable aggregation. Information communicated through the NDC is, instead, described as an ex-ante instrument which is ‘distinguished from the “information” to track progress made to implement the NDCs under the transparency framework’ (China pre-APA 1–4). Because ‘the information is not the same as information to illustrate the progress made on implementation […] it is of little possibility and feasibility to use the information on NDCs as a source of input for the global stocktake’ (LMDC³ pre-APA 1–4). From this perspective, ‘it will be both pre-mature and inaccurate to figure out the aggregate effect of the contributions via the information on NDCs, because of the vital missing pieces of detailed information on the means of implementation’ (LMDC pre-APA 1–4). The NDC, from this perspective, is represented as a communicative tool where states’ intended climate plans can be made public, and which should not serve as basis for formulating prescriptive conclusions. These states argue that centering on results – i.e. estimated aggregated emissions reductions, rather than conduct – would entail a renegotiation of the Paris Agreement mandate and must thus be avoided.

5.2 Trust-builder

Another identified function of the NDC is that of enhancing trust. This function can be divided into two themes pointing to different areas in which trust-building is considered important: i) trust among parties; and ii) public trust in state climate action.

Several parties stress the need for creating, maintaining, and enhancing trust among parties and point to the ways in which the NDC can be an instrument for achieving this. Transparency on states’ pledges is portrayed as one way of promoting mutual trust. By making sure that NDCs can be well-understood, allowing for third party reconstruction of emission pathways, and making sure that guidance on NDCs is relevant for different types of NDCs, the NDC is envisioned as an important interstate transparency mechanism. This can be done by demonstrating the environmental integrity of the pledge (e.g. by ensuring avoidance of double counting, applying internationally agreed methodologies, or providing sufficient clarity on problematic areas, such as forest, land use, and oceans); demonstrating democratic integrity (e.g. describing how social groups have been involved in the NDC process or integrating gender aspects into the NDC); demonstrating co-benefits of the pledge (i.e. how the NDC contributes to non-climate issue areas); and demonstrating the types of actions envisioned (e.g. clearly showing which actions are conditional and unconditional, or describing the qualitative actions envisioned, such as policies or laws). Trust is also thought to be enhanced by building confidence in parties’ implementation of commitments, including outlining means of implementation or making it clear that actions will not have adverse effects on other Parties.

Building public trust in states’ climate actions serves two purposes. First, it is argued that the NDC plays a role in communicating with the ‘broader public: a similar way of framing contributions helps to provide up-front clarity on what to expect from NDC communications’ (Switzerland pre-APA 1–4). Second, the NDC is envisioned as an important instrument in mobilizing nonstate actors as implementers and investors in climate actions: up-front information ‘enables Parties to send a clear signal that mobilizes actors and stakeholders involved in converting NDCs into implementing policies and measures’ (Canada pre-APA 1–2).

The function of Trust-Builder points to a perceived lack of trust between states and between states and nonstate actors, as well as among nonstate actors toward the multilateral process, which, it is argued, inhibits effective climate action. In contrast to requests for detailed aggregation of emission reductions, this function points to the social political sphere within which global climate governance is enacted, where the level of climate action ambition is at least partly dependent on constructive relations between actors. As articulated in the empirical material, the practice of enhancing trust is, however, portrayed in mainly instrumental terms: through a higher level of detail in the technical data, transparency is achieved which, in turn, builds trust. As such, trust-building through the NDC does not explicitly suggest attending to a lack of trust related to structural issues, such as responsibility for historic emissions, imperialist legacies, or relations of economic dependency.

5.3 Influencer

The NDC is represented as a tool for influence and learning. In the process of periodic preparation, communication, and revision of NDCs, learning opportunities are identified in relation to both the practice of drafting the NDC and the design of climate actions. In this way, the NDC can function as a source of inspiration where good examples can be showcased to influence other actors. By enabling easy access to other countries’ planned actions, there can be an ‘[…] exchange of practices on low-emission, climate-resilient and sustainable development among Parties” (China pre-APA 1–4). In this way, it is argued, ‘[t]he NDCs could facilitate Parties to make finance flows towards a low-carbon and climate-resilient economy and accelerate the development and transfer, innovation and collaboration of climate-related technologies […]’ (China pre-APA 1–4).

Representing the NDC as an Influencer suggests that effective climate action at least partly hinges on closing perceived knowledge gaps on how to design and report on climate actions. In this way, the NDC is not necessarily needed to enable quantification of states’ aggregated emissions reductions, but serves a purpose of communicating and showcasing best practice. Providing opportunities for learning has been identified as an important element in a catalytic regime, including through structured review processes (such as the NDC cycle) and creating opportunities for information exchange, as has been conducted in relation to nonstate climate action (Hale 2020). In addition to providing opportunities to learn, the practice of exhibiting successful actions contributes to shaping the picture of what constitutes desirable climate action. In contrast to UNFCCC-led initiatives to induce nonstate climate action, such as the 2018 report covering Examples of Good Practice⁴ or the annual Global Climate Action Awards, where selected nonstate climate actions are highlighted, what is showcased as best practice in the NDC fully depends on what states include in their submitted NDCs.

5.4 Differentiator

As a fourth function, the NDC is posited as an instrument through which the Convention’s and the Paris Agreement’s principles on differentiation can be concretized. The analysis shows that ideas about how differentiation should be demonstrated in the NDC can take different forms and serve different purposes. The NDC is portrayed by some states as the appropriate place for developed countries to demonstrate how they are taking the lead. This can be done, for instance, by ‘requiring developed country Parties to provide more types of information with greater levels of detail […] while developing country Parties would be provided with flexibility’ (LMDC, pre-APA 1–4), or through developed countries ‘demonstra[ting] their leadership on achieving sustainable life styles and sustainable patterns of consumption’ (LMDC, pre-APA 1–2). Some also argue that the NDC can be used to create better prerequisites for developing countries’ climate actions. From this perspective, for the NDC to represent differentiation in an appropriate way, reasonable expectations need to be placed on developing country parties, for instance by respecting the different capacities of parties and by retaining space for developing countries to meet their development priorities.

The NDC in this way functions as a space for operationalizing the principles of differentiation that permeate the Paris Agreement and the Framework Convention. This clearly places the NDC in the borderland between national and international climate politics, requesting from developed states that they concretize their roles as leaders in the multilateral process. In this way, the NDC is not merely a place to outline domestic climate priorities, but constitutes an expression of states’ views on diplomatic relations, fairness, and historical responsibility. While indeed named nationally determined contributions, the NDC as Differentiator serves to remind us of the interlinked, historically unequal political sphere in which global climate governance takes place.

5.5 Gatekeeper

The NDC as a Gatekeeper point to contestation regarding the appropriate boundaries of national and international politics in relation to operationalizing the NDC. Gatekeeper, in this sense, refers to the use of the NDC to uphold national sovereignty in climate action by limiting the scope of internationally agreed uniformity. Accentuating the ‘delicate balance’ (Rajamani and Bodansky 2019, 1035) of national determination and international oversight achieved in Paris and the risks entailed in reopening the Paris mandate, the function of Gatekeeper fends off efforts to increase aggregability and uniformity. As such, Gatekeeper stands in stark contrast to the functions of Progress Tracker and Trust-Builder as it suggests that perceivably unnecessary detailed guidelines on the NDC represents an intrusion into the principle of national determination.

When it comes to expressions of the need to limit efforts to create uniformity of NDCs, two strands of arguments can be identified. One reason is to avoid imposing undue burden on developing countries through the introduction of common formats for information or accounting. To ‘preserve the nationally determined nature of the NDCs, [guidance] must not introduce a common format for all Parties. It should not present an additional burden to Parties, especially developing country Parties.’ (India pre-APA 1–4). From this perspective, retaining flexibility in NDC design is crucial for ‘taking into account Parties’ capacities’ (African Group⁵ pre-APA 1–2). As expressed by Turkey (APA 1–4), ‘the diversity of the NDCs [is] as a key strength of the Paris Agreement. Through the concept of national determination, the Agreement safeguards this diversity and operationalizes the principle of CBDR-RC & NC. In determining their individual NDCs, Parties take into account their national circumstances, capabilities, and different starting points.’

Another reason to avoid imposing uniformity is the belief that national determination allows parties’ climate actions to respond more appropriately to their particular national circumstances and prerequisites. By allowing diversity of NDCs, parties can ‘choos[e] the policy options that are feasible, replicable, cost-effective and environment-friendly in accordance with their nationally defined development priorities,’ which is highlighted as a way of ‘achiev[ing] a win-win solution between robust economy growth and ambitious climate actions’ (China pre-APA 1–3). This sentiment is further elaborated on by Papua New Guinea (pre-APA 1–3):

[domestic relevance] is an important principle, as it compels parties to also respect each other, and not assume that one party knows another party’s requirements better than they themselves do. It also compels parties to move away from theoretical assumptions about what is meaningful and relevant for other parties, while compelling them to focus on what they can specifically offer, as a result of the practical implementation measures and progress from their own domestic arrangements.

Allowing parties to form their NDCs in close connection to their national circumstances and priorities is here posited as a way to increase the ambition of climate actions, the likelihood that they will be implemented, and their positive impact on other development areas. In this way, the NDC functions as a Gatekeeper which allows parties to independently articulate their national priorities while adhering to their international obligations.

The analysis shows, however, that there are substantial lines of contestation in terms of what national determination in relation to the NDC should entail. In stark contrast to the efforts to retain a high degree of flexibility in NDC design, other states express the need to clarify the limits of national determination. While agreeing that formulating NDCs should be a nationally determined process, some states highlighted that ‘pure national determination does not deliver a coherent international regime and that national determination should be complemented by guiding elements’ (Switzerland pre-APA 1–4, bold in original). From this perspective, retaining a sense of national determination is certainly important, but guidance is needed to define ‘the different ways that [parties] can exercise their national determination with respect to their NDCs’ (Canada pre-APA 1–4). Here, the diversity of NDCs ‘poses challenges for understanding what each Party has offered to do, for aggregating Parties NDCs, and for tracking our individual and collective progress’ (EU pre-APA 1–2). The guidance on NDCs can, from this perspective, ‘assist each Party to demonstrate it is meeting this responsibility’ (New Zealand pre-APA 1–4).

6 Governing through the NDC: catalyzing action or displacing conflict?

The Paris Agreement institutionalizes a catalytic logic (Hale 2020), where the NDC constitutes a central mechanism for recording and ramping up climate ambition. The protracted post-Paris negotiations on operationalizing the NDC and the still incomplete submission of updated or new NDCs that were due in 2020⁶ point to the continued struggles involved in orchestrating the global effort to address climate change. By exploring the NDC as an instrument for governing, this study has illuminated the presence of diverging ideas about the appropriate functions of the NDC. These functions are, in turn, informed by different rationalities that shape the idea of what constitutes appropriate climate conduct under the Paris regime.

The first three functions – Progress Tracker, Trust-Builder, and Influencer – center around a techno-managerial rationality. Here, the problem to be addressed is largely one of insufficient information: with better information – be it detailed reporting GHG budgets, transparency on methods, or examples of innovative climate policies – better climate action can be crafted. In this context, the NDC works as an instrument for inducing appropriate reporting, gathering, and making public that information and emphasis is placed on negotiating an appropriate level of uniformity of the NDC to allow for comparison and aggregation. The identification of these functions brings empirical substantiation to Bäckstrand and Lövbrand’s (2019) claim that post-Paris climate governance is informed to a large extent by a governing rationality that they call ‘green governmentality,’ which portrays climate change as a monitorable and manageable collective problem in need of a globally coordinated response based on technical and managerial expertise. In this context, the NDC emerges as a means through which states can demonstrate their responsible climate conduct by providing sufficient and timely information that can properly contribute to the much-needed mapping of disperse pledges.

While possibly adding to a feeling of momentum in the global climate governance sphere by highlighting the aggregated emissions reductions of pledges, this techno-managerial rationality assumes a complementarity of pledges which risks obscuring adverse impacts from climate actions. Chan et al. (2019, p. 5) argue, in their study of nonstate climate actors in the Paris regime, that the seeming depoliticization of nonstate climate action inherent in dominant win-win narratives risks obscuring ‘politically contentious outcomes’ that may result from deficient implementation or distorted prioritization of sustainable development goals. The same could be said for governing through the NDC, which risks presenting problems of insufficient climate action as a lack of expert knowledge, quantification, and reporting cycles. This risks displacing political contentions to the periphery by representing them as nuisance to the goal of implementing climate action (Death 2011). At the same time, research has showed that the content of states’ NDCs differs widely, and provides ample room for states to advance their views on appropriate climate responses (Jernnäs and Linnér 2019), implying that the NDC could function as an instrument for articulating resistance to dominant narratives.

The remaining two functions – Differentiator and Gatekeeper – differ from this techno-managerial rationality. Rather than pointing to the need for increased information to unlock climate action, these functions highlight the long-standing, structural political struggles that surround climate governance, such as differentiation of responsibility between developed and developing countries and negative effects from response measures to climate change. From this perspective, the NDC can be utilized to acknowledge and emphasize these struggles and concretize efforts to address them, for instance by explicating leadership or fending off seemingly predatory attempts at increased international assimilation. In this way, Differentiator and Gatekeeper exhibit an antagonistic rationality, which highlights socio-political aspects of climate action. Importantly, this should not be interpreted as merely a means to oppose ambitious climate action. Rather, it suggests that climate action needs to be understood as more than merely the sum of pledged emissions reductions.

I do not argue that negotiations on the format and scope of the NDC are either the only or the appropriate place for these kinds of debates. What this study demonstrates, however, is how political antagonisms seep through in processes that seek to operationalize the Paris Agreement. While the adoption of the agreement seemed to indicate that states had found a way to move past long-standing – at times paralyzing – issues of contention (Keohane and Oppenheimer 2016), these conflicts continue to inform debates on the appropriate means and ends of the NDC as a governing instrument under the Paris Agreement. In this context, research plays an important role in charting the characteristics of conflicts and how they are addressed by examining the productive effects of particular governance arrangements. Climate governmentality studies provide one such avenue for bringing light to the rationalities that inform governing instruments and for illuminating and critically exploring the ways in which climate change governance is accomplished under the Paris regime (Lövbrand and Stripple 2014, Bulkeley 2016).

6.1 Conclusions

By taking the NDC seriously as a governing instrument, this study set out to explore states’ ideas on the appropriate function(s) of the NDC in the Paris Agreement. Asking what purposes for the NDC states articulate in their submissions to post-Paris negotiations, this study has showed how states’ ideas about the means and ends of the NDC diverge by pointing to the articulation of five different functions of the NDC. Three of those functions – Progress Tracker, Trust-Builder, and Influencer – derive from a techno-managerial rationality. The remaining two – Differentiator and Gatekeeper – are grounded in an antagonistic rationality. While the former emphasizes the need for better information to bring about more effective climate action, the latter outlines an image of climate action infused with political and historical contention. These findings have at least two implications. First, they not only provide insight to sources of frustration in ongoing negotiations seeking to fully operationalize the NDC. They also direct attention to the importance of carefully exploring how processes that seek to reign in and aggregate pledges made in the NDC, such as the 2023 global stocktake, contribute to shaping the idea of appropriate climate conduct under the Paris regime. Second, the study points to the importance of directing research efforts toward seemingly apolitical, technical instruments in international climate politics. By approaching the NDC as a governing instrument – rather than merely a bureaucratic document – we can gain a greater understanding of the politics involved in accomplishing climate politics under the Paris Agreement. In the orchestration experiment that is the Paris regime, efforts to encourage data disclosure, highlight innovative actions, and build momentum are abundant. These are laudable efforts, but their emphasis on techno-managerial solutions risk obscuring the presence of political antagonisms that surround climate governance, in turn displacing fundamental disagreements over responsibility and fairness. While there is no doubt that climate change posits an acute challenge and that there is no lack of action alternatives, acknowledging and addressing the politics involved in designing instruments for governing climate conduct remains a crucial task.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas [2011-779].

Notes

1. Available at https://unfccc.int/process/bodies/subsidiary-bodies/ad-hoc-working-group-on-the-paris-agreement-apa/information-on-apa-agenda-item-3 (Accessed May 5, 2021).

2. Environmental Integrity Group (EIG). Members: Liechtenstein, Mexico, Rep. of Korea, Switzerland, Monaco & Georgia.

3. Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC). Members: Algeria, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bhutan, China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Vietnam & Zimbabwe.

4. UNFCCC (2018). Global Climate Action 2018: Examples of Good Practice. Available at https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/GCA_TD_GoodPractices_2018.pdf (Accessed Aug 13, 2021).

5. Members: 54 African states.

6. UNFCCC website. Available at https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/nationally-determined-contributions-ndcs/nationally-determined-contributions-ndcs (Accessed May 3, 2022).