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

KEYWORDS:

• climate change
• Paris Agreement
• interdisciplinarity
• critical policy studies
• governmentality

This article is part of a series including:

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

This article responds to:

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

Enhancing understanding of and critically engaging with the ideas and practices of climate governance as played out under the Paris Agreement has been high on the agenda for scholars of global climate governance since the agreement’s adoption. That is true for me as well. In March 2023, my article entitled ‘Governing through the NDC: Five Functions to Steer States’ Climate Conduct’ was published in Environmental Politics. Part of a larger endeavor to understand how ideas on climate change governance are articulated under the Paris Agreement regime, the article set out to examine states’ ideas on the appropriate functions of the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) as a governing instrument. It analyzed states’ submissions to the post-Paris negotiations on the guidelines for the NDC, and outlined five functions for the NDC that were portrayed in the empirical material: progress tracker, trust-builder, influencer, gatekeeper, and differentiator.

Following the article’s publication, Timo Leiter offered his thoughts on the study in a response (published on the Environmental Politics’ website on 19 September 2023). I have been invited to comment on Timo Leiter’s response and agreed to take that chance to offer my reflections on the critique leveraged toward the original article and to highlight what I view as an important discussion on the challenges and merits of operating in an interdisciplinary academic field.

Core to Leiter’s critique is what they perceive as a misrepresentation of the actual governing functions under the Paris Agreement. Leiter argues that the negotiation positions that states held are not all reflected in the final decision on guidelines for NDCs, and that countries’ positions narrowed to a set of rules, captured in the Paris Rulebook (the adoption of which is indeed mentioned in the article). They further argue that the NDC is by no means the only important governing instrument under the Paris Agreement, and that studying only the NDC does not cover other important mechanisms, such as the National Adaptation Plans and the Enhanced Transparency Framework. This is all correct, but here is where our perspectives differ. Unlike Timo Leiter, I believe that the ideas articulated during the negotiation phase matter, and that examining them will teach us something about which ideas on governing exist under the Paris Agreement architecture.

In my view, Leiter’s response misreads the analytical work that the original article set out to do. In contrast to what the comments allude to, identifying the perceived – not actual – functions of the NDC articulated in the negotiation material sought to highlight states’ ideas of what constitutes appropriate climate conduct. Rather than attempting to establish the governance effect of the NDC or quantify the relative importance of one function compared to another, the article draws on a tradition of critical policy analysis (Fischer 2015). This is not to say that specificity and clarity is not important – quite the opposite – but that placing ideational aspects of governing in center is a way of interrogating the ways in which governing is imagined (Lövbrand and Stripple 2011). The NDC, then, is considered a materialization of certain governing ideas; a technique through which governing is accomplished (Dean 2010, Bulkeley 2016). Examining portrayals of the NDC’s appropriate functions is a way of bringing those ideas out in the open which, in turn, allows for critical examination of the governing rationalities that underpin them (Miller and Rose 2008, Walters 2012).

Leiter’s comments point to the importance of continual engagement across analytical traditions to understand how different types of studies contribute to our collective understanding of climate governance. The response also shone light on the need to be explicit when communicating research findings to an interdisciplinary audience. That effort does, however, go both ways; explicating your analytical project in a clear, reflexive, and stringent way is crucial, especially when addressing an interdisciplinary crowd. So is approaching colleagues’ work with an explorative mind to appreciate how different research traditions bring different insights into a shared topic, even if the underlying assumptions and methods differ from those commonly used in one’s own academic environment. An open mindset – coupled with critical engagement and review – is, to my mind, a recipe for joint learning and enhanced understanding of global climate governance, both of which are crucially needed to boost effective and just climate action in these urgent times. I welcome Timo Leiter’s close engagement with the arguments of my article and the important discussion on how we can make sense of governing under the Paris Agreement. I hope to continue this discussion with them and other scholars in the field.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

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