Climate governance is the most demanding coordination problem that human institutions have ever faced. Its failure, so far, reflects the limits of the institutional forms available for addressing it.
The Coordination Challenge
Climate governance requires the coordination of nearly two hundred sovereign nations, thousands of subnational governments, millions of enterprises, and billions of individuals around the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions — a coordination problem whose scale, whose temporal horizon, and whose asymmetry between those who bear the costs of mitigation and those who bear the costs of inaction has no precedent in the history of international governance. The international institutions available for this coordination — the UNFCCC process, the Paris Agreement framework — are built on the voluntary commitments of sovereign states whose domestic political constraints shape what they can credibly commit to, whose implementation of those commitments is not subject to external enforcement, and whose contributions to the problem are sufficiently asymmetric that the institutional design's equity dimension is as contested as its effectiveness dimension.
The Paris Agreement's nationally determined contributions framework — the structure through which each country sets its own emission reduction commitments — was a diplomatic achievement that produced the broad participation that a more demanding framework would not have achieved. It was also an insufficient mechanism for the scale of emission reductions that climate science requires, because voluntary national commitments calibrated to domestic political feasibility systematically produce commitments that are insufficient to the global challenge while being adequate to the domestic political constraints.
Climate governance's institutional failure is not a failure of scientific understanding or of economic analysis — both are clear enough. It is a failure of the institutional forms available for coordinating sovereign actors around a global commons problem whose costs and benefits are asymmetrically distributed across space and time. The institutions we have are not adequate to the problem. Building adequate institutions is itself a governance challenge that the existing inadequate institutions must somehow address.
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