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Does the form of a multilateral agreement (MEA) by itself improve environmental performance? In particular, do legally nonbinding MEAs pose a rival to the effect of more traditional legally binding international agreements? Our theory builds on the legal and international regimes literatures and postulates that legally binding agreements (LBAs) have more benign effects on water quality than legally nonbinding agreements (LNBAs). We probe two operationalizations of the form of MEAs. First, we purely focus on the form: of legally binding versus legally nonbindings. Second, we combine the form of an agreement each with an index of precision and an index of delegation. The empirical focus is on upstream–downstream water quality in Europe during 1990 to 2007. Our regression analyses, regardless of specification, find that LBAs beat LNBAs and that LBAs with high degrees of precision and delegation beat the effect of any other configuration of agreements with respect to enhancing water quality.

To what extent has the European Union (EU) had a benign or retarding effect on what its member states would have undertaken in the absence of EU climate policies during 2008–2012? A measurement tool for the EU policy’s effect is developed and shows a benign average EU effect with considerable variation across countries. The EU’s policy effectiveness vis-à-vis its member states is explained by the EU’s non-compliance mechanism, the degree of usage of the Kyoto flexible mechanisms, and national pre-Kyoto emission reduction goals. Time-series cross-sectional analyses show that the EU’s non-compliance mechanism has no effect, while the ex-ante plans for using Kyoto flexible mechanisms and/or the ambitious pre-Kyoto emission reduction targets allow member states to escape constraints imposed by EU climate policy.

Although the Paris Agreement arguably made some progress, interest in supplementary approaches to climate change co-operation persist. This article examines the conditions under which a climate club might emerge and grow. Using agent-based simulations, it shows that even with less than a handful of major actors as initial members, a club can eventually reduce global emissions effectively. To succeed, a club must be initiated by the ‘right’ constellation of enthusiastic actors, offer sufficiently large incentives for reluctant countries and be reasonably unconstrained by conflicts between members over issues beyond climate change. A climate club is particularly likely to persist and grow if initiated by the United States and the European Union. The combination of club-good benefits and conditional commitments can produce broad participation under many conditions.

Using a novel agent-based model, we study how US withdrawal might influence the political process established by the Paris Agreement, and hence the prospects for reaching the collective goal to limit warming below 2°C. Our model enables us to analyze to what extent reaching this goal despite US withdrawal would place more stringent requirements on other core elements of the Paris cooperation process. We find, first, that the effect of a US withdrawal depends critically on the extent to which member countries reciprocate others’ promises and contributions. Second, while the 2°C goal will likely be reached only under a very small set of conditions in any event, even temporary US withdrawal will further narrow this set significantly. Reaching this goal will then require other countries to step up their ambition at the first opportunity and to comply nearly 100% with their pledges, while maintaining high confidence in the Paris Agreement's institutions. Third, although a US withdrawal will first primarily affect the United States' own emissions, it will eventually prove even more detrimental to other countries' emissions.

Perhaps like no other country, Germany has radically changed its policies towards regulating air pollution in the European context. Acting originally as a dragger in the 1970s to regulate transboundary air pollutants due to pessimism about the relationship between causes and effects, Germany responded very decisively to its own damage assessment in the early 1980s. In particular the adverse effects to forests (Waldsterben" or forest decline) led to the formulation of strict air pollution regulations in the domestic context, efforts to spread the regulatory system within the European Union, and activities within the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe to foster stronger, continent-wide emission reductions. Using three conceptual models (rational actor, domestic politics, and social learning), we show that Germany deviated strongly from the ideal policy cycle consisting of (i) domestic policy formulation, (ii) international negotiations, as well as (iii) implementation and compliance with the provisions of international environmental agreements. Both national policy-making as well as partial implementation have been well on the way towards compliance even before Germany entered international negotiations on substantive protocols. Therefore, one may conclude from this country study that push countries may use the results of their national policy processes to influence the policy of other countries.

"We examine the negotiations held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change in Paris, December 2015. Prior to these negotiations, there was considerable uncertainty about whether an agreement would be reached, particularly given that the world’s leaders failed to do so in the 2009 negotiations held in Copenhagen. Amid this uncertainty, we applied three different methods to predict the outcomes: an expert survey and two negotiation simulation models, namely the Exchange Model and the Predictioneer’s Game. After the event, these predictions were assessed against the coded texts that were agreed in Paris. The evidence suggests that combining experts’ predictions to reach a collective expert prediction makes for significantly more accurate predictions than individual experts’ predictions. The differences in the performance between the two different negotiation simulation models were not statistically significant." (author's abstract)

The 2015 Paris Agreement (PA) has been widely hailed as a diplomatic triumph and a breakthrough in global climate cooperation. However, it is commonly accepted that the PA's collective goal—keeping global warming “well below” 2°C above preindustrial levels—remains ambitious. Making matters even more challenging, in 2017, global CO2 emissions resumed growth after 3 years of near standstill. In 2018, this growth accelerated. It is therefore extremely important that the PA's institutional architecture meet expectations concerning its ability to induce member countries to promise and deliver emissions reductions. This study offers a review of the rapidly growing literature on the PA, to assess its strengths and weaknesses, its significance, and its prospects. We focus on evaluations of its institutional structure and its ability to induce member countries to implement policies. We frame the issues as a trilemma: the challenge of simultaneously satisfying all three main conditions for effectiveness—broad participation, deep commitments, and satisfactory compliance rates. Based on our review, we conclude that the key challenge for the PA will likely be to facilitate sufficiently fast ratcheting‐up of nationally determined contributions, while keeping compliance rates high. This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance

Dealing with the challenges of global change requires a transition not only in society but also in the scientific community. Despite continued claims for more inter-disciplinary approaches, progress to date has been slow. This paper elaborates on the need for innovation in methodologies and knowledge, on the one hand, and methods and data, on the other, to build the foundations for dealing with the challenges from global change. Three questions related to the nature of global change, the dynamics of sustainability transitions and the role of human agency guide analyses on the state of the art, barriers for innovation and need for action. The analyses build on literature reviews, expert workshops and surveys which were conducted under the umbrella of RESCUE, a foresight activity funded by the European Science Foundation. The major recommendations focus on integrating environmental and human dimensions, bridging scales, data and knowledge for global change research and overcoming structural constraints to make global change research more policy relevant.

On 1 June 2017, President Trump announced that the US intends to leave the Paris Agreement if no alternative terms acceptable to his administration can be agreed upon. In this article, an agent-based model of bottom-up climate mitigation clubs is used to derive the impact that lack of US participation may have on the membership of such clubs and their emissions coverage. We systematically analyse the prospects for climate mitigation clubs, depending on which of three conceivable roles the US takes on: as a leader (for benchmarking), as a follower (i.e. willing to join climate mitigation clubs initiated by others if this is in its best interest) or as an outsider (i.e. staying outside of any climate mitigation club no matter what). We investigate these prospects for three types of incentives for becoming a member: club goods, conditional commitments and side-payments. Our results show that lack of US leadership significantly constrains climate clubs’ potential. Lack of US willingness to follow others’ lead is an additional, but smaller constraint. Only in a few cases will US withdrawal entail widespread departures by other countries. We conclude that climate mitigation clubs can function without the participation of an important GHG emitter, given that other major emitters show leadership, although these clubs will rarely cover more than 50% of global emissions. Key policy insightsThe US switching from being a leader to being a follower substantially reduces the emissions coverage of climate mitigation clubs.The US switching from being a follower to being an outsider sometimes reduces coverage further, but has a smaller impact than the switch from leader to follower.The switch from follower to outsider only occasionally results in widespread departures by other countries; in a few instances it even entices others to join.Climate mitigation clubs can function even without the participation of the US, provided that other major emitters show leadership; however, such clubs will typically be unable to cover more than 50% of global emissions.Climate mitigation clubs may complement the Paris Agreement and can also serve as an alternative in case Paris fails. The US switching from being a leader to being a follower substantially reduces the emissions coverage of climate mitigation clubs. The US switching from being a follower to being an outsider sometimes reduces coverage further, but has a smaller impact than the switch from leader to follower. The switch from follower to outsider only occasionally results in widespread departures by other countries; in a few instances it even entices others to join. Climate mitigation clubs can function even without the participation of the US, provided that other major emitters show leadership; however, such clubs will typically be unable to cover more than 50% of global emissions. Climate mitigation clubs may complement the Paris Agreement and can also serve as an alternative in case Paris fails.

The limited success of the UNFCCC negotiations has enticed scholars, environmentalists, and policymakers alike to propose alternative approaches to climate cooperation. This article reviews the scholarly literature concerning one such proposed alternative—climate clubs. According to the club approach, it would be promising to start with small groups of “enthusiastic” countries. These countries would outline what they are willing and able to do, conditional on what other enthusiastic countries offer and implement. Moreover, these enthusiastic countries would try to entice “reluctant” countries to join via “exclusive and contingent” measures. Focusing on the conditions for a climate club to effectively reduce global emissions, we organize our review around four main questions: first, what is a climate club’s potential for providing benefits that accrue exclusively to club members? Second, how might leadership influence a climate club’s ability to eventually become effective? Third, what insights can the formal modelling literature offer concerning the effectiveness of climate clubs? Finally, which is the empirical record of existing climate clubs? We conclude by providing several suggestions for future research.

Many international policies encourage a switch from fossil fuels to bioenergy based on the premise that its use would not result in carbon accumulation in the atmosphere. Frequently cited bioenergy goals would at least double the present global human use of plant material, the production of which already requires the dedication of roughly 75% of vegetated lands and more than 70% of water withdrawals. However, burning biomass for energy provision increases the amount of carbon in the air just like burning coal, oil or gas if harvesting the biomass decreases the amount of carbon stored in plants and soils, or reduces carbon sequestration. Neglecting this fact results in an accounting error that could be corrected by considering that only the use of ‘additional biomass’ – biomass from additional plant growth or biomass that would decompose rapidly if not used for bioenergy – can reduce carbon emissions. Failure to correct this accounting flaw will likely have substantial adverse consequences. The article presents recommendations for correcting greenhouse gas accounts related to bioenergy., Energy Policy, 45, ISSN:0301-4215

According to two-level game theory, negotiators tailor agreements at the international level to be ratifiable at the domestic level. This did not happen in the Kyoto negotiations, however, in the US case. We interviewed 26 German, Norwegian, and US participants in and observers of the climate negotiations concerning their views on three explanations for why the United States did not become a party to Kyoto. Explanation 1 argues that Kyoto delegations mistakenly thought the Senate was bluffing when adopting Byrd–Hagel. Explanation 2 contends that Europeans preferred a more ambitious agreement without US participation to a less ambitious agreement with US participation. Finally, explanation 3 suggests that in Kyoto the Clinton–Gore administration gave up on Senate ratification, and essentially pushed for an agreement that would provide them a climate-friendly face. While all explanations received some support from interviewees, explanation 1 and (particularly) explanation 3 received considerably more support than explanation 2.

This article provides a concise overview of methods for analyzing policy choices that have been used in the study of long-term environmental challenges. We open with an overview of the broad classes of methods used for long-term policy analysis, and subsequent sections will describe in depth three particular methods. They are: statistical models, such as employed in the debate on the environmental Kuznets curve, which infer past patterns from data and project them into the future; robust decision-making, a decision analytic framework that supports choices under deep uncertainty, and relates near-term policy interventions to different clusters of long-term environmental futures; and adaptive control and agent-based modeling, which provide an approach to simulation modeling that focuses on cooperation and conflict among multiple actors and their choice of strategies. While all three approaches can be used for various applications, this article focuses on the challenge of a potential transition to a low-carbon future to illustrate the strengths, weaknesses, and synergies among the respective methods. In the final section, we offer guidance for choosing among methods.

As a quintessential long-term policy problem, climate change poses two major challenges. The first is to develop, under considerable uncertainty, a plan for allocating resources over time to achieve an effective policy response. The second is to implement this plan, once arrived at, consistently over time. We consider the second of these two challenges, arguing that it consists of three interrelated, commitment problems—the time inconsistency problem, the domestic politics problem, and the anarchy problem. We discuss each of these commitment problems in some detail, explore how they relate to climate policy, and suggest institutional designs that may help limit their adverse impact. While each of these commitment problems is difficult to tackle on its own, climate change requires us to cope with all of them at once. This is likely one major reason why we have so far made only modest headway on this vital issue.

Considering the long-term is not new, yet we seem to be overwhelmed by the long-term nature of many of our environmental policy problems. Following a definition of long-term policy problems, this editorial introduces the contributions to this special issue of Global Environmental Politics and outlines three major challenges for future research, including the time inconsistency problem, the effect of democratic and decentralized governance on problem-solving, as well as institutional designs to prevent or recover from unwanted long-term policy outcomes.

Why are multilateral institutions absent from some areas of international relations? Governments have not concluded regulatory policy agreements on tactical nuclear weapons and small arms control, deforestation, information privacy, and other transnational issues. The absence of regimes in such policy arenas is an empirical phenomenon with considerable theoretical and policy implications. Yet, existing scholarship on global governance largely ignores the instances in which such institutions do not emerge. This essay develops a research agenda to extend and strengthen regime theory through analysis of nonregimes. We articulate the concept, draw a typology of nonregimes, discuss the contributions that nonregime studies can make to IR theory, outline methodological approaches to pursue the proposed agenda, and highlight a priori theoretical considerations to guide such research. Six illustrative cases in the realms of arms control, environmental management, and international political economy are described and used to make preliminary observations of factors that impede regime formation.

Arild Underdal's work on the Law of the Least Ambitious Program (LLAP) is a significant contribution to our understanding of the logic of international collaboration. The LLAP, however, applies only under particular conditions. After comparing the law to the joint decision trap and the veto player concept, we discuss four observations that tend to limit the law's domain. First, while the LLAP is intended to apply to decision-making under unanimity, in a number of international bodies decisions are made by some kind of majority voting. Second, the LLAP assumes that the alternative to collective agreement is individual decision-making, yet in practice the relevant alternative (the “reversion rule”) is often the continuation of some pre-existing collaborative arrangement. Third, whereas the LLAP assumes that the unanimity rule invariably favors the least ambitious program, there are interesting cases where this assumption does not hold. Finally, the LLAP does not take into account that the outcome of international decision-making not only depends on the decision rule and the reversion rule, but also on the voting sequence.

Political Science research encounters inferences across levels of analysis; however, they are fraught with challenges. After introducing voting examples of aggregation bias, problems posed by aggregation bias are summarized more generally. Subsequently, the article reviews the major methodological approaches to overcome aggregation bias and to solve the ecological inference (disaggregation) problem. The article highlights the possibility that aggregation bias may lead governments to accept (or reject) international climate agreements when negotiating as blocs of countries as compared to the distribution of the preferences of all countries involved in the negotiations.

The article outlines a method to measure the effect which international regimes have on solving global environmental problems such as global climate change. By using political-economic cost/benefit analysis, a no-regime counterfactual and a collective optimum (lower and upper bounds) are derived. By comparing the actual performance of a regime to these bounds, a simple coefficient of regime effectiveness can be computed. After theoretically deriving the various bounds, the authors discuss the determining factors and provide guidance on how such a research agenda could be pursued empirically. The authors conclude with suggestions to further refine the measurement concept and its merit for public policy.

Climate change is very likely to lead to undesirable climate impacts. How to compensate for such negative impacts at the international level has, hitherto, received little attention. This article reviews the most frequently discussed grounds for legal obligations of states vis-à-vis climate impacts (damages) and concludes that no convincing mechanism has yet been found to compensate climate impacts. The authors outline an architecture for a voluntary, international compensation fund with specialized, independent climate courts. Subsequently, this article addresses three strategic considerations related to the fund, namely, the incentives for founding it, the merits of double proportionality with respect to contributions and payments, as well as the benefits of employing prediction markets to enhance trustworthiness.

Fromourpoint of view, the exchange has been very rewarding. In this rejoinder, we brie‘ ysummarize our own position and identify some remaining issues where ourviews seem to differ from Oran Young’ s.First, we are encouraged by Young’ s evaluation that there are some attrac-tive features about the Oslo-Potsdam solution— in particular that it offers a con-ceptual framework producing a single effectiveness score bounded between 0and 1 which permits comparisons across regimes.Second, Young is correct in pointing out that there are multiple alternativeprocedures for evaluating regime