In this interview, we discuss the research and findings of their recent article in Environmental Politics: ‘Making and breaking promises: must a country harmonize its climate pledges and policies?’.
Congratulations on your recent article! What is the key message that you hope people take from this research?
Governments frequently do less than they committed to do about climate change, and in some instances, they end up doing more. While it seems obvious to hold anyone accountable for failing to do what they said they would do, it is not as obvious that we should chide them harshly for not exactly meeting their target or even for doing more than they said they would do.
While exceeding a commitment might seem unequivocally positive at first sight, in the context of tackling climate change even exceeding a commitment might actually carry negative implications. For example, certain domestic constituents of a government might have built their plans on the expectation that the government would follow through with what it said. Further, such “overperformance” is often still insufficient from a climate perspective and less than what justice demands of a country, given its historical responsibility and current capacity.
That being said, it is sometimes beneficial to give governments some slack in both regards – i.e., when they fall short of or go beyond their commitments. This allows them, for example, to set aspirational goals that might provide some motivational pull – for other countries and for their own constituency – even if it is likely that they’ll miss their aspirational targets. Of course, words should be more than hot air – but how much weight exactly: this is more of an art than a science. Our article attempts to get the ball rolling on this discussion.
You engage with climate activist Luisa Neubauer’s claim ‘I don’t think it’s a particularly radical demand to ask governments to keep their promises’. Do you ultimately disagree? If so, what demand might be more effective?
Countries put their climate commitments into so-called “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs) and communicate them internationally. It’s not clear, however, that such NDCs should be interpreted as promises in a strict sense. At the 2013 Warsaw COP the “C” in “NDC” was deliberately changed from standing for ‘commitment’ to standing for ‘contribution’ in order to avoid overly strict connotations. Further, there is a quite theoretical point: countries are less able to make genuine promises than individuals in the first place. The leaders of countries come and go and even the borders of countries change. Thus, compared to individual agents collective agents such as countries make for less stable agents in the first place. But such stability is a prerequisite for the ability to commit to future actions. Still, even if NDCs are something weaker than paradigmatic promises, they should of course have some weight.
However, this weight is further diminished if we take into account that many countries promise less than what would amount to their fair share of the overall task (by any reasonable interpretation of “fair share” according to different views of climate justice). If a country promises to do less than it ought to do anyway, the fact that it promised it doesn’t add much extra weight to its moral duty. Climate justice already calls for it independently of your promise. Imagine promising the librarian to give your overdue book back tomorrow. The fact that you promised it doesn’t add much strength to your duty – given that it’s overdue, you ought to give it back independently of your promise.
We think that a more helpful approach puts the primary emphasis on the positive and negative consequences of cultivating a norm of harmonizing pledges and policies. There are some benefits of holding countries strictly accountable to their NDC, and there are some benefits to being lax about it. The primary positive effect is, of course, that many countries do less than they said they would and holding them accountable puts pressure on them to do more. And more is better. Also, if countries can count on each other to stick to their pledges, this creates trust.
However, there are a number of countervailing considerations once we take indirect effects into account. For example, putting pressure on countries to follow through on their words could incentivize countries to avoid ambitious promises in the first place. It would in particular prevent countries from making deliberately overambitious promises. This might be a loss because overambitious targets can sometimes generate a positive dynamic – both in the country that sets the overambitious target as well as in other countries, too. Another negative effect of taking climate commitments very seriously is the unavoidable messiness of international and national climate action. If we want to have any hope for progress on the climate front, we have to make space for muddling through. This, in turn, requires a certain amount of leeway for countries – we can’t hold them accountable for every little deviation from the trajectory that they envisaged and communicated.
So this is about strategy – whether focusing on promises is the right approach, or whether outcomes are more important?
At the end of the day, it is far more valuable to get the outcomes right than keeping commitments just for the sake of having kept them – especially in the face of a problem such as climate change when the actual reduction of emissions is paramount. However, that doesn’t diminish the utility of making and tracking commitments. When governments set goals, of any kind, it sets expectations on which other governments and non-state actors (e.g., business) can plan their own activities. Setting expectations, and in turn meeting them, fosters trust amongst countries which can spill over to other (global) policy issues with beneficial implications. That being said, this is just the tip of the iceberg in debating which focus – i.e., commitments or outcomes – is the most important. Both lines of inquiry are interesting, relevant, and add value in understanding what drives effective climate policy action.
Your conceptual focus is on ‘disharmony’. Why was this idea useful to you?
We make use of disharmony, aside from connecting our paper to related work, as this concept more comprehensively portrays that “breaking promises” can mean both doing less or doing more than one committed to. That is, disharmony as a concept is not binary – the antithesis to achieving pledges is not only breaking commitments, but also overachieving on one’s own promises. As an individual, overachieving is straightforwardly a net positive outcome. However, when a country outperforms its target, it may be to the detriment of another part of its constituent whole. For example, entire industries plan their business on a trajectory set by the commitments their government make at the international level. Governments doing, or pushing for, more domestically might render those plans insufficient and businesses may feel that they need to catch up.
Finally, what would be helpful next steps in this line of research?
People might agree or disagree with our views. However, regardless of whether our conclusion is convincing, we think that our paper provides a helpful template for other policy domains. In many areas, there are structurally analogous situations to climate policy: countries make – more or less formal – commitments at the international stage but then implement domestic policies out of step with their international commitments. Just think of foreign aid, trade liberalization or respect for international law. Our two approaches for assessing a norm of being strict or relaxed about such disharmony – first, whether it amounts to breaking a promise, and second, whether it has practical costs or benefits – can be generalized beyond climate policy.
Bios:
Dominic Roser is a Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the University of Fribourg’s Interdisciplinary Institute for Ethics and Human Rights. He works in the area of political and moral philosophy and he has a background in economics. Apart from climate ethics, he has also worked intergenerational justice and global justice more generally, as well as effective altruism, risk, and human rights.
Jack Baker recently completed his doctoral studies at the Institute of Political Science and Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern. He researches climate policy processes and politics, with particular interest in studying the gap between countries’ international commitments and domestic policies to mitigate climate change.
