Climate negotiators forged a new climate agreement this past weekend. It’s been named the Lima Accord, and it relies on countries to individually decide if and by how much they want to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. In other words, the Lima Accord sets out to solve a problem that was caused by countries doing whatever they wanted by letting countries do whatever they want. So maybe they didn’t nail it.
Now, it is possible that a system of individual pledges under the Lima Accord leads to a significant reduction in global greenhouse gases. The problem is that nobody has clearly articulated why we should expect it to. The climate problem, after all, is a social dilemma; one in which individual interests are at odds with the collective interest. The goal of an international climate treaty is to better align the individual and collective interest. To expect a system of voluntary pledges to achieve that goal requires that something else be at play. The agreement compels countries to be transparent with their pledges, and so perhaps behavioral motivators like “peer pressure” or “shame” can move countries to ambitious emissions reductions. Indeed, economists have documented that these can be powerful motivators. However, for a name-and-shame strategy to be effective, countries must be able to easily make comparisons between commitments. On a global scale, this is difficult. Comparing the equivalence of emissions abatement pledges between developed and developing countries is a very subjective analysis. Each country is on its own development path, with its own perspective on the nature of the climate problem. To exploit behavioral responses from shaming, the global community must be able to determine which actions are shameful.
Perhaps the bottom-up, pledge-driven agreement is trying to harness the conditionally cooperative nature of countries. This is the idea that countries are more willing to take on costly emissions reductions if other countries take on similar burdens. I have little doubt that this is true. In fact, when the United States declined to ratify the Kyoto Protocol they argued that the agreement would achieve little without major polluters like China and India taking on emissions reduction responsibilities. The problem is that without defined emissions targets, the pledge system does not provide a clear structure to base conditional responses on. Moreover, without an aggregate target in mind, there is no assurance that an individual country’s efforts will make a difference. Indeed, emissions reductions by one country can be completely offset by increased emissions of another.
We have seen recent movement away from trying to negotiate top-down approaches towards more bottom-up efforts. This is understandable. By most accounts the Kyoto Protocol is a failure. But for all its flaws, Kyoto recognized the fundamental point that climate change is a social dilemma; one that is unlikely solved through unilateral management. I think the Lima Accord largely misses this point.
