Global Discourse on Climate Change and Its Association with Technical Ambition

• In Event: Institutions and Climate Change

Abstract

This study compares the discourse contained in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. NDCs are documents that summarize the ongoing and planned policies of each party to the Convention. These documents encapsulate one of the main governance mechanisms formulated by the international community in response to climate change. We make a conceptual contribution by identifying a thematic framework for analysing the discourse in these documents comparatively and comprehensively. Many existing studies of NDCs focus on quantifying the technical ambition contained in them, such as the size of authoring countries’ commitments to mitigate and adapt to climate change. By contrast, we focus on the discourse used to justify parties’ commitments. After describing the discourse, we problematize the differences between the strength of the language used and the levels of technical ambition. We develop and test an institutional explanation of these differences that focuses on the level of accountability to which state governments are subject.

The new thematic framework for comparing NDCs is based on subject area experts’ knowledge of the UNFCCC negotiation process and qualitative human coding of a broad range of NDCs, which have featured on our previously published research on these topics. The present study also makes a methodological contribution by applying a new method for automated text analysis, seeded topic modelling (keyATM), to the entire corpus of NDCs using the established thematic framework. The advantage of seeded topic modelling over previous, more inductive variants of topic modelling, is that it enables us to integrate knowledge from our previous qualitative inquiries into the contents of NDCs. The application of keyATM results in a substantive contribution, which consists of new insights into the ways in which parties’ NDCs are changing over time as they are updated, and the ways in which different parties’ NDCs compare to each other.

In the final step of the analysis, we theorize and examine the similarities and differences between the levels of ambition expressed in the discourse in NDCs with the available evidence on the levels of technical ambition contained in these documents. We identify cases in which the level of ambition implied by the discourse is not matched by the level of technical ambition contained in the parties’ substantive policy commitments. We theorize why accountability is necessary for brining discursive and technical ambition into line and consider the different forms that accountability can take.

Authors

• Justin Leinaweaver, Drury University

• Robert Thomson, University of Hong Kong

• Slava Jankin Mikhaylov, University of Essex