Why Would Aspirational Goals Matter in Global Environmental Governance?

• In Event: Effects of Climate Change and External Climate Policies on Domestic Politics

Abstract

The inclusion of a 1.5◦C limit on global mean temperature increase in the 2015 Paris Agreement has been widely acclaimed as a key achievement. Many international treaties contain similar “aspirational goals”: explicit and ambitious targets with low legal obligation. Scholars have claimed that they impact policy, e.g., in regard to human rights norms. Yet few studies investigate the impact of aspirational goals contained in some of the nearly 300 international environmental agreements. This paper identifies six general causal mechanisms through which such goals in an agreement might alter concrete policies. It then investigates their real-world impact using a nested case study design. Starting from an original historical dataset of all international historical environmental agreements, we find only eight that contain truly aspirational goals. Detailed case studies of these reveal two – those to mitigate acid rain in Europe and depletion of the ozone layer – where evidence suggests that aspirational goals influenced policy change. In those apparently exceptional cases, impact appears to have been contingent on the existence of highly mobilized coalitions. We conclude with tentative implications for the 1.5◦C target in the context of the recent attention it has received, as well as for aspirational goals in other issue areas.

Authors

• Hélène Benveniste, Stanford University

• Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University