Conference Agenda

Eight years after the Paris Agreement, non-Annex I countries face some gaps for the continuity of the mitigation mechanisms. One of the most challenging is ensuring sufficient financing for emission absorption projects. Thus, these nations meet with an additional difficulty for setting up the adequate machinery and receiving the necessary technology for fulfilling their emission goals. In this sense, it is worth asking how small developing countries, such as those in Central America, would address these challenges while striving to meet their emission goals. Hence, can the new mechanisms address the unfulfilled promises of the Clean Development Mechanism of providing a reliable source of finance and technology transfer?

This paper will discuss the operation of carbon removal projects in Central America. These projects are as an essential pillar of their contribution to the fight against climate change. It analyses the contribution of climate governance in the advancement and implementation of these projects. It explores the extent to which intergovernmental and transnational institutions have exploited the potential of climate governance to address the obstacles and challenges related to the absorption of greenhouse gas emissions. Also, it reveals serious knowledge disparities among agents: government officials, entrepreneurs and scholars have little to no information about domestic carbon removal projects. Instead, organizations such as the IPCC have sufficient expertise, but offer almost no guidance to domestic agents. This results in poor interest on investing in carbon removal projects and in a steep path to accomplish the emission goals for these nations.

The research will be carried out as an extension of my doctoral research. It will be based on a detailed investigation on carbon removal project in Central America. Interviews with relevant actors have been conducted. The project will focus explicitly on the interaction between local institutions and international support mechanisms.

Meeting the Paris Agreement’s global temperature goal requires countries to both propose ambitious mitigation targets under their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), and to implement the necessary laws, policies, and measures at the domestic level to meet those targets. In this paper, we propose a conceptualization of countries’ climate mitigation policy performance that disentangles these two dimensions – ambition with respect to the global temperature goal, and alignment with national policies and measures –, considering both as complementary and necessary to reach the Paris Agreements’ goals. Combining the ambition and alignment dimensions leads to four country categories: those having both ambitious targets and strong national policies are regarded as real climate leaders, while countries with unambitious NDCs and insufficient policies can be considered the laggards. Two further categories are the careful countries with unambitious targets but strong national policies, and the performative countries with ambitious targets but insufficient policies.

We use existing measures of NDC ambition as well as a newly developed climate harmonization index to identify typical countries in these four categories. Preliminary results suggest that the USA is a laggard country, with an unambitious NDC and insufficient national mitigation policies; Brazil, the EU and Singapore are careful ones, with rather unambitious NDCs but middle to strong mitigation policies; Peru has an average performance in both NDC ambition and national mitigation policies; Bangladesh and Indonesia are among the performative countries with middle to high ambition but weak mitigation policies; and Ethiopia appears among the few real leader countries, with an ambitious NDC and middle to strong mitigation policies. Using qualitative methods on selected case studies, we explore potential explanations for their classification, beyond the traditional interest-based and capacity drivers, including countries’ democratic and institutional quality, domestic political orientation, level of engagement in the polycentric climate governance system, targeting of climate finance, among others. We expect that particularly small and vulnerable countries with low capacity but strong interest in mitigation may profit from a stronger engagement with international and transnational climate governance initiatives and from larger finance flows, resulting in more ambitious NDCs and stronger domestic policy frameworks.

Growing focus on target-setting in climate governance inevitably leads to the development of pathways on how best to reach these targets. For example, in some countries, this has resulted in the establishment of climate-specific domestic institutions, such as climate expert councils. While some research has paid attention to the formation of state-level climate institutional mechanisms, there is a lack of understanding of the link between different climate policy narratives and types of institutions that arise as a result. In other words, do certain climate policy narratives about pathways to decarbonization influence the emergence and composition of institutional arrangements? Previous research argues that states with low political polarization where mitigation is present as a dominant climate narrative are most likely to create the conditions for new purpose-built institutions to strategically achieve mitigation objectives, while in states with narratives that embed mitigation within other pressing domestic goals and with higher political polarization, climate action is more likely to occur at random through sectoral changes. In this study, we draw on these arguments, but expand on the typology of climate narratives and investigate if and how they influence the characteristics of climate-focused institutions. As types of climate policy narratives we consider apolitical and technocratic framing vs a need for transformation of mainstream policy institutions; mitigation and adaptation as comparable with economic growth vs narratives of degrowth and a-growth. Inspired by recent studies that draw attention to the importance of climate institutions, we look at countries that have established separate climate policy institutions (e.g. UK, Germany, Sweden, and South Africa) and assess how domestic climate policy narratives influence institutional arrangements. We argue for a broader typology of decarbonization pathways and explore institutional consequences associated with them. As a part of the puzzle, we also consider how new climate institutions may, in their turn, influence domestic climate policy narratives. When we are better able to understand the link between climate policy narratives and institutions, we will be better equipped to design institutions that are capable of guiding societal transformations to sustainable living.

It is crucial that the energy transition enfolds democratically, in order to increase the legitimacy of the transition and its outcomes. Practitioners and scholars increasingly point to community renewable energy (CRE) initiatives as legitimate agents in governing a democratic energy transition. In an attempt to fill the empirical knowledge gap on the often-assumed democratic legitimacy of CRE initiatives, we conduct an analysis of how and to what extent democratic legitimacy is being pursued and met by community renewable energy initiatives in their governance of energy generation projects.

We developed an analytical framework based on literature on energy democracy and democratic legitimacy, which we applied to governance practices of CRE initiatives in the city of Utrecht, The Netherlands. In a comparative case study containing four different CRE initiatives, varying in their energy source and maturity, data was primarily collected by means of interviews and document analysis. Triangulation of data sources and methods allowed an in-depth assessment of the pursuit and success of CRE initiatives in meeting democratic principles, nuanced by analytical considerations of different project stages.

Results show that CRE initiatives are democratically legitimate to a moderate to extensive degree, with transparency as a core principle. However, significant differences between principles and initiatives exist, so the assumption that CRE initiatives are by definition democratically legitimate is proved incorrect. Trade-offs are being made by decision-makers in CRE initiatives, pressured by resource limitations and based on the perceived importance of certain principles, varying per initiative. Four factors that influenced differences in democratic legitimacy between initiatives included the maturity of the initiative, the pursued energy source, the complexity of the local stakeholder arena and location-specific practicalities.

Future research could further investigate the influence of local stakeholders on the democratic legitimacy of CRE practices, while making use of our stage-specific results. By doing so, it could add a ‘good governance’ layer to strategic niche management in the CRE sector and safeguard democratic legitimacy in the stimulation and facilitation of initiatives’ upscaling. CRE initiators are recommended to discuss a collective perception of democratic legitimacy with participants and stakeholders, and to deploy their partnerships for sharing expertise. Policy makers are recommended to consider the democratic strengths and deficits of CRE initiatives in the support they provide. These considerations are necessary to steer the ongoing energy transition in a democratic and legitimate way.