Editing IPCC:AR6/WGIII/Chapter-14 (section)

== 14.7 Knowledge Gaps ==

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Any assessment of the effectiveness of international cooperation is limited by the methodological challenge of observing sufficient variance in cooperation in order to support inference on effects. There is little in the way of cross-sectional variance, given that most of the governance mechanisms assessed here are global in their geographical coverage. One exception is with respect to the effects of the Kyoto Protocol, which we have reported. Time series analysis is also challenging, given that other determinants of climate mitigation, including technology costs and the effects of national and sub-national level policies, are rapidly evolving. Thus, this chapter primarily reviews scholarship that compares observations with theory-based counterfactual scenarios.

Many of the international agreements and institutions discussed in this chapter, in particular the Paris Agreement, are new. The logic and architecture of the Paris Agreement, in particular, breaks new ground, and there is limited evaluation of prior experience in the form of analogous treaties to draw on. Such instruments have evolved in response to geopolitical and other drivers that are changing rapidly, and will continue to shape the nature of international cooperation under it and triggered by it. The Paris Agreement is also, in common with other multilateral agreements, a ‘living instrument’ evolving through interpretative and operationalising rules, and forms of implementation, that Parties continue to negotiate at conferences year on year. It is a constant ‘work in progress’ and thus challenging to assess at any given point in time. The Paris Agreement also engages a larger set of variables – given its privileging of national autonomy and politics, integration with the sustainable development agenda, and its engagement with actions and actors at multiple levels – than earlier international agreements, which further complicates the task of tracing causality between observed effects and international cooperation through the Paris Agreement.

Understanding of the effectiveness of international agreements and institutions is driven entirely by theory-driven prediction of how the world will evolve, both with these agreements in place and without them. The predictions in particular are problematic, because governance regimes are complex adaptive systems, making it impossible to predict how they will evolve over time, and hence what their effects will be. Time will cure this in part, as it will generate observations of the world with the new regime in place, which we can compare to the counterfactual situation of the new regime’s being absent, which may be a simpler situation to model. But even here our modelling capacity is limited: it may simply never be possible to know with a high degree of confidence whether international cooperation, such as that embodied in the Paris Agreement, is having a significant effect, no matter how much data are accumulated.

Given the importance of theory for guiding assessments of the past and likely future impacts of policies, it is important to note that among the alternative theoretical frameworks for analysis, some have been much more extensively developed in the literature than others. This chapter has noted in particular the partial dichotomy between a global commons framing of climate change and a transitions framing, which include different indicators to be used to evaluate the effectiveness of policies. The latter framing is particularly under-developed. Greater development of theories resting in social science disciplines such as economic geography, sociology, and psychology could potentially provide a more complete picture of the nature and effectiveness of international cooperation.

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