Twelfth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

The mitigation of climate change is often met with policy inertia as a super wicked problem. Evidence suggests that national governments worldwide often tend to remain reluctant in climate policy implementation despite their commitments to international climate policy regimes. This leads to a substantial and irreparable gap between policy commitments and policy implementation for a significant global public good. While measuring the climate policy outcome against a policy commitment is reasonably quantifiable, the ‘commitment’ variable faces conceptualization and operationalization challenges (Dolsak, 2001) in the empirical environmental politics literature. Policy scholars use several alternatives, often with an ordinal scale, to measure national level policy commitment towards climate change mitigation which lacks precision and is prone to measurement bias. A new set of reports called “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)” by global national governments submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) provide a unique opportunity to measure commitments quantitatively against some tangible, measurable outcomes. A total of 147 countries have submitted their INDCs that contain essential information related to national-level climate change commitments. Using the time-series model, the preliminary analysis of the paper with some sample reports reveals that most countries are far behind their commitment to reducing various GHGs for the target year of 2030 against base years. The paper contributes to understanding the word-action gaps in the climate policy implementation and provides important insights on why some nations are more committed than others and the need for a coherent guideline for evidence-based climate policy actions.