International Environmental Governance

This paper explains the emergence of the ‘pledge and review’ governance approach found in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, in place of the ‘obligatory targets and timetables’ approach found in the Kyoto Protocol, from a neo-Gramscian perspective. The main argument is that the adoption of pledge and review was a response to both the pressure to agree a new international treaty and the simultaneous divergence of interests and fragmentation of negotiation groups within the UNFCCC regime. The pledge and review approach can be seen to have reinforced cooperation between nations and strengthened consensus building, facilitating the search for an agreement under differentiated interests. Being less fixed than obligatory quantitative emission reduction targets, this degree of flexibility is key to the functioning and adoption of the system. This flexibility allowed many of the key contentions within the negotiations to be sidestepped, in order for an agreement to be reached.