Abstract: A pledge to limit global warming “to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C” has been widely acclaimed as the key achievement of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Other international agreements contain similarly explicit, ambitious but nonbinding international aspirational goals (IAGs). Extensive literature claims IAGs impact policy in areas like human rights and development, yet no study investigates the impact of IAGs on international environmental cooperation. Starting from a new historical dataset of 696 international environmental agreements across 73 issues, we identify six general causal mechanisms through which IAGs might alter concrete policies, then estimate their real concrete impact. Of the eight regime complexes including 80 agreements with IAGs, we find just two–mitigation of acid rain in Europe and depletion of the ozone layer–where IAGs could possibly have influenced policy change. Even in these exceptional cases, the impact appears limited: at most, IAGs slightly encourage or marginally enlarge an already mobilized coalition of first movers. Throughout, wealth, abatement costs, domestic political support, and relative power explain more concrete policy change. These conclusions counsel databased skepticism about the potential for the 1.5/2°C climate target and other IAGs to drive concrete policy change.

Bio: Hélène Benveniste is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Social Sciences at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.  She uses both quantitative and qualitative methods drawn from political and other social sciences to answer research questions directly relevant to international climate change policy. Her topics of research include climate-related  human migration, global  environmental governance, and the politics of decarbonization. 

Prof. Benveniste received her Ph.D. in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. She previously was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, as well as a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. During the Paris Agreement year, Prof. Benveniste served as research scientist and project manager of a scientific advisory group to the French climate negotiation team, focusing on assessing countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions. As part of her career in energy and climate policy prior to graduate school, Prof. Benveniste also served as deputy attaché for energy at the French Embassy in Germany.