The Paris Agreement At Five Are States Ready To Be Held To Account

The modalities for Technical Expert Review under the Enhanced Transparency Framework are essentially limited to whether Parties' reports include all the required information and follow the applicable methodology. Although the Paris Agreement calls this review to promote the treaty's "effective implementation," experts may not engage with the "adequacy" of Parties' levels of climate finance or of their actions to achieve their NDC targets (let alone the adequacy of those targets themselves in light of the global climate challenge).

The Facilitative Multilateral Consideration of Progress (also under the Enhanced Transparency Framework) will allow Parties to question each other regarding whether they are on track to achieve their NDC targets (an important avenue for accountability), but the modalities exclude questions about whether those targets themselves are fair and ambitious. Furthermore, the modalities preclude the participation of stakeholders as initially proposed by some Parties. Both design features reveal an important missed opportunity for what Kramarz and Park call "first tier" accountability, that is answerability for the goals that have been set, as opposed to how these are being pursued.[vii]

The modalities limit the outputs of the Global Stocktake to collective examinations of progress on mitigation, adaptation, and support, and explicitly bar any "individual Party focus" or "policy prescriptive" conclusions. Furthermore, although stakeholders may make written submissions, they are also excluded from the interactive parts of this collective examination. Again, both features limit state accountability, even though the Stocktake's core mandate is to "inform Parties in updating and enhancing" their climate actions.

The modalities also constrain how the Implementation and Compliance Committee may engage with Parties in order to "promote compliance" with the Paris Agreement. For example, the committee may unilaterally approach a Party that fails to submit an NDC or one of its reports. However, it may not engage with a Party that is failing to achieve its NDC or that has only provided limited climate finance unless that Party self-refers to the committee. One may speculate, as a result, that the committee's primary focus will be Parties that lack the capacity to implement the Paris Agreement, rather than political will.

One avenue is for audacious Parties to play a leadership role during the Facilitative Multilateral Consideration of Progress by asking their peer's hard questions about their mitigation actions, or even raising such questions about their own level of progress. Indeed, developing country negotiators are likely to weigh their desire to hold other countries accountable for the risk of damaging diplomatic ties or even jeopardizing access to climate finance. By contrast, there is an opportunity for other countries to act as "norm entrepreneurs"[x] by putting the questions of the highest possible ambition, fairness, and progress of NDC targets on the agenda.

Another avenue is for the Global Stocktakes, starting in 2023, to deliver outputs that take a clear and replicable approach to inform Parties on how to upgrade their NDC targets. Unfortunately, as much cannot be said of the Talanoa Dialogue held in 2018. The Stocktake's mandate to engage with equity and the best available science opens the door to creative ways of going beyond a purely global examination of progress, for instance through the identification of indicators, benchmarks, and best practices.[xi]

The Implementation and Compliance Committee is mandated to identify systemic issues and to refer these to the Conference of the Parties (CMA) with its recommendations. Although reporting challenges are likely to arise on a systemic scale for Parties with capacity limitations, the committee could also be on the lookout for substantive implementation concerns. The current development of the committee's Rules of Procedure offers an opportunity to anticipate how the committee could hold Parties to account in response to large-scale issues with the ambition and progression of NDCs such as those identified in UNEP's Emissions Gap Report 2019.