Climate Clubs: Drivers for Norm Success in Climate Action?

Recent years have seen a proliferation of coalitions and club-like arrangements in climate governance. Many of these are focused on specific issue-areas that have been slow to advance in the consensus-based multilateral UN climate negotiations. The common assumption is that for clubs to sufficiently reduce emissions, they must attract large emitters such as China and USA (Busby and Urpelainen 2020). However, large emitters are commonly reluctant to join such clubs at best, and are veto players at worst (Victor 2011; Eckersley 2012; Urpelainen 2013; Shum 2014; Nordhaus 2015; Hovi et al. 2017; Mitchell and Carpenter 2019). One common explanation for why climate clubs cannot be effective is thus because of the lack of engagement by veto players (Sprinz et al. 2018). This, however, overlooks the potential normative power of climate clubs. Indeed, we argue that performance and effectiveness in reducing emissions are not optimal measures for capturing the clubs’ contributions and potential. While the role of norms has long been downplayed in much of the climate governance literature (Green 2018; Sikkink 2023), more recent studies have argued that it would be fruitful to focus greater attention on political efforts that promote strong global ethical norms for climate action (Sikkink 2023; Mitchell and Carpenter 2019). In this paper, we set out to examine why the norms promoted by some climate clubs spread more than others and explain differences in success in spreading norms. To this end, we study three policy norms for climate action that are established and diffusing in varying degrees: net-zero goals, coal phase out, and carbon pricing. Through case studies, we illustrate how clubs and specific norms interact. Drawing on literatures on international norms and climate clubs, this paper develops an analytical framework to assess climate clubs in relation to these norms. The paper thereby offers novel insights into the relevance of club-formations and draws out implications for scholarly literature and practice.