Rescuing the Paris Agreement: Improving the Global Experimentalist Governance by Reclassifying Countries

Abstract

The Paris Agreement design follows the Global Experimental Governance mode, which once achieved success in ozone protection. However, the implementation of the Paris Agreement encountered difficulties, as it inherited the traditional dichotomy country classification established at the 1992 Rio Summit. Still, over time, the capability and motivation in Annex I and non-Annex I countries developed so differently that incentive and constraint policies do not encourage more ambitious mitigation commitments using the previous classification. For this reason, according to a country’s capability and motivation, this research divided these countries into four categories: Leader, Reserve Force, Waverer, and Obscurity, and proposed a potential climate action roadmap for different types of countries to mobilize their internal forces by dynamically classifying a country’s character and to improve overall global climate governance.