The Bottom-Up Alternative: The Mitigation Potential of Private Climate Governance after the Paris Agreement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change has sought to inject renewed energy into the international climate regime. As a treaty, however, it allows States to set their own emissions targets. Even before the U.S. withdrawal, State Parties' commitments together fell far short of what is required to achieve the treaty's objectives. The low level of State ambition, coupled with the lack of an international enforcement mechanism, means that private initiatives -- including through courts, investor actions, and voluntary business commitments -- will be critical, especially in the United States, if the climate regime is to deliver on its goals. This Article seeks to contribute to both the theoretical and empirical literature on private climate governance and develop a richer understanding of bottom-up options for the implementation of the Paris Agreement where State leadership is weak or lacking. First, it develops an analytical framework to evaluate the effectiveness, or the mitigation potential, of private climate governance. Second, it provides a critical assessment of three promising forms of private climate governance: (a) disclosure of company emissions and climate risks; (b) voluntary commitments to reduce emissions; and (c) carbon labeling. The Article shows empirically that these private initiatives face a number of constraints that make them unlikely to generate significant mitigation action in the near term on their own. However, other bottom-up options, such as climate litigation, can play an important role in closing the ambition deficit by increasing government accountability and facilitating the de facto implementation of the Paris Agreement in the United States and elsewhere.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".