Moral duties, compliance and polycentric climate governance
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Moral duties, compliance and polycentric climate governance Alexandre Gajevic Sayegh1 Accepted: 2 July 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Contributions to the climate governance literature have highlighted the importance of recognizing its new polycentric nature, which includes roles for non-state and subnational actors in climate change mitigation and in leadership for climate action. Yet, the literature is missing a normative cartography—that is, a mapping of the distribution of moral duties in the real world—which is tailored to a context of polycentric governance. This paper answers the question: how can moral duties be distributed in a context of polycentric climate governance such as to diminish the problem of non-compliance? This implies the following question: do duties change in situations of non-compliance in a context of polycentric governance, and if so how? Acknowledging polycentric governance is the key to an effective distribution of moral duties, as it allows for a more accurate mapping of non-state and subnational actors’ duties in leading the charge against climate change. Correspondingly, a normative cartography fitted to this context will be instrumental in showing how morally informed climate governance can diminish the problem of non-compliance. This paper focusses on the distribution of moral duties in a context of polycentric governance as a contributing factor to inducing agents to act according to the collective goal. It argues that a more fine-grained distribution of climate duties, tailored to polycentric climate governance, contributes to addressing the problem of non-compliance. Keywords Polycentric climate governance · Moral duties · Non-compliance · The Paris agreement · Climate ethics · Collective action What is held in common by the largest number of people receives the least care. For people give most attention to their own property, less to what is communal, or only as much as fall to them to give. For apart from anything else, the thought that someone else is attending to it makes them neglect it the more. Aristotle, Politics (Hackett Publishing, 1998), 1261b.
* Alexandre Gajevic Sayegh [email protected] 1
Department of Political Science, Université Laval, Québec City, Canada
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1 Introduction The literature on global climate governance has highlighted the importance of recognizing its polycentric nature, which includes roles for subnational and non-state actors with regard to climate change mitigation and leadership for climate action (Bäckstrand et al. 2017; Dorsch and Flachsland 2017; Gallemore 2017; Hermwille 2018; Jordan et al. 2018; Maltais 2014; Torney 2019; Widerberg and Pattberg 2015; Wurzel et al. 2019). Yet, the literature is missing a normative cartography1—i.e. a mapping of the distribution of moral duties in the real world—that is tailored to this context of polycentric governance. Today, acknowledging polycentric governance is vital to a successful distribution of moral duties, as it allows f
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