Global Climate Governance: The Paris Climate Agreement, Achievements and Challenges

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive assessment of the Paris Climate Agreement's achievements and persistent challenges within the broader architecture of global climate governance. Moving beyond the celebratory narrative of diplomatic success, the analysis examines the Agreement's paradigmatic shift from the Kyoto Protocol's top-down regulatory model to a bottom-up, facilitative framework centered on nationally determined contributions, hybrid legal obligations, and iterative ambition cycles. The article identifies four principal achievements: the near-universal ratification establishing a global normative framework and catalyzing the net-zero movement, the construction of a common transparency architecture culminating in the first Global Stocktake, the institutionalization of climate justice through the Loss and Damage Fund, and the systematic mobilization of subnational and non-state actors creating a polycentric governance reality. Against these accomplishments, the analysis confronts four structural challenges: the persistent mitigation ambition and implementation gap leaving the world on a catastrophic trajectory, an accountability architecture incapable of compelling state compliance, a climate finance system mired in mistrust and definitional battles, and a geopolitical landscape where energy nationalism and supply chain weaponization undermine cooperative logic. The article advances a reform agenda encompassing domestic legal enforceability, prescriptive evolution of the Global Stocktake, transformative climate finance architecture, and the judicialization of Paris norms through transnational litigation. The central argument contends that the Agreement's defining diplomatic genius, its nationally determined, facilitative design, has simultaneously become its principal structural weakness, and that the critical decade ahead demands institutional creativity that matches the scale of the crisis the Agreement was designed to address.

Keywords: Paris Agreement, Global Climate Governance, Nationally Determined Contributions, Global Stocktake, Climate Finance, Transnational Climate Litigation