The Paris Agreement’s facilitative approach: a compliance-inducing design?

Given the critical importance of taking effective international action on climate change, the regulatory design and implementation of the Paris Agreement’s compliance framework warrants close scrutiny. This framework encompasses the Agreement’s formal compliance mechanism in Article 15 and its interactions with the Enhanced Transparency Framework for Action and Support, Facilitative Multilateral Consideration of Progress, and Global Stocktake, in Articles 13 and 14. The Paris compliance framework privileges a facilitative, rather than an enforcement-based, approach to non-compliance. This chapter evaluates the regulatory design of the Paris compliance framework, drawing upon insights from two influential schools of thought on promoting compliance with international legal rules: the managerial model and the enforcement model. We suggest that these two approaches are best conceptualized as complementary strategies, which provide valuable evaluative criteria for analysing the design of the Paris compliance framework. We argue that while some elements of the framework facilitate party compliance with procedural obligations, weaknesses within the regulatory design undermine the potential to induce party compliance with the overarching temperature limitation goals and progress toward more ambitious individual contributions.