Mr William Hopkinson1
1University Of Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
William Hopkinson is a PhD Candidate at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. His substantive research interests include climate change politics, comparative politics, and set-theoretic methods. As a climate advocate, his PhD research focusses on domestic political processes and the enabling and constraining conditions that shape climate ambition and its change over time. His research aims to help scholars, policymakers, and activists better understand how to accelerate more ambitious climate action to meet international climate goals. His work centres on the domestic politics between fossil fuel and green actors over climate policy.
Abstract:
To meet the Paris Agreement’s goals, states must increase their ambition to mitigate climate change and accelerate their efforts as rapidly as possible. Yet, there has been substantial variation in climate ambition through nationally determined contribution (NDC) submissions between COP21 and COP26. Understanding this cross-national variation is important, but the central challenge lies not solely in how states can implement ambitious climate policy but rather how states can accelerate climate ambition as rapidly as possible in this ‘critical decade’. Cross-national climate ambition literature largely neglects this temporal dimension, instead offering a static analytical focus across a single point in time. This article rectifies this oversight through elite interviews and comparative process tracing of Japan and Norway’s NDC formation for COP21 and COP26. While the Norway made modest NDC improvements to its ambitious NDC between COPs, Japan dramatically increased its ambition. Thus, this research questions why Norway and Japan submit NDCs with different climate ambition? This comparison offers further analytical value as it centres a climate leader with persistent, yet somewhat static NDC ambition and a laggard that has significantly improved its NDC ambition. An analysis of the distributive conflicts between carbon-intensive and non-intensive industries over time identified incremental changes in industries’ balance of power in Norway whereas Japan’s institutional configurations briefly amplified non-carbon intensive interests. For environmental scholars, this article offers a temporal comparison of distributive conflicts that enable and constrain greater acceleration of NDC ambition.