D4.1 - What determines climate ambition? Analysing NDC enhancement with a mixed-method design

The study presents four key findings. First, based on prior academic and policy literature, we establish three categories of potential drivers and barriers to NDC enhancement: political institutions, the economy, and structural factors. Second, we identify the key role of democratic institutions through quantitative and qualitative methods. We find that more democratic countries were more likely to enhance their 2030 emission targets in the updated NDCs. The qualitative part of the deliverable supports this by finding that open and transparent stakeholder consultations were beneficial for the enhancement of greenhouse gas emission targets in updated NDCs. Saudi Arabia, however, is a key outlier as it enhanced its 2030 NDC mitigation target within completely closed decision-making institutions. Third, we establish that government and stakeholder concerns about the potential negative impacts of the green transition constitute a key barrier to continued NDC enhancement. The quantitative analysis shows that governments in countries with high economic fast-growing economies tended to keep their pledges the same or even reduced ambition. Qualitative interviews indicated that this may be due to worries about increasing GHG emissions and the effects of the low emission transition on future economic growth. The mixed-method findings suggest that the enhancement of climate pledges is supported by open political processes that manage to take into account concerns about economic development. Finally, we do not find that structural factors, such as fossil fuel production and physical impacts of climate change constitute a significant barrier to NDC enhancement, although they may determine the initial level of climate ambition in the first NDC