Climate Change, Human Rights and State Accountability

Practitioners often describe the international mechanisms that review states’ climate actions as conducive to accountability, in the sense that they can encourage a country to achieve international goals even if they do not result in formal legal findings. For example, the Paris Agreement envisages a periodical “stocktake” process to determine whether collective progress towards net-zero emissions is sufficient. Accountability claims have surged since the 1960s but have also been met by law and political science scholarship with calls for greater clarity, and even skepticism regarding whether the mechanisms described in such terms truly advance their purported aims. In this context, this project analyses the range of international state accountability mechanisms established to catalyze international efforts in response to the climate challenge, widely recognized as the defining issue of our time.