Collective Progress in the Light of Equity Under the Global Stocktake

The Global Stocktake compels states periodically to focus on the Paris Agreement’s ultimate aims. Without it, each state’s attention would have been fixated on its own Nationally Determined Contribution and little else. The Paris Rulebook clarifies how the stocktaking mechanism is to function—in all but one respect: although the rules keep the emphasis squarely on “collective progress” as the proper object of the stocktake’s assessment, the text is ambiguous on whether its implied opposite—individual state progress—is to be excluded from the assessment. The ambiguity rides mainly on the notion of “equity”—a term as dutifully inserted into key passages of the Rulebook as its explanation is studiously avoided. Whatever the negotiators may have intended in this respect, an objective construction of the Rulebook shows that an assessment of the individual progress of states is permitted to occupy a substantial part of the stocktaking process, except when it comes to formal reporting on the stocktake’s outputs. The non-exclusion of individual assessment from the dialogue that powers the stocktake means that, while the ideology of “national self-determination” may have succeeded in turning out an Article 15 Committee of unprecedented blandness, it has neglected to defend its flanks in the Global Stocktake, making for an unpredictable, yet potentially useful process.