The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change set an international goal of reaching net zero (NZ) greenhouse gas emissions globally by 2050 to limit global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. The global emissions goal and the concept of NZ have become central to climate change debates, and research on the topic has proliferated alongside individual NZ pledges from states, cities, regions, and companies (Green and Reyes Reference Green and Reyes2023; Hale, Smith, et al. Reference Hale, Smith, Black, Cullen, Fay, Lang and Mahmood2022). Yet despite being a central concept in global climate governance, the politics of NZ remain relatively poorly understood.
Numerous scholars and policy experts have referred to NZ—and the largely interchangeable concepts of climate neutrality and carbon neutralityFootnote 1—as an international norm (e.g., Climate Change Committee 2021, 10; Flagg Reference Flagg2015; Green Reference Green2018; Lüpke et al. Reference Lüpke, Aebischer, Breviglieri, Goel, Iskandar and Marquard2022; Parris, Anger-Kraavi, and Peters Reference Parris, Anger-Kraavi and Peters2023; Paterson and Blakey, Reference Paterson, Blakey, Alger and Dauvergneforthcoming; Van Coppenolle, Blondeel, and Van de Graaf Reference Van Coppenolle, Blondeel and Van de Graaf2023).Footnote 2 A norm is usually defined as “a standard of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity” (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998, 891). Van Coppenolle, Blondeel, and Van de Graaf (Reference Van Coppenolle, Blondeel and Van de Graaf2023), for example, conceive of NZ as a norm; they chart how national governments’ adoptions of NZ pledges follow the norm life-cycle model of Finnemore and Sikkink (Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998). They argue that norm entrepreneurs promoted an NZ norm ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in 2015, where it was institutionalized in the Paris Agreement before achieving a worldwide norm cascade by 2020.
This article offers an alternative conceptualization of global NZ. I argue that NZ is better understood as an aspiration—“a lofty goal ‘that exists without being fully realized, and toward which one progresses by means of change’” (Roosevelt Reference Roosevelt2012, 2; as cited in Finnemore and Jurkovich Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020, 760). I show that NZ meets all three of the characteristics of aspiration theorized by Finnemore and Jurkovich (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020): it is a lofty, future-oriented goal requiring sustained effort over time and transformative change through imagination; reaching global NZ is far from assured and requires significantly more robust and ambitious efforts from virtually all societal actors over many decades; and NZ requires transformations on a global scale that must be driven by imaginative thinking to develop new technologies, production processes, and regulatory frameworks.
Accurate conceptualization of NZ has important consequences for thinking about policy making and strategy. If NZ is understood as an international norm, as it is coming to be described in the climate politics literature, then certain expectations follow, including that NZ involves standardized behavior that specific actors ought to implement. If this norm has been institutionalized, as some scholars have argued, then the behavior should be presently enforced with social consequences for nonconformity (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998). Aspiration, however, is a distinct, future-oriented phenomenon that obfuscates necessary behaviors and responsible actors. Aspiration mobilizes support for goals, but it also creates perverse incentives to manipulate metrics, supplant action with discourse, and distract from and justify harmful behaviors (Finnemore and Jurkovich Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020). I will show that an aspiration conceptualization of NZ fruitfully draws attention to pertinent manifestations of these challenges and elucidates potential policy solutions while highlighting pitfalls in approaches that might seem appropriate under alternative conceptual framings. An accurate understanding of these risks may be important given the rampant “greenwashing” seen around the global NZ goal and widespread adoption of low-integrity NZ targets by a range of state and nonstate actors (Coen, Herman, and Pegram Reference Coen, Herman and Pegram2022; Green, Hale, and Arceo Reference Green, Hale and Arceo2025; Hale, Smith, et al. Reference Hale, Smith, Black, Cullen, Fay, Lang and Mahmood2022). I argue that understanding NZ as an aspiration points to the need for more concrete, specific standards of behavior for climate action that may then become institutionalized as international norms.
This analysis offers a more generalizable insight into the political significance of accurate conceptualization. While climate policy practitioners may not explicitly engage with concepts from academic literature to define NZ, conceptual framings like “norm” and “aspiration” may influence expectations set in policy discourse, the strategic behavior of actors, and the assumptions that underpin accountability frameworks. Widespread scholarly labeling of NZ as a norm, including in policy and advocacy contexts, may inadvertently imply that appropriate standards and enforcement mechanisms for achieving the goal are already in place, or it may generate expectations about the effectiveness of potential strategies to promote climate action. The same may be true with regard to aspirational goals in other policy domains, obfuscating the need for urgent action or generating faulty expectations about the most effective approaches to deliver progress. By making the case for greater conceptual clarity, this article helps to explain persistent governance challenges in achieving international goals.
This article also draws on the case of global NZ to identify potential pitfalls in Finnemore and Jurkovich’s (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020) theoretical framework on aspiration. I argue that particular attributes of the global NZ goal could undermine some of their conjectures, which have gone unchallenged in the nascent international politics literature on aspiration. I challenge the expectation that actors will not face social consequences for failure to achieve international aspirational goals provided they make at least some progress. I suggest that this expectation hinges on implicit assumptions of aggregate welfare improvement, but political actors concerned with blame avoidance seek to shirk responsibility for collective problems by imposing blame on other actors when shortcomings on a goal correlate with increased aggregate harm, thereby generating potentially adverse social consequences for the blamed actor.
The remainder of the article is structured as follows. I first discuss the concept of aspiration and describe recent theoretical advancements on aspirational goals and how they are related to and distinct from international norms. I then provide an overview of NZ as both a scientific and policy concept. Next, I assess NZ against theorized criteria for international norms and aspirations, showing how it better meets the definition of the latter. I then discuss the greater analytical value of opting for the aspiration framework and the implications for policy. Although I argue for using this framework, I show how theorized expectations from previous research may not hold in the case of goals structured like global NZ, especially related to the social costs of making only partial progress. Finally, I conclude and discuss avenues for future research.
Aspiration in International Politics
Finnemore and Jurkovich (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020) brought the concept of aspiration firmly into international relations theory, defining it as a lofty goal that is especially difficult to achieve; as having a future-oriented nature, requiring change with significant time and effort; and as having a transformative character that necessitates imaginative thinking about novel possibilities and alternative futures. They theorize aspiration as serving to articulate objectives and affirm identities and values. Activists secure actors’ commitments to aspirational goals by linking goals to identities that those actors share. Aspiration thereby mobilizes support by playing on emotions and triggering desires, and it facilitates loose agreement on an end point, if not necessarily on the means of achievement.
Aspiration, defined as such, is an established feature of international politics that can be observed across many policy domains. Its constituent properties are especially prominent in the fields of global environmental politics and sustainable development. Setting and governing by ambitious global goals is a key feature of contemporary sustainable development and climate change regimes (Biermann, Kanie, and Kim Reference Biermann, Kanie and Kim2017; Fukuda-Parr Reference Fukuda-Parr2014; Kanie et al. Reference Kanie, Griggs, Young, Waddell, Shrivastava, Haas, Broadgate, Gaffney and Kőrösi2019; Long, Censoro, and Rietig Reference Long, Censoro and Rietig2023; Morseletto, Biermann, and Pattberg Reference Morseletto, Biermann and Pattberg2017; Vijge et al. Reference Vijge, Biermann, Kim, Bogers, Van Driel, Montesano, Yunita, Kanie, Biermann and Kim2020; Young Reference Young2018). Environmental policy, especially climate policy, is often concerned with the future and characterized by long-term planning challenges (Buylova et al. Reference Buylova, Nasiritousi, Duit, Reischl and Lejon2024; Finnegan Reference Finnegan2022; Gifford et al. Reference Gifford, Liverman, Gupta and Jacobson2023; Hale Reference Hale2024; Sprinz Reference Sprinz2009). Sustainability governance particularly emphasizes the importance of transformations from unsustainable to more sustainable pathways of development, characterized by economic, environmental, and social policy integration (Clark and Harley Reference Clark and Harley2020; Scoones Reference Scoones2016). The political significance of imagination for constructing desirable futures is also an important element of much environmental politics research and the concept of transformation (Cork et al. Reference Cork, Alexandra, Alvarez-Romero, Bennett, Berbés-Blázquez, Bohensky and Bok2023; Knappe and Schmidt Reference Knappe and Schmidt2021; Milkoreit Reference Milkoreit2017).
Finnemore and Jurkovich (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020) differentiate aspirations and norms, from which follows important theoretical and policy implications. Aspiration is defined by a future orientation, but norms necessarily apply presently: “Should the relevant context arise today, we should expect the norm to apply in full force. … Violating a norm means that actors are behaving badly right now and that behavior needs to change right now” (Finnemore and Jurkovich Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020, 764). Norms, in the conventional sense, should also be specific and apply to actors with a given identity, and eventually society must collectively share that norm with sufficient specificity to identify violators (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998; Jurkovich Reference Jurkovich2020). Aspiration, however, obfuscates individual responsibility by specifying a desired end state without clarifying who must do what to achieve it (Finnemore and Jurkovich Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020). International goal-setting initiatives often intentionally exclude clear lines of responsibility from their frameworks for achieving outcomes (Clegg Reference Clegg2015).
By obfuscating the identity of responsible actors and setting lofty goals without prescribing behaviors to achieve them, aspiration creates certain potentially negative effects. Finnemore and Jurkovich (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020) lay out several conjectures: (1) aspiration limits individual accountability, resulting in actors not facing social costs and instead being rewarded as long as they make at least partial progress toward an aspirational goal; (2) audiences may experience aspiration fatigue if goals frequently go unmet, incentivizing aspirants to assign deadlines and manipulate metrics to make goals appear fulfilled; (3) aspirational discourse substitutes for urgently needed action by displacing outcomes and incentives to the future; and (4) goal commitments help insincere actors distract from or justify harmful behaviors. Conventional norm theory holds that norms carry different risks and benefits: the specificity of behavior and actor for an institutionalized norm enables identification and social sanctioning of violators in a way that is ineffective for other social phenomena (Jurkovich Reference Jurkovich2020). It is therefore important, from an enforcement or compliance perspective, to get the conceptualization right when analyzing global goals such as NZ.
Net Zero in Science and Policy
NZ is a scientifically informed target as well as “a frame of reference through which global action against climate change can be (and is increasingly) structured and understood” (Fankhauser et al. Reference Fankhauser, Smith, Allen, Axelsson, Hale, Hepburn and Michael Kendall2022, 15). The scientific concept was established within the past two decades amid a growing body of research concluding that temperatures stabilize at zero emissions. The fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2014) established the idea of a carbon budget based on near-zero emissions by the end of the century to limit global warming to 2°C above preindustrial levels. This scientific advancement laid the groundwork for determining the need for NZ targets in policy. Together, the science consolidated in IPCC reports, policy-relevant insights from United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) reports, and the 2013–15 Review of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) facilitated the translation of NZ from science to policy (Geden Reference Geden2016; Rogelj Reference Rogelj2023).
Activists promoted NZ ahead of COP21 in Paris, where it was formally set as an international goal in the Paris Agreement (Jepsen et al. Reference Jepsen, Lundgren, Monheim and Walker2021). Article 2 of the Paris Agreement commits parties to limiting warming to “well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C” (UNFCCC 2015, Art. 2.1.a). Parties “aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century” (UNFCCC 2015, Art. 4.1). Read together in light of the best available science from the IPCC, these articles establish the goal of achieving global NZ by 2050 (Allen et al. Reference Allen, Friedlingstein, Cécile, Jenkins, Malhi, Mitchell-Larson, Peters and Rajamani2022).
The Paris Agreement thus set several interconnected but distinct mitigation goals that are formally binding under international law: two temperature goals and an emissions goal (Geden Reference Geden2016). The relationship between 1.5°C and NZ was affirmed in a landmark IPCC report in 2018, which set out that achieving global NZ by 2050 was the emissions trajectory consistent with this upper limit of warming, beyond which the planet will cross a threshold into significantly more extreme climate conditions. This influential report contributed to a discursive shift in which global NZ by 2050 became a clearer and more prominent goal. Given that “net zero” and the 2050 date are not terms used explicitly in the Paris Agreement and require a close reading of Articles 2 and 4 (see above), the IPCC (2018) report may have consolidated frames of the NZ goal that make it more conducive to mobilizing support and allow it to largely eclipse the temperature goals in public debates. The 1.5°C goal arguably has more parameters than the global NZ goal. It is contingent on declining non-CO2 radiative forcing (i.e., warming caused by other types of emissions), on emissions peaking by 2030, and ultimately on sustaining NZ across multidecadal timescales (Fankhauser et al. Reference Fankhauser, Smith, Allen, Axelsson, Hale, Hepburn and Michael Kendall2022; IPCC 2018). NZ is more squarely focused on greenhouse gas emissions, although many actors misinterpret NZ to mean cancelling out emissions to precisely zero at a given point in time, problematically reframing the goal as a mere accounting target for a particular year (Allen et al. Reference Allen, Friedlingstein, Cécile, Jenkins, Malhi, Mitchell-Larson, Peters and Rajamani2022).
The 1.5°C goal has been described as an aspirational goal by numerous scholars (e.g., Falkner Reference Falkner2016; Finnemore and Jurkovich Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020). NZ, however, has come to the fore of public attention in part because it is more conceptually amenable to individualization, if not necessarily easier to achieve on a global scale. Any single entity could in principle balance emissions within its jurisdiction. National targets therefore “can be seen as countries’ attempts to translate the global emissions reduction aim of Article 4 of the Paris Agreement to the national level” (Rogelj Reference Rogelj2023, 1). Academic research regularly analyzes NZ at national, regional, local, and firm level (Green and Reyes Reference Green and Reyes2023). Temperatures, however, can only be evaluated globally, and there are no established formulae for distributing mitigation obligations aligned with temperature goals (Geden Reference Geden2019). Moreover, current IPCC methods for measuring global temperature would delay identification of an overshoot by a decade, whereas NZ is more readily and immediately measurable (Betts et al. Reference Betts, Belcher, Hermanson, Tank, Lowe, Jones, Morice, Rayner, Scaife and Stott2023).
Conceptualizing Net Zero
It might seem obvious that NZ meets the criteria of an aspiration as a future-oriented goal that is difficult to achieve and requires transformation through imagination. That has not stopped a significant body of research from referring to it as a norm. My aim is not to argue that there are necessarily no (or could never be) “NZ norms.” Rather, I argue that global NZ is, first and foremost, a goal, the achievement of which presently lacks internationally agreed-upon standards of behavior or well-defined actor responsibilities, and I argue that from that observation follow important implications for how we think about global climate policy.
Adhering to conventional conceptual boundaries of norms (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998; Jurkovich Reference Jurkovich2020), NZ does not fit the criteria. Some scholars argue that the Paris Agreement institutionalized an NZ norm, which then cascaded through the international system (Green Reference Green2018, suppl. material; Van Coppenolle, Blondeel, and Van de Graaf Reference Van Coppenolle, Blondeel and Van de Graaf2023). Yet the Paris Agreement does not explain what either of its goals mean for specific actors, nor does it delineate required behaviors for reaching NZ (Allen et al. Reference Allen, Friedlingstein, Cécile, Jenkins, Malhi, Mitchell-Larson, Peters and Rajamani2022; Rogelj Reference Rogelj2023). It did not stipulate the need to adopt national or corporate targets and pledges, nor did it instruct specific actors to reach NZ within their jurisdictions, either simultaneously or by specific deadlines (Averchenkova and Chan Reference Averchenkova and Chan2023). The treaty muddled the identification of responsible actors by designating an explicit role for the private sector without clarifying how to divide responsibilities for overlapping emissions (Hale Reference Hale2016). Nonprescriptive wording provided “constructive ambiguity” to facilitate agreement on the end goal (Geden Reference Geden2016, 791), which is indeed one of aspiration’s fundamental political functions (Finnemore and Jurkovich Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020). Norm institutionalization is also generally marked by specification of procedures for coordinating social sanctioning of nonconformity (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998). The Paris Agreement lacks any such procedures, and negotiators intentionally forewent including formal procedures for interstate shaming in the text, agreeing only to a nonadversarial, nonpunitive compliance mechanism (UNFCCC 2015, Art. 15.2). Although undergirded by a logic of naming and shaming, the Paris Agreement leaves this task to civil society (Falkner Reference Falkner2016), whereas norm compliance is also enforced among peers (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998).
Norms are ultimately marked by their intersubjectively agreed-upon quality of moral oughtness (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998; Jurkovich Reference Jurkovich2020). They need not have been fully institutionalized, but there also remains no international consensus on how the global emissions budget ought to be distributed, complicating the consolidation of international NZ norms (Hale, Wetzer, et al. Reference Hale, Wetzer, Abebe, Allen, Amel-Zadeh, Armour and Axelsson2024). Diffusion of individual NZ targets has still not led to broad agreement on what the global goal means for a given actor, and initiatives to develop clearer standards have focused more on target setting than on governance pathways, leaving governments and businesses persistently unsure of what they are supposed to do (Allen et al. Reference Allen, Friedlingstein, Cécile, Jenkins, Malhi, Mitchell-Larson, Peters and Rajamani2022; Averchenkova and Chan Reference Averchenkova and Chan2023; Geden Reference Geden2016; Hale, Wetzer, et al. Reference Hale, Wetzer, Abebe, Allen, Amel-Zadeh, Armour and Axelsson2024; Rogelj Reference Rogelj2023). Indeed, it is not obvious that all or even most national or firm-level targets are conceived in alignment with the global NZ goal at all. Despite efforts from the UN and the International Organization for Standardization, there remain no widely used frameworks for holding nonstate actors accountable for the integrity of NZ targets or deviations from NZ-aligned behavior, and regulatory and accountability mechanisms remain extremely limited (Merner et al. Reference Merner, Benjamin, Ercole, Keuschnigg, Kunik, Toral and Peterson2024; Rogelj Reference Rogelj2023).
NZ does, however, meet the criteria of an aspiration (Finnemore and Jurkovich Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020). First, global NZ is lofty. It is technologically, politically, and socially difficult to achieve. By 2050, almost half of emissions reductions will have to come from fledgling technologies still largely or recently in prototype phases of development (International Energy Agency 2021). The feasibility, sustainability, and scalability of technologies included in most pathway models and long-term strategies for NZ by 2050 are highly questionable (Buylova et al. Reference Buylova, Nasiritousi, Duit, Reischl and Lejon2024; Kaya, Yamaguchi, and Geden Reference Geden2019; Pye et al. Reference Pye, Broad, Bataille, Brockway, Daly, Freeman and Gambhir2021). Jacobs, Gupta, and Möller (Reference Jacobs, Gupta and Möller2023) refer to intentions of using negative-emission technologies in long-term climate strategies as “governing by aspiration.” Even governments’ current plans for relying on these technologies may anyway be insufficient to achieve the Paris goals (Lamb et al. Reference Lamb, Gasser, Roman-Cuesta, Grassi, Gidden, Powis and Geden2024).
Political gridlock and corporate structural power also create significant barriers to governing toward NZ. States adopted the pledge-and-review Paris regime after other governance models failed to engender adequate climate action (Falkner Reference Falkner2016; Hale Reference Hale2020). The voluntary nature of this model and the ambiguity of the goals convinced or enabled the United States and other powerful states to join the Paris Agreement, giving it sufficient political support to be adopted (Milkoreit Reference Milkoreit2019). This approach, although it facilitated agreement on goals, has so far failed to catalyze sufficient ambition to reach them. Nationally determined contributions, which parties to the agreement must submit every fifth year outlining efforts toward the goals, remain poised to miss the midcentury deadline for global NZ. The first global stock take—a quinquennial exercise to promote increased ambitions under the Paris Agreement—concluded in 2023 that nationally determined contributions require more ambitious mitigation targets to be consistent with reaching NZ by 2050 (UNFCCC 2023).
Achieving NZ requires hard-won support from the public and different stakeholders, given the significant justice and equity implications of energy transitions. Governments that adopt NZ targets without popular acceptance may fail to meet their commitments when leadership changes (Joo, Paavola, and Van Alstine Reference Joo, Paavola and Van Alstine2023). Right-wing populists have successfully leveraged sentiments of injustice to foster forceful anti-NZ movements that impede progress toward the goal (Paterson, Wilshire, and Tobin Reference Paterson, Wilshire and Tobin2024), and human rights–based legal challenges to NZ initiatives increasingly stand to impede energy transitions (Savaresi et al. Reference Savaresi, Setzer, Bookman, Bouwer, Chan, Keuschnigg and Armeni2024; Savaresi and Setzer Reference Savaresi and Setzer2022). Even governments with sincere NZ commitments and some degree of popular support may find that fossil fuel dependency constrains domestic policy making, resulting in nonalignment with international climate goals (Baker Reference Baker2023). Business recalcitrance further emphasizes the structural barriers to achieving NZ, as large emitters persistently lack robust NZ strategies and do not plan to shift away from fossil fuel production (Berger-Schmitz et al. Reference Berger-Schmitz, George, Hindal, Perkins and Travaille2023).
Second, NZ is clearly a future-oriented goal that requires significant time and effort to achieve. Negotiators of the Paris Agreement made the goal future-oriented by setting a deadline 35 years into the future. To meet the linked temperature goal, near-zero emissions must then be sustained over many decades (Allen et al. Reference Allen, Friedlingstein, Cécile, Jenkins, Malhi, Mitchell-Larson, Peters and Rajamani2022; Fankhauser et al. Reference Fankhauser, Smith, Allen, Axelsson, Hale, Hepburn and Michael Kendall2022). Moreover, NZ is potentially consistent with the 1.5°C target if it is followed by an extended period of net negative emissions; thus, “presenting ‘net zero’ as a scientifically self-evident target misrepresents as destination what can only be a milestone in a much longer journey” (Reisinger et al. Reference Reisinger, Cowie, Geden and Al Khourdajie2024, 2).
Achieving NZ will require global renewable energy transitions, and historical energy transitions took decades or sometimes centuries (Fouquet and Pearson Reference Fouquet and Peter2012). Although faster transitions are possible, they require enormous effort, contingent on numerous circumstances (Sovacool Reference Sovacool2016). To date, renewable energy projects have mostly added to the energy supply without supplanting fossil fuels, and it is arguably unprecedented in human history to transition away entirely from energy sources (York and Bell Reference York and Bell2019). The International Renewable Energy Agency (2023) nonetheless maintains that a global energy transition by 2050 remains possible, but only if governments take dramatic action.
The future orientation of the goal has not diminished; nearly all actors remain a considerable distance from achieving entity-level NZ. As of August 10, 2024, 143 states had NZ targets in laws, policies, pledges, or proposals, of which 13 targets were set for 2030–45, 121 for 2050, and 13 for 2053–70. Over a thousand companies had adopted NZ targets, with the majority having a deadline of 2050 or slightly sooner. Several hundred cities and regions had similar targets. Only four states had self-declared that they had already achieved NZ, and only two regions and five companies had externally verified declarations of achievement (Net Zero Tracker 2024). Most NZ pledges therefore remain a considerable temporal distance from their deadlines, focusing attention on the future.
Third, achieving global NZ would require societal transformations that can only be realized through imaginative thinking. The IPCC (2022, 29) identifies a need for “transformational changes in production processes” and other “system transformations” to limit global warming and achieve NZ. Similarly, the UNEP (2022) calls for a system-wide transformation that fundamentally reconfigures industry, electricity, building, transportation, food systems, and finance to achieve NZ by 2050. These transformations will require radical and imaginative economic thinking and new governance approaches that align climate action with other areas of sustainable development (Pye et al. Reference Pye, Broad, Bataille, Brockway, Daly, Freeman and Gambhir2021). Imagination enables representations of possible futures to inform public debate and decision making on environmental sustainability and engender global transformations (Moore and Milkoreit Reference Moore and Milkoreit2020). Put simply, imagination is needed to develop new ways of producing, consuming, and living on a more sustainable planet and new technologies for reaching and sustaining balanced emissions.
Implications for Theory and Policy Making
The global NZ goal illustrates the analytical utility of the aspiration framework and the limitations of conceptualizing NZ as an international norm. Different theoretical expectations and hypotheses follow for different social phenomena, and conceptual clarity is inherently beneficial for enhancing the rigor and quality of academic research. Accurate conceptualization should also better enable one to identify effective policy interventions for achieving global NZ and to assess the risks and opportunities of this goal. The aspiration framework leads to very different conclusions about the potential effectiveness of various advocacy strategies for getting governments and companies to take more robust climate action for achieving the goal. In this section, I argue that the conceptualization advanced above points to the urgent need to focus more seriously on elaborating, codifying, and enforcing specific rules for NZ-aligned behavior, driven by the overarching goal. I also show how the aspiration framework draws attention to the risks of “greenwashing” in NZ governance that norm theory might otherwise overlook, illustrating the analytical significance of appropriate conceptualization. By providing conceptual clarity, academic research becomes better situated to offer effective insights into solutions for achieving international goals and tackling challenges like greenwashing.
From Goal Setting to Rulemaking
One could argue that scholars like Flagg (Reference Flagg2015) and Van Coppenolle, Blondeel, and Van de Graaf (Reference Van Coppenolle, Blondeel and Van de Graaf2023) are concerned empirically with national NZ pledges rather than global goals per se. Pledging is a behavior that could in principle be standardized, deemed obligatory for specified actors, institutionalized in international rules, and enforced through social pressure. The Science Based Targets initiative is essentially a multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at doing exactly those things for corporate NZ commitments (Romito, Vurro, and Pogutz Reference Romito, Vurro and Pogutz2024). NZ pledging certainly shows key qualities of a norm: aside from a similar diffusion pattern for pledges, scholars find that early adopters set more robust targets than late adopters, indicating norm-like socialization effects later in diffusion (Green, Hale, and Arceo Reference Green, Hale and Arceo2025). My aim is not to further parse the technicalities of this empirical distinction, but instead to argue for the value of a more apposite conceptualization of NZ in which pledging is understood not primarily as norm adoption but as a fundamental political effect of mobilizing support: it is the initial response of actors that become motivated to take action following the articulation of identity-laden aspirational goals.
Scholars of goal-based global governance consistently advocate differentiating between commitments to goals and actions toward their achievement. Goals can have different types of discrete effects, including discursive, normative, and institutional effects. Discursive effects involve aligning national debates and international goals by making commitments, while normative effects involve law and policy change (Biermann et al. Reference Biermann, Hickmann, Sénit, Beisheim, Bernstein, Chasek and Grob2022). Climate policy makers arguably see talk, decisions, and actions as “independent organizational products, and do not see decisions as necessarily requiring appropriate action” (Geden Reference Geden2016, 792). This inconsistency suggests that NZ commitments might indicate mobilized support but do not translate automatically into actual behavior change. Research on NZ affirms that pledges are political commitments distinct from policies or processes for reducing emissions (Averchenkova and Chan Reference Averchenkova and Chan2023; Rogelj Reference Rogelj2023). Commitments are evidence of mobilizing support, which is a fundamental feature of aspiration and goal setting in global governance (Fukuda-Parr Reference Fukuda-Parr2014; Gifford et al. Reference Gifford, Liverman, Gupta and Jacobson2023). There is empirical evidence that international mobilization efforts influence actors’ decisions to make commitments that align with international goals; for example, both state and company NZ targets strongly track UN mobilization efforts (Green, Hale, and Arceo Reference Green, Hale and Arceo2025).
Yet merely committing and setting a target does not amount to implementation, which is crucial for averting the worst consequences of climate change (Pye et al. Reference Pye, Broad, Bataille, Brockway, Daly, Freeman and Gambhir2021). Moreover, the potential misalignment between individual targets and the global NZ goal illustrates the significance of rulemaking as a complement to goal setting. Because the norm label indicates that standards of appropriate behavior already exist and are being automatically socially enforced, its usage risks diminishing the urgency of demanding bolder action or exerting pressure for accountability: enforcement will be automatic, and there is little that activists should need to do to induce compliance with standards for appropriate behavior. The point here is not to suggest that aspirations can or must “become” norms to be effective or enforceable. If an aspirational goal is set and actors make commitments to it without any corresponding adoption of norms that would enable the achievement of that goal, aspiration could still induce the construction and diffusion of a norm. That is why aspiration is (or can be) an integral part of norm construction and the norm life cycle, and vice versa (see, e.g., Tornius Reference Tornius2023), which is not to say that it is something that inherently develops into a norm.
One could also argue that even if the mere act of pledging to achieve NZ emissions amounts to a norm, the usual enforcement mechanisms and compliance incentives are unlikely to be particularly effective or robust. It is difficult to see the utility in expending resources and political capital on shaming an actor’s failure to set a target when other actors that have set one still do not make sufficient progress toward it. This conjecture is even more plausible if the aspirational quality of a goal means audiences do not expect it to be realized and doubt the sincerity of actors’ commitments in the first place. Understanding pledging as indicative of the mobilization effects of aspiration focuses attention on the need to more seriously promote implementation and consolidate standardized behaviors aligned with the goal. Actors may be mobilized into making commitments and potentially taking action, but it does not automatically follow that there is clarity on which actions are needed and how compliance can be enforced. Young (Reference Young, Kanie and Biermann2017) conceptualizes goal setting and rulemaking as entirely distinct governance modalities with little mechanistic overlap: rulemaking steers behavior by articulating requirements and regulations and devising compliance mechanisms; goal setting steers behavior by establishing priorities for resource allocation, long-term planning, and generating enthusiasm and sustained effort. Combinations of these modalities may enhance their effectiveness, as incentives and pressures to adhere to goal commitments may be insufficient to steer behavior absent appropriate regulatory frameworks (Young Reference Young, Kanie and Biermann2017; Reference Young2018).
The aspirational quality of the global NZ goal could thus be useful for constructing climate action norms that are more enforceable. Ideational change around the behaviors needed to achieve specific goals can facilitate norm emergence (Hirsch Reference Hirsch2014; Rosert Reference Rosert2019). Additionally, values, which aspiration serves to affirm, are one component of norms, along with the specified behaviors needed to address a particular problem (Winston Reference Winston2018). Finnemore and Jurkovich (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020) acknowledge that aspirations may shape future norms, and scholars find that aspiration enables the construction and brokerage of ideas that evolve into new norms (Tornius Reference Tornius2023). International goal setting and widespread mobilization suggest that there are significant prospects for leveraging the NZ aspiration in norm construction, but this has to date not occurred to an adequate extent. Conceptualizing NZ as an aspiration highlights significant support for the goal, as evidenced by individual pledges, but it also draws attention to the reality that much effort has been expended on promoting uptake of entity-level NZ targets, seemingly without an equivalent focus on promoting the uptake of behaviors needed to achieve those targets. Norms on which behaviors are needed from—and which should be unacceptable to—companies and governments, as well as “strict and robust” frameworks for monitoring compliance with NZ objectives, remain lacking (Rogelj Reference Rogelj2023).
Indeed, there is a growing consensus that global climate policy must shift from a strong focus on promoting the voluntary adoption of NZ targets to a focus on rulemaking. Scholars argue that the growth of NZ commitments from various actors highlights the need for actionable policy guidelines to bridge commitments to the desired end goal (Kaya, Yamaguchi, and Geden Reference Kaya, Yamaguchi and Geden2019). Others have noted that although authoritative bodies have produced some NZ guidelines, especially for corporations and financial institutions, they are not widely used and contain significant gaps in coverage and accountability frameworks (Rogelj Reference Rogelj2023). Achieving NZ may require rapidly consolidating more robust and ambitious norms on setting corporate standards that can evolve into legally binding regulation (Hale, Wetzer, et al. Reference Hale, Wetzer, Abebe, Allen, Amel-Zadeh, Armour and Axelsson2024).
Green (Reference Green2018) argues that anti–fossil fuel norms (AFFNs) such as fossil fuel divestment, fracking bans, and coal mine moratoria are a promising approach to tackling climate change. AFFNs are straightforward imperatives that effectively engage the public imagination, whereas understanding emissions and temperature goals like NZ requires “cognitively demanding forms of ethical reasoning” (Green Reference Green2018, 108). Sikkink (Reference Sikkink2024) suggests that AFFNs are the most promising climate change–related norm candidates precisely because they are easily understood and designate specific actors—fossil fuel companies—to target. The NZ aspiration still usefully emphasizes the scale of required action and sustains consensus, but orienting advocacy toward rulemaking initiatives, such as the development of AFFNs, could be more effective for climate mitigation than a continued fixation on target setting.
Constructing and institutionalizing AFFNs or similar NZ-aligned behavioral standards should enhance accountability by engendering greater social enforcement. In the interim, if shaming insufficient progress toward an aspirational goal can be expected to have little effect, then an accurate conceptualization of NZ helps to inform the optimization of strategic resource usage for actors seeking to induce behavior change. Environmental NGOs already compete for scarce resources by diversifying their activities away from conventional shaming and toward law enforcement, including by invoking Paris goals in litigation (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Sharman Reference Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Sharman2022). An understanding of the dynamics of aspiration could generate better analysis of how activists should allocate resources to develop maximally effective strategies.
The Downsides of Aspiration and the Risks of “Zero Washing”
The imperative to focus on specific actions for achieving global NZ does not mean aspiration has no utility. There are significant benefits to phenomena that mobilize political support and encourage actors to make commitments. But aspiration can have negative effects. The three risks theorized by Finnemore and Jurkovich (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020) are that aspiration can incentivize actors to manipulate metrics, supplant action with discourse, and distract from and justify harmful behaviors. The global NZ goal provides a stark illustration of the gravity of real-world manifestations of these downsides and allows for an analysis of how policy interventions might help to mitigate them.
Theorized aspiration risks closely relate to the challenge of greenwashing, in which actors misrepresent their sustainability credentials to reap reputational benefits without making sufficient efforts to improve performance. The term “greenwashing”—sometimes called “climate washing” or “zero washing” in the context of NZ commitments (Merner et al. Reference Merner, Benjamin, Ercole, Keuschnigg, Kunik, Toral and Peterson2024)—is commonly used in relation to businesses, especially for environmental issues. Governments also make insincere commitments, not only to appease domestic constituencies but also to enhance their international reputations (Simmons Reference Simmons2009). Treating the making of commitments to international aspirational goals as a standardized behavior that has fully cascaded and been institutionalized risks entrenching inadequate climate action and legitimating greenwashing. Because norms are standards that already exist and are automatically enforced by peers, inappropriate application of the term to aspirational commitments might discursively diminish the urgency of demanding bolder action on climate change. Observable manifestations of greenwashing and insincere goal commitments abound. Global climate governance has long dealt more with intentions than results, with climate science having primarily informed goal setting, not action (Geden Reference Geden2016). The UN secretary-general recently stated that businesses need to be held accountable for delivering on climate-related commitments and called for regulatory interventions to ensure “all efforts are made to eliminate rampant green-washing and Goals-washing.” (UN Secretary-General 2023, para. 55). A proliferation of NZ pledges that lack credibility has also driven an expanding body of litigation challenging alleged “zero washing” (Merner et al. Reference Merner, Benjamin, Ercole, Keuschnigg, Kunik, Toral and Peterson2024).
Offsets are one of the key ways in which actors might manipulate reporting metrics to make emissions reductions appear to be progressing toward the NZ goal. Many existing NZ commitments rely on dubious offsets and unproven technologies, often having no effect other than to enhance the aspirant’s reputation (Geden Reference Geden2019; Hale, Smith, et al. Reference Hale, Smith, Black, Cullen, Fay, Lang and Mahmood2022). Some of the worst emitters use offsets from historically implemented emissions-avoidance projects that do not presently remove atmospheric carbon (Trencher, Blondeel, and Asuka Reference Trencher, Blondeel and Asuka2023). By calculating emissions reductions using unreliable offsets, emitters are essentially manipulating their metrics to show progress toward the NZ goal. Even those individual NZ pledges that may seem robust and are accompanied by relatively strong efforts to reduce emissions are not necessarily meaningful commitments to the overarching global NZ goal. It is not automatically the case that an actor’s 2050 NZ target is aligned with a scientifically informed conception of global NZ, particularly where the entity uses offsets that may be unreliable or disputed or are accompanied by ongoing fossil fuel activities. More sincere or robust individual commitments to aspirational goals are thus not inherently immune from the manipulation of metrics, at least where global goals and actor-specific pledges may be in tension.
NZ commitments also suggest primarily discursive effects that relegate the need for action to an unspecified future. Companies that commit to lofty principles can sometimes reap reputational gains without improving their sustainability practices (Berliner and Prakash Reference Berliner and Prakash2015), and recent corporate climate commitments are largely unmatched by action (Coen, Herman, and Pegram Reference Coen, Herman and Pegram2022). Governments’ incorporation of unproven negative emissions technologies in long-term low-emissions development strategies might be purely aspirational, limiting these policies’ effectiveness by substituting talk for action and thereby enabling delays (Jacobs, Gupta, and Möller Reference Jacobs, Gupta and Möller2023). This approach shows how aspiration serves to obfuscate responsibility and enforcement in the present.
Furthermore, NZ commitments are certainly capable of distracting from or justifying harmful behaviors by the actors that make them. Large fossil fuel companies link discourses of emissions reductions and promotion of their NZ targets with justifications for the ongoing production of natural gas as a “clean” fossil fuel (Si et al. Reference Si, Desai, Bozhilova, Puffer and Stephens2023). Major oil companies have mostly committed to achieving NZ, but their strategies fail to encompass a business model transformation away from fossil fuels (Trencher, Blondeel, and Asuka Reference Trencher, Blondeel and Asuka2023). The cascade of NZ pledges has not translated into a cascade away from persistent behaviors that exacerbate looming climate catastrophe.
These insights further strengthen the case for the consolidation of clearer rules that enhance prospects of goal achievement. The absence of precise rules and regulations in governance situations where actors are incentivized to commit to environmental goals is a crucial driver of greenwashing (Delmas and Burbano Reference Delmas and Burbano2011). The adverse effects of aspiration thus further emphasize the urgency of consolidating more specific standards for NZ-aligned behavior. Yet institutionalizing specific behaviors in international rules and international law does not ensure those behaviors become widely agreed-upon norms that are readily enforced. International rules are not invariably backed by social norms that lead to compliance, and even binding treaty ratifications can be insincere (Jurkovich Reference Jurkovich2020). It is therefore important that activists link AFFNs and other robust climate norms to common general problems to which policy makers and the public better relate, which can make climate-related norms easier to understand and help to encourage their adoption and implementation (Blondeel, Colgan, and Van de Graaf Reference Blondeel, Colgan and Van de Graaf2019).
Blames Games and Aggregate Welfare
I have argued that NZ is best conceptualized as an aspiration primarily according to the Finnemore and Jurkovich (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020) framework, but this analysis challenges certain theorized conjectures they put forward and invites a potential refinement of that framework. In this section, I will suggest that although the concept of aspiration describes the global NZ goal, NZ also forces a reassessment of Finnemore and Jurkovich’s expectation that only making no progress toward or backsliding against an aspirational goal will generate social costs for actors committed to that goal, while partial progress will result in praise. This expectation generally requires the implicit assumption of aggregate welfare improvement, but partial progress toward an aspirational goal might also correlate with increased aggregate harm. Although that does not preclude receiving some praise, actors may seek to avoid blame for the increased harm by shirking responsibility onto other actors with accusations of not doing their fair share to achieve the collective goal, generating potential costs for blame targets.
Finnemore and Jurkovich (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020) illustrate their expectation by suggesting that governments will receive praise for reducing hunger by 2030 even if they fail to eradicate it in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The expectation seems reasonable: although persistent hunger may be unacceptable, one would not expect excoriation for lifting millions of people out of starvation. The authors further cite the example of the 1.5°C goal in the Paris Agreement, arguing that “audiences will not expect or require complete fulfillment. We should expect effort and progress to be rewarded by domestic and international audiences. Fulfilling the goal itself will not be required to reap benefits” (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020, 768). This expectation seems less plausible. It is apparently predicated on an implicit assumption that audiences perceive partial progress toward aspirational goals as corresponding with improved welfare. The expectation ignores the potential for blame attribution and resulting social costs when partial progress correlates with increased aggregate suffering, even if the limited progress made may result in some instances of praise. I posit that when an aspirational goal may be partially achieved in tandem with a deterioration in welfare, especially when the goal is conceptually conducive to individualization, the prospect of cost-inducing blame games increases.
Political actors may be even more motivated by the desire to avoid blame for unpopular actions than the desire to garner praise, and they act strategically to do so, including by scapegoating and “passing the buck” (Weaver Reference Weaver1986). One can thus infer that blame generates at least some potential social costs when responsibility attribution sticks to the blame recipient and actors anticipate that they risk facing these costs. Blame is therefore a strategic, future-oriented behavior that facilitates dispelling future indictment of the issuer for complicity (Balzacq and Rousseau Reference Balzacq and Rousseau2020). It is highly political. Elites exploit information asymmetries to assign blame where attribution for wrongdoing is uncertain (Schulzke Reference Schulzke2018). Much of the blame literature focuses on attributing responsibility across governance levels (Heinkelmann-Wild et al. Reference Heinkelmann-Wild, Zangl, Rittberger and Kriegmair2023; Zangl et al. Reference Zangl, Heinkelmann-Wild, Glovania and Klein-Bölting2024). But interstate blame games are also important (Verbeek Reference Verbeek2024), and they often concern progress toward aspirational goals (Clegg Reference Clegg2015).
Yet the factual basis of interstate blame attribution is frequently contested and may not correspond to “objective” reality (Verbeek Reference Verbeek2024). The social construction of blame attribution is significant because it shapes audience beliefs, which are subsequently difficult to alter with new information (Schulzke Reference Schulzke2018). The costs of blame can therefore be high, as can the benefits of blame avoidance. Indeed, activists leverage blame as a tool for motivating and mobilizing its effects on those who are being blamed and on audiences who might identify with victims of the negative behavior. Blame thereby galvanizes support for collective efforts toward shared goals. Responsibility for climate change especially gets assigned, assumed, and dodged in social interactions, being both a social construct and a “terrain of contestation” (Goodhart Reference Goodhart2023).
Aspirational goals on mitigating inherently worse outcomes resulting from cumulative effects, such as climate change, may be particularly conducive to blame. The dearth of sufficiently ambitious climate policy innovations often results from decision makers’ desire to avoid blame for policy failures, and governments that adopt policies tend to be motivated by the threat of blame for inaction (Howlett Reference Howlett2014). Collective national climate goals that do not delineate local-level responsibilities can create governance frameworks that are highly amenable to blame games (Bache et al. Reference Bache, Bartle, Flinders and Marsden2015). Interstate climate blame games could follow a similar logic. Moreover, although partial progress, such as reducing but not eradicating poverty, leaves more people better off, fully achieving NZ still leaves people far worse off than when the goal was set. As Williams (Reference Williams2020, 274) states, “even if global average temperature rise is limited to 1.5°C, while avoiding some of the most devastating impacts of anthropogenic climate change, the additional 0.5°C of warming (compared with current warming) will result in greater unavoided and unavoidable losses and damages than have been observed thus far.” There is tragically no climate scenario in which aggregate harm does not increase, and the public may seek to apportion blame in response to this detriment. Goal fulfillment might then serve the political function of diffusing blame by creating a perception that any suffering was still the best possible outcome, or that a tipping point was successfully dodged. Missing the goal may not provide such cover.
The structure of the global NZ goal further emphasizes the need to (re)consider the potential blame-induced social costs of partial international climate goal fulfillment, especially when aggregate welfare deteriorates. Finite problems generally appear to be solved more easily than continuous problems, rendering assessment of goal attainment inherently more difficult for climate change goals (Young Reference Young, Kanie and Biermann2017). Where a goal is conducive to setting individual targets, blame attributions can also be more readily individualized, exacerbating prospects of scapegoating (Hood Reference Hood2011). The 1.5°C goal is less conducive to individualization than global NZ: as discussed above, temperature goals cannot provide the same principle as emissions goals for assessing individual entities’ contributions to climate change. Furthermore, increasingly sophisticated attribution science is improving the ability to assess specific actors’ contributions to climate change, reducing ambiguity in assigning responsibility for disasters (Otto Reference Otto2023). Although it would not be factually valid to assign full blame for failing to achieve global NZ to any individual actor, scientific advancements in allocating partial responsibility could add credibility to discursive responsibility allocation. NZ’s enhanced potential for individualizing blame can therefore have consequences that induce social costs, even when an actor makes limited progress toward the goal, for which it may or may not also receive praise.
Finnemore and Jurkovich’s (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020) expectation that domestic audiences do not induce negative consequences provided at least some progress is made toward climate aspirations seems particularly implausible. One would not expect citizens bearing the brunt of climate catastrophe to live contentedly with the consequences of their governments’ climate mitigation policies when greater effort was possible—or to heap praise on fossil fuel companies that only partially reduced production by the date they said they would. Recent evidence affirms that when governments fail to align their behavior with emissions goals set by international organizations, the individual government, not the international organization, faces discrete blame from a variety of other actors (Zangl et al. Reference Zangl, Heinkelmann-Wild, Glovania and Klein-Bölting2024). Business actors could also be blamed, and they may seek to avoid blame by blaming competitors or blaming governments that fail to provide adequate guidance and regulation.
Negative public opinion, especially leading to civil unrest or consumer boycotts, may in turn prompt interstate or cross-sectoral blame games to shirk responsibility in the eyes of the public. One can already observe NZ-related blame attribution between governments. Former British prime minister Rishi Sunak set out a “new approach” to NZ in September 2023 that rolled back many initiatives previous governments had adopted in pursuit of the goal. Sunak (Reference Sunak2023) justified the policy changes by comparing the United Kingdom’s purportedly superior mitigation efforts to those of China, France, and the US. The Swedish government also scaled back climate mitigation policies in 2023 and sought to justify the changes by arguing that Sweden had already done more than its fair share and placing blame on Brazil, China, and India (Sverigedemokraterna et al. 2023). The Biden administration in the US also blamed China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia for insufficient climate change mitigation efforts at several international summits, including the G20 and the UNFCCC, and China has in turn blamed the US for failing to deliver on the climate finance goal linked to the global NZ goal (Harvey Reference Harvey2021; Herszenhorn Reference Herszenhorn2021; Milman Reference Milman2022; Puko and Restuccia Reference Puko and Restuccia2021). There is, however, no reason to assume that blame of foreign actors necessarily occurs solely at the interstate level. Domestic audiences may initially blame their own governments and home firms when global goals go unmet, causing leaders to seek to shift blame onto foreign actors. But citizens may also generally attribute blame for partial progress to primarily nondomestic actors, further complicating the dynamics of blame politics.
Blame games have clearly become a prevalent diplomatic strategy in climate politics, even between states whose emissions have decreased since setting the global NZ goal in 2015. This point has both theoretical and policy implications. If blame has social costs—or indeed alters actors’ and citizens’ perceptions sufficiently to generate material costs—then the conjecture Finnemore and Jurkovich (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020) make on partial progress should not invariably hold. These insights could also inform both activist and diplomatic strategy. If naming and shaming governments for inadequate but partial climate action encourages blame avoidance and responsibility shirking, it might be counterproductive. From this perspective, ex ante encouragement to reach goals might be more effective, but only if it can be done in a catalytic way (see Hale Reference Hale2020) that does not reward bad behavior or backsliding, potentially leading toward global governance scenarios in which norms develop and become enforced by negative incentives and social sanctioning.
This last point leads to a final consideration on blame attribution in the context of aspirational politics. It is important to consider the temporal dimensions of aspiration in relation to goals, especially those that have a deadline, such as global NZ by 2050. Many of the examples above concern hypothetical ex post blame from domestic audiences once they are living with the consequences of missed emissions targets amid climate disaster. Interstate blame would also make sense in this context, where governments might seek to deflect blame attribution for negative outcomes. But many of the above examples, especially relating to interstate blame, are ex ante. Indeed, states engage in blame games during interim reviews well before deadlines on international goals have lapsed (Clegg Reference Clegg2015). The examples of the UK, Sweden, and the US show that this is already happening with regard to NZ. One can also see this happening in the form of protests against governments and corporations that are perceived as doing too little in the present to meet future climate goal deadlines. Ex ante blame may be more likely to correlate with instances of praise, as actors are lauded for taking action that might still not be sufficiently ambitious, whereas after deadlines have lapsed, it is more conceivable that actors would bear the brunt of blame for the problems that follow without receiving much praise for having made problems less bad than counterfactual reasoning might indicate. Ultimately, whether partial progress results in praise or blame may depend on whether audiences compare the present situation to current conditions or to an imagined future, with different counterfactual baselines shaping the perceived meaning of goal progress.
Conclusion
This article has argued for conceptualizing global NZ as an aspiration. Global NZ is a lofty, future-oriented international goal requiring both significant effort to overcome the vast political, social, and technological challenges to its realization and imaginative thinking to deliver large-scale sustainability transformations. This article has offered a clarifying intervention that can have important consequences for the quality of academic and policy analysis and the ability of research to inform real-world global climate policy. Seeing NZ as an aspiration focuses attention on risks that might be overlooked in a conceptualization drawn entirely from norm theory—particularly greenwashing risks associated with target setting and collective sustainability goals. This conceptualization of NZ also generates distinct expectations for developing sorely needed climate policy interventions and designing effective activist strategies by highlighting the limited utility of shaming nonconformity with aspirational goals and, especially, emphasizing the urgent need to consolidate and promote concrete NZ-aligned behavioral standards for different actors. Existing efforts to codify standards mostly focus on the setting—not achieving—of NZ targets and have enjoyed only limited uptake. By rejecting treatment of NZ pledges as instances of norm adoption, we might better recognize the need for clearer standards of conduct to achieve NZ.
The conceptualization offered here also makes important theoretical and empirical contributions to the global environmental politics literature. NZ is a subject of increasing attention in academic research, but the politics of the goal remain poorly understood. I have offered a new way of understanding NZ that should provide a fruitful avenue for further empirical research. It would be especially useful for scholars to explore empirically how international aspirational goals facilitate greenwashing in relation to other initiatives, such as principles of conduct or certification schemes. Future research could also more closely examine the politics of target setting—for example, explaining why nonstate actors commit to lofty goals set by states and whether they actually understand themselves as contributing to collective political endeavors.
There remains a need for better theory development on aspiration in international relations. Future research should continue to examine the dynamic relationship between norms and goals, which could have significant implications for policy making and activism. We continue to lack adequate knowledge about pathways from aspiration commitment to norm institutionalization and the conditions under which aspirational goals might effectively steer or consolidate norm construction. Scholars should also empirically assess my challenge to conjectures advanced by Finnemore and Jurkovich (Reference Finnemore and Jurkovich2020), such as by assessing social costs resulting from partial progress on goals in the context of interstate blame games. It would also be worth studying the effects of blame and praise when both are experienced simultaneously, sometimes with conflicting international/domestic dynamics: consider, for example, that Sweden received international acclaim for its pioneering climate goals at almost the same time that Greta Thunberg achieved fame for her protests against the Swedish parliament every Friday and as Sweden’s Climate Policy Council harshly criticized the government for taking inadequate action (Klimatpolitiska rådet 2019). Beyond advancing academic theory, policy making would benefit from more research on when and how blame can be leveraged to promote accountability or subdued to constrain responsibility shirking.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Alina Averchenkova, Daniel Berliner, Tiffanie Chan, Marion Dumas, Francisco Garcia-Gibson, Catherine Higham, Kathy Hochstetler, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, Boram Lee, Michael Lerner, Naghmeh Nasiritousi, Joana Setzer, Karen Smith, and Theresa Squatrito for helpful comments and suggestions. Thank you also to the editors and three anonymous reviewers for excellent comments and feedback that made the article stronger. Previous drafts of this paper were presented at a governance seminar at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics in May 2023; at the International Institutions, Law and Ethics seminar in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics in October 2024; and on a panel at the European Consortium for Political Research General Conference at Charles University, Prague, in September 2023.
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