Cunha Silva, Leonardo

This paper explores the methodological contributions of institutional grammar in analyzing how international obligations under the Paris Agreement are translated into national decision-making procedures. The study focuses on the formulation of Brazil’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which reflect the country’s climate commitments to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change, as required by Article 4(2) of the Paris Agreement.

The case study covers Brazil’s first three NDC submissions (2016, 2020, and 2022). In the first part, institutional grammar version 2.0 is applied to encode the administrative processes and legal documents associated with these NDCs. This section identifies key legal and procedural elements, such as mandates, responsibilities, and discretionary spaces, revealing how international obligations are interpreted and implemented domestically. The study explores how institutional grammar helps analyze ex ante procedural choices during the NDC formulation phase.

The second part examines how institutional grammar contributes to understanding institutional development through the interaction between administrative decisions and judicial review ex post NDC formulation. It analyzes Brazilian climate litigation cases, encoding the parties' arguments and the judicial decisions through institutional grammar. The findings illustrate how institutional grammar captures changes in institutional statements as they evolve in judicial proceedings.

As countries periodically update their NDCs, understanding how global commitments are translated into national policies is essential for achieving meaningful climate action. So, this paper contributes to the field of climate governance by demonstrating the potential of institutional grammar in legal research, offering research tools for analyzing legal frameworks, administrative procedures, and judicial cases.

The concept of credible commitments lies at the core of collective action studies and relates to the challenge of maintaining adherence to agreements over time and space. From a legal-institutional perspective, this issue raises the need for safeguards—or commitment devices—against non-compliance in international agreements, such as those addressing climate change and the formulation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement.

NDCs represent each country’s self-determined efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change, in accordance with the procedural obligations outlined in Article 4(2) of the Paris Agreement, including principles of maximum possible ambition and progression in formulating climate goals. This paper aims to explore the administrative procedures involved in the formulation of European Union NDCs, the implementation decisions that shape their content, and the ex ante procedural safeguards (commitment devices) incorporated into these processes.

To achieve this objective, the paper is divided into three sections. The first section reviews the literature on sources of non-compliance with international environmental agreements, including opportunistic behavior, ambiguity or indeterminacy in language, institutional incapacity, and temporal challenges related to social, economic, and political factors. The second section analyzes the European Union’s procedures for formulating NDCs, focusing on the commitment devices designed to ensure ambition and progression in climate goals during the NDC update cycles. The third section evaluates whether the identified commitment devices address the sources of non-compliance discussed in the literature.

In conclusion, the paper highlights the contributions of the European Union’s climate governance framework, particularly how procedural safeguards create lock-in effects that promote ambitious and progressive climate goals over the long term.