UC Berkeley

Can international climate law shift states' behavior towards decarbonization? In its current form, no. But the reason matters more than the conclusion.The Paris Agreement did not arrive weak and become weaker. It was designed from the outset around a single organizing principle: no state would ever face legal accountability for insufficient climate action. Sovereign discretion was written simultaneously into the normative structure, the legal obligation, the documentary form of NDC submissions, and the carbon market — not at one level as a compromise but at every level as a condition of the Agreement's existence. This dissertation establishes that as a legal finding, not a political observation. The core finding is this: international climate commitments do not shape domestic political economies — they reflect them. States do not arrive at negotiations with open ambition and negotiate toward a number. They arrive having already decided what their domestic political and economic interests can sustain and submit that as their NDC. The Agreement's architecture was built around that reality, which is why it cannot change it. What states commit to internationally is a function of what fossil fuel industries, legislatures, and electoral coalitions will tolerate domestically. No treaty cycle reverses that direction.Four findings ground this conclusion. The Agreement's failures — unenforceability of the legal obligation, immeasurability of NDC baselines, structural dysfunction in carbon markets — are not independent problems. They are expressions of the same design logic, operating simultaneously across every governance layer, each one reinforcing the others. The NDC framework reproduced rather than corrected the UNFCCC's original governance weakness: the same self-determined, discretionary character that made general obligations unenforceable in 1992 was preserved in 2015 with greater institutional complexity and the same practical result. Article 6's carbon market generates a contradiction internal to the Agreement itself — higher NDC ambition reduces a state's tradeable credit pool, making stronger targets a competitive economic liability and rewarding the domestic coalitions most opposed to decarbonization. And every reform that operates within the interstate system faces the same structural barrier: it requires consent from the states whose interests the current design was built to protect.The twenty-to-twenty-four billion tonne emissions gap projected by 2030 is not political will falling short of adequate institutions. It is the product of governance choices that have been tested against a decade of state practice and confirmed to produce precisely what their logic predicted. The deeper structural problem is directional: domestic political economies determine international commitments, not the reverse. States do not decarbonize because a treaty asks them to. They decarbonize when the internal costs of inaction — imposed through courts, legislatures, financial markets, and organized civil society — exceed the costs of action. International climate law's most productive role is therefore not to override domestic political reality but to restructure the institutional conditions under which domestic actors can hold their own governments accountable. The ICJ's 2025 Advisory Opinion does not repair the Agreement's enforcement architecture, but it hands domestic courts and civil society a legal instrument the Agreement itself was designed to withhold. That is where the legal lever actually sits — and this dissertation establishes why it cannot sit anywhere else.