Naming and shaming as a strategy for enforcing the Paris Agreement: The role of political institutions and public concern.

Enforcement is a challenge for effective international cooperation. In human rights and environmental law, along with many other domains of international cooperation, "naming and shaming" is often used as an enforcement mechanism in the absence of stronger alternatives. Naming and shaming hinges on the ability to identify countries whose efforts are inadequate and effectively shame them toward better behavior. Research on this approach has struggled to identify factors that explain when it influences state behavior in ways that lead to more cooperation. Via survey of a large (N = 910) novel sample of experienced diplomats involved in the design of the Paris Agreement, we find support for the proposition that naming and shaming is most accepted and effective in influencing the behavior of countries that have high-quality political institutions, strong internal concern about climate change, and ambitious and credible international climate commitments. Naming and shaming appears less effective in other countries, so further enforcement mechanisms will be needed for truly global cooperation. We also find that the climate diplomacy experts favor a process of naming and shaming that relies on official intergovernmental actors, in contrast with studies suggesting that NGOs, media, and other private actors are more effective at naming and shaming. We suggest that these tensions-the inability for naming and shaming to work effectively within the countries least motivated for climate action and the preference for namers and shamers that seem least likely to be effective-will become central policy debates around making cooperation on climate change more enforceable.

Segregation and clustering of preferences erode socially beneficial coordination.

Polarization on various issues has increased in many Western democracies over the last decades, leading to divergent beliefs, preferences, and behaviors within societies. We develop a model to investigate the effects of polarization on the likelihood that a society will coordinate on a welfare-improving action in a context in which collective benefits are acquired only if enough individuals take that action. We examine the impacts of different manifestations of polarization: heterogeneity of preferences, segregation of the social network, and the interaction between the two. In this context, heterogeneity captures differential perceived benefits from coordinating, which can lead to different intentions and sensitivity regarding the intentions of others. Segregation of the social network can create a bottleneck in information flows about others' preferences, as individuals may base their decisions only on their close neighbors. Additionally, heterogeneous preferences can be evenly distributed in the population or clustered in the local network, respectively reflecting or systematically departing from the views of the broader society. The model predicts that heterogeneity of preferences alone is innocuous and it can even be beneficial, while segregation can hamper coordination, mainly when local networks distort the distribution of valuations. We base these results on a multimethod approach including an online group experiment with 750 individuals. We randomize the range of valuations associated with different choice options and the information respondents have about others. The experimental results reinforce the idea that, even in a situation in which all could stand to gain from coordination, polarization can impede social progress.