Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Despite the proliferation of international climate pledges and national contributions, global carbon emissions continue to rise, undermining efforts to stabilise temperatures at 1.5°C. Such a trend raises serious questions about the effectiveness of the current climate governance framework. Such enduring gaps pose a serious threat to the ability of international climate commitments to deliver real environmental benefits, particularly in countries with weak domestic institutional capacities. This paper analyses the relationship between global climate commitments, regulatory capacity and carbon emissions in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) with a focus on the conditional role of institutional quality on global climate governance. This study employs balanced panel data from SSA countries for the period 2009–2024 and utilises the panel random-effects model with interaction and robustness analyses to explore the moderating role of regulatory capacity in the link between global climate commitments and carbon emissions. Results show that increased commitments to global climate change are strongly associated with reductions of carbon emissions, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on the strength of domestic regulatory institutions. The interaction estimates show that the effect of international climate commitments in reducing emissions is intensified when there is a higher level of regulatory capacity, underscoring institutional effectiveness as an important transmission mechanism that links global climate governance and national environmental outcomes. This research contributes to the rapidly expanding literature on climate governance studies from the perspective of new institutional economics, highlighting the importance of governance-dependent policy effectiveness in achieving sustainable decarbonisation outcomes in developing regions.
Source: Research Square
Institutions: Dominion University, Ibadan, University of Ilesa
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7166012007