Academic Elements
The Climate Laws, Institutions, Policies, and Practices (CLIPPS) Project

The lacuna of data measuring and assessing climate laws and policies is creating problems for social scientists studying how national policies impact climate change mitigation efforts worldwide, as attested by Rowan’s (2019), as comparisons even across NDCs are impossible because these are “apples and oranges.” Universities, international organizations, and non-government organizations do track whether and how many climate laws a nation has implemented (Grantham Research Institute 2020), whether it has a policy regarding carbon pricing (The World Bank Carbon Pricing Dashboard 2023), and how strongly a nation has committed to Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit 2021).

However, these indicators are all partial and based on formal declarations and statutes. They must be complemented by data on formal and informal political institutions and practices such as whether nations have established cross-cutting agencies across the executive to mainstream climate issues, whether they have a climate ombuds or climate council and how long the term lasts, how permeated a nation is by interest groups like fossil fuel producers, and whether and how budgets are being used to climate-proof economic sectors. In short, we need candid assessments of the de facto scope and implementation of laws and practices to complement extant – and growing – knowledge of the de jure components.

This project will offer researchers worldwide of correlates of domestic climate policy new data and generate an unprecedent “public good” dataset for social scientists. Using CLIPPS, the first externally valid and comprehensive data set devoted to assessing domestic climate policy in mitigation and adaptation, the PIs, their Steering Committee, and regional coordinators, will identify experts to report a broad range of domestic climate policy data for 80 nations in five-year waves (starting with this 2027 pilot, for which NSF funding is being sought). For the first time, researchers will be able to answer questions like the following: 1) How much variance exists in nations’ domestic climate policy ambitions, by issue area? 2) Does ambition vary within sectors (energy, industry, agriculture and land management, transportation, waste disposal, etc.)? 3) What are the correlates of domestic policy, for both mitigation and adaptation? 4) How do we explain why only some correlates matter? 5) After the second, 2032, wave, we will also be able to ask where nations are advancing and where are they regressing.

Climate justice questions will also be featured throughout the survey, but these will be particularly extensive in the adaptation area. The CLIPPS working assumption in adaptation is that national contexts are necessary (but not sufficient) for examining local community responses to climate risks (Waha et al. 2017). CLIPPS data will also help case-focused researchers of local adaptation practices. By including data from the Global South (as well as OECD and other major emitter economies), CLIPPS will ensure the data is useful to diverse shareholders from all regions of the world (the international advisory board is linked here).

Using methods similar to those of other successful social science elite surveys, such as Varieties of Democracy, or VDEM (Coppedge et al. 2020), the survey will ask respondents scores of questions across dozens of climate policy categories. CLIPPS will feature a series of “control” variables as robustness checks, including the few comprehensive measures that do exist, such as the World Bank’s ECR data (2026), International Energy Agency (2026) data on the growth of renewable energy by nation-year, and, in the adaptation area, the Germanwatch (2026) data for mortality and monetary costs of climate-related disasters by nation-year. While the Phase I survey will address national conditions in 2026, an even greater benefit will accrue from Phase II, which will help policymakers chart changes from 2027 to 2032.