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

Climate change is poorly understood by social scientists, partly because no uniform global measure exists to track climate policy-generating institutions across nations. United Nations’ (UN) negotiators constantly warn of the urgency of “ratcheting up” national actions to manage global warming. And yet we cannot even measure whether nations are increasing the stringency of their policies, as there is no routinized means of examining whether national governments even implement their pledges. Changes in national greenhouse gas emissions have served as proxies for national policy, but as the COVID pandemic reminded us, changes in emissions have many causes. Robust and precise measures of policy outputs are sorely needed.

This project, led by CEP Director Todd Eisenstadt and co-principal investigator Tofigh Maboudi of Loyola University Chicago will offer essential new data gathered from fall 2026 expert surveys on the climate policies of 80 nations. Using over 1000 survey respondents recommended by the project’s 120-member advisory board in over 50 nations, as well as other sources of potential respondents, the project will identify conditions facilitating robust climate policies and how these policies impact climate mitigation and how vulnerable nations are adapting to climate damage. The data will be publicly disseminated to assess government climate policy performance around the world in comparative perspective.

Recommended for funding in late 2025 as a three-year project sponsored by the National Science Foundation, The Climate Laws, Institutions, Policies, and Practices (CLIPPS) data set measures the scope of the problem as a first step toward solving it. While the start of the project was delayed, it started up in 2026 and will produce important research findings and the most comprehensive public data set assessing domestic climate policy robustness. Using the highest methodological standards to ensure validity and reliability will allow scholars and practitioners to assess which nations are engaging in best practices and measure nations’ claims against expert evaluations. The data will allow for systematic study of climate policy ambition over time, rather than just looking at changes in emissions as a proxy for a nation’s policies. Using this data, we will address a range of questions, including: 1) What are the determinants of robust mitigation and adaptation policies within nation-states? 2) What roles do robust mitigation and adaptation policies play in reducing GHG emissions and environmental and human damage? For more information, see the “Policy Elements of CLIPPS” and “Academic Elements of CLIPPS” pages on this website.