Benchmarking climate futures: the public authorization of climate pathways and its political afterlives

Climate governance increasingly relies on pathway objects such as carbon budgets and net-zero trajectories. This article proposes benchmark authority as an analytical lens for examining how selected pathway outputs acquire public standing as standards of adequacy, how they reorganize political debate, and how they are renegotiated after changes of government. Benchmark authority refers to the socially organized capacity to present specific modelled futures as reasonable, realistic, and publicly defensible. An interpretive comparison of South Korea and Germany explores two routes of authorization and two political afterlives. In South Korea, administrative authorization was followed by conversion: the 2030 nationally determined contribution (NDC) remained formally intact while its substantive pathway changed during a presidential transition. In Germany, juridical authorization was followed by drift: the Federal Constitutional Court embedded carbon-budget reasoning in constitutional doctrine, while later governments loosened the pathway’s evaluative specificity. Drawing on Mahoney and Thelen’s typology of gradual institutional change, the comparison suggests that authorization type channels the forms of renegotiation available to successor governments. It also identifies the politics within formally persistent but substantively hollowed benchmarks as an agenda for environmental sociology.