Comparative analysis of climate commitments: the current state of climate governance in China and the US

This paper explores how divergent multi-level governance architectures, US federal climate denialism and institutional retrenchment under Trump 2.0, compared to China’s state-embedded decarbonisation commitment on the credibility, spatial implementation, and global governance pathway of national climate policy. We systematically analyse the dimensions of policy continuity, territorial governance and international credibility on the basis of a ‘structured, focussed comparison’ of the two largest global emitters in the period between 2020 and 2025 with empirically grounded and theoretically derived dimensions. The analysis finds that the US federal system creates high levels of institutional volatility, as the executive changes and inter-scalar conflicts emerge, making decarbonisation a dispersed process across states, while China’s party-state system institutionalises long-term goals in its Five-Year Plans, but faces principal-agent risks from central directives and coal dependencies with local provinces. This study shows that governance structure is a key causal mechanism that shapes the potential of national commitments to lead to enduring decarbonisation pathways, by connecting scalar political architectures with territorially differentiated implementation outcomes. The findings contribute to the field of comparative climate governance by shedding light on the influence of the institutional design of domestic climates on international mitigation capacity and sub-national planning horizons of stakeholders.