Aiming for zero: what makes nations adopt carbon neutral pledges?

Amid widespread inaction in the face of the looming threat of climate change, the leaders of nine nation-states have opted for a bold, seemingly anomalous, course of action by making national carbon neutrality pledges. Because prior research has focused on why states fail to curb emissions, there is a paucity of research on why some states take a different path by committing to drastic emission reductions. This research aims to help fill that gap. First, a content analysis of 252 newspaper articles reveals that New Zealand made the first pledge and eight other states have followed. Second, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis is used to compare political and social conditions in states with carbon neutral pledges to conditions in a randomly selected group of states without such pledges. Pledge states, compared to non-pledge states, have better governance scores on world indices, an abundant presence of global environmental NGOs, and smaller populations. Pledge states also have lower levels of income inequality (measured by Gini coefficients) than non-pledge states. I argue that these conditions (effective governance, abundant NGOs, small population sizes, and egalitarian class structures) facilitate collective action, and thus enabled some states to make carbon neutral pledges.