Linkage as Leverage: OECD Accession as an Informal and Indirect Graduation Mechanism in the International Climate Regime

As global power is shifting, international institutions face a challenge: established powers will often request that rising powers no longer continue to benefit from their status as “developing countries”. Yet only a few institutions have formal rules in place to organize this transition. As a result, tracing the informal pathways through which change occurs becomes relevant. In this article, we study one such mechanism in the international climate regime. In that regime, the so‐called Annex I countries agreed “to take the lead” in reducing greenhouse gas emissions while developing countries remained exempt from a similar obligation. Because Annex I was hard to amend, the regime has frequently been said to lack a graduation mechanism. Yet, once we take the interaction between the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its broader institutional environment into account, the process of acceding to the Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) comes into view as an indirect and informal graduation mechanism. We examine the effects and limitations of this mechanism in relation to the accession processes of Mexico (1994), South Korea (1996), and Chile (2010). Our analysis leads to two main results. First, we show that a graduation mechanism based on “linkage as leverage” existed. Second, we sketch three distinct causal pathways that lead to different degrees of graduation in each case. Overall, our study suggests that graduation based on “linkage as leverage” depends on three conditions. First, states needed to activate the mechanism in each case. Second, domestic support was required to sustain graduation. And third, major emitters had to develop an interest in joining a club organization that could exercise leverage.