In the last two Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Working Group II assessed socio-economic factors that make adaptation difficult. Together with finance, governance was found to be the most pertinent, almost universal, barrier to adaptation (IPCC, 2014; IPCC, 2022). New research also analyzed the role of governance for countries’ ability to mitigate and found that it is the key driver of feasibility concerns, yet one that has traditionally been missing from scenario-based analyses (Brutschin et al., 2021).

This likely means that only scenarios that contain indicators governance will be able to comprehensively assess countries’ and regional capacities for climate action. Qualitative descriptions of broad trends of governance are part of the SSP narratives, and in the paper entitled “Governance in socioeconomic pathways and its role for future adaptive capacity” we combined these descriptions with statistical analyses of an existing set of governance indicators provided by the World Bank to develop internally-consistent projections.

How do we measure governance?

Governance is notoriously difficult to define. When we say “governance” here, we refer to a broad set of characteristics of governments and institutions that make it easier or harder to enact policies, to respect the rule of law, to retain political stability, etc. We base this on the definitions accompanying the Worldwide Governance Indicators (Kaufmann and Kraay, 2018, 2023). But there are many other ways to do this - check out the “Behind the numbers” story about rule of law, for example.

We find that this indicator of governance is well explained with a combination of GDP, share of population with higher education and gender gap in mean years of schooling. We don’t try to establish causal effects between these factors, but rather assess how they move together – this is what we mean when we say that the projections are internally consistent.

The projections indicate that even under the most optimistic development scenarios, it would take until around 2050 to overcome weak (or very low levels of) governance globally. Under pessimistic scenarios characterized by socio-economic stagnation, more than three billion people would still be living in countries with weak governance conditions well beyond mid-century (see e.g. Fig 1).

On the upside, we also show in our paper that countries characterized by very weak governance have a near-term rate of improvement of up to five times faster under the most optimistic scenarios than they do under the worst. This suggests a window of opportunity in the next couple of decades!

The need for more concrete political futures in scenarios

SSP scenarios have not been designed to capture rapid deteriorations in political stability and consequently socio-economic conditions, which we see, for example, during and in the aftermath of a war. Because of this, our projections here could be too optimistic. But, political scientists have been increasingly engaging with the climate change scenario community and the community that designs the next generation of scenarios will be even better resourced for incorporating various facets of governance (and other political features) into scenario building from the very beginning.