Climate Change Negotiations under the Shadow of History

Climate change is a global challenge requiring unprecedented levels of collective action. In this context, this paper asks: do appeals to historical responsibility facilitate or hinder collective action? This paper uses a simple lab experiment simulating climate mitigation bargaining between high- and low-income countries. A key design feature is that the need for mitigation is triggered based on historical actions that were undertaken without knowledge of their impact on the environment (and hence, the need for mitigation). Two treatment arms were conducted, a baseline where the cause for mitigation (past actions) is not revealed, and a treatment—“the shadow of history”—where the historical origins of the problem are made explicit. In both conditions, negotiations take place regarding contributions to a mitigation fund (i.e., collective action). Results show that revealing the shadow of history marginally increases average contributions, but the distribution of those contributions changes markedly. When made aware of the historical causes of the climate problem, low-income countries significantly reduce their contributions, while high-income countries contribute more—offsetting the reduction. Critically, the overall welfare of low-income countries increases, while it decreases for high-income countries. Moreover, results from textual analysis of chat data show greater tension when historical responsibility is made explicit, with more negative sentiment and adversarial conversat ions. These results suggest that appealing to historical responsibility appears to be a successful negotiations tactic for poor countries.