This chapter focuses on the global decarbonisation policy gap and the need to account for measurable policies for carbon neutrality, specifically in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. One strategy to raise accountability is policy tracking, a technique that has gained traction in empirical policy analysis. The chapter introduces this technique and provides an example of a methodologically rigorous tracking of climate policies in the GCC countries in response to pledges and obligations under the Paris Agreement. This includes government policies, laws, and measures toward the mitigation goals of the Paris Agreement and carbon neutrality targets. We situate our tracker in the wider landscape of policy metrics and indexes, discuss its features, and present results on mitigation and energy policy responses to the climate crisis in the Gulf. Key conclusions are that stringency, intensity, effectiveness, and sustainability of measures vary widely across the sample and over time. Necessary macroeconomic, fiscal, technological, and social policy measures also vary greatly in terms of their intensity and the public investments made. In some GCC countries, policy measures appear to be disproportionate to the challenges linked to both reaching the goals of the Paris Agreement and the Gulf countries’ very own nationally determined contributions (NDCs), to varying degrees.

The proposal I make in this book is that the perennial quest for justice is about making sure each individual has an appropriate place in what our uniquely human capacities permit us to build, produce, and maintain, and that each individual is respected appropriately for their capacities to hold such a place to begin with. Following a distinction that goes back to Aristotle, under this umbrella we later distinguish commutative from distributive justice. The former maintains and restores an earlier status quo that set the stage for the interaction or otherwise responds to violations. The latter is concerned with sharing out whatever a community holds in common.

Rawls’s conceptualization is the culmination of reflection on the social question over 200 years. The grounds-of-justice approach unifies a broad range of thinking about justice at the global level as it has unfolded over millennia, reflecting the current stage of the great tale of humanity. The animating concern behind human rights is protection of personal inviolability and subsistence from patterns of societal organization that might threaten them. Human rights focus on the status and well-being of any one person rather than an overall distributive picture. The global dimensions of the social question have long gone unappreciated. The global can no longer be an afterthought but is imminent in reflection on justice also in more confined spaces. The default contemporary understanding of justice is global in scope, complex in structure, stringent in demandingness, and extensive in its reach in a manner that is best understood in a public reason sense.

Justice is a political value that holds across reasonable comprehensive doctrines. I introduce the notion of a frame of human life. For Aristotle, the polis does that job, but nowadays the institutions and practices that do so are embedded into the human web. To call something a “political value” – beyond the generic sense of pertaining to the creation of order – means that it pertains to the design of that frame. Justice is the value of giving each their own within this frame. The political value of distributive justice gives rise to principles of justice, which generate rights and duties. Justice honors the distinctiveness of each within the distinctively human life. That is why the value of distributive justice is the most stringent value. Justice as a value radiates into different domains of practical reasoning in ways that principles, rights, or duties do not. It takes exceptionally strong considerations to offset justice.

Chapter 6 compares the outcome additionality of thirty-two indicators in a quantitative meta-analysis, and tests hypotheses derived from an inductive theoretical analysis of micro-institutional dynamics. It examines the comparative impact of regulatory clarity and stringency; effective training and capacity building; the existence of significant, individualized price premiums; the presence of investment and opportunity costs; restrictive auditor oversight policies; and the coexistence of public regulation on the likelihood that a requirement will show outcome additionality in matched farmers. The results show that regulatory clarity and stringency, along with the provision of substantive price premiums, have the most significant positive correlation with outcome additionality (i.e., likely behavior changes); while the coexistence of public regulations and the existence of high opportunity costs has a significant negative impact. These results are striking, as the majority of standards are currently moving away from a stringent regulatory approach. However, this approach is unlikely to allow for the creation of price premiums that could compensate farmers for high-cost practices.

Chapter 2 constitutes the core theoretical chapter of the book. It serves two functions. First, it introduces the micro–institutional rational choice approach that is applied throughout the work. It explains why producers targeted by market-driven regulatory governance can be considered boundedly rational actors, what this characterization entails, and how institutional arrangements can help such actors to overcome collective action problems. It then shows how Kiser and Ostrom’s Three Worlds of Action can be leveraged to link institutional design choices to their outcomes. In a second step, Chapter 2 examines market-driven regulatory governance using this approach. It uncovers the institutional design dilemma that standards face as they scale up, and specifies a number of hypotheses on how these choices (e.g., between binding and flexible standard–setting; strict or flexible oversight mechanisms; and a focus on price premiums or on capacity building) will affect the implementation of standards by drawing on institutional rational choice theory as well as insights from the socio-legal literature.