Summary/Abstract
This thesis analyses the contested politics of including (and accounting for) land-based mitigation in a post-2020 climate agreement, and the consequences for future mitigation pathways over the course of this century. It finds that the legitimization of a technical or ‘expert-led’ approach to climate governance in the context of the Paris Agreement has so far led to an expectation for unprecedented reliance on the land sector to meet the ‘balance’ goal in the long-term mitigation objective, implying strong trade-offs with other societal goals.
The thesis concludes that the Paris Agreement institutionalizes similar dynamics to the Kyoto Protocol, taking a technocratic approach to land-sector governance, where the perception of model-based knowledge as ‘objective science’ lends authority to outcomes that might otherwise be more critically debated and contested.