Shaming climate wrongdoers

Climate law, policy, and governance have grown substantially in recent years, yet these efforts have achieved only modest success. This article spotlights an underexplored complementary strategy in policy, governance, and legal domains: climate shaming—the use of public condemnation to encourage climate-responsible behaviour among governments, corporations, and their leaders. While shaming has been studied and applied as a regulatory and governance tool in other contexts, only a small but growing body of scholarship has begun to examine its potential in the climate arena. Drawing on multidisciplinary research from the social sciences, the humanities, and law, we review and map the main strands of this emerging literature to show the diverse forms and potential of shaming mechanisms, actors, and messages in the climate domain. Based on this analysis, we identify several gaps in the literature and practice of climate shaming, including explicit regulatory shaming, intergovernmental shaming, shaming of regulators by civil-society actors, and regulatory shaming of industry leaders. We propose expanding the conceptual framework of climate shaming to encompass these neglected dimensions, with the aim of encouraging further research as well as policy and governance experimentation in this evolving field.