ACHIEVE at the 2026 Earth System Governance Conference in Bath: General Impressions

ACHIEVE researchers joined one of the largest conferences of social scientists working on environmental change, contributing to conversations about the integrity of voluntary climate action in theory and practice.

We organized two panels and one innovative session, and ACHIEVE members took part as chairs, discussants and paper presenters.

Key messages from our panels:

🔹 Integrity cannot be reduced to compliance with standards, disclosure requirements and accountability processes. High integrity action also needs to respond to questions of justice and equity: who participates, whose priorities and knowledge count, and how benefits and burdens are distributed.

🔹 Political contestation, changing regulatory environments and economic uncertainty affect not only whether actors make ambitious commitments, but whether those commitments endure and translate into implementation.

Across the conference, questions of justice, equity, accountability, democratic legitimacy and power came up again and again. For ACHIEVE, these discussions reinforce the importance of understanding integrity as multidimensional and context dependent, which closely reflects our ambition to develop principles, criteria and indicators for high integrity voluntary climate action.