Evolutionary simulations of institutional dynamics in global climate governance

Global climate governance is shaped by NDCs and LT-LEDS that embed benchmarking norms, yet implications for polycentric diversity remain unclear. This study integrates polycentric governance, governmentality, path dependence, and structural reproduction to examine how discursively coded strategies, motives, and incentives relate to institutional responses across 73 countries. A two-stage design combines text-as-data indicators with a repeated evolutionary simulation and system-GMM regression. Under mean-field updating on a fully connected structure, convergence is model-implied; results report the rate and stability of contraction across a 10-round benchmarking horizon using dispersion and ε = 0.001 diagnostics. Five response types are heuristic, scale-dependent discretisations of continuous positions with threshold sensitivity noted. System-GMM estimates show strategy indicators are most strongly associated with response shifts, while economic pressure, bandwagon dynamics, and weak nodes align with stabilisation, acknowledging construct proximity in shared texts. Proposed pathways are evidence-informed normative implications within the study’s discursive scope.