Governing the Climate Change Regime

Institutional Integrity and Integrity Systems

Tim Cadman, Rowena Maguire, Charles Sampford, Tim Cadman, Rowena Maguire, Charles Sampford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367024185
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315442341
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Administrative Law
• Index: Law

This volume, the second in a series of three, examines the institutional architecture underpinning the global climate integrity system. This system comprises an inter-related set of institutions, governance arrangements, regulations, norms and practices that aim to implement the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Arguing that governance is a neutral term to describe the structures and processes that coordinate climate action, the book presents a continuum of governance values from 'thick' to 'thin' to determine the regime's legitimacy and integrity. The collection contains four parts with part one exploring the links between governance and integrity, part two containing chapters which evaluate climate governance arrangements, part three exploring avenues for improving climate governance and part four reflecting on the road to the UNFCCC's Paris Agreement. The book provides new insights into understanding how systemic institutional and governance failures have occurred, how they could occur again in the same or different form and how these failures impact on the integrity of the UNFCCC. This work extends contemporary governance scholarship to explore the extent to which selected institutional case studies, thematic areas and policy approaches contribute to the overall integrity of the regime.

Part I
Exploring the links between governance and the integrity of climate change

1
Introduction

Governing the climate regime

Tim Cadman, Charles Sampford, Rowena Maguire and Hugh Breakey

Governing the climate regime

The Paris Conference of Parties (COP) has sought to initiate a global regime for the mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and, where necessary, adaptation to them. The governance challenges are immense – in the governance of the negotiations, in the governance of the complex set of mechanisms that those negotiations are generating, in the integrity mechanisms to ensure as far as possible that those mechanisms fulfil their functions (leading to a rudimentary Global Carbon Integrity System/Regime).¹ In the light of the dynamic relations between state and non-state actors within the climate negotiations, there is a growing recognition that more research is needed to explore the social dimensions of governance quality in climate mechanisms, particularly around decision-making processes. These take note of the social-political nature of climate governance and explore governance quality by looking at the participatory structures, deliberative processes, substantive products, and longer-term outcomes as the determinants of regime effectiveness.² Effectiveness is understood as the measure of institutional performance against a set of desired objectives.³ In this case, the desired objectives concern themselves with ‘good’ governance and constitute a ‘thick’ set of governance values, as outlined late in this chapter and more extensively in Chapter 2. Following the approach delineated there, the governance quality of the climate regime is not attributed to any single institutional arrangement, such as transparency, even though this is, of course, important. Evaluating the performance of an institution on the basis of a restricted set of values would constitute a somewhat ‘thin’ assessment; consequently this volume explores some of the broader parameters affecting quality of governance and institutional integrity and their possible impacts on the policy responses to climate change.

It is suggested here that the social and political interactions occurring within an institution’s participatory structures and deliberative processes also contribute to institutional legitimacy. However, legitimacy has proven to be an analytical challenge for governance theory, and while some excellent scholars have delineated some of its normative and empirical dimensions, they also have maintained that research in this field remains incomplete.⁴ Acknowledging these observations, it is suggested here that legitimacy can be seen, at least in the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), as a desired attribute. It would be difficult to justify a regime that was not sanctioned by those that ratified it. As Chapter 2 discusses, legitimacy may be investigated by exploring the structural and procedural components (inputs) of the institution’s governance system and how they interact one with another (throughputs), as well as the rules, standards, etc., this interaction creates (outputs). The ‘thickness’ of the governance values incorporated will also contribute to the longer-term behavioural and problem-solving impacts of the institution on the ground (outcomes). This is an integrating model of institutional legitimacy discussed by previous governance theorists (Scharpf 1997, Kjaer 2004, Schmidt 2012), as depicted in Figure 1.1.⁵

Institutional integrity and its relationship to governance

In the companion volume to this book, Breakey and Cadman build on Samp-ford’s work to analyse institutional integrity and to consider its several interrelated components.⁶ This topic is explored in detail in Chapter 2; however, it is worth just sketching the broad ideas here.

Figure 1.1 Theoretical model for the evaluation of contemporary global governance (Cadman 2011, adapted)

Sampford theorises ‘institutional integrity’ as taking the same form as ‘individual integrity’.⁷ He starts with a version of Singer’s fundamental ethical question – ‘how are we to live our lives?’⁸ Individual ethics involves individuals asking hard questions about their values, giving honest and public answers, and trying to live by those answers. If they do, they have integrity in the sense they are true to the values they claim to stand for. Similarly, institutional ethics involves an institution/organisation asking hard questions of its value and values, giving honest and public answers and living by them. This more complex institutional process starts with the vital questions that must be asked of any institution or organisation: ‘What is it for?’ ‘What justifies the institution to the community in which it operates (recognising that the community gives it the right to operate and takes the risk that the concentration of power in that institution may be used against that community)?’ Asking those questions involves an institutional and collective effort under the institution’s formal and informal constitutional processes. An institution has integrity if it lives by its answers – by creating mechanisms which make it more likely that the institution keeps to the values to which it is publicly committed. These mechanisms might be seen as an institutional ‘integrity system’. Such institutional integrity systems need to be articulated with external institutions and mechanisms designed to ensure that entrusted power is not abused for personal gain (Transparency International’s definition of corruption) but is used for its claimed purposes (Sampford’s definition of integrity).

Breakey and Cadman elucidate and expand, seeing integrity involving a process of reflecting on and developing one’s values, giving a public profession of those values, and then working to achieve them.⁹ An institution sets down its values in its Public Institutional Justification (PIJ). The PIJ stands as a public record (a code, charter, constitution, mission statement, etc.) of the institution’s values, commitments, principles, and goals. When the institution’s existence, activities, or privileges are challenged on social or moral grounds, the PIJ’s role is to provide a justification for the institution.

Not all institutions will possess a PIJ, having never undertaken the process of developing one. If an institution does have a PIJ, then its actions, processes, and outcomes can be evaluated from the perspective of that PIJ. If the institution succeeds in living up to the PIJ’s values, goals, and purposes, then the institution possesses ‘consistency-integrity’, as its actions are consistent with its values.

The institution may have succeeded in achieving consistency-integrity because its internal organisational arrangements are well designed to facilitate its living up to its PIJ. In this case, the institution can be said to boast ‘coherence-integrity’ because its internal constitution coheres with achieving its PIJ. An institution with coherence-integrity can be expected to go on achieving consistency-integrity in the future because its parts work together effectively to promote the desired outcomes.

Alternatively, the institution might achieve consistency-integrity because its external environment facilitates this outcome. In this happy arrangement, other organisations, regulations, and laws tend to support the institution when it is achieving its PIJ, but resist it when it betrays its PIJ.¹⁰ In this case, the institution enjoys ‘context-integrity’ because its external context facilitates its ongoing achievement of its PIJ.¹¹

Governance values, on the account developed in Chapter 2, apply to the structures, processes, and mechanisms that steer an institution. Rather than focusing on institutional integrity, governance values confer legitimacy on the institution. The level of legitimacy conferred depends on the comprehensiveness – the ‘thickness’, as we will call it – of the governance values. ‘Thin’ governance values, like accountability and transparency, secure only basic oversight. ‘Thickish’ governance values capture broader concerns with the institution’s effective functioning, including questions about who makes decisions and how those decisions are made. Finally, ‘thick’ governance values incorporate a rich portfolio of ethical values, including equality, democracy, and inclusiveness. If present, thick governance values confer legitimacy on the institution’s structures and processes.

These two qualities of legitimacy and integrity differ: the former confers a social and moral status, while the latter relates purely to how the institution measures up to its own standards (as it sets down in the PIJ). Nevertheless, because governance values require attention to the way information, authority, feedback, and decision-making flow through the institution, there is often a fertile and mutually facilitative process between governance values and (especially context-integrity).

Integrity (evaluated through consistency, coherence, and context dimensions) and legitimacy (assessed through increasingly thick governance values) are not the only moral evaluations possible. An institution can boast both integrity and legitimacy without fulfilling everything that an objective moral theory – or a particular moral community – might demand of it. This is because integrity only asks whether the institution is being true to its own standards, while legitimacy applies only to the structures and mechanisms that steer an institution (at least in the theoretical terms of input, throughput, and output legitimacy, as Figure 1.1 conceptualises legitimacy). A comprehensive moral evaluation will draw in all of the substantive moral values and goals (for example, human rights, sustainable development) that an institution may be morally asked to uphold. This leads us to the idea of ‘governing values’, which we discuss in Chapter 2.

The following chapters will explore in more detail the various implications for the climate regime of these differences between institutional legitimacy-based governance values, PIJ-based integrity values, and morality-based governing values. (On the relationship between the governance values and the governing value of human rights touched on previously, see especially Chapter 9 by Bridget Lewis.) In general though, it is important to bear in mind the distinction between governing and governance values when discussing the climate regime. In particular, an expansion in the governing values that the climate regime pursues (or professes that it pursues) does not necessarily equate to an expansion in its governance values. Through outputs like the Paris Agreement, the climate regime can declare its commitment to myriad different governing values. Whether those values can be achieved, however, depends upon the development of appropriate institutional machinery and processes to operationalise them. In short, it is easy enough for the climate regime to profess idealistic governing values, but much harder to put in place the governance values that alone can achieve those laudable goals.

Background to the Paris Agreement

By November 2015, as the twenty-first Conference and Meeting of the Parties (COP and CMP) to the UNFCC approached, the endless round of pre-negotiations referred to as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• PART I Exploring the links between governance and the integrity of climate change
• PART II Evaluating governance arrangement within the UNFCCC
• PART III Improving governance within the UNFCCC
• Afterword: The long road to Paris: Insider and outsider perspectives
• Index