Reconfiguring the Global Governance of Climate Change

John J. Kirton, Ella Kokotsis, Brittaney Warren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780429619281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book charts the course and causes of UN, G7 and G20 governance of climate change through the crucial period of 2015–2021. It provides a careful, comprehensive and reliable description of the individual and interactive contributions of the G7, G20 and UN summits and analyses their results.

The authors explain these contributions and results by considering the impacts of causal candidates, such as a changing physical ecosystem and international political system and the actions of individual leaders of the world's most systemically significant countries. They apply and improve an established, compact causal model, grounded in international relations theory, to guide these tasks.

By developing, prescribing and implementing immediate, realistic actionable policy solutions to cope with the urgent, existential challenge of controlling climate change, this volume will appeal to scholars of international relations, global governance and global environmental governance.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780429055485-1

The Challenge

On August 9, 2021, the world’s 234 leading climate scientists and 195 governments, including all those of the G7 and G20 countries, agreed on several shocking fundamental facts (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] 2021). Global warming could not be stopped from intensifying over the next 30 years. In 20 years, the world would be 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels, even with deep emissions cuts starting today. Every global region was already suffering severe damage from climate change, which would steadily intensify for decades. Confirmation came weeks before the IPCC reported these stark certainties, as unprecedented heatwaves and wildfires devastated the United States, Canada, Russia, Greece and Turkey; historic floods hit Germany, Europe and China; and droughts killed many more beyond. United Nations secretary general António Guterres called the IPCC report a “code red warning” (UN 2021). The world looked in desperation to the G20’s Rome Summit in October and, above all, the UN’s long-awaited climate summit in Glasgow in November to avert this “hell on earth” (Financial Times 2021f).

As 2021 unfolded, new hope arose that the global summit governance of climate change would finally take the necessary steps to avert the climate catastrophe. The diversionary shock of COVID-19 was diminishing in some parts of the world, replaced by the soaring shocks of climate change everywhere. New leaders arrived to chair and shape the G7 and G20 summits, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom and Mario Draghi of Italy, respectively. The UN prepared to hold the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in November 2021. Moreover, the special ad hoc, climate-focused summits arising since 2017 expanded, with Joe Biden, the new, climate-committed US president hosting the first Leaders Summit on Climate on April 22–23, with leaders from over 40 major emitting countries. This unprecedented sequence of global summits, all working closely together for the first time, brought the reconfiguration of global climate governance to new heights.

Debate

The scholarly debate about the course and causes of global climate governance after 2015 revolved around the respective contributions of the formal multilateral organizations of the UN galaxy, the old informal plurilateral summits of the G7 and G20, the 10 newer special summit supplements since 2017, and the effectiveness of the centralized or fragmented, top-down or bottom-up regime complexes, including non-state actors that the UNFCCC fostered (Gupta 2016; Kahler 2017). Among the many possible combinations, several major schools of thought stood out.

The first looked to the promising multilateral UNFCCC as central and prospectively effective. Hall (2016) showed how a broad array of UN functional organizations became involved in climate change in support of the UNFCCC and how the UN’s September 2015 summit that adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) introduced a new, much more inclusive, integrative focus for the climate cause. Betsill et al. (2015) pointed to the UNFCCC possibly providing the needed overall coordination. Floyd (2015) argued for the integrative role of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and its human security concept in overcoming the dangerous fragmentation of the climate security regime created by the intrusion of other organizations. Engelbrekt (2016) and Scott (2015) similarly believed in the UNSC’s integrative power.

The second school saw little independent role for informal, global plurilateral summit institutions (PSIs). Rinaldi and Martuscelli (2016) noted the disposition of the BRICS of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa to act in multilateral forums but highlighted the constraints on a consensus among them.

The third school saw UN failure, including prospectively at COP26 in 2021, due to China’s domestic coal addiction and the international linkage of climate cooperation with China’s key geopolitical demands (Erickson and Collins 2021). This could, however, be overcome if the G7 democracies with Australia and Korea formed a “competition club” to impose a carbon price at home and carbon border adjustments on China abroad. As these democracies accounted for about half of global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019, and members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development had almost 75% of global GDP and 35% of global carbon emissions, they could force an export-dependent China to adjust.

The fourth school saw plurilateral promise in a more UN-supportive way, with such bodies operating from the bottom up to reinforce the central UNFCCC. Slaughter (2020, 74, 93–94) saw the G20 as a potential UN supporter, as G20 summits addressed climate change from the start, and did so quite well at Hamburg in 2017, despite the economic interests of the key fossil fuel–producing countries of Australia, Russia and Saudi Arabia. For Slaughter, this meant the G20 should shift from negotiating outstanding issues of the Paris Agreement to technical implementation, as this was a G20 strength.

A variant of the fourth school saw fading climate leadership from the G20, G7 and BRICS since 2017, due to the arrival of climate change–denying Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the rise of nationalist, populist parties in Europe. Bauer et al. (2019, 2020, 115) argued that the G20 summits in 2015 and 2016 provided strong support for the Paris Agreement and the SDGs. However, the G20 then struggled to provide leadership. Still, with its globally predominant share of economic capabilities and global emissions, its small club, greater procedural flexibility than the UNFCCC’s COPs and strong engagement groups, the G20 should be able to lead, as it did increasingly before 2016.

The fifth school saw a broader role for informal PSIs. Falkner (2016) identified how climate clubs in the context of multilateral negotiations usefully enhanced political dialogue, created club benefits that improved mitigation strategies, reduced free riding on coalitions of the willing and helped legitimate global climate governance, despite the slowing multilateral progress caused by major power shifts.

The sixth school identified the G20’s potential and performance in global energy governance and in climate governance itself. Heubaum and Biermann (2015) saw the historically limited policy interaction between the climate and energy regimes improving due to the International Energy Agency’s expanding agenda embracing renewables and its bottom-up new partnerships with the International Renewable Energy Agency and the UNFCCC. Sainsbury and Wurf (2016) agreed. Downie (2015a, b, 2020) showed how the G20 had worked with multilateral organizations on energy to play a significant role. Van de Graaf and van Asselt (2017) discussed its role on energy subsidies. He (2016) argued that the G20 and China as its summit host in 2016 should lead in global energy governance.

The seventh school saw greater G20 climate performance, due to growing Chinese and Indian leadership. Kirton (2016a) identified China’s G20 leadership on energy and climate change. Rashmi (2020) argued that a more climate-committed India could lead emerging powers through the G20 to control climate change, especially with the postponement of COP26 in 2020.

The eighth school emphasized the G20’s poor performance on climate change, relative to its core, early focus on economic issues. Kirton and Warren argued that this was due to the G20’s governance of climate change in a separate siloed, rather than a synergistic way that linked to closely connected subjects such as health, rather than simply the economy (Kirton and Warren 2020a, b; Warren 2020; Kirton and Wang 2021). Berger et al. (2019, 502) saw declining performance, arguing that the G20, not being a “club of like-minded,” found it increasingly challenging to reach consensus on “fundamental issues such as … the amelioration of dangerous climate change.” Ambumozhi (2018, 88) observed that the G20 “tends to focus on less controversial issues affecting the financial architecture … such as climate change” due to members’ diverse mix of energy resources and nationally determined contributions commitments under the UNFCCC.

The ninth school highlighted the G7’s potential, displayed at the 2015 Elmau Summit and the UNSC. Hall (2016, 69–70) suggested that the G7, UN and others could productively work together, due to “increased scientific and political consensus,” and called for continued action on “financing, multilateral organizations, heads of state and scientific research” plus “from civil society.” Kirton et al. (2018) found that between 2013 and 2016, the G7 performed better than the G20 on climate change, with both having generally rising commitments and compliance.

The 10th school emphasized G7 failure. Kirton et al. (2019) concluded that the G7’s 2017 Taormina Summit largely failed on climate change, due to a recalcitrant Trump. Andrione-Moylan et al. (2019, 172) suggested that Trump spurred China’s Xi Jinping to assume global climate leadership. He (2016) saw such leadership arising even before Trump arrived.

The 11th school advised the G20 to seize control of climate change governance from the UN, due to the cumulating crises coupled with the failure of the UN’s multilateral organizations in response. Bishop and Payne (2020, 134) said “the broad remit of the G20” should be expanded even if it means “seizing directional control of the politics of an issue like climate change, from the UN system.”

The 12th school saw false rhetoric and real failure everywhere, as the G20, UN and other intergovernmental institutions all consistently failed to match their deliberative and direction-setting words with appropriately ambitious decisions and above all implementing delivery. This was due to inadequate accountability mechanisms and insufficient civil society involvement, despite the compounding climate crisis. Stevenson (2021) emphasized the G20 summit’s unfulfilled promises to phase out fossil fuel subsidies since 2009, its decline in ambitious climate promises with Trump’s arrival, and the leading global rank of G20 members China, the United States, Russia, the European Union and India in subsidizing fossil fuels. Others argued that reversing climate change required all hands on deck (Hale 2016; Chan et al. 2019).

The 13th school saw supplementary special climate summits failing, due to fading US power. Matthews (2021, 12) recalled that Barack Obama had to design the 2015 Paris Agreement without the need for Senate treaty ratification, and although climate change was Biden’s top priority, his team might overestimate “the leverage that the United States retains for initiatives that depend on its example, such as the global summits the president wants to convene on climate change.”

Puzzles

Despite their important contributions, these schools present numerous puzzles. First, several offer prescriptions or describe possible contributions, rather than explain what the central global institutions for governing climate change have done and why. Many do not specify the unique contribution of summitry to spurring the authoritative and comprehensive action that climate change demands (cf. Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen et al. 2016). Few treat the full role of the G20 or touch on the G7, despite their increasing if intermittent emphasis on climate change. None deal directly with the important interaction among the G7, G20 and UN. Nor do any comprehensively cover developments in the critical years from 2015 to 2021 (Kirton and Kokotsis 2015; Engelbrekt 2016). The major work with a comprehensive, systematic, theoretically informed and analytically guided model for such a task was published before the Paris Agreement was signed (Kirton and Kokotsis 2015). No schools traced and assessed a central feature of the reconfiguration of global climate governance — the increasing number of new, ad hoc, special climate plurilateral summits, starting with the One Planet Summit in 2017. None put together the three central global summit systems of the G7, G20 and UN, and the special climate summits at the centre of the ever-growing and diversifying regime complex for climate change, or assessed how and why each tried to integrate all the key actors into a whole-of-global-governance approach.

Purpose

This book thus has four central purposes. The first is to provide a careful, comprehensive, detailed, reliable description of the individual and interactive contributions of the G7, G20 and UN summits and the special climate summits in the global governance of climate change from 2015 to mid 2021. This critical period stretches from the 2015 UN Paris Summit to the lead-up to the successor UN Glasgow Summit in 2021. The second purpose is to explain these contributions and results, by considering the impact of causal candidates at all levels of analysis, from that of a changing physical ecosystem and international political system to the individual leaders of the world’s most systemically significant countries. The third purpose is to apply and improve an established, compact causal model, grounded in international relations theory, to guide these tasks (see Appendix A). This will assist others in developing, prescribing and implementing immediate, realistic actionable policy solutions to cope with the urgent, existential challenge of climate change, in a world rapidly running out of time. Its fourth purpose is to continue the work begun by Kirton and Kokotsis (2015) in The Global Governance of Climate Change: G7, G20 and UN Leadership, which told the story up to just before the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Argument

This book argues that G7, G20 and UN performance has varied widely, individually and interactively, from 2015 to 2021, and that the addition of 10 ad hoc, plurilateral special climate summits since 2017 reconfigured global summit climate governance to spur much stronger performance in 2021 (see the section titled “Overall Performance” on page 11 for an explanation of the categories of performance). This assessment is based on a comparison of summits to their predecessors. Given the climate crisis, regular and special summitry has fallen far short of contributing to restoring and sustaining climate and ecological balance.

Four phases in this reconfiguration stand out. The first phase, producing Paris in 2015, explored in Chapter 2, saw the G7’s strong performance at Elmau, but not the G20’s small performance at Antalya, contribute to the solid performance of the UN’s Paris Summit and Agreement in December (see Appendix B).

The second phase, relying on Paris from 2016 to 2019, examined in Chapters 3–7, saw G7 and G20 leadership rotate among the G7’s substantial performance at Ise-Shima in 2016, the G20’s strong performance at Hamburg in 2017, the G7’s significant performance at Charlevoix in 2018 and the G20’s significant performance at Osaka in 2019, while the UN ministerial COPs produced a solid performance in 2017 and small ones otherwise. The G7 and G20 summits we...