Climate Change in World Politics

J. Vogler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137273406
• eBook ISBN: 9781137273413
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

John Vogler examines the international politics of climate change, with a focus on the United Nations Framework Convention (UNFCCC). He considers how the international system treats the problem of climate change, analysing the ways in which this has been defined by the international community and the interests and alignments of state governments.

1

Introduction

There are already a great many books about climate change and some very good ones about its international dimensions. Any author venturing into this crowded field needs to provide a justification. Here is mine. It is essentially twofold. First, that the importance of international politics, in the sense of relations between sovereign states rather than the transnational and non-state phenomena that now occupy so much attention in academic studies of the international relations of global environmental change, deserves if not re-instatement then certainly a re-statement. Second, those studies of international environmental cooperation, now commonly described as ‘global governance’, have become rather divorced from the world political context that surrounds them. This might not matter so much for functional negotiations on highly technical aspects of transborder pollution, but it will be significant for the long-running attempt to create a comprehensive and effective international climate regime. From the outset this has been widely, but not universally, recognised as something of critical importance for planetary survival and has been accorded a political status which marks it out from more mundane environmental issue areas. Conferences of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have been attended at the highest political level by presidents and prime ministers. United Nations (UN) Secretary Generals have summoned them to take action and climate change issues have appeared on the agenda of the Security Council, Group of 8 (G8) and, indeed, most other leading international organisations. Furthermore, the international climate regime has been constructed during 20 years of the most profound change in the international system, from which it cannot have remained isolated.

It is very understandable that much writing and research on the international relations of global environmental change has avoided a ‘state-centric’ approach. The interstate climate regime has moved at a glacial pace since the signature of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. There have been numerous disappointments and frustrations as the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties (COP) of 2009 and other meetings failed to match expectations. In fact, in ways which are considered in Chapters 3 and 8 of this book, the climate regime has not only been becalmed but in some respects has moved backwards. In sharp contrast, and frequently as the direct result of perceived ‘deadlock’ in international negotiations, there has been a flowering of non-state, sub-state and transnational activity. This has occurred with the activities of cities (Bulkeley and Schroeder, 2012) and in the corporate sector (Clapp, 1998) to the extent that private governance is now a very important component of the academic study of global environmental politics (Pattberg, 2007).

One of the first books to address the international relations of the environment, published at the time of the signature of the UN climate change Convention, formulated the problem as follows:

Can a fragmented and often highly conflictual political system made up of over 170 sovereign states and numerous other actors achieve the high (and historically unprecedented) levels of co-operation and policy co-ordination needed to manage environmental problems on a global scale?

(Hurrell and Kingsbury, 1992, p. 1)

After 20 years of experience with the climate regime many analysts would be tempted to answer in the negative. Disillusionment with interstate cooperation goes deeper than the specific failure to produce a new and comprehensive climate agreement. It should be seen in the context of a more general concern about the continuing viability of state-based political forms. The final test of the climate regime will be its effectiveness in providing a means to manage the global atmospheric commons. Commentators have generally been dismissive of what has been achieved so far. Treaties have been made that ‘are easy to agree on’ yet ‘had almost no impact on the emissions that cause global warming’ (Victor, 2011, p. 3). The question of whether this is true, and likely to continue to be so, forms the substance of the concluding chapter of this book.

Green thinkers and radical ecologists have, in fact, identified the state itself as part of the global environmental problem. In these circumstances, international cooperation between state authorities could be a potentially damaging distraction.¹ The question of the desirability and relevance of international environmental cooperation has thus been part of a broader political and philosophical debate concerning the possibility of a ‘green state’ (Eckersley, 2004). A distrust of existing forms of state and government runs deep in green politics and, at the international level, was coupled with an enthusiasm for an emergent ‘global civil society’ represented by the very large number of environmental and development non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working on climate-related issues and appearing in force at the annual UNFCCC COPs. The failure of state governments to take decisive action and the apparent weakness of interstate processes led to a search for political alternatives in novel forms of discursive democracy and ‘networked governance’ (Stevenson and Dryzek, 2014).

In the light of all this, what remains for international cooperation? The considered conclusion of over 30 researchers working within the ‘Earth Systems Governance Project’ addresses this question:

New governance mechanisms cannot take away from the urgent need for effective and decisive governmental action, both at the national and inter-governmental level. Governance beyond the nation state can sometimes be a useful supplement especially when they avoid being captured by powerful interests and instead focus on problem amelioration. Yet even for this, it requires support and oversight from national governments.

(Biermann et al., 2012, p. 5)

In an attempt to defend the practice of international environmental cooperation between governments, I have argued that there are certain functions that need to be performed by nation-states as presently constituted, at least within any time frame that is relevant to dealing with the climate change problem (Vogler, 2005). Establishing what these may be is important because it can provide a perspective on what may reasonably be expected of international cooperation. All too often a lack of clarity about the, sometimes limited, contribution that can be made to the solution of problems at the international level can lead to disillusionment and a rejection of the entire process. The point has frequently been made that problems that are conceptualised on a global scale do not necessarily require fully global solutions. All that may be required is an orchestration of local and regional actions. Norm creation and propagation is one such orchestrating function with which the UN system, since 1972, has been involved. A famous example, written in the 1992 Climate Convention and extensively referenced elsewhere is the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ (CBDR-RC).

Chapter 2 of this book takes up the issue of how prevalent international norms and understandings ‘frame’ the issue of climate change, defining both substance and the limits of the possible. Much effort has been expended on encouraging private sector funding for climate mitigation and adaptation, but it remains the case that it is only state authorities that are in a position to mobilise the resources required to build capacity among less-developed countries and to provide aid and assistance. Both are highly significant elements in the operation and politics of the climate regime. The same point can be made for information-gathering and scientific work. There is really no alternative to international cooperation and funding of bodies such as the, significantly named, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The private sector may undertake pharmaceutical and other types of commercially relevant research but it will lack the incentives and authority to engage in basic climate science and the compilation of inventory data.

To this list of state functions in the international environmental realm one might normally add the regulation of transboundary flows of pollution and goods, and there are parts of the global climate problem for which this is relevant activity. However, the fundamental requirement for interstate action arises from an understanding that the atmosphere constitutes one of the global commons. Because it is beyond sovereign jurisdiction there are incentives that drive excessive exploitation in terms of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) with the ‘tragic’ result of dangerous climate change. State authorities need to impose some regulatory control to mitigate these emissions, in the same way as other commons are governed through voluntary action by users. The critical issue, reflecting the competition and distrust that exist between users, is to ensure that ‘free riding’ does not occur. Users of the commons will need to be assured that any efforts that they make to reduce their polluting emissions will not be exploited by others who fail to make equivalent reductions. This is, in essence, the economist’s view of climate change as a collective action problem where climate change represents the world’s greatest market failure in the provision of the ultimate public good. Here, the role of international cooperation is expressed in terms of action to: ‘… overcome the market failures that lead to the under-provision of public goods where individuals or countries face an incentive to free ride on the actions of others’ (Stern, 2007, p. 45).

In the global system only cooperating governments are in a position to agree and impose such controls, and this remains the central functional requirement of an effective climate regime. Radical critics sometimes portray the state as being trapped within the global structure of capitalist accumulation and incapable of independent agency. This is unduly fatalistic, for there is evidence to suggest that governments have on occasion summoned up the will to make the changes required for, to quote a famous example, the restitution of the stratospheric ozone layer (in fact one of the problems with the climate regime was that, as will be argued in Chapter 2, it was overly influenced by the success of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer).

It also continues to be the case that nation-states remain the focus of loyalty and are, in the absence of a central world government, the only agents possessing sufficient capability and legitimacy to orchestrate the regulatory action necessary to sustain the global atmospheric common. A serious qualification needs to be added concerning the undifferentiated use of the category ‘nation state’. In reality we are dealing with a class of state actors which do have effective governments and control of resources, to which we may add the European Union (EU), when acting within its climate-related competences. A substantial number of the state Parties to the UNFCCC would not fulfil these requirements. They are often miserably poor, highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and lacking in resources, effective internal government and the capability to engage in anything more than minimal participation in the climate regime. It is for this reason that the provision of aid and capacity building represents such a significant element of the climate regime.

However, it is evident that a great deal of the activity to be observed in international climate politics does not necessarily accord with the stated purposes of the regime. The pursuit of very specific national interests, often determined by questions of competitiveness and energy security, will be evident alongside regional conflicts and the politics of organisational status within the UN system. The UNFCCC should be conceived of as one arena among many in a long-term North–South confrontation over economic development and environmental responsibility and justice. It is also infected by struggles for recognition and prestige which have always interacted with the dynamics of power relations between states. In the background are the momentous structural changes that have transformed the global economy and international political system since the beginnings of the climate regime in the 1980s. Such things are, or perhaps ought to be, the stock-in-trade of the academic study of International Relations (IR).

Climate change and environmental issues in general have often sat uneasily within the discipline of IR. There are several reasons for this. Climate change was for a long time seen as a rather specialised area, dependent on an understanding of a contested and difficult science and negotiated by technical experts operating within an arcane and complicated regime. The overwhelming bulk of scholarship was performed within a rational choice and liberal-institutionalist paradigm that took as its main problematic the solution of collective action problems. This has been observed by outside critics for some time (Smith, 1993). There is no space here to review the extensive literature on international environmental politics, a task that has been ably performed elsewhere (O’Neil, K., 2009), but institutionalist approaches are still prominent alongside studies of NGOs and transnational activity. Their shared, and very understandable, preoccupation is with governance. The difficulty is that, as I have argued elsewhere, this is often to the exclusion of politics (Vogler, 2012). Approaches to IR that are prominent in the discipline, including realist power politics, normative analysis, English School reflection on the nature of international society and constructivist studies of the politics of identity, have not been very evident in the climate change literature. In consequence, it may be argued that the international climate regime tends to be treated endogenously, in both empirical and theoretical isolation. Much of the literature on international environmental cooperation can also be characterised as having a functionalist orientation towards the conclusion of effective international agreements. The functional approach to IR has a long history that refers back to the great public international unions of the nineteenth century and to later schemes by David Mitrany (1975) and others to circumvent the sovereign sensitivities of statesmen, and their explicitly political differences, by organising low-level cooperation across national borders for the solution of shared economic, social and welfare problems. A review of work by Oran Young (2010), who has been the leading theorist in the field, makes the point explicitly:

One of the greatest challenges to improving our understanding of global environmental governance is acknowledging the excessive functionalism of much recent research … It is entirely possible that institutions are also created for functionalist purposes – but it is not axiomatic. Institutions may also be functional for states precisely because they are weak. Politicians may find value in supporting institutions that provide little more than symbolic benefit … The strong functionalism implicit in many strands of research on environmental governance renders them unable to make sense of these dynamics. It also leads them to systematically underestimate the political obstacles facing some environmental regimes.

(Marcoux, 2011, p. 147)

This book attempts to take up this challenge by conducting a political investigation of the ways in which the international community has sought to deal with the complex and difficult problem of climate change. It asks questions about how and why the climate problem has been framed in a particular and fragmentary way, leading to responses that appear to neglect some of the key socioeconomic drivers of the enhanced greenhouse effect. It goes on to consider the motivations and national interests of the state Parties to the UNFCCC and the alliances that dominate the politics of that institution. Part of the explanation of why it has proved so difficult to arrive at a comprehensive post-Kyoto climate agreement, is to be found in the incompatibility of perceived national economic interests and the disconnection between national responsibility and vulnerability to effects of alterations in the climate. But this is by no means the whole story. There is also the indissoluble relationship between the climate regime and the demands for restitution and fairness that motivates developing countries, leading to the issue of what exactly ‘climate justice’ means at the international level and whether it is separable from the pursuit of material national interests. In common with many areas of international life, symbolic politics is an evident dimension of international climate discussions, and it will be amplified when the climate is linked to security issues or discussed at the level of heads of state or government. There is a need to consider who benefits from prestige- and recognition-seeking activities and what they may mean for the possibilities of agreement.

Underlying any international political analysis are questions of power in both its relational and structural forms. How is power exercised within the climate regime and to what effect? Questions of national interest and motivation involve agency, but agency is constrained and conditioned by structures. Much of the research on the climate regime tends to be focused on the regime itself, rather than the wider structural context of the international system. A further, and very difficult, question concerns the extent to which the fate of the regime, and power relations within it, are determined by the overall international economic and political structures. Most significant in all of this is the shifting relationship between the climate regime and trends in the wider international system within which it is embedded. At the primary level of analysis this denotes the international system of states, but beneath this are the shifting and crisis-ridden structures of the global economy which have driven both the exponential rise in GHGs and the alteration in interstate power balances. This is especially important in an era when these structures have been subject to very substantial changes.

In grappling with these questions I have resorted to various types of IR theory, where appropriate and where they provide tools of analysis for the dissection of national interest or the influence of structure. This may be criticised as theoretical eclecticism, but I found it useful to think through the classic dialogues between liberalism and realism or between communitarianism and cosmopolitanism in relation to the specifics of the climate regime. In Chapter 2, I have used the framework of regime analysis to organise discussion of the way the climate ‘issue area’ was defined, and in Chapter 3 the description of the UNFCCC follows established practice in terms of its outline of principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures. The influence of constructivism is evident in the discussion of ‘framing and fragmentation’ in Chapter 2 and again, to a lesser extent, in the discussion of EU identity creation in Chapter 6.²

An outline of the book

The book is organised as follows. It commences with a discussion of the way in which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Framing and Fragmentation
• 3 The UNFCCC Regime
• 4 Interests and Alignments
• 5 The Pursuit of Justice
• 6 Recognition and Prestige
• 7 Structural Change and Climate Politics
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index