SPERI Spotlight on the UN climate summit III

UN climate change negotiations have been temporally structured around a series of crunch moments: Rio, Kyoto, The Hague, Bali, Copenhagen and now Paris.  The lessons of Rio and Kyoto seemed to be that, if you give a clear deadline, you could structure the expectations of negotiators around that deadline and thereby produce a deal.

At Rio it worked; at Kyoto it ‘sort of worked’, but there were so many loose ends, notably with the design of the ‘Kyoto mechanisms’ – especially the Clean Development Mechanism – that it took four years to sort the details.  Then, at The Hague, the deadline failed to work for the first time, and they had to hurriedly fix it over the next 6 months in the deal finally signed in Marrakech in 2001.  The deadline logic started to unravel, even while it had solidified as a practice.

Since then the expectation of a strict deadline has failed to produce the outcome, if outcome is to be understood as a single treaty text (revisions to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) or a Protocol to succeed Kyoto) to address all the principal issues in the negotiations in one package deal.  At Bali it succeeded, but only in establishing an agenda for the negotiations.  At Copenhagen it failed totally and negotiations since have been playing catch-up.

This is one sort of context for the Paris negotiations.  Perhaps they will produce a deal, although the current version of the negotiating text gives no real hints as to this.  Certainly, most commentators are more optimistic than they have been at previous meetings, with the combination of Obama’s incentives to produce a positive legacy, the extensive US-Chinese coordination and a range of other developments leaving room for optimism that a deal will struck – although not of course saying anything as to how effective such a deal will be in combating climate change.

But the legacy of the deadline logic makes us pause for thought.  Whether or not a deal is struck, it should make us realise the limits of the UN negotiations themselves.  In particular, it should make us focus more carefully on the relationship between UN-based governance and the wide range of transnational climate change governance that has emerged over the last decade.

While much is known about individual initiatives in this transnational governance and the overall landscape of the initiatives is reasonably well mapped, how effective they are is not yet that well known.  But, arguably, the important and urgent question is one concerning the linkages between initiatives, as well as between those initiatives and UN system.  There is emerging research on this, but much more to be learned.  This is crucial since measuring the effectiveness of these initiatives on their own is notoriously difficult (what is the appropriate baseline measurement for an entire carbon offset certification system?).  Yet it is likely to be in these interactions that transformative shifts in investment in renewables, energy efficiency and so on could be triggered, rather than in any individual initiative on its own.