SPERI spotlight on the UN climate summit V

Today, the 21st ‘Conference of the Parties’ to the UNFCCC begins in Paris. The climate of international affairs has changed dramatically in recent weeks. Yet the four contributors to this blog series point to troubling continuities. They highlight, in different ways, the ongoing failure of multilateral climate negotiations to respond adequately to the political-economic context in which climate change and a myriad of other ecological issues arise, and within which they must be addressed. Contemporary capitalist political economies confront an ecological crisis in which they are themselves implicated, and of which the accumulation of greenhouse gasses is but one symptom. Viewed in this way, climate-change mitigation and political-economic change are inseparable issues.

For Matthew Paterson, the focus of climate negotiations on (scientifically insufficient) emissions targets misses the crucial issue of how changes in investment, production and consumption can be mobilised to achieve them. He argues that the UNFCCC must evolve into a mechanism able to facilitate and coordinate changes among the preferences and behaviour of a variety of different interest groups that comprise the international political economy.

If Paterson’s contribution brings the international political economic context into view, Greg Fry’s draws our attention to the ongoing relevance of domestic political economies and their associated growth models. He notes the role of high per capita emissions in shaping the preferences and tactics of Australia and New Zealand, whose opposition to tighter emissions targets is tantamount to a position of ‘sink thy neighbour’ for their small Pacific island negotiating partners.

The importance of domestic political economies in shaping national negotiating positions is sometimes neglected in the literature on ‘global governance’, wherein there is a tendency to speak of so-called ‘state actors’ and juxtapose them with supposedly distinct categories such as ‘business actors’. This obscures the reality that the kinds of intervention that national and sub-national state officials are willing or able to make are shaped by the way that power, income and influence are distributed among the various societal interests groups that exist within their jurisdiction. The interests of industries and sectors that are integral to a country’s growth model, for instance, are likely strongly to influence the negotiating position of ‘state actors’. This is unfortunate if, as in the case in Australia, one of these industries is coal-mining.

The issue, of course, is how robust environmental policies can be advanced in the face of such conservative forces. Hayley Stevenson’s injunction is that ‘bottom up’ deliberation of environmental policy is a prerequisite of its successful implementation. She argues that without public debate ambitious international commitments cannot be translated into public support for effective action. Her argument hints at the importance of the relative strength and strategies of the domestic social interest groups that animate social change. Such groups include social movements, organised representatives of industries and sectors, trade unions and so forth. The conflicts, compromises and alliances that emerge among these groups are the very stuff of domestic political-economic analysis, shaping the way in particular that associated growth models develop. The emergence of more ecologically sustainable growth models (or indeed ‘post-growth models’) implies a strategy to reconfigure these social conflicts, compromises and alliances in a way that attracts support for the corresponding ‘green’ forms of investment, production and consumption.

I consider in more detail what such a strategy might entail presently. However, it’s important to note immediately that the scope for domestic political-economic change is unquestionably shaped by international governance. Yet, rather than enabling the ecological restructuring of domestic political economies, the mechanisms that have emerged from the UNFCCC have, thus far at least, largely conformed with the prevailing ‘neoliberalising’ dynamic in the international political economy.