Suchergebnisse

Introduction / Carola Klöck, Paula Castro, Florian Weiler and Lau Øfjord Blaxekjær -- Fragmentation in the climate change negotiations : taking stock of the evolving coalition dynamics / Paula Castro and Carola Klöck -- The role of coalitions in the climate change negotiations / Florian Weiler and Paula Castro -- The temporal emergence of developing country coalitions / Nicholas Chan -- Pacific Island states and 30 years of global climate change negotiations / George Carter -- How the Cartagena Dialogue brought UN climate negotiations back on track and helped deliver the Paris Agreement / Lau Øfjord Blaxekjær -- The narrative position of the like-minded developing countries in global climate negotiations / Lau Øfjord Blaxekjær, Bård Lahn, Tobias Dan Nielsen, Lucia Green-Weiskel and Fang Fang -- One voice, one Africa : the African Group of Negotiators / Simon Chin-Yee, Tobias Nielsen And Lau Øfjord Blaxekjær -- AILAC and ALBA : differing visions of Latin America in climate change negotiations / Joshua Watts -- Conclusions / Florian Weiler, Paula Castro and Carola Klöck.

This introductory chapter sets the scene for the present volume on cooperation and coalitions in the climate change negotiations. Coalitions – understood here as cooperative efforts between at least two parties to obtain common goals – come in many forms and shapes. Although central to multilateral negotiations, they have received surprisingly little academic attention. We review research on coalitions, with a focus on the climate change negotiations. Our review shows that we still have a poor understanding of coalition formation, maintenance, and effectiveness. We then outline how the various chapters of this volume address this gap and contribute to our understanding of coalitions in multilateral (climate) negotiations.

This introductory chapter sets the scene for the present volume on cooperation and coalitions in the climate change negotiations. Coalitions – understood here as cooperative efforts between at least two parties to obtain common goals – come in many forms and shapes. Although central to multilateral negotiations, they have received surprisingly little academic attention. We review research on coalitions, with a focus on the climate change negotiations. Our review shows that we still have a poor understanding of coalition formation, maintenance, and effectiveness. We then outline how the various chapters of this volume address this gap and contribute to our understanding of coalitions in multilateral (climate) negotiations.

Yamin and Depledge (2004) argue that the UNFCCC regime is characterised by formal and informal coalitions, alliances, and political groups. Blaxekjær and Nielsen (2014) have demonstrated how new groups since COP15 have transformed the narrative positions and negotiations space in the UNFCCC, creating bridges as well as new trenches between North and South in relation to the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibility. As the UNFCCC regime readjusts after COP21, these new narrative positions and negotiations space should be re-examined. Through original data such as official statements from groups, observations at UN climate conferences (2011-2015), and interviews with delegates and experts, the paper analyses the narrative position of the Like Minded group of Developing Countries (LMDC), an influential political group under the UNFCCC established in 2012. Following Blaxekjær and Nielsen's (2014) policy-oriented narrative approach to IR the paper analyses LMDC's identity, the problems identified by LMDC and the solutions to these problems, and the paper identifies five central characteristics of the dominant LMDC narrative. The analysis also touches upon what narrative techniques are used in constructing the LMDC identity. This framework reveals the embeddedness of narratives in practice as they unfold in the formation of new alliances and ruptures in old ones. This paper contributes to the emerging Narrative in IR research agenda with a policy-oriented model of analysis. The paper also contributes to the broader research agenda on the post-Paris UNFCCC regime, and argues that as long as CBDR/RC is a major unresolved issue – an essentially contested concept – as long will the LMDC play a prominent role in the UNFCCC regime.

In fisheries management—as in environmental governance more generally—regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives that make easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in panaceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts have suggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panacea mindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolkit to distill the vast amount of information on fisheries governance into an easily accessible, open, on-line database of checklists, case studies, and related resources. Toolkits like this could be used in many governance settings to challenge users' understandings of a policy's impacts and help them develop solutions better tailored to their particular context. They would not replace the more comprehensive approaches found in the literature but would rather be an intermediate step away from the problem of panaceas.

In fisheries management—as in environmental governance more generally—regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives that make easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in panaceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts have suggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panacea mindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolkit to distill the vast amount of information on fisheries governance into an easily accessible, open, on-line database of checklists, case studies, and related resources. Toolkits like this could be used in many governance settings to challenge users' understandings of a policy's impacts and help them develop solutions better tailored to their particular context. They would not replace the more comprehensive approaches found in the literature but would rather be an intermediate step away from the problem of panaceas.