Success and failure in environmental regime formation -- Shared knowledge and collective action in global environmental politics -- Out of thin air: the regime on stratospheric ozone depletion -- No pie in the sky: the regime on transboundary air pollution -- Lost in the woods: international forest negotiations -- At sea: international coral reefs management -- Knowledge, power and interests in environmental cooperation
The proliferation of environmental agreements is a defining feature of modern international relations that has attracted considerable academic attention. Typically focusing on happy-end stories of policy creation, the cooperation literature often ignores issue areas where policy agreements are absent. Science and International Environmental Policy introduces nonregimes into the study of global governance, and compares successes with failures in the formation of environmental treaties. By exploring collective decisions not to cooperate, it explains why international institutions form but also w
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AbstractWhy are some institutions without any policy powers or output? This study documents the efforts by governments to create empty international institutions whose mandates deprive them of any capacity for policy formulation or implementation. Examples include the United Nations Forum on Forests, the Copenhagen Accord on Climate Change, and the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. Research is based on participation in twenty-one rounds of negotiations over ten years and interviews with diplomats, policymakers, and observers. The article introduces the concept of empty institutions, provides evidence from three empirical cases, theorizes their political functions, and discusses theoretical implications and policy ramifications. Empty institutions are deliberately designed not to deliver and serve two purposes. First, they are political tools for hiding failure at negotiations, by creating a public impression of policy progress. Second, empty institutions are "decoys" that distract public scrutiny and legitimize collective inaction, by filling the institutional space in a given issue area and by neutralizing pressures for genuine policy. Contrary to conventional academic wisdom, institutions can be raised as obstacles that preempt governance rather than facilitate it.
The Paris Agreement constitutes a political success in climate negotiations and traditional state diplomacy, and offers important implications for academic research. Based on participatory research, the article examines the political dynamics in Paris and highlights features of the process that help us understand the outcome. It describes battles on key contentious issues behind closed doors, provides a summary and evaluation of the new agreement, identifies political winners and losers, and offers theoretical explanations of the outcome. The analysis emphasizes process variables and underscores the role of persuasion, argumentation, and organizational strategy. Climate diplomacy succeeded because the international conversation during negotiations induced cognitive change. Persuasive arguments about the economic benefits of climate action altered preferences in favor of policy commitments at both national and international levels.
This article clarifies the outcome of the Copenhagen climate conference from the perspective of a government delegate. Access behind closed doors reveals the full extent of the damage. The failure at Copenhagen was worse than our worstcase scenario but should not obscure a bigger and brighter picture. Aggregate climate governance is in healthy condition that contrasts with the plight of multilateral climate governance. While the multilateral UN process is damaged, multilevel governance comprising regional, national and local climate policies worldwide is steadily gaining speed. The challenge to the academic community is to develop a composite measure of multilevel governance that captures aggregate public and nonstate policy initiatives at various levels.
AbstractUN negotiations on climate change entail a fundamental transformation of the global economy and constitute the single most important process in world politics. This is an account of the 2009 Copenhagen summit from the perspective of a government delegate. The article offers a guide to global climate negotiations, tells the story of Copenhagen from behind closed doors, and assesses the current state of global climate governance. It outlines key policy issues under negotiation, the positions and policy preferences of key countries and coalitions, the outcomes of Copenhagen, and achievements and failures in climate negotiations to date. The Copenhagen Accord is a weak agreement designed to mask the political failure of the international community to create a global climate treaty. However, climate policy around the world is making considerable progress. While the UN negotiations process is deadlocked, multilevel climate governance is thriving.
The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate, Andrew E. Dessler and Edward A. Parson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 190.Among policy issues struggling for attention on political agendas, climate change is particularly consequential, by virtue of its large-scale negative consequences for all human communities and ecosystems and the high policy costs of remedial action. The stakes are singularly high, yet the general public is not well informed about the reality of climate change. Even the concerned citizen seeking information gets lost between tendentious sketches in the mass media, on the one hand, and practically illegible specialized literature, on the other. Dessler and Parson's work is a welcome middle ground that provides clearly comprehensible scientifically validated information on all aspects of the issue. The book summarizes and evaluates current information on climate change, focusing primarily on multilateral scientific assessments conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It offers a balanced review of the state of knowledge, and carefully delineates the bounds of scientific agreement and uncertainty.
Global forest politics reveal surprising impacts of environmental norms on state behavior at the international level. Negotiations regarding deforestation have repeatedly failed to produce a policy agreement. Instead of abandoning the deadlocked talks, governments created the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF), a hollow entity deliberately deprived of decision-making powers. Various theoretical perspectives fail to explain why states create blank international institutions without policy mandates. Several arguments are advanced here. First, a global norm of environmental multilateralism (NEM) helps explain the creation of the UNFF as well as universal state participation in it. Second, such "good" norms can have negative consequences in world politics. NEM prohibits states from disengaging from failed political initiatives, and fosters the creation of hollow institutions that nourish skepticism about the effectiveness of global governance. Finally, global forestry defies the widespread academic notion that norms, institutions and governance are coterminous. Sometimes states design "decoy" institutions whose function is to preempt governance.
