GEG guest blogger Ryan Hogarth reviews the outcomes of the Copenhagen Summit for climate change governance. While the substance may be thin, he argues that the shift in decision-making procedure is significant. This post was the winner of the GEG blog competition ‘Governing Climate Change After Copenhagen’.
In a 2006 article, Joanna Depledge argued that the descent of global climate talks into ‘rancorous relationships, stagnating issues and stifled debates’ was the result of ’ossification’ in the global climate change regime. Along the same metaphorical lines, one might argue that the degeneration in substance from the Kyoto Protocol, a complex treaty comprising legally-binding quantitative targets and sophisticated market-based mechanisms, to that of the Copenhagen Accord, a dud, is the result fossilization or putrefaction in the regime.
However, the significance of the Copenhagen Accord lay not in the substance of the agreement, but in who agreed, and how.
For better or worse, the brinkmanship demonstrated by US President Barack Obama that resulted in the Copenhagen Accord signals a shift in the decision-making procedures that govern international diplomacy on climate change, and could effectively usher in an entirely new climate change regime.
Obama’s closed door dealing was reminiscent of that of Jan Pronk, the President of COP-6, which led to the breakdown of negotiations at the Hague in 2000. In an effort to salvage an agreement after talks reached a deadlock, Pronk, like Obama, jettisoned years of bureaucratic negotiations on technical legal texts and tabled a document comprising vague political agreements on principles. In both cases, the legal status of the respective document was unclear and delegates were not given enough time to respond.
However, Obama went one step further by prematurely depicting the document to the press as a done deal. In doing so, and in presenting the Copenhagen Accord to the rest of the parties as an ultimatum, Obama abandoned standard decision-making procedures of the UN.
Grubb and Farhana argued of Pronk’s actions, which holds true for Obama’s as well, that they reflected the extent of the ‘procedural abuse’ negotiators had come to regard as necessary to achieve ‘results’. This presumed necessity was the manifestation of ossification in the climate change regime, whereby progressive agreements became impossible to reach. Depledge attributed the ossification to two characteristics of the regime: the rigidity of political alliances, such as the G-77 which consistently ran climate negotiations into a north-south divide; and the built-in high threshold for decision-making as a result of the requirement to achieve consensus for virtually all agreements. The difficulty in achieving agreement between all member states bent the regime towards weak decisions and endless impasse. Depledge contended that reform on voting rules was impossible, as it in itself would require consensus:
‘The consensus rule for decision-making thus reflects, and in turn reproduces, the ossification of the regime.’
Interestingly, the few cases of progress since the Kyoto Protocol have resulted from informal workshops similar to the ‘Ad Hoc Working Group’ that produced the Copenhagen Accord. In such informal settings, smaller groups of delegates could speak more freely on highly politicized topics and work together to build solutions that transcended divides. However, unlike the Copenhagen Accord, deals were formerly always brought back to the formal arena for wider scrutiny before being finalized. According to Depledge, this process had mixed results in generating improvements in formal negotiations.
In light of the ossification in the climate change regime, some would argue that Obama’s closed-door dealing with a few nations at the expense of the rest was pragmatic. Mexican President Felipe Calderón was perhaps alluding to this pragmatism in his post-conference announcement:
‘We need to establish new formulas and new rules that will enable us to make [commonalities take precedence over] differences; to understand that the rule of consensus should not necessarily be a permanent veto rule to agreements and the will of the people.’
In contrast, Grubb argued that consensus is necessary to ensure compliance:
‘Collective decision making is the only guarantee that the difficult political, economic, and social choices made by today’s policy-makers will be understood, respected and implemented by tomorrow’s voters.’
The consensus principle also functions to ensure that each country has a voice in the decision-making process.
COP-15 will not be remembered for producing a substantive agreement on climate change. It may always be deemed a failure. However, the conference was not without consequence. The adoption of the Copenhagen Accord produced by five nations in closed-door negotiations signals an impending change towards a regime without the decision-making requirement of consensus.
If the motivation of those five nations was merely to maintain hegemony by excluding the least developed nations from the table, then the new regime will only be capable of generating disregarded treaties and reinforcing the status quo. However, if (a big if) the heavy emitters possess the genuine political will to agree on legally-binding targets, then the more dynamic decision-making procedures of the new regime are the only means by which the entrenched political cleavages of the old can be bypassed and bridged.
In the eleventh hour at Copenhagen, ossification in the climate change regime gave way to deliberation. In that sense, there was progress.
- Ryan Hogarth is an MSc student in the Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics.
