The success or failure of Copenhagen will depend not only on the substance of the deal but on the spirit and message of the talks as well. Negotiators inside the Bella Center in Copenhagen will no doubt go down to the wire on commas and clauses. For the ordinary citizen, the legitimacy of any climate agreement will depend on answers to four questions.
-
07 Dec 2009 / Arunabha Ghosh
-
13 Jul 2009 / Arunabha Ghosh
Can 192 countries agree on a global deal to confront climate change when 17 economies cannot? For those watching the proceedings at the G8 summit in L’Aquila last week, this must be a nagging question in the lead up to the much-anticipated meeting on climate change in Copenhagen in December. The signs are mixed but [...]
-
30 Jun 2009 / Arunabha Ghosh
Arunabha Ghosh writes in Indian business newspaper, The Financial Express, that developing countries face a triple challenge of increasing income growth, building energy infrastructure, and confronting climate change.
In her speech to Parliament last week, President Patil declared that one of the top priorities for her government would be ‘energy security and environment protection’. The intention [...] -
30 Jun 2009 / Arunabha Ghosh
Arunabha Ghosh writes in Indian business newspaper, Mint, that reconciling the competing concerns of poverty reduction in and lower emissions from developing countries depends upon a credible multilateral mechanism for technology transfer.
Is it possible for India to make a significant contribution towards mitigating climate change without undermining its growth and poverty-reduction imperatives?
Indian policymakers view calls [...] -
20 Mar 2009 / Arunabha Ghosh
Trade is one of the first casualties of a global economic crisis. We saw this happen during the Great Depression, after the oil shocks of the 1970s, in the early 1980s, and now the first contraction in global trade since 1982. A reformed and robust trade monitoring system should be among the top priorities for world leaders meeting in London in April and beyond. Many argue that the priority for governments should be to ‘fix’ the crisis first; reforming the governance of the global trade (and financial) system could come later. That would indeed be a mistaken strategy and a lost opportunity. It would be mistaken because better trade monitoring could determine the difference between a coordinated response and a deepening crisis. It would be a lost opportunity for reform because the current crisis sharply exposes the deficiencies in trade governance, which if tolerated any longer would only serve to delegitimise a rule-based trade system.
-
28 Nov 2008 / Arunabha Ghosh
The UNFCCC Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland from 1-12 December comes right in the middle of climate negotiations launched last year in Bali and scheduled to be completed in Copenhagen in 2009. Developing countries have submitted several proposals. Will Poznan give momentum to discussions on the governance of a post-2012 climate regime?
-
30 Oct 2008 / Arunabha Ghosh
Don’t waste your energy tweaking at the margins.
This was the crux of Hunter Nottage’s presentation at GEG on 24 October, on the integration of developing countries in the WTO legal regime.
Nottage is Counsel at the Advisory Centre on WTO Law, a Geneva-based non-profit organisation tasked with offering litigation, legal advice, and legal training services to developing countries. Established six-and-a-half years ago, the ACWL aims to reduce the asymmetry of access to the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Mechanism by responding to financial constraints and lack of legal expertise that many developing countries face. It has participated in 20 per cent of all DSM activity and lost only one case to date. But the core of Nottage’s presentation was to challenge some of the received wisdom, arguing that in order to improve access to the DSM, it was necessary to reform trade rules rather than focus on procedural changes for disputes.
