Climate Governance is Failing Us : We All Need to Respond

Peer reviewed introduction to the Special Issue on Global Climate Change Policy: Post-Copenhagen Discord, guest edited by Chris Riedy and Ian M. McGregor, University of Technology, Sydney.


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Climate Governance is Failing Us PORTAL, vol. 8, no. 3, September 2011. 3 dioxide levels in the atmosphere to 350ppm (Hansen et al. 2008).Second, the emission reductions pledged by countries to date are not sufficient to meet even the objective listed in the Cancun Agreements of limiting temperature rise to no more than two degrees.Climate Action Tracker (Hohne et al. 2011) estimates they will lead to temperature rise of between 2.6 and 4 degrees.Third, the Copenhagen Accord and the Cancun Agreements are non-binding.If countries fail to achieve the emission reductions they have pledged, then temperature rises will be even higher than the range listed above.The past record of nations in meeting their emission reduction commitments does not inspire confidence in the emission reductions being achieved.Fourth, serious barriers exist to the establishment of a binding treaty, including ongoing disputes over the legal form of a treaty, its relationship to the Kyoto Protocol, financing mechanisms, and the fair share of emission reductions that different nations should take on.Most developing countries support a Second Commitment Period of the Kyoto Protocol alongside an agreement on Long-term Cooperative Action, while many developed countries are resisting an updated Kyoto Protocol.Fifth, the requirement for international consensus on decisions under the UNFCCC makes progress painfully slow and subject to veto by nations pursuing what they see as their national interest.Some have questioned whether an effective international response to climate change is even possible under such a system (Naim 2009).
We should not be surprised that agreement on an effective global climate governance system is proving so difficult.As Mike Hulme (2009)  (which is essentially the same group), is a more promising route to overcoming barriers to an international agreement on climate change response.This is a utilitarian position, based on the observation that an agreement to reduce emissions between the 20 nations responsible for 80 percent of emissions would essentially solve the problem.
McGee positions minilateralism as an emergent discourse in the field of climate governance.He assesses the key objections to minilateralism, most worrying of which is the exclusion of those most impacted by climate change from the negotiations under many minilateral models.He demonstrates that minilateralism is inconsistent with both cosmopolitan and deliberative theories of democracy and therefore does not advocate a solely minilateral approach to climate governance.However, McGee draws on John Dryzek's work to argue that emergent discourses that gather power either replace existing discourses or are accommodated into them.He sees potential for some of the positive elements of a minilateral discourse to be incorporated into the UNFCCC, without compromising democracy.For example, the UNFCCC could form 'a peak body of the twenty most responsible, vulnerable and capable states plus representatives of key NGO groups' that would become an influential advisor to the process without having ultimate decision making power.
Whether international climate negotiations are multilateral or minilateral, some key challenges remain unchanged.One of these is the continuing failure of the United States to commit to strong domestic action on climate change and the critical role this plays in undermining trust in the international negotiations.As the largest historical emitter of

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Climate Governance is Failing Us PORTAL, vol. 8, no. 3, September 2011. 6 greenhouse gases, the second largest current emitter and one of the highest per capita emitters in the world, other nations look to the USA to show leadership in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.To date, that leadership has been sadly lacking.The remaining papers look at alternatives to the current system of State-based international negotiations through the UNFCCC.Chris Riedy and Jade Herriman investigate the potential to develop a system of global climate governance that is more consistent with principles of deliberative democracy.Deliberative democracy puts talking, rather than voting, at the heart of democracy.In For Goodman, the prevailing climate responses, such as carbon trading and offsets, are maladaptive in that they serve to defend a regime that ultimately needs to undergo transformative change.These responses are part of the system that created the problem and will therefore fail.Central to Goodman's argument is the idea of climate justice and the contention that the current climate governance regime is unjust and needs to be disrupted.The recent emergence of the Occupy movement, drawing attention to economic injustice and calling for economic transformation, seems to add further weight to Goodman's argument.

Bob
Brinkmann and Sandra Garren provide a comprehensive examination of the recent development of climate change policy in the United States through the Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the courts.As the only major developed nation not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the United States has long been a drag on international climate change response.Brinkmann and Garren argue that, while there were some hopeful developments under President Obama, the election of the Republican-dominated 112th Congress, with many members of Congress openly questioning the science of anthropogenic climate change, has dashed any hope for domestic legislation to respond to climate change.Brinkmann and Garren look at alternative responses, particularly the regulation of greenhouse gases by the EPA and the use of the court system to litigate for stronger greenhouse gas controls.It is the former that remains the greatest source of hope for greenhouse gas emission reduction in the United States.But it is only a small glimmer of hope in a political landscape that seems gridlocked on climate change and many other issues.The prospects of the United States playing a leadership role in the international response to climate change seem remote at this time.

Riedy and McGregor Climate Governance is Failing Us
the climate governance system is failing humanity and is in need of repair.However, the authors have very different prescriptions for reform of climate governance, ranging from minor reforms to radical overturning of the existing regime.
points out, there are many reasons to disagree on climate change.It is a problem with some unprecedented characteristics that challenge governance systems like never before.It is a global commons problem, requiring simultaneous action by diverse governments, businesses and people on a scale that has never been achieved.It is a creeping problem; people perceive climate change as affecting other people in other places and times, rather than Brian Fisher's article assumes that the UNFCCC will remain a key site for global climate governance but argues for an important shift in the focus of the negotiations.He contends that the negotiations are hampered by the lack of a shared long-term vision and by the narrow focus on emission reduction targets and timetables.Seeking an alternative approach, Fisher looks closely at the wording of Article 2 of the UNFCCC, which sets an objective of avoiding dangerous interference with the climate system.Through this examination, he identifies five alternative approaches that could theoretically be employed to achieve the objectives of Article 2. Each approach focuses on a different element of what he calls the 'climate process': local anthropogenic drivers of emission (i.e.sources); global anthropogenic structural drivers; national greenhouse gas emissions (i.e. the current targets and timetables approach); the fairness of the process of international climate negotiations; and the outcomes of climate change.governance.However, despite numerous proposals for institutional reform of climate governance in recent years, the pace of change is glacial.It remains to be seen whether the type of proposals that Fisher puts forward can gain some traction.Further, Fisher's

Riedy and McGregor Climate Governance is Failing Us
(Rajamani 2011) the UNFCCC intact as the key site of global climate governance, a position that sits awkwardly with some of the other articles in this special issue.One proposed alternative model of global climate governance is minilateralism, which Jeffrey McGee investigates in his contribution to the special issue.It is often observed that the UNFCCC consensus rules make any meaningful agreement between the 195 Parties to the UNFCCC difficult.While discussions about reform of these rules continue, and the overruling of Bolivia's express objection to the Cancun Agreements sets an interesting precedent for moving beyond simple consensus(Rajamani 2011), some argue that the multilateral UNFCCC should be abandoned altogether in favour of negotiations within smaller groups of nations.Proponents of minilateralism argue that convening a smaller group of key states, perhaps the 20 biggest emitters or the G20 PORTAL, vol.8, no.3, September 2011.5 As two of the organisers of the Australian WWViews event, Riedy and Herriman provide a reflective evaluation of WWViews.They examine the role that deliberative mini-publics, like WWViews, can play in facilitating the emergence of a global deliberative system for climate change response.Their evaluation is mixed; while the project was well managed, enjoyed by participants and demonstrated the feasibility of convening global mini-publics, it arguably achieved little influence on global climate change policy.This is a recurring problem for deliberative mini-publics at all scales.Riedy and Herriman argue that global mini-publics do have a role in democratizing the global climate governance system.But they need to: place greater priority on the quality of deliberation; provide flexibility to respond to diverse cultural and political contexts; maximize their potential for influence by running over longer time periods; and bring global citizens together in international processes rather than discrete national events.While organized deliberative democracy events may have a role in democratizing global climate governance, James Goodman argues for more radical forms of democracy.For Goodman, climate governance is a space that needs to be confronted, contested and disordered by global civil society.He argues that the official climate governance discourse reproduces hegemonic power relations and supports exploitation of the South by the North.He traces the emergence of unofficial discourses of climate justice that seek to disorder and contest the official discourse of climate governance.This nonofficial climate justice discourse focuses attention on the devastating impacts of climate change on those in the South and on specific sites of climate policy failure.Sites of proposed power station and runway expansions, for example, highlight the contradiction between official climate policy and climate practice and have attracted particular forms of protest, such as climate camps.