When Success Fails Us — COP21, Denial, and Climate Governance
This article is published as part of Fridays With MUNPlanet , and its special series dedicated to world politics. The aim of this series is to bring you the analysis of global affairs by the established and upcoming scholars, decision-makers and policy analysts from various world regions. This week, Scott Hamilton (London School of Economics and Political Science) discusses the climate governance in the wake of the Paris Agreement, and asks “has a successful and effective governance of the climate finally been achieved at COP 21” and what message does it send? The author argues that in the Anthropocene the world must ‘walk the walk” in new ways, the ‘outdated governance’ has to be replaced, and a substantive action on climate change be taken with no hesitation.
In the contentious arena of climate governance, universal accords or agreements between nation-states, non-governmental organisations, and civil society more generally, are stunningly difficult to reach. Despite estimates that 90% of deadly natural disasters are now climate related, that climate change is perceived by publics around the planet as the greatest threat to Earth, and that the occurrence of wars, conflicts, refugee and agricultural crises, and international instabilities will increase dramaticallywith climatic change, governments have so far ‘talked the talk’ on the governance of climate change but have failed to ‘walk the walk’. Instead of the legally binding reductions once idealistically pledged in the Kyoto Protocol, today, connections between talk, decisions, and actions break down: “policymakers view [climate governance] decisions as independent organizational products, not necessarily connected to action.” (Geden, 2015) In other words, promises are made in theory — and then celebrated politically and publicly — only to be broken later on, in actualpractice. So, with the recent COP21 climate conference, and its ‘Paris Agreement’ now being lauded as “extraordinary” and “the world’s greatest diplomatic success” (Harvey, 2015) — a “major leap for mankind” according to the French president,François Hollande — this leads us to ask: has a successful and effective governance of the climate finally been achieved at COP21? What does the Paris Agreement actually doto safeguard our planet from pending catastrophe? What message does COP21’s supposed “success” send to the world about climate governance today?
Held in Paris, France, from the 30 November — 12 December, 2015, the Paris Agreement was established at the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21), under the auspices of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNCCC). It was met with immediate political adulation: a “monumental triumph” declared UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the Paris Agreement “sets the stage for progress in ending poverty, strengthening peace, and ensuring a life of dignity and opportunity for all.” (UN News Centre, 2015) Yet, what does the Paris Agreement actually do? Its primary victory is a political consensus to establish the status-quo of climate governance: that all states conceptualise sustainable development and economic growth as no longer being antithetical to one another, but as integrated within a shared international acknowledgement — made by all states and parties — that climate change is indeed an urgent existential threat demanding a concerted global response. This response — the ‘Paris Agreement’ — introduced long-term mitigation goals for states and secured universal agreement on a 5-year review mechanism to take stock of each state’s Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), or the promise of each state to reduce their carbon emissions (and by obvious implication, shift their economies away from the burning of fossil fuels). In this light, the Paris Agreement is indeed a cause for celebration when diplomatic acrobatics are considered, even amongst environmental activists: finally, 196 states had agreed that climate change was a problem that “marks the end of the era of fossil fuels. There is no way to meet the targets laid out in this agreement without keeping coal, oil and gas in the ground.” (Boeve, 2015) As The Economist triumphantly declared, “The Paris agreement marks an unprecedented political recognition of the risks of climate change” by signaling to investors that the era of carbon-fueled economic growth, is evaporating (2015). On the surface, therefore, it appears that COP21 was a success.
However, the Paris Agreement’s purported reach — according to Ban Ki-moon, the realisation of prosperity, political accord, and freedom “for all” — is an enormous task for a single nation-state to accomplish, let alone for today’s international society or world order to establish in a single international treaty, protocol, or conference. Indeed, this is why we talk of “global governance without global government” (Weiss, 2013: xiii). Without a top-down government, the eventual success or failure of the Paris Agreement hinges upon each state voluntarily reducing their own carbon emissions, so as to keep the Earth below the quantified temperature targets established under the agreement in Article 2.1a, and which — since the end of COP21 — have been the cause of great media publicity and global public acclaim:
You can read the full article on MUNPlanet.
Cover image: Artifacts.co [a screenshot taken from Radiohead’s music video House of Cards]
