High Ambitions
PUNTA DEL ESTE, 28 NOVEMBER 2022: Lack of ambition was not an issue, as a pair of tango dancers kicked off the first meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on plastic pollution in Uruguay.
The negotiations, foreseen to conclude with the adoption and signing of “the most important treaty of our age” in Ecuador in 2025, will no doubt be rife with legal, technical, and political complications. The awkward spat over the committee’s rules of procedure less than an hour into the meeting signalled that these negotiations will not be a walk in the park. Yet, the 61 states that voiced their positions during the general debate were all in blissful agreement on the need for an “ambitious” treaty.
But what is ambition? The vagueness of the concept may, in part, explain its attractiveness. Historically, ambition hasn’t always been considered a virtue. In the mid 14th century, ambition suggested an eager and inordinate desire for honour or preferment, a blind striving for favour or flattery and a thirst for popularity. In Latin, ambitio means “going around”, especially to solicit votes.
In the negotiation process now underway, there is a risk that unchecked ambition may lead to an aspirational instrument driven more by a desire to achieve an ultimate, perfect, end-state than the actions needed to get there. The negotiations may, in such a scenario, turn into a rhetorical popularity contest rather than a serious consideration of what must be done to solve the plastic pollution crisis.
The international negotiations on climate change appear to have suffered this fate. Over the past 30 years, climate ambition has been defined more by countries’ eagerness to set lofty impact goals than by their ability to agree on a credible plan of action. Had the international community, 30 years ago, instead focused their regulatory efforts on the root causes of climate change, our future would likely have looked significantly less gloomy.
But there are signs that ambition is taking on a less vacuous and more action-oriented meaning in the plastic pollution treaty negotiations. In a statement delivered on Monday morning, the High Ambition Coalition — a group of 42 countries [and one regional economic integration organization] — outlined the contours of a plan for how the goal of an “end to plastic pollution by 2040” may be achieved. In a key paragraph, the group stated their intention to:
work towards an international treaty that will eliminate problematic plastics, substances and additives, including by bans and restrictions; develop global sustainability criteria and standards for plastics; set global baselines and targets for sustainability throughout the life-cycle of plastics [and] establish mechanisms for strengthening commitments, targets and controls over time.
Several regional groups — including the Latin American and Caribbean states, the European Union, and the African group — similarly expressed their support for a treaty with specific and mandatory core provisions. In their national statements, an encouragingly high number of countries outlined the types of common control measures that the new treaty could contain — some, like Israel, with impressive level of detail.
These statements of intent give hope that the negotiations may produce a treaty that will in fact contribute meaningfully to solving the plastic pollution crisis. Ambassador Gustavo Meza-Cuadra of Peru, the negotiations’ elected co-chair, will in the coming months have an important job in safeguarding and further refining these proposals.
This will be a challenging task. In past treaty-making efforts, calls for specific and mandatory core provisions have too often been sacrificed in the name of compromise. Some countries, including the United States, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, continue to advocate a loose bottom-up treaty based solely on country-driven approaches. The culture of consensus decision-making in global environmental diplomacy may require truly ambitious countries to revisit the original meaning of the word and intensify their efforts to solicit votes for a treaty that commits states to a specific course of action.
For more on the plastic pollution treaty negotiations, see Earth Negotiation Bulletin’s reporting from the meeting.
By Magnus Løvold and Torbjørn Graff Hugo, Norwegian Academy of International Law (NAIL)
