Rising Powers in Global Climate Governance: Negotiating Inside and Outside the UNFCCC

Abstract

This chapter looks at how the emergence of new powerhouses challenges global cooperation to combat climate change. That cooperation has mainly taken place within an institutional framework that scholars call the “global climate regime,” which is designed “to mitigate human-induced climate change by limiting anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases [GHGs] such as carbon dioxide and methane and protecting associated sinks” (Downie, 2011: 74). Its main components include, but are not limited to, the principles, norms, rules and procedures of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), of the UNFCCC’s annual Conference of the Parties (COP) and of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (Downie, 2011). Similar to many fields of environmental politics, the global climate regime is characterized by a lack of environmental effectiveness, which is partly due to a discrepancy between the regime’s institutional design and real-life developments. While the UNFCCC targets the “stabilization” of GHG concentrations (UNFCCC, 1992: §2), emissions have risen by 49% between 1990 and 2012 (PBL, 2012). That discrepancy was embedded in the regime from the start, but it worsens at a growing pace and calls for an increasing sense of urgency. Furthermore, the evolution is to a significant extent linked to the emergence of new economic and political powerhouses.

This chapter builds on a paper that was co-authored by Hans Bruyninckx, Astrid De Man, Joke Langens, Liene Vandamme, Lize Van Dyck and Tine Wintmolders (Happaerts and Bruyninckx, 2013).