10.1: Introduction

For decades, countries have not achieved much real cooperation on climate change, in part because there were too many players at the table and the interests of those players were divergent. Making complex deals has been exceedingly complex and vulnerable to vetoes by countries that abhorred cooperation on the issue. Diplomats have solved this problem by agreeing on what was agreeable, which usually meant broad, vaguely worded agreements that had little impact.

The Paris Agreement offers a new opportunity for serious efforts to achieve cooperation on climate change. Paris has set up a process through which national efforts become more transparent and may, over time, help governments achieve deeper cooperation. Although a global agreement, the Paris process also allows and encourages countries to work out solutions in smaller groups—often called clubs by scholars who study international cooperation. Those small-group “club” efforts can then deepen and diffuse more widely.

Paris creates an opportunity for doing better. That’s because Paris has a much more flexible framework than those of past agreements, one that allows countries to set their own obligations according to what they are willing and able to implement.

Evaluating the Paris Agreement, which is the core topic of this chapter, requires understanding the incentives for countries to cooperate in the first place—the topic of Section 10.2. Failure to understand those incentives has led to many strategies for improving cooperation that, in practice, have not really worked. That reality is clear when looking at the full history of climate diplomacy, which is the subject of Section 10.3.

In Section 10.4 we explore how Paris might be different. One of the chief advantages of this new, more flexible approach to diplomacy is the ability to tailor diplomatic efforts around the countries that matter most and the countries that are most willing to take actions. (Those two groups are often not the same, which is one reason why effective cooperation is so hard to craft. Often, the countries that are most willing to act account for only a small share of the global emissions.) For too long, diplomacy has focused mainly on global agreements, but it is extremely difficult to reach agreements that have meaningful content when every nation must participate and any nation can, in effect, veto the result. A new reality is emerging that emphasizes the benefits of making progress through smaller club groups of countries. This chapter will examine those benefits and also outline how such clubs could emerge.

Nearly all of the club literature has focused on clubs of sovereign nations. Research has revealed many of these climate-related clubs, and still more are forming. Arctic nations have a variety of clubs, notably the Arctic Council, through which they can cooperate. Forested nations have still other clubs. The European Union has become a club for advancing climate policy. The seven industrialized nations have their club, the G7, and the big economies of the world have yet another club with overlapping membership, the G20. In the run-up to Paris, the most important club was the bilateral effort of the US and China, which a year before Paris led to high-level pledges for emission controls that, in effect, defined what both countries would offer in Paris.

This approach of looking at national governments and international cooperation is often called two-level bargaining because what is possible at the international level is constrained by what is feasible for national governments (and vice versa). But this two-dimensional approach prizes the actions of the nation-state itself when, in fact, much of the real effort at cutting emissions and inventing new technologies happens along a third dimension—within the nation-state, especially within firms and industries. Where national governments are strong and consolidate power, this extra dimension may add little to our understanding of behavior. But in modern economies, national governments are relatively weak; by design, most political and economic behavior is devolved away from the state to other actors.

Finally, we look ahead at what needs to happen to turn the promise of the Paris framework into a reality. The list of needed actions is long—much longer than diplomats can reasonably achieve—and success is far from guaranteed. The chapter will help explore which of these Paris implementation efforts are most important. Success will require a careful strategy that focuses inside the formal Paris framework, which is part of the United Nations (UN), for the kinds of activities that are feasible in that framework. At the same time, leaders will need to work in parallel but formally outside the Paris framework to do some of the things that will not be agreeable by all nations and therefore infeasible in a consensus-based UN-based process. Those areas of key leadership include demonstrating new technologies for deep decarbonization and also imposing penalties on jurisdictions that fail to make an effort.