10.3: A Brief History of Climate Diplomacy

We now have a simple tool for understanding the history of climate change diplomacy. Real solutions to the climate change problem would offer huge joint gains, but those solutions would require deep collaboration that could be, in reality or perception, contrary to the interests of important countries. Diplomats quickly learned that, and they focused mainly on producing agreements that aimed just at simple coordination with few joint gains. Put differently, the diplomats got good at crafting agreements that had little real impact on emissions and warming.

As the climate change issue emerged on the international agenda in the late 1980s, diplomats working on behalf of the dominant and most interested powers—the US and, increasingly, Europe, which about that time became the global leader on most international environmental issues—quickly sought centralized solutions in the form of a global and legal binding agreement. They worked within the only institution that stood ready to help broker global solutions, the United Nations (UN). A sign of their confidence is that it took less than 2 years from the start of negotiations early in 1991 until the finalization of the first global treaty on climate change: the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). That treaty had little real content—it was mostly an umbrella that committed the parties to share information, make efforts to reduce emissions, and attend future annual meetings for ongoing diplomacy.

The first formal follow-up meeting—known as the Conference of the Parties (COP), which convened in 1995 in Berlin with COP1—reached the conclusion that the UNFCCC by itself was inadequate. That conclusion launched a negotiating process that 2 years later begat the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Formally a daughter of the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol included a schedule of targets and timetables for the 38 advanced industrialized countries while imposing no emission control obligations on the rest of the world. By targets and timetables, I mean specific goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (the targets) by specific dates (the timetable).

Figure 10.3.1 The declining impact of Kyoto. Data from Victor 2011.

In the years that followed, nearly all countries ratified the Kyoto Protocol because it did not require that they do much beyond what they would have done anyway—their diplomats ensured that schedule of targets and timetables mirrored what their countries were already on track to do. The one big exception was the US, where the economy in the late 1990s grew much more rapidly than expected (and with that growth came more emissions)—making it all but impossible to honor the Kyoto targets. The US never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and when Canada (the largest commercial trading partner of the US) saw that, Canada withdrew as well.

Figure 10.3.1 shows how this Kyoto approach, over time, became increasingly irrelevant to solving the climate problem. The left bar shows the fraction of world emissions that were included in the Kyoto targets and timetables in the year 1997—when the Kyoto negotiations formally concluded. The middle bar shows the fraction of emissions covered by those targets and timetables in the year 2010—after many years when countries outside the Kyoto strictures (for example, China) saw extraordinary growth and two important countries that had been inside Kyoto (the US and Canada) exited. And the right bar shows the fraction of world emissions covered by Kyoto when the agreement was formally extended at the Conference of the Parties meeting in Doha in 2012. (At that extension point, the European Union agreed to continue, but Japan, under pressure to end a deal that was seen by Japanese industry as unfair, did not.) Put differently, Kyoto became a club of the highly converted, committed countries. But with political and structural changes in the world economy, that club accounted for a shrinking share of the global problem.*

As the US failed to ratify Kyoto, some of the flaws in this system became apparent—in particular, the problem of rigid, binding targets and timetables when countries, for the most part, don’t plan that way. New ideas surfaced, but none of them attracted much effort.

In 2001, just months after taking office, US President George W. Bush announced he would never submit the Kyoto Protocol for ratification; instead, his administration created a “coalition of willing supporters” of climate mitigation in an Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP). (The concept of a “coalition of the willing” was also how Bush’s team described the other countries that joined the US reinvasion of Iraq. When the Iraq war proved a fiasco, the term, although informative, fell out of favor.) While the Bush team correctly diagnosed some of the failings of the Kyoto Protocol, their favored alternative fared no better. The Bush team did little to invest in their alternative vision, other than hold meetings and commission a few studies. Most other countries stayed married to Kyoto-style targets and timetables.

Even the cleverest diplomacy aimed at more effective top-down solutions could not mask the failure of the Kyoto approach. Despite massive diplomatic effort, emissions trajectories barely changed. The good news in all this is that failure came with a bang, and the shock helped open diplomacy to superior, alternative ideas.

The bang was the 2009 Copenhagen Conference—an event convened with the goal of crafting a successor to the Kyoto Protocol but ending with the parties unable even to negotiate a formal plan for further negotiations. Without top-down agreement, what was left in the wreckage of Copenhagen was a loose bottom-up process that encouraged nations to outline their own national plans. These pledges, updated and elaborated, would become the backbone of a new process set out in Paris.

The reasons for failure at Copenhagen were many, but the underlying forces at work were familiar.

The first was political: the fragmentation of power and authority in the international system and the corresponding absence of a leader that could reliably impose order on actors with sharply divergent interests. Until the early 1990s, the US provided that function on most issues of economic and environmental organization. Since then, it has not played that role and no other actor has occupied that role, although the European Union has tried and China may yet step into that function. Europe, although increasingly unified at home on environmental issues, never had the power to convert its strong and growing environmental commitment into true global hegemonic leadership.

The second underlying force was cognitive: uncertainty about the cost and efficacy of reducing emissions through policy coordination. When the first global international agreement on climate change was penned—the UNFCCC in 1992—the joint obligations were so vague that the uncertainty in just how countries would cut emissions could be ignored. In a sprawling paragraph free of any definitive punctuation, Article 4.2 of the UNFCCC required industrialized countries to adopt policies to “demonstrate that developed countries are taking the lead in modifying longer-term trends in anthropogenic emissions.... ” Diplomats did what diplomats did best—they found ways to agree even when the underlying facts and interests made detailed agreement impossible.

As pressure to take more serious actions mounted, no country or firm that took deep decarbonization of emissions seriously could identify exactly which behavioral, technological, and regulatory commitments would prove most effective. Indeed, the full text of the sprawling, punctuation-free paragraph in Article 4.2 made all commitments conditional upon technological, political, and other developments.** All this diplomatic artistry made it possible to ignore for years the key reality of climate cooperation: the challenge in collective action was not merely that countries had diverging interests, but that even those that wanted to act did not know which efforts would prove feasible, at what cost, and whether they would stay aligned with shifting national interests.

This veil of uncertainty about what true collaboration would cost— and how it would affect organized interest groups within countries—has exacerbated the bargaining problems that arose as diplomats tried to craft international agreements. Uncertainty made it hard for governments and firms to understand their interests, because nobody really knew when (and at what cost) big reductions in emissions would be feasible. Because climate diplomacy was focused on reaching agreements that looked, at least on paper, ambitious, it was convenient to skirt around some of the central challenges. The diplomats driving the process—a mantle that European diplomats increasingly took for themselves—focused less on grappling with uncertainty and more on making sure the whole treaty was binding, that is, that it represented a commitment that countries were expected to honor as a matter of international law. The pursuit of binding law was based on the theory that binding law would be more effective—because most countries take their international legal obligations seriously, and some even allow those commitments to be enforced through national and other courts. Ironically, the desire for binding law helped guarantee that the entire effort would fall far short. Binding law made governments focus on agreeing only to what they were sure they could honor, which led either to agreements that were designed to have little or no impact on behavior (Kyoto) or deadlock (Copenhagen).*** What was different about the Paris process that followed was its explicit design to address these profound uncertainties in what countries were willing and able to implement.

*For more on these problems with Kyoto, see Victor (2001).

***See the text of Article 4.2 that follows our earlier quotation, which includes this language: “taking into account the differences in these Parties’ starting points and approaches, economic structures and resource bases, the need to maintain strong and sustainable economic growth, available technologies and other individual circumstances.... ”

***On countries taking their obligations seriously, see Chayes and Chayes (1998); it is a point underscored even in studies that are skeptical about the impact of international law (Goldsmith and Posner, 2006). On the trade-off between bindingness of commitments and depth, see Abbott and Snidal (2000). For the synthesis of these ideas, applied to climate, see Victor (2011).