Paris: Beyond the Climate Dead End
through Pledge and Review?
1. Introduction
2. The Difficulty of Action on Climate Change and
the Dead-End of Kyoto
Climate change poses a growing and in some respects an imminent threat not only to fragile
ecosystems but to the livelihoods and lives of billions of human beings.
2.1. Inherent Difficulties of Climate Change Action
Why it is difficult to get an international agreement:
- World politics is a decentralized realm, with no common government capable of
deciding on a course of action and of implementing it through an organized hierarchy.
Furthermore, climate change is a public bad. The climate problem resembles the
classic Prisoners Dilemma, in which the option of not cooperating typically is more
attractive than cooperation.
- Any international agreement must pass a basic test of fairness, a reasonably
equitable apportionment of the costs and benefits of implementation. Naturally,
leaders and publics in each set of countries have distinctive conceptions of fairness,
which often more or less coincide with their own interests in not accepting what seem
to them disproportionate burdens. And countries and blocs have unequal power,
deriving both from their different levels of emissions (making their participation more
or less critical to an agreement) and from their different degrees of asymmetrical
vulnerability to the actions of other states in domains other than climate.
Why it is difficult to solve the climate problem:
- the benefits and costs of cooperation. The ratio of benefits to costs is obviously
important: the higher the ratio, the more the incentive to find some way to collaborate
in order to secure these gains. This will be true of states, subnational governments,
firms, and individuals. But the absolute level of costs is also important, since
cooperation is risky, and when costs are high, states undertaking costly action risk
being seriously disadvantaged if their partners do not fulfill their side of the
agreement.
- whether the agreement can be enforced, on the other. Due to the decentralization of
world politics, hierarchical enforcement of agreements through global government is
not feasible. To effectively bind states, agreements must be self-enforcing.
selfenforcing agreements:
- no member can benefit by withdrawing
- no member can benefit by being noncompliant
through Pledge and Review?
1. Introduction
2. The Difficulty of Action on Climate Change and
the Dead-End of Kyoto
Climate change poses a growing and in some respects an imminent threat not only to fragile
ecosystems but to the livelihoods and lives of billions of human beings.
2.1. Inherent Difficulties of Climate Change Action
Why it is difficult to get an international agreement:
- World politics is a decentralized realm, with no common government capable of
deciding on a course of action and of implementing it through an organized hierarchy.
Furthermore, climate change is a public bad. The climate problem resembles the
classic Prisoners Dilemma, in which the option of not cooperating typically is more
attractive than cooperation.
- Any international agreement must pass a basic test of fairness, a reasonably
equitable apportionment of the costs and benefits of implementation. Naturally,
leaders and publics in each set of countries have distinctive conceptions of fairness,
which often more or less coincide with their own interests in not accepting what seem
to them disproportionate burdens. And countries and blocs have unequal power,
deriving both from their different levels of emissions (making their participation more
or less critical to an agreement) and from their different degrees of asymmetrical
vulnerability to the actions of other states in domains other than climate.
Why it is difficult to solve the climate problem:
- the benefits and costs of cooperation. The ratio of benefits to costs is obviously
important: the higher the ratio, the more the incentive to find some way to collaborate
in order to secure these gains. This will be true of states, subnational governments,
firms, and individuals. But the absolute level of costs is also important, since
cooperation is risky, and when costs are high, states undertaking costly action risk
being seriously disadvantaged if their partners do not fulfill their side of the
agreement.
- whether the agreement can be enforced, on the other. Due to the decentralization of
world politics, hierarchical enforcement of agreements through global government is
not feasible. To effectively bind states, agreements must be self-enforcing.
selfenforcing agreements:
- no member can benefit by withdrawing
- no member can benefit by being noncompliant
