Street Lessons in Climate Governance - by Arunabha Ghosh
Urmi Sen
TODAY'S COLUMNIST
Column: Street lessons in climate governance
Arunabha Ghosh
Posted: Friday, Dec 18, 2009 at 1958 hrs IST
Updated: Friday, Dec 18, 2009 at 1958 hrs IST
There’s a lot of anger and frustration around Copenhagen these days—
and the snow isn’t helping. On Monday it took me 8.5 hours of standing
in sub-zero temperatures to get registered. This was after I was only
about fiftieth in line and had shown up at 6.45 am (thousands more
were standing behind me). No official came out to explain what was
happening, there was no food, no drink and no rest. By Tuesday,
rationing had been introduced. The UN was distributing ‘secondary
passes’ to each observer institution (from universities to NGOs to
business groups), which would, in turn, ration the passes to their
registered members. By Wednesday, all additional registration was
barred, pass or no. By Thursday, an alternative venue was found where
non-official delegates could congregate and, hopefully, ease pressure.
As I write this well past midnight, I have received a message that a
grand total of 100 non-governmental participants will be bussed in
from a ‘secret location’ on Thursday and Friday; everyone else can
enjoy the snowstorm outside! Meanwhile, major hotels around the city
stand barricaded. Patrol boats with police divers in wetsuits zip
around the waterways (though that didn’t prevent a Greenpeace boat
from making an appearance). And police and protesters will likely
continue to confront each other. Any international regime goes through
several stages, from agenda-setting and negotiations to
implementation, monitoring and enforcement. What lessons do the events
in Copenhagen have for climate change governance?
Let’s take participation and agenda-setting. Who sits at the table
matters for the legitimacy of an institution. It also affects the
efficiency of discussions. Climate talks face the same dilemma both
inside and outside the Bella Centre. The so-called walkout by
developing countries on Monday was partly because some of them felt
they were not privy to draft texts that the major players were
discussing. Outside in the cold, thousands wanted to be in, not only
to observe what was going on but also to set whatever agenda each
organisation fervently believed in. Some seemed legitimate—research
institutions with credible records, experts helping governments draft
laws and investors seeking to increase local capacity for renewable
energy. Others seemed a bit out of place like the 17-year-old school
kid ahead of me, who said she was there because her teacher knew
someone who knew someone who could register her. She confessed, “I
don’t really know what the UNFCCC is all about—it’d be nice to find
out!” I wondered why she didn’t just read up on Wikipedia; it would
have meant one less person in a crowd of thousands. And once I made my
way inside, there was a circus: anti-nuclear protesters, pro-vegan
diehards, an angry mermaid, daily ‘fossil prizes’ for the most
obstructionist governments, even Christmas carol singers!
International regimes face a similar cacophony of messages—heads of
states making their statements this week have come with different
agendas. But when there are so many messages, there is perhaps no
clear message.
Then there are negotiations and rule-making. The UN seems as unclear
about limiting participants as it is about limiting emissions. The
caps on delegates to the biggest climate conference came after days of
confusion. Was this not anticipated? For months we have known that
thousands of people might show up. For weeks we have known more exact
numbers. And still the Danish hosts and the UN have been caught
unawares. Will negotiators turn similar blind eyes to the growing
scientific evidence on climate change and the dangers it poses? What
kind of crisis will it take for the world’s leaders to act? Unlike
Hollywood films, the seas will not rise overnight, glaciers will not
melt in a week and rainfall patterns will not change in a season. The
climate crisis will unfold incrementally and hit the poor
disproportionately. When the risks become impossible to ignore, what
measures will they take? Will there be a cap on emissions like the UN
has capped participants? What will be the basis of such a cap? How
will the burden be distributed?
That brings us to implementation, monitoring and enforcement. If this
level of mismanagement had occurred in a developing country, we would
have heard complaints about ‘poor governance’ and calls for ‘capacity
building’. Climate negotiations expose similar concerns. On one hand,
rich countries want poorer ones to commit to national plans that would
be internationally monitored and verified. In turn, developing
countries argue that: (1) they need financial support to implement
their plans and (2) rich countries should implement their commitments
and non-compliance should be punished. The challenge for international
regimes, particularly on climate change, is how to build the
institutions that would effectively monitor all parties and establish
processes that would fix responsibility. No responsibility has been
fixed yet for the chaos in the streets of Copenhagen. Similar lessons
and concerns continue to haunt negotiators working on a deal to
confront the world’s biggest collective action problem.
The author is Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellow at the Woodrow
Wilson School, Princeton University