After the Paris Agreement: What Role for the BRICS in Global Climate Governance?
| Author | Marc Williams,Christian Downie |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12550 |
After the Paris Agreement: What Role for the
BRICS in Global Climate Governance?
Christian Downie
The Australian National University
Marc Williams
University of New South Wales
Abstract
The rising power of the BRICS is now at the centre of debates about the future of global governance. Despite the consensus
that the political, economic and strategic differences between the BRICS trump the commonalities, the BRICS have managed a
level of cooperation that has exceeded expectations. This has led to inquiries about their influence on several policy domains,
especially global finance. However, less attention has been given to the role of the BRICS in global climate governance, espe-
cially in the aftermath of the Paris climate agreement in 2015. Following the Paris Agreement, and the US’withdrawal, this
paper examines the capacity of the BRICS to re-shape global climate governance. Based on an analysis of the emissions profile
of the BRICS, and multilateral and bilateral meetings between BRICS countries since 2015, it argues that while significant
obstacles to the BRICS acting as a coalition remain, there are areas that can be identified where cooperation could be scaled
up in coming years.
Policy Implications:
•Policy makers in the BRICS need to overcome significant variations in their interests due to their differing production and
consumption of oil, gas, and coal if they are to act as a coalition on climate change.
•In the aftermath of the Paris Agreement, policy makers should work to identify areas that are ripe for intra-BRICS coopera-
tion and could be scaled up in the coming years.
•In the first instance, policy makers should focus on the areas of energy efficiency, agriculture and development finance.
•Policy makers should build bilateral relationships that could provide a basis for coordinated BRICS action. The most
promising bilateral relationship appears to be between China and India.
In less than a decade the BRICS –Brazil, Russia, India, China
and South Africa –have gone from a Goldman Sachs moni-
ker to a central player in international affairs. Since 2009 the
BRICS have managed a level of cooperation that has
exceeded expectations, with an increasing frequency and
breadth of cooperation evident in regular leader level sum-
mits, ministerial meetings and the creation of new interna-
tional institutions. In this context, it is no surprise that
widespread scepticism about the grouping has been
replaced by scholarly inquiries into what the BRICS mean for
the future of global governance. In particular, to what extent
these countries with diverse economic and political struc-
tures can effectively act as a coalition to shape international
outcomes across multiple policy domains. Traditionally litera-
ture on the BRICS has focused on the domain of global eco-
nomic governance, especially in the aftermath of the global
financial crisis in 2008 and the subsequent discussions about
the need to reform the international financial architecture
(Chin, 2014; Qobo and Soko, 2015; Stuenkel, 2013).
Less work has considered the role of the BRICS in global
climate governance (Leal-Arcas, 2013; Br€
utsch and Papa,
2013; Gladun and Ahsan, 2016; Rinaldi and Martuscelli,
2016), and few studies have examined the capacity of the
BRICS to shape global climate governance in the aftermath
of the 2015 Paris climate agreement (for an exception see
Viola and Basso, 2016). There are two important reasons for
doing so. First, the rise of the BRICS is fundamentally
re-shaping the global governance challenges in the domain
of climate change. The BRICS are among the largest emitters
in the world due to their enormous production and con-
sumption of fossil fuels. China, for example, is now the lar-
gest energy consumer in the world and has overtaken the
US to be the largest emitter with almost 30 per cent of glo-
bal greenhouse gas emissions (IEA, 2016). Second, and as a
result, there are ongoing global governance challenges. For
example, one point of contention in international climate
change negotiations for more than a decade, including in
the most recent negotiations in Paris in 2015, has been how
©2018 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2018) 9:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12550
Global Policy Volume 9 . Issue 3 . September 2018
398
Research Article
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