Failing International Climate Politics and the Fairness of Going First
| Date | 01 October 2014 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.12073 |
| Published date | 01 October 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
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P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 1 4 VO L 6 2 , 6 1 8 – 6 3 3
doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12073
Failing International Climate Politics and
the Fairness of Going First
Aaron Maltais
Uppsala University
There appear to be few ways available to improve the prospects for international cooperation to address the threat of
global warming within the very short time frame for action. I argue that the most effective and plausible way to break
the ongoing pattern of delay in the international climate regime is for economically powerful states to take the lead
domestically and demonstrate that economic welfare is compatible with rapidly decreasing GHG emissions. However,
the costs and risks of acting first can be very large.This raises the question of whether it is fair to expect some states
to go far ahead of others in an effort to improve the conditions for cooperation. I argue that a costly obligation to act
unilaterally and to accept weak initial reciprocity can be justified and does not violate standards of fair burden sharing.
Rather, the costs of creating the underlying conditions within which we can hope to achieve meaningful international
cooperation are non-ideal burdens for which we can appropriately assign fair shares.
Keywords: climate change; leadership; non-ideal theory; fair shares; international
cooperation
From the perspective of intergenerational and global justice the mitigation goals interna-
tional climate negotiations are aiming for appear to be broadly the right ones.1 Participants
of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are in
agreement that there is an imperative to limit how bad global warming will be.The purpose
of their negotiations is to create international arrangements that will in one way or another
ensure that humanity remains within a safe global budget for greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions. Finally, negotiations are (ostensibly) aiming at identifying a principled basis for
sharing the burdens of mitigation based on the recognition that different parties have
different capacities and development needs, and have contributed to the accumulation of
GHGs in the atmosphere at different levels.2
However, due to deep-seated disagreements over each of these general goals the inter-
national climate regime is currently failing on a potentially unprecedented scale. The
international community has been trying to address the peril of global warming for over
twenty years but has made little progress on curbing emissions growth. Global CO2
emissions (the most important GHG) must be reduced to at least half of current levels by
2050 if we are to have even a reasonable chance of keeping warming within 2°C
(International Energy Agency [IEA], 2012a, pp. 31–3). However, on current trajectories
CO2 emissions are projected to be 45 per cent greater than current levels by 2030 (IEA,
2012b). Past inaction means that we have within a decade to start redirecting these powerful
trends if we are to avoid dangerous levels of warming (International Panel on Climate
Change [IPCC], 2007b, p. 23).
The continued delay of emissions reductions increases the cost of stabilising atmospheric
GHG concentrations, the risk that dangerous climate thresholds are exceeded, the level of
© 2013 The Author. Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
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warming and associated costs the world is committed to and the risk of irreversible
ecosystem damage, and leaves future generations without sufficient capacity to reduce
aggressively their own emissions. Henry Shue compellingly argues that the consequences of
delay give the current generation a strong moral obligation to act now to avoid levels of
warming that will undermine conditions for human welfare (Shue, 2005, pp. 272–5).3
Given the short time frame for action, satisfying this obligation requires heavy investment
in a rapid shift to low-carbon economies because ‘it is increasingly evident that there is no
allocation of GHG emissions ... that is both morally tolerable and, at present, politically
feasible as long as most economies are dependent for energy upon carbon-based fuels’
(Shue, 2005, p. 265).
Because the community of states has not been effective in bringing about sufficiently
significant investment of this kind, Shue’s reasoning leads to the further conclusion that the
most capable states must take the lead in demonstrating that economic welfare is compatible
with rapidly decreasing GHG emissions (Shue, 2011). Thus even though the goals of the
international climate regime are the right ones, international cooperative challenges force
us to ‘bring the state back into cosmopolitanism’ (Brown, 2011, p. 64): not in the sense of
giving up on the goals of the international climate regime but in the sense of recognising
capable states as key agents for achieving such principled ends (Ypi, 2010, pp. 540–3).
Of course the view that highly developed states should take on the largest burdens and
act first is already recognised in the international climate regime. This more established
notion of climate leadership is also reflected in the academic literature. There is a sizeable
body of literature on the extent to which more developed countries should take on larger
burdens than less developed states when distributing mitigation and adaptation costs in an
international climate regime (e.g. Baer et al., 2007; Caney, 2005; 2010; Dellink et al., 2009;
Page, 2008). Other areas of research focus on the role of leadership within the process of
international climate negotiations (Oberthür and Kelly, 2008; Parker and Karlsson, 2011;
Zito, 2005).There is also increasing academic attention to so-called ‘mini-lateral’ or ‘carbon
club’ approaches. Proponents argue that a group of leading states that emit the largest share
of GHGs are better positioned to implement an effective international climate regime than
is possible via the existing United Nations process (e.g. Carin and Mehlenbacher, 2010;
Keohane and Victor, 2010; Victor, 2011). In this vein, there are also new proposals for
reforming the structure of UNFCCC negotiations that would secure some of the gains of
mini-lateral approaches but would not exclude those states most vulnerable to climate
impacts in ways that raise serious issues of legitimacy (Eckersley, 2012).
The argument to be developed in this work follows from Shue and is different in
important ways from the existing climate leadership literature. In particular, I will highlight
the normative difference between claiming that some states ought to have greater com-
parative burdens within international agreements and seeing some states as having an
obligation to reform unilaterally in order to help bring about conditions that make effective
international cooperation politically feasible. As we will see, acting unilaterally as leaders
within a context of weak international cooperation can create very large additional costs
and risks.These additional costs and risks are especially demanding given that some agents
must take them on because there is good reason to expect that others will not reciprocate in
the near term. The combination of unilateralism, weak initial reciprocity and the risk that
© 2013 The Author. Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
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A A RO N M A LTA I S
efforts will be wasted makes the type of climate leadership I argue for distinct in kind from
questions about the extent to which some states should do more than others within a shared
global project. Political theorists working on climate change have focused quite heavily on
distributive principles that assume some form of international burden sharing but have yet
to give sufficient attention to the more demanding forms of leadership argued for here.
The first section defends two claims: (1) that it is now urgent to improve the underlying
conditions for achieving effective international action; and (2) that achieving this goal
requires economically powerful states to implement domestic reforms that rapidly accel-
erate our ability to make the transition to economies with very low GHG emissions. In the
second section I ask if it is fair to expect some states to go first in demonstrating the
compatibility of economic welfare and emissions reductions. I argue that the primary
difficulty we currently face is not with the non-compliance of some agents with their ideal
fair shares of the global mitigation burden but the very poor conditions for securing
compliance with the demands of justice from all the relevant agents.As a result, I claim that
a set of agents have obligations to take on the burdens involved in bringing about conditions
in which an effective global response becomes politically feasible. These burdens are not
things these leaders should do instead of their fair share of an effective international
response but over and above their fair shares of an international burden-sharing scheme. At
the same time, I argue that requiring something ‘over and above’ does not actually violate
standards of fair burden sharing. Instead, the demands of leadership are non-ideal burdens
for which we can appropriately assign fair shares. In the third section I suggest an approach
to identifying the particular states that have special responsibilities to act as climate leaders.
Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the relevance of this line of argument for
climate politics.
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