Rethinking leadership: understanding the roles of the US and China in the negotiation of the Paris Agreement
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066120927071 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
Article
Rethinking leadership:
understanding the roles of
the US and China in the
negotiation of the
Paris Agreement
Robyn Eckersley
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Abstract
The study of leadership in International Relations has followed two different paths:
work on hegemony and work on different leadership types in international negotiations.
Yet there is little overlap between them and no agreement on the distinctive features of
leadership and what connects leaders and followers in a collective pursuit. This article
critically engages with both literatures and offers a reconceptualization of leadership as
a form of legitimated asymmetrical influence that is marked off from domination and
performs an important social function in facilitating collective agency towards common
goals in a given community. This account is then operationalised in relation to multi-
lateral negotiations to examine and clarify the roles of the United States and China in
the negotiation of the mitigation provisions of the Paris Agreement. It is shown that the
US under the Obama administration performed a sustained but largely transactional
leadership role in bringing the parties to an agreement while China’s role was pre-
dominantly that of a defensive co-operator but with significant moments of shared
leadership with the US towards the endgame. The analysis shows that, despite growing
international expectations, China, unlike the United States, did not see its role as
leading the world.
Keywords
Leadership, hegemony, Paris Agreement, climate negotiations, China, United States
Corresponding author:
Robyn Eckersley, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Parkville, VIC
3010, Australia.
Email: r.eckersley@unimelb.edu.au
European Journal of
International Relations
2020, Vol. 26(4) 1178–1202
ªThe Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066120927071
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Introduction
The demand for leadership is ubiquitous in international and domestic politics, but the
supply is invariably disappointing. Indeed, Foley has suggested that ‘there is practically
no problem that cannot be attributed to an alleged failure of leadership, and no solution
that cannot be achieved through an alternative leadership’(Foley, 2013: 3). Calls for
leadership are pervasive in relation to collective action problems, especially in situations
of political gridlock. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of climate change,
where the demand for leadership has concentrated on developed states and major
emitters and, above all, the United States and China, who account for around 40 percent
of aggregate CO
2
emissions.
The United States and China are both widely recognised as playing ‘a leading role’in
shaping the Paris Agreement 2015 (Parker and Karlsson, 2018: 531), and their joint
statement on climate change announced in November 2014 (The White House, 2014) is
commonly singled out as a game changer that enabled the historic agreement. Victor
(2016: 138) has suggested that China was ‘[p]erhaps the most pivotal nation in making
Paris feasible’while Gao has claimed that China has moved from a ‘dead weight’and
‘wrecker’at Copenhagen to a climate leader at Paris (Gao, 2018: 238). The widespread
speculation on whether China will fill the ‘leadership vacuum’created by the Trump
administration’s defection from the Paris Agreement assumes that the previous admin-
istration had played a leadership role.
Yet these observations beg the crucial question: what exactly is leadership? The status
of China and the United States as the world’s two most significant great powers (G2) and
the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters (E2) certainly makes their cooperation indis-
pensable for the effectiveness of Paris Agreement. But is their great power status,
emissions profiles and/or the fact that they cooperated enough to qualify as leadership?
In order to clarify their respective roles in the negotiations leading to Paris, this article
revisits two fundamental questions: what is leadership, and what form does it take in
multilateral negotiations?
The International Relations (IR) literature on leadership has tended to follow two
parallel tracks: work on hegemony conducted from a wide range of different theoretical
perspectives in IR, and work on diplomatic leadership in regime negotiations, which is
mostly grounded in neoliberal institutionalism. The former has been more preoccupied
with economic and security orders rather than specific environmental regimes. The latter,
which has informed most of the research on leadership in the climate negotiations by
global environmental governance (GEG) scholars, has been preoccupied with refining
and applying a set of leadership types based on mechanisms of influence at the expense
of examining the fundamental nature of the relationship between leaders and followers
and what it is that brings them together in a collective pursuit. This article offers a
reconceptualisation of leadership that addresses this relationship and operationalises it in
relation to large-n, multilateral regime negotiations.
Leadership, in general, is defined as a process of interaction whereby one or more
actors (the leaders) exercise asymmetric influence in attracting or negotiating the consent
or acquiescence of other parties (the followers), either directly or indirectly, in ways that
facilitate collective action towards the achievement of a common purpose in a given
Eckersley 1179
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