Natasha Joyce Weidener: A Reflection on Climate Governance

Stop being disappointed: re-imagine climate governance

A reflection on the UN approach to climate governance

by Natasha Joyce Weidner, September 1, 2014

There is a perpetual cloud of disappointment hovering over the UN climate change negotiations.  Rich countries won’t give money to poor countries for adaptation and mitigation. Heavy emitters won’t commit to meaningful emissions cuts. Nations are unwilling to compromise with one another, unwilling to take the actions that the science recommends, unwilling to come to an agreement that might save humanity from the greatest ecological crisis in our history. My question is, how can we expect them to? We live in a globalized world dictated by the merciless greed of the capitalist economy, which benefits a very small proportion of the people on earth and exploits the rest.  The history of the modern world has been largely shaped by the exploitation of people and the environment by a small number of wealthy elites. How can we expect a UN conference to reverse this historic pattern and upend this deeply entrenched global system?  We would have to be extremely naive.

For twenty years we have watched this UN process try and fail to produce a meaningful outcome. Of course! This shouldn’t come as a disappointment; this is to be expected, because there is no way that a meaningful outcome could be reached without seriously challenging the current world order. A meaningful outcome means shifting a significant amount of money from rich, heavy-emitting countries to poor countries and completely phasing out the burning of fossil fuels. Taking these steps would mean disempowering global elites, reversing the direction that wealth has been flowing for centuries, and radically transforming the way in which people in rich countries live their lives. I do not believe that the current multilateral framework for addressing climate change (the UNFCCC) is capable of accomplishing this revolutionary task.

A large part of why I think the current process isn’t working and won’t work is because it places the burden of responsibility on states: states must pledge to cut emissions, and rich states must give money to poor states. Perhaps this system made more sense back when the UNFCCC was first created, but today we live in a globalized world.  The economic system that created the climate crisis knows no political boundaries. There are affluent emitters living within the same national boundaries as absolutely impoverished populations.  Multinational corporations run the show. Therefore, I think we need to stop pointing fingers at states and focus international efforts on holding accountable the individual actors (including corporations) who are responsible.

I realized this after reading a brilliant chapter by Paul G. Harris in his new book, What’s Wrong With Climate Politics and How To Fix It.  Harris suggests that a more effective framework for the UNFCCC negotiations would be to empower governments to hold individuals responsible for their contributions to climate change. This way, states are still the main players in multilateral talks, but they are working together rather than pitted against one another. This would reduce the political deadlock amid nations at the climate negotiations, because there would no longer be a question of which country is responsible and which country needs to act. Harris uses the example of the tension between China and the US, a tension that has played a large part in stalling global climate negotiations. If pressure is taken off of states and applied to individual Chinese actors and individual American actors, the two governments will be more willing and able to work together.

States could agree to target individual emitters within their countries by, for example, heavily taxing fossil fuel based activities and luxury consumer products, and using the revenue gained from those taxes to fund adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable development projects throughout the world. This strategy would make tremendous progress for environmental justice by massively redistributing global wealth in a more fair way than the current “global adaptation fund” plan.

I am a strong believer in government. I don’t see the world as government versus the people – government IS the people. Of course, governments are corrupt, and sometimes they do a terrible job of representing the people, but this fact cannot be improved by mistrusting the notion of government itself.  Therefore, I am confident that governments working together are the best entities for solving the climate crisis.  However, the current framework for this global climate governance – the COP to the UNFCCC – is not working.  We need to come to terms with this fact, and to accept that it is a result of the complex world system we inhabit and its historical patterns – or else continue to be disappointed.