| Global negotiations – negotiations that are open to all of the world’s nation states – have become an increasingly popular means of tackling pressing problems that cut across international boundaries. Environmental issues have been at the forefront of this trend, with global negotiations at the close of the last millennium agreeing treaties on, for example, climate change, biodiversity loss, desertification, persistent organic pollutants, prior informed consent and stratospheric ozone depletion. Other issues have also been addressed through global negotiations, including anti-personnel landmines through the 1997 Ottawa Convention, international trade under the 1994 World Trade Organization (WTO) and even smoking under the 2003 World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the first public health global treaty. The focus of this book is on the global negotiations attempting to resolve one of the more complex and difficult issues facing the international community – global climate change.
This book is linked into broader, long standing debates over global governance, and global environmental governance in particular (e.g. see Rosenau and Czempiel, 1992; Young, 1997; Brack and Hyvarinen, 2002). Debates over global environmental governance span a range of proposals, including the potential for exploiting synergies across different regimes and even the possibility of establishing a new overarching Global Environment Organization. Although the negotiation process, and how it could be improved, has remained on the sidelines of these debates, its rightful place is at their centre. In whatever way the current system of global environmental governance is eventually reformed (or not), it will remain founded on negotiation as the engine of intergovernmental cooperation.
The book explores the organization of the climate change negotiations from the first session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 1) to the UNFCCC in 1995 to COP 9 in 2003. The climate change negotiation process went through three distinct phases over this eight-year period:
- the Kyoto Protocol negotiations that led to the adoption of the Protocol at COP 3 in 1997
- the post-Kyoto negotiations on the details of the Kyoto Protocol and the implementation of the UNFCCC, which broke down at COP 6 in 2000, but finally culminated in the adoption of the political Bonn Agreements at COP 6 (part II) and the more technical Marrakesh Accords at COP 7 in 2001
- the post-Marrakesh negotiations, which continue to this day on more routine aspects of the development of the regime.
About the Author
Joanna Depledge is Sutasoma Research Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University, UK. |
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