Great-power politics, order transition, and climate governance: insights from international relations theory

Abstract

The complex politics of climate change cannot be properly understood without reference to deeper geopolitical trends in the wider international system. Chief among these is the growing resurgence of ‘great-power politics’ between China and the US, along with failures of socialization and enmeshment into global governance structures in relation to these two powers. Traditional theoretical frameworks have failed to adequately account for these developments. Nonetheless, this current great-power contestation is at the core of an order transition that has prevented the large-scale institutional redesign required to remove deadlocks in existing global governance structures, including climate governance. Examples from the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference provide ample evidence for these claims. The slow progress of the climate change negotiations are due not just to the politics of the issue itself, but to the absence of a new political bargain on material power structures, normative beliefs, and the management of the order amongst the great powers. Without such a grand political bargain, which could be promoted through a forum of major economies whose wide-ranging remit would go beyond single issues, the climate change regime is only ever likely to progress in a piecemeal fashion.

Policy relevance

Despite the achievements of the 2012 Doha Climate Change Conference, the climate negotiations are not on course to limit warming to 2 °C, and thereby avoid ‘dangerous’ climate change. Several factors have been invoked to account for such slow progress: notably, the nature of the climate change problem itself, the institutional structure of the climate regime, and lack of political will among key players. An alternative explanation is proposed such that the failure to seriously address climate change – as well as other global problems – reflects a resurgent meta-struggle between the ‘great powers’ of China and the US over the nature of the global order. Without such a broader understanding of the deeper dynamics underlying the stalemates of the climate change negotiations, there is little chance of turning those negotiations around.

Keywords:

• China
• climate change negotiations
• environmental governance
• United States

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Robyn Eckersley and Markus Lederer for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. They would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Climate Policy for their valuable suggestions.

Notes

Chasek and Wagner (2012, pp. 2–3) note how, since 1972, the number of environmental regimes has risen from 200 to over 1000. Moreover, most of the early (pre-1990) regimes were bilateral or limited in scope.

The BASIC countries are Brazil, South Africa, India, and China.

In total, 70.4% of China's energy needs are accounted for by coal and 17.7% by oil (Tellis & Tanner, 2012).

The concept of power is a recurring, often controversial, theme in the IR literature. For more recent authoritative accounts, see Barnett and Duvall (2005), Finnemore and Goldstein (2013), and Nye (2011).

By comparison, the entire German Federal Budget for 2009 stood at only around $450 billion.

By contrast, English School theory provides a framework that reconciles power- and world view-related aspects of first-order negotiations (Buzan, 2004; Hurrell, 2007).

Premier Wen felt excluded when he had not received an invitation to a forthcoming meeting, which he had heard about from another world leader over dinner. It turned out that China was (of course) on the list of invited countries, but the written invitation had not yet reached the Chinese Premier (probably because they were being distributed in alphabetical order).

On US exceptionalism, see Ignatieff (2005), Foot, Gaddis, and Hurrell (2003), and Malone and Khong (2003).

See Eckersley (2012) for a discussion of such proposals.

See Naim (2009) for an overview of minilateralism.