Rising Powers, NGOs and North–South Relations in Global Climate Governance: The Case of Climate Finance

Abstract

Climate finance is defined as all financial transitions to cope with the mitigation and adaptation of climate change additional to official development aid. This is, arguably, at the core to breaking the deadlock in international climate change negotiations within the framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This deadlock is characterized by multiple overlapping conflict lines, by increasingly diffuse actor groups and coalitions and the often stifling overarching ethical debate on climate justice and what is constructed as common but ‘differentiated responsibilities’. In this article, we look at climate finance as a site of power struggles and identify key actor groups and the types of conflicts that they engage in. Our findings are transferrable to the analysis of the international climate regime and, potentially, other fields of global governance in an area of complex multilateralism.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their inspiring and motivating comments.

Notes

1 The text of the Accord states that Annex-I countries pledge US$10 billion a year in fast-track finance from 2010 to 2012, a sum to be increased to US$100 billion a year by 2020.

2 This includes auctioning of emission allowances, international levies and taxes, a financial transaction tax and Special Drawing Rights at the IMF.

3 This obviously applies to other sectors of global governance as well, such as finance, trade and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, etc.

4 For the case study at hand, we define NGOs as formal (professionalized) independent societal organizations whose primary aim is to promote common goals at the national or the international level.

5 A useful way of apprehending the endowment with crucial natural resources as a potential source of leverage is to look at the subtractability and excludability of certain environmental goods. Subtractability means that one specific actor has the potential to destroy a certain natural resource despite others’ will to protect it. Excludability means that a certain resource is prevalent in only one territory, which gives influence to the state that can exclude others from their resource (DeSombre, 2007, 18ff.).

6 These principles include ‘polluter pays’, ‘right to economic development’ or ‘common, but differentiated responsibility’.

7 For our analysis, we have chosen Climate Action Network and Climate Justice Now, because they are the largest non-business NGO networks in global climate governance and they significantly differ in terms of their composition, agendas, interests and strategies, thus representing very distinctive types of NGOs. While CAN encompasses predominantly NGOs from the Global North, focuses more on environmental issues and primarily seeks to participate in the official negotiation process, CJN! predominantly consists of NGOs from the Global South and places greater emphasis on developing issues and activities placed outside the official negotiations.

8 The AWG-LCA is generally seen to be more ‘developing-country’ and ‘climate’-friendly.