This was the tone of an op-ed I pitched regarding the Rio+20 environmental summit. Below the fold, I offer a slightly more nuanced argument …
Rio+20, the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit, kicks off the formal part of the negotiations tomorrow as leaders of 130 countries arrive to take part. It strikes me as a misguided nostalgia tour and will probably achieve even less than the tenth anniversary that took place in South Africa. Environmental indicators continue to deteriorate but sending 50,000 people to Rio (40,000 of them environmentalists) is a waste of time and energy (literally as Joe Biden would say).
How the times have changed. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush, facing a tough reelection, made an appearance in Rio to shore up his green credentials. This time, President Obama won’t be going. Nor should he. Not much will happen there. We a new approach to conserve the resources of the planet both at home and abroad.
Here at home we need to convince Republicans that environmental protection is a conservative value. Internationally, we need to persuade countries in Asia that is in their interest to pollute less and be more efficient in their use of energy. Environmental protection will save lives and money.
Why am I so pessimistic? As I’ve argued elsewhere, mega-conferences do not appear to be great venues for collective problem-solving. In common vernacular, it akin to too many cooks in the kitchen. In political science speak, it’s too many actors with too diverse preferences shackled by consensus-based rules. As David Bosco argues on The Multilateralist:
But the low expectations also reflect a broader dynamic: what might be called “big-bang multilateralism”–in which the world’s nearly 200 sovereign states attempt to hammer out complex agreements–is mired in a losing streak.
Pessimism
Pessimists of Rio+20 are focusing on the lack of agreement on a negotiating text, with developing countries fighting a losing battle for more pledges of assistance at a time when the entire European project is under threat. That negotiating text, which will be a non-binding agreement in any case, covers a raft of issues, including whether a “green economy,” whatever that is should serve as the roadmap for the future. Perhaps the most problematic issue is that developed and developing countries do not see eye to eye about what kind of meeting this is. Developed countries want this to be an environmental meeting, but developing countries want to focus on issues related to poverty. As Todd Stern, the U.S. climate negotiator and leader of the U.S. delegation to Rio, said:
Let me also remind you that sustainable development is not at all just about the environment, and this conference is not an environmental conference. This conference is a development conference.
Among the contentious issues is the fate of the United Nations Environment Programme, based in Nairobi. It is a low stature organization within the UN system, and advocates from France in particular are seeking to elevate its status from program to a specialized agency, more like the World Health Organization. The idea would be to make UNEP more politically and financially independent. Given the WHO’s current budgetary woes, it is highly problematic as a model. Moreover, as Adil Najam argued in Global Governance a decade ago, in the absence of political agreement on the environment, the organizational status of UNEP is akin to “merely rearranging the organization of chairs on our planetary Titanic.”
Nature issued a pre-Rio report card on how the world has fared on three core environmental problems, climate change, biodiversity, and desertification. The results are dispiriting, an F for stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions, an F for reducing biodiversity loss, and an F for reversing desertification and land degradation.
Optimists
While CFR’s Stewart Patrick agrees that the era of “grand multilateral treaty-making is over,” he is more sanguine the Rio may exceed expectations. A number of analysts have suggested that a novel feature of the meeting, of states and other actors registering a “cloud” of commitments, may in time yield significant results. As Patrick concludes:
If this seems a depressing scene-setter, the Rio summit is not fated for failure. It may yet exceed expectations with a low-key approach focused less on the painstaking negotiation of treaties than on generating practical national commitments to advance sustainable development.
Echoing these sentiments was the late Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrum who in a final op-ed before her death praised the actions of cities and other actors to build sustainability from the ground up: “we are seeing a heterogeneous collection of cities interacting in a way that could have far-reaching influence on how Earth’s entire life-support system evolves.” I tend to agree with Thomas Lovejoy that these patchwork of commitments may not be nearly enough: “The best one can hope for is a sort of mosaic approach, which by definition won’t be sufficient.”
I think thematic meetings, organized around non-binding commitments on a particular issue, are likely to be more successful than catch-all meetings like this one.
Despite my pessimism, if nothing else, Rio+20 may have at least one positive benefit. With world media focused on the host country, on May 25th Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff vetoed key clauses of a land law that would have opened up the Amazon to deforestation.
The Road Ahead
Looking ahead, the environmental community needs to rethink how to approach these issues. In the United States, the challenge is clearly about making the environment a bipartisan issue again. Democrats own the issue and that is bad for the environment.
Internationally, advocates for environmental protection need to be more creative. David Victor and Leslie Coben wrote a piece some years ago that suggested there was a herd mentality among environmentalists who tended to embrace legally binding international commitments as the only way forward. While that has started to change, faith in piecemeal bottoms-up efforts seems to me like small ball. In between are more ambitious efforts like what Simon Zadek proposed — green unilateralism by the major actors.
Rather than seeking to contain this unilateralism, world leaders should leverage it in pursuit of global public goods. Such a strategy’s success depends on three factors: a focus on a small number of big-ticket national and regional actions, adequate policy leverage over these actions, and international coalitions to steer them along a legitimate path.
This is an agenda I can finally get excited about.
thanks for the great post! I just have a brief pushback on your pessimism re: bottom-up initiatives as a way forward on environmental/climate governance. I agree fully that the mega-multilateralist approach is dead in the water. However, I wonder if bottom-up initiatives might prove to be more meaningful that you assert – in terms of serving both a narrow as well as a broader/systemic purpose.
On the former, city-driven initiatives, for example, to engage in climate governance offer possible levers to shift everyday practices and behaviors (transportation modes, location and consumption decisions) and beliefs (conscious awareness of the implications of consumption). These are, without a doubt, “small ball” when placed in context. But they offer a means of linking abstract values/concepts with concrete actions; translating across scales as a way of making climate change legible at the local level. Access to $ remains the most substantial barrier to scale – but perhaps the green unilateralism suggested by Zadek offers an opportunity to leverage sovereign wealth funds to overcome this barrier (recent moves by the C40 city network, in partnership w/ the World Bank and CDP, to begin to standardize the measurement and reporting of local emissions baselines offer a possible means of upping the appeal of local projects to outside investors).
On the latter, I would argue that initiatives that network cities (and other actors) both within and across national borders, and the way these networks are highlighting the inadequacies of the status quo as a means of opening up space for new actors/new modes of governance, may offer a broader opportunity and may be representative of a more consequential sort of “friction” in the system. What this can/may lead to is unclear for certain…but by challenging the legitimacy of the current process perhaps it may help contribute to the sort of systemic transition that appears to be needed.
David,
Thanks much for your thoughtful comment. To the extent that these efforts scale, I absolutely agree that the city-driven initiatives are part of the mix of the way forward. Mayor Bloomberg and former President Clinton have brought this aspect of climate governance more attention, and I hope that these efforts will coalesce into something meaningful. Perhaps if Ostrum’s op-ed had been framed in more concrete terms, I would have reacted more favorably, but I perhaps read into it a sort of hopeful but not helpful embrace of localism based on her scholarship of small-scale community self-organizing to protect environmental resources that I never found all that convincing for more complex, highly populated modern societies.
I can’t tell if Rio+20 advanced the city agenda which was started before Rio and ongoing in any case. Rio+20 probably just helped marginally amplify the message and maybe encouraged some mayors on the margins to step up their efforts in time for the event.
On climate change, in the absence of national level action in the United States, for example, I can’t imagine that the efforts by a handful of cities will cumulate enough to really change the trajectory. I’d have to see which cities are participating, what share of overall emissions they are responsible for, and are seeking to alter. It’s certainly not nothing, but a series of national actions by the United States, China, and others are needed. The timing unfortunately is not propitious but the economic downturn has dampened emissions, though a robust recovery would probably see them increase pretty quickly.
I think a series of problem-specific efforts are needed in different domains. Who the main players, culprits, change agents will vary by problem. Treaties may be ancillary to some of these issues. So, I’m not dismissive of these other efforts, but I agree that they have to be coordinated with purpose to scale from the outset and seek to involve the main players.
Would love to engage more on this. I know Michelle Betsill at Colorado State has written a lot on these city level initiatives.
Thanks Josh for the detailed reply! This conversation is giving me a wonderful excuse to step away from dissertating for a few moments, and so I hope you’ll forgive an equally detailed reply.
In terms of the capacity for cities to scale their actions, my take is that the absence of national action/targets is perhaps less of a barrier than the absence of financial capacity/resources (although, of course, the two may be related). Cities in the C40, as noted in a recent report, have funded somewhere in the range of two thirds of all current climate policies/initiatives out of municipal budgets. Not a recipe for long-run success, and certainly a major barrier to policies that might challenge the interests of powerful local interests. How to get financial resources into cities, however, is a big problem (even moreso in the US given cutbacks in state/federal funding, as well as the mess that is the Surface Transportation authorization currently ongoing).
What I find interesting about city-networks like the C40 is that they offer a potential (and, I would argue in the case of the C40, a novel) model for coordinated climate governance that may allow cities to move from the margins (ie: setting aspirational targets, making vague commitments – ie: the US Conference of Mayors commitment on climate change – I tend to agree w/ you on the relative irrelevance of such initiatives) to a much more consequential position in the broader system of climate governance. Put crudely: Since they need money, this drives them to search out legitimacy. In making claims re: the legitimacy of the network, there is a need to demonstrate internal coherence and the ability to achieve results. In order to do so, the network needs to develop internal mechanisms to create incentives/opportunity costs for its members. And this is what appears to be happening.
Whether this can produce investments at the level needed to drive scaled implementation of projects aimed at reducing emissions in the built sector (lots of retrofitting needed there), increasing efficiency in the transportation sector (esp. building out public transportation options, but also rolling out alternative transportation technologies), re-engineering local power grids (decentralized generation, smart transmission), and reducing emissions from waste (capturing waste gas, increasing recycling) is an open question. But it offers an interesting set of possibilities. I have an intuition that, due to the scale-free distribution of population and visibility across cities in the world (a small # of very large/visible cities; a large # of moderate to small cities) there is a possibility of contagion effects within the city-system such that governance initiatives undertaken across a large enough subset of “global cities” may tip over into systemic change – but this is just a bluesky thought at the moment.
And so, in some ways, I think I see city-city coordination in a manner very similar to your framing (problem-specific coming together of key actors operating in loose constellations).
Full disclosure: i’m currently in the midst of a dissertation project looking at global cities and climate governance.
I’d love to hear any further thoughts you might have on the issue, and would be happy to continue the conversation via email (david.gordon@utoronto.ca) if that is any easier.
Cheers!
Dave