The (Welcome) End of Unanimity

This is the thirty-second of a continuing series of essays and interviews from Earth Institute scientists on the prospects for a global climate-change treaty. Check with us daily for news and perspectives, and to make comments, as events unfold throughout the Copenhagen meetings.

The most common reaction to Copenhagen is dismay at the failure to reach binding emission reduction targets. But Copenhagen actually represents a major success.

Why? It signals, finally, the abandonment of an experiment in hyper-multilateralism that never had much chance of success. From the early days of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the dominant view was that any agreement had to be negotiated among all countries and had to assign commitments to all countries. For the Kyoto Protocol, the latter requirement was relaxed to require commitments in an initial phase that applied only to wealthy industrial countries–still a large group.

These assumptions were always dubious. A small group of contrarians recommended moving forward on climate change policy through a sequence of coordinated actions among small groups of countries. They argued that the complexities inherent in how societies would bring about reductions in emissions made it almost impossible to negotiate a global regulatory regime. Although they were in the minority, the experience of the past 20 years suggests that they were right, and the outcome in Copenhagen explicitly acknowledges that. Now, instead of beating our heads against the brick wall of unanimity, we have a more realistic way forward.

In retrospect, what is surprising is how long the mistaken faith in hyper-multilateralism survived. None of the cherished examples of effective multilateralism emerged under such a constraint. The post-World War II trade regime, for example, made progress through unilateral and bilateral tariff-reduction agreements that spread through reciprocity, under the norm of most-favored nation treatment. If postwar tariff reductions had had to be agreed on by every country in the world simultaneously, we would have been in big trouble.

Likewise for everyone’s favorite environmental treaty: the Montreal Protocol, which is aimed at protecting earth’s ozone layer. The framework convention that it operated within was signed by only 20 countries, in 1985; the protocol itself was signed in 1987 by only 25. Both of the postwar trade regime and the Montreal Protocol now have near-universal participation; and the key point is that they didn’t start out that way.

Trade liberalization and ozone-layer protection made progress because governments found effective ways to catalyze processes that amount to “social learning.” Governments, citizen groups, industries and scientific experts embarked on dynamic experiments in problem-solving. Politics was always present, but the overarching architecture channeled the politics into progressive directions.

We can’t tell whether the follow-up to Copenhagen will resemble the way governments liberalized trade or protected the ozone layer. The Copenhagen accord provides few specifics. But it does provide a framework in which motivated actors can charge ahead with experiments that have good chances of success; in which lessons can be learned and shared; and in which regulatory forms can bend to the realities on the ground, rather than remain rigid until they break. Copenhagen is cause for hope.