Issue linkage

Sometimes I run into areas where I suddenly realize that I have unconsidered assumptions that aren't shared by the field. It's always odd.

For instance, there's this concept in negotiation called issues linkage, which, in practice, basically means that if you're negotiating about one issue, you might choose to bring a separate (possibly related, but possibly totally unrelated) issue into the negotiation.

One line of reasoning behind this idea is that you do it to introduce opportunities to trade: if you give me what I'm trying to get on issue 1, I'll give you this concession I know you want on issue 2.

This is to me such an obvious logical interpretation of the practice that it was sort of startling to find that it's something of a latter interpretation. The prior, "classical" interpretation is that it's a way of using leverage: I have power in issue area 1, therefore I'll bring in issue area 2 where I have less power in an attempt to try to generalize the power I have in issue area 1.

Why I hate polisci

In Negotiating the Law of the Sea (Sebenius 1984), Sebenius spends a section discussing the idea that some resolutions to negotiation might involve what are essentially betting schedules, with participants having different estimations of the probabilities of various outcomes. It also analyzes whether participants ought to reveal what their beliefs are. It's an extension of the idea that differences between negotiating partners can be exploited to create mutually acceptable outcomes. Sebenius' extension may well be perfectly logical in theory. It is utterly ridiculous in practice. Consider:

Proposition 3 shows that, unless an individual is "very" risk-averse, it is worthwhile to accept a logarithmic betting schedule and to announce true probabilities when faced with an arbitrary probability announcement by an opponent.

Proposition 3. Accepting a logarithmic bet schedule and announcing one's true probabilities regardless of the opponent's announced probabilities is preferable to not betting if one's absolute risk aversion function is less than unity. (155)

[Proof withheld - it was long and involved mathematical equations with symbols I didn't even recognize.]

Corollary. A risk-neutral individual should accept a logarithmic betting schedule and should announce his true probabilities regardless of what are the announced probabilities of his opponent. (157)

I mean, give me a frakking break. Can you see Obama asking Congress to approve (and his constituents to put up with) a treaty that involved anything like this?* We already got the key insight - that differing beliefs about probabilities can support mutually acceptable agreements - last chapter. This kind of refinement doesn't serve any practical purpose that I can see, but it is precisely the kind of thing that political scientists love to do.


* It's fun to imagine, though. "Now, folks, what we have here is something they're calling a 'logarithmic bet schedule.' Now, I know - I know that's not a term everyone's use to hearing in their local grocery store. But it's really pretty simple. What it means is..."

Models

One recurring theme in complex negotiations is the potential for informational models to be useful in driving outcomes. Thus, for instance, some researchers credit the increasingly useful models of acid rain effects developed over the course of the acid rain negotiations for helping smooth the course of that negotiation.

Models also turn up in the Law of the Sea negotiations. A model developed by MIT for estimating the financial aspects of seabed mining became critical because it provided a neutral common ground that different countries could use to assess the expected outcomes of various proposed arrangements. Sebenius (1984) writes:

It is hard to overestimate the effect of the model on the deliberations of NG2 in Geneva and in subsequent sessions. In his report, Koh stated: 'In the group of financial experts we were immediately confronted with the need to agree on a set of assumptions. Without an agreed framework of assumptions it would not have been possible for us to carry on with our deliberations...' (27)

The problem is relevant to climate change. One problem climate change mitigation faces is that there's a lot of baseline argument about what's really likely to happen when the planet warms, and how fast. There are also arguments over the appropriate economic models to use to assess the costs and benefits of different response plans.

Sebenius goes on to describe why the MIT model was so easily accepted by negotiators with widely differing interests:

The model had clearly not been designed originally for the international use to which it was being put: for example, the U.S. tax system was built directly into the economic routine, and there was little discussion of the financial provisions in an eventual LOS treaty. These characteristics, perhaps a bit paradoxically, tended to reinforce perceptions of the model's independence. (28)

So in other words, it was the fact that the model had not been made for the purpose to which it was put that made it easily acceptable. Had a model been built specifically for the purpose, it would presumably have generated distrust (over who the builders were and what might have been their agenda) and controversy (over what assumptions ought to be designed in.)

A frustrating finding if your purpose is to understand how people faced with a negotiation can try to predispose it to be successful: go back in time 10 years and start an unrelated project.

Differences

Sebenius (1984) makes the point that successful negotiations often hinge on differences rather than similarities. Basically, this is pretty obvious. If we're negotiating over how to divide a gold ring and a silver ring amongst ourselves, it will be easier for us to agree if I like silver and you like gold than it will be if we both prefer silver.

But Sebenius goes on to say something a little more interesting: that because of this, it's not always a good thing to do pleasant things like establishing common ground and finding points of agreement and hashing out common assumptions. It may be precisely our differing assumptions that make an agreement possible. Thus, for instance, if I have a house whose value I believe will go down, while my prospective buyer believes it will go up, we'll find it easier to come to an agreement than we would otherwise. Or let's say we're hashing out the details of a book deal; if you're publishing my book and believe it will do only moderately well, while I believe it will do quite well, a deal that gives me an unusually small advance but a very generous royalty package will leave us both eager to sign.

Shilling for the EIA

The US's Energy Information Agency, which is part of the DOE, is a really amazing organization that offers a staggering amount of information, relatively clearly presented - about the US's energy picture, of course, but also a fair amount of info about the global energy picture. If I'm not mistaken, until recently the UN relied on the US EIA's data for tracking emissions globally and by country. If you want an important number about energy, there's a reasonably good chance the EIA has it.

Anyway. I was thinking of this today because I was looking for info on investment and, in looking at the EIA's page, I found the nifty set of charts they have headlining their Environment subsection. Take a look at this, which charts the US's energy-related emissions growth from 1990 to 2009:

(EIA 2011, http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/environment/emissions/carbon/index.html)

US energy-related emissions growth was flat or negative in 6 out of 19 years. Of course, we need it to start being negative basically every year pretty soon, but still. That's actually a bit better than I might have thought.

You should also be noting that emissions declines track pretty well to recessions, which isn't surprising. The ongoing Great Recession has actually had a fairly large effect on global emissions. Some of that will be lost when the economy recovers, but some of it will probably be permanent, to the extent that it's the oldest, least efficient operations that tend to get scrapped during recessions (though such effects may quickly be swamped by new development in a year or two).

Consider this other chart from the same EIA series:

(EIA 2011, http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/environment/emissions/carbon/index.html)

This is nifty. Basically, four things go into emissions: population, GDP, energy intensity of the economy (that is, energy used per average unit of GDP), and carbon intensity of energy (that is, carbon emitted per unit of energy). Right now, the US is growing in population (which tends to raise emissions) and declining in GDP per capita (which tends to lower emissions).

It's also decreasing in energy intensity. That could come from a variety of things:
1) On-going shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy
2) Acceleration of manufacturing loss caused by stresses from the recession
3) Increases in efficiency as the most inefficient operations die off (naturally or in response to recession)
4) Privately incented efficiency measures (that is, steps toward efficiency that private actors would take anyway)
5) Publicly incented efficiency measures, like those in ongoing programs and in special one-offs like the relatively large efficiency measures subsidized by the stimulus bill
6) Other things I haven't thought of, doubtless

In the US, energy intensity tends to decrease, which is typical as a country develops, but not necessarily inevitable - for instance, China has absorbed a lot of our energy-heavy manufacturing like steel, aluminum, and glass; so their energy intensity may or may not be decreasing, net.

Finally, the carbon intensity of energy is declining. I would love to think that's from renewables entering the market, and it probably is to some degree, but it's probably also from efficiency measures at fossil fuel-based plants. And there may be a recession effect their as well: if power companies need to supply less power in general, they may be cycling up their older, least efficient, peak-power-only plants less often, increasing total carbon efficiency.

So, bottom line, this chart is cool! But it needs a little unpacking. The "GDP" chunk is likely not actually the only chunk that contains recession-related effects.

Conference notes

So, a few interesting things from the conference last week:

Green stimulus (that is, stimulus spending on renewables/efficiency/etc.):
1) Green stimulus made up 16% of total stimulus, and 0.7% of world GDP. By country, South Korea had the highest share of GDP in green stimulus (5% - Korea essentially put all of its stimulus in green stimulus, I believe, as it's a big part of their national strategy). China (unsurprising) and Saudia Arabia (really? he didn't go into this) were also relatively high. The US spent 0.9% of GDP on it, just a bit above average.
2) 2/3 of green spending was energy efficiency. The lower total spend was as a percentage of GDP per country, the higher the percentage given to efficiency tended to be; so only in countries with relatively large spends did countries find much room for investment in renewables or environmental improvements. Those countries, incidentally, were countries like Japan, South Korea, the US, and China. Not surprising.
3) Actual disbursement of green stimulus funds has been slow - only 6% in 2009, and only 29% by the end of 2010 in the US. It is believed we'll eventually get to the target in terms of disbursement and jobs, but not till 2012.

Be afraid; be very afraid:
From last year to this year, China went from 24 cars per 1000 people to 32 cars for 1000. As a snapshot of one year, just think about that. It's huge.
Similarly, over the past 30 years, China has urbanized more than 300,000,000 people - essentially, a group the size of the entire United States.
China consumes 43% of the world's coal.

The most subsidized industry in the US:
Is transportation. This is obvious once you think about it: roads built by the government are a huge subsidy. I'd just never thought about it in those terms before.

Tokyo:
Has its own little cap and trade program!

China and efficiency:
One of the speakers projected that inefficiency in energy use will become a large and growing drag on China's economy, with 5-6% of GDP projected to be tied up in environmental costs under the business as usual scenario. Subsidies don't help with this. At times, the cost of generating a kilowatt-hour from coal is actually higher than the price at which that kilowatt-hour is sold.

The greens...

It cannot be denied that part of the problem with the climate change negotiation issue is that part of the set of interest groups that out to be pushing for climate change action are kind of crazy.

Of course, this is true about both sides, but in the case of the crazy side of the coalition that blocks action, the crazy is helpful to its cause, rather than divisive.

I was in a conference all Friday and Saturday, making it difficult to post. It was a conference on energy efficiency, so it wasn't necessarily hugely generative of punchy blog posts, but there were a few interesting points. Which I'm saving for tomorrow, because the whole thing also set me behind on doing actual research, and now I'm going to go attempt to catch up.

Tough negotiation

International relations theorists are often quite fond of brinksmanship. A certain brand of negotiation theory really likes to theorize about exactly how hard you can push or use threats, and the right strategy for using and reacting to strategies in which people exaggerate how committed they are to getting a better outcome for themselves, and walking out if they can't. I don't think I'm wrong in saying that this strand of literature believes that it's often the case that negotiators leave potential gains on the table that they could have gotten, because they aren't willing to push so hard that they risk having negotiations collapse, even when the risk may be justified by the potential gains.

This is probably true as far as it goes. Sadly, my impression is that often the only people who effectively and successfully practice brinksmanship in negotiation are those who actually don't want an agreement. So, for instance, I'm currently reading about Law of the Sea stuff, and the account I'm reading gives a beautiful example of tough negotiation. Near the end of the LOS conference, the US (which has just switched administration, with Reagan incoming) suddenly decides that the draft text that's been negotiated - which the US delegation helped shape - is not sufficiently friendly to developed country/maritime country interests. It sends back a set of very strong demands that require significantly shifting the shape of the treaty and who it favors. In response to this, there was an eventual proposal by a group of 12 developed countries (referred to as the "Good Samaritans") that conceded on many of the points the US was making demands on. The account I'm reading at the moment comments:

Leigh Ratiner [a US official involved in the negotiations] says today: 'The Good Samaritans' paper would have been supported by the Group of 77, if it had been backed by all industrialized countries. Combined with the "grandfather rights" clause [another concession to US desires], that makes the treaty highly favorable to industrialized countries, though not perfect... we could have walked away with a resounding success.' (52) 

(Clyde Sanger, Ordering the Oceans, 1987)

The problem is that this all happens because there's a large faction in the incoming administration that just has no interest in seeing the US sign an LOS treaty at all; thus, even when the US appears to have extracted concessions which are, diplomatically, apparently something of a coup... it still doesn't sign. I'm a little uncertain how publicly this all went down, but potentially the net effect is that the US humiliates a bunch of foreign delegations by demonstrating that they could be backed down from firm positions by a sufficient show of force - to no purpose. 

Something I wondered about today

The EU added a bunch of Eastern European member states in 2004. However, they were on a path to membership from the early to mid-1990s on, at least a few years before Kyoto came into effect. What was the influence of these states on European international climate policy?

The states themselves tend to be heavier fossil fuel users than the Western European states, which at first glance suggests they would be an influence away from emissions mitigation agreements.

On the other hand, Soviet-legacy energy systems are rife with potential low-hanging fruit in terms of improvements, if you have someone to provide the funding for them. And Kyoto allows for joint implementation, in which countries cooperate to meet their pooled targets collectively, with the actual location of cuts being wherever the cooperating countries find it easiest to make them. So has the actual effect of the Eastern European countries been to be an insurance policy for West European target-setting, making them more comfortable pushing for and signing on to Kyoto's targets? (Easiest piece of evidence to look for: has the EU collectively tended to pursue its targets via JI that locates a lot of emissions cutting in Eastern Europe? Current answer: no idea.)

Treaty success

So basically, I'm interested in how states succeed in making treaties. That presumes, of course, that I'm able to tell the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful attempt to make a treaty. Which, of course, I'm totally not. What defines a successful treaty-making attempt? Is it successful if you get ratification? Not necessarily; you might end up getting ratification of a totally worthless aspirational agreement that ultimately has no effect. How do you tell the difference (particularly given that there's a real branch of political science that argues that treaties are, by definition, epiphenomenal and therefore NEVER matter)?

Or you might get ratification of a more authentic treaty, only to have it collapse afterward. Is it successful if it lasts for only 2 years? 10? 25?

There's also the question of, success for who? Is it success if the two drivers of a treaty effort are the US and the USSR, and one of them gets what they want but the other doesn't? Is it successful if you get ratification of a carbon emissions treaty but the US, the largest emitter in the world at the time, doesn't sign?

The last question is particularly relevant to me at the moment, because I'm looking at the Law of the Sea negotiations, which are largely judged successful, from what I've seen, even though the US never actually signed (but which signed some subsequent stuff, and mostly - I believe - abides by the treaty anyway) in spite of the fact that it was a major driver of negotiations. So was the treaty a success immediately even though the US didn't sign, because enough other people did, even though the US is the world's largest maritime power? Was it not initially a success, or impossible to judge, but became a success because in practice it seems to have held? How do I treat that in a rigorous manner?

The Copenhagen round is widely judged to have obviously been a failure, because nobody got what they went in wanting and negotiations very visibly fell apart. On the one hand, this judgment is made even though there ultimately was a document, approved by all but one participant, containing voluntary emissions mitigation pledges from a much higher number of nations than committed to mitigations under Kyoto - including the US and China. Should that lead us to call it a success? On the other hand, those pledges are all voluntary, while Kyoto's pledges were binding; does that confirm that Copenhagen was a relative failure? On the third hand, Kyoto's binding pledges haven't, in practice, uniformly led to actual achievement of real cuts - so are voluntary pledges really that much worse? Could we call that a success? On the fourth hand, though all but one of the nations at Copenhagen accepted the document, one - Bolivia! - refused, and since the Convention on Climate Change works by consensus, this means the document is not formally adopted into the Convention - failure! And on the fifth hand, nations have continued to add their pledges in over time, months after the Bolivian-dictated failure to add it to the Convention. Does the fact that countries cared enough to keep adding to it months afterward suggest that it has been something of a success after all?

Whew.

Things that might not be quite TRUE

One of the weirdest things about being a Real Researcher, For Reals in the grad school gig is that it really forces you to come face to face with the idea that actual papers with actual ideas that lots of actual people think are quite convincing might be wrong, even though lots of people think they're quite convincing.

I mean, there are several rather reputable ideas about treaty-making that I'm simply not sure about. For instance, there's the idea that building scientific knowledge-gathering into a negotiation convention is an important and helpful thing. A lot of people argue this about several important environmental treaties, like the acid rain accords. They might be right; but my guess is they are more boundedly right than generally right, and that the mechanism might be different than they think. I think the mechanism in the acid rain case might be that the increase in knowledge allowed negotiations to become more pointed, and hence more effective, but making it clearer who was at fault for what, and how much damage, precisely, those specific states were causing if they didn't stop. If that's true, then knowledge only helps in cases where specific individual damages can, by virtue of additional knowledge, be better traced to specific individual states. Increasing knowledge seems to have been only marginally helpful in the case of climate change, where this is not the case.

Or tonight, in a rather random book on the Law of the Sea negotiations, the author states at the outset that one critical factor in making the Third Round of negotiations more fruitful than prior rounds is the shift to use of a "single negotiating text", which he states is an innovation. Really? The idea of putting all your proposed bits of draft text in one document where they can be looked at together and slowly consolidated via negotiation is an innovation? And one that makes a serious difference? Coming up with the idea of creating a single negotiating text is really helpful, AND people never thought of it before the 1970s?

God help us all.