Sebenius on climate change

Sebenius ("Designing negotiations toward a new regime: The case of global warming," International Security, 1991) writes, in an article on how best to accomplish climate negotiations in a timely manner:

Many factors contributed to the length of the LOS [Law of the Sea] process, but four procedural cornerstones virtually guaranteed its duration and could easily do the same if adopted for global warming negotiations: 1) virtually universal participation; 2) a powerful set of rules and understandings aimed at taking all decisions by consensus, if at all possible; 3) a comprehensive agenda; and 4) the agreement to seek a single convention that would constitute a "package deal." (123)

Let's check that against what has actually played out in real-world approach to climate change negotiations:

1) Universal participation? Check.
2) Consensus-based decision-making? Check.
3) Comprehensive agenda? Check.
4) A single convention "package deal"? Check.

*sigh*

In many ways, I like Sebenius' approach more than a lot of other scholars'. It's closer to how I think about the issues. A major theme of the article is setting up negotiations to avoid successful blocking coalitions - that is, to make sure that, for any deal that goes to the table, the natural opponents of that deal in its generic sense don't make up such a powerful coalition that they can't be overcome. This is one of the reasons that going for a comprehensive agenda or package deal makes things difficult: it maximizes the number of opponents you have to overcome all at once.

Sebenius does suggest that a way to get out of this in the climate change case is to push for cap-and-trade. This, he thinks, will allow countries to avoid the need to bureaucratically negotiate against specific opponents (keeping opposition diffuse) and (hopefully) ensures that emissions reduction is maximally efficient, thus reducing incentives to oppose it. History, I think, has not been kind to this hope; costs when spread most efficiently are still costs, and all the industries that are prone to block haven't declined to block simply because we've tried to arrange a solution that will lower their overall costs from, say, 140% to 110% of the theoretical minimum. Opposition has in fact hardened throughout a broad variety of interest groups.

My intuition wonders if we might actually have been better off negotiating more specifically; it would have solidified the opposition of specific actors, of course, but it might have diffused the opposition of others not under discussion - and when talking specifics about who will shoulder costs, it also becomes possible to get specific about how to recompense particular interests that will be damaged by a deal. Hmm.

K's Law of Negotiation

To get a successful negotiation:

1) At least one of the parties must really want a successful outcome*, and

2) That parties (or parties) must be able to get all necessary negotiation partners to want it too.

It sounds simple, but you'd be surprised how much of the literature I read doesn't seem to be based on this basic point.


* I mean REALLY want, in the sense of expecting to gain an important, impactful benefit or avoid an important, impactful loss; merely thinking it wouldn't be a bad idea, all told, is not enough for this condition.

South Korea: domestic vs. international markets

It's a bit surprising to me how few moderately important secondary powers there seem to be in the climate debate. It's really South Korea and Brazil... Maybe Indonesia. Saudi Arabia as well, I suppose, though in a very different way.

South Korea is in an interesting position because it's advanced enough to really cash in on a green tech market boom, but doesn't have the sheer market size-based power the major players do. South Korea has been fairly successful in playing the game with this handicap thus far. One of my fellow grad students writes about the different ways the South Koreans and Japanese have played the national vs. international markets game recently; in particular, he looks at the cellular market, where South Korea has been fairly successful in adopting international standards and selling into them, while Japan decided to define its own domestic technology standard for mobile phones, failed to spread it to any other countries, and... well, when was the last time you bought a Japanese phone? Japanese phones have the Japanese market cornered, though!

I'm returning to this idea of domestic vs. international markets in thinking about South Korea. Smart grid and related products are a natural market for South Korea given its industrial profile. And hey, look, they've got a smart grid roadmap! But they face several obstacles, most of which have to do in one way or another with the relationship between their prospective domestic and international markets. I'm working under the assumption - which I believe South Korea would agree with - that they need to be able to sell first to the domestic market successfully, but in such a way as to prepare them to sell successfully to international markets.

One is that a smart grid needs to have at its heart a flexible electricity market that can accommodate things like advanced metering, real time pricing - things that provide consumers with incentives to care about efficiency and demand response. Right now, Korea has a subsidized electricity market that doesn't give consumers these incentives. To provide a good domestic "nursery" for smart grid and related efficiency products that can ultimately be sold abroad, Korea needs to restructure its market to give its domestic consumers reason to care about - and pay for - these types of products. That means liberalizing and desubsidizing, which could create disruption, at least in the short term.

Even if that hurdle is overcome, though, it's not clear that the products that Koreans will want to buy will, in a general sense, be the same products that international markets will want to buy, not least because different international markets differ a lot in this area. The most obvious difference is the one between the fully industrialized countries, which are generally fully electrified, often with aging grids that need to be replaced, added on to, modified, and supplemented; and developing or transitioning countries like China and India where electrification is far from complete and there's huge scope for building smart grids from the ground up. But even within these broad categories, countries differ a lot in terms of what the existing power structure is, what needs the existing industrial profile imposes on it, and what current or future efforts are underway to integrate which kinds of renewable and/or decentralized generation. These differences may be more crucial, more constraining, and more complex than the inter-state differences that constrain a market like mobile phones (or, hey, they might not).

Some key questions might be, which country or set of countries does South Korea most resemble in terms of industry? Which does it want to? Whose strategy for integrating renewables will it most closely follow (it doesn't have a lot of renewables yet)? How much is it willing to distort or restructure its domestic market to prepare itself for selling outside its borders? Can it successfully sell into all markets, or might it need to focus? Could South Korea be a nice nexus point? Is it a little like the US, a little like Europe, a little like Japan, and a little like China?

It's a particularly important issue because South Korea is entering this market earlier than it entered the mobile phone market, such that it could face similar interoperability standards issues, but at an earlier point in their development where Korea could need to make more guesses - but, on the other hand, may have more opportunities to influence international choices. It doesn't want to get marooned - but on the other hand, it could become a leader. It needs to figure out where are the critical branching points, in terms of standards and usage characteristics, that could differentiate markets. How much can Korea lead or dictate by (say, by getting there first, heading meetings, and providing a focal point within a range of possible solutions), and how much will be determined by existing structures and conditions in key international markets?

Odds and ends

India: the tidal power power? Huh. Okay. This article does provide a stellar demonstration of a problem news articles often have in talking about renewable energy, which is that they like to throw around the term "leadership" when talking about installed capacity of various forms of energy. To me, this isn't a very useful form of "leadership" (particularly when it's an industry with very low levels of installed capacity in general - declaring leadership on the basis of one installation is sort of silly). I wish news articles would focus more on leadership in terms of creating technology or selling product; that can be related to installed capacity, if you make a point of buying domestically, or if you're very good at bringing new technologies inside your borders and stripping the knowledge from them to provide the basis for a domestic industry, but it's not directly connected.

News articles tend to conflate, the two, I think; hence this one, which concludes, "And with that, the country hopes to make its mark on the renewable energy sector globally – deemed important to an emerging superpower as it seems that present-day global supremacy wars are being fought on the alternative energy pitch." The plant's being built by a British company. It may well help India develop a domestic tidal power industry in the long run, but it's not "making a mark" on the renewable energy sector in an economic competition sense.

I hear President Obama talked a lot about clean energy in the SotU! Points for effort, Mr. President, but sadly, if you have to tell people it's a Sputnik moment, it's not a Sputnik moment. Would that it were. Am I pleased that he made it a priority? Huh. From a saving the planet point of view, of course. More investment is an absolute good from that perspective, and of course I think it will benefit the US in general to not screw up the planet. But from a narrower national strategy perspective? I'm not sure. If I thought we had the political will to go whole hog on it, I would be thrilled. But with China having a stronger set of built-in incentives to push hard on this already, and our tendency to be comparatively half-hearted on this sort of thing, the heretic in me wonders if maybe we should be focusing our tech investment somewhere with less international competition that could still have high payoffs in terms of growth. Let's say I hope we find the political will to really follow through on this one, because it would be better for us and everyone if we did.

Panama canal negotiations

Early in my grad school career, I did a project with a fellow grad student looking at conflict behavior. We looked, among other cases, at the Panama invasion, and found, among other things, that one reason the Panama invasion happened was because the process of escalation made it difficult to back down even when backing down was possibly in everyone's best interest. Specifically, the US reached a point in negotiations where it decided to offer a deal which was believed to fulfill Noriega's minimum needs for a deal. But Noriega rejected the deal, likely because it was offered by Reagan (an outgoing president) and would need to be fulfilled by Bush (an incoming president who would be facing reelection.) The run-up process to invasion had shifted the domestic incentives. The invasion had been "sold" well enough that it's believed Noriega believed that Bush wouldn't be able to honor the deal Noriega wanted and Reagan was willing to offer. The US initially needed people behind an invasion so that it could threaten an invasion in order to get concessions; but having got concessions, it found it had been backed into a corner domestically.

It's amusing, then, to read that something similar almost happened in the bargaining that originally took place in 1902 around the initiation of the canal. In this negotiation, the US played Nicaragua off against Panama; it made a number of moves that showed a public interest in and preference for a Nicaraguan project. This successfully convinced France (which controlled the canal site) that there was a danger of losing the deal to a competitor, and secured concessions. But it had also successfully convinced US legislators, meaning the votes weren't there in the Senate once the US got the deal it was looking for!

How was this solved? Partly through direct persuasion, and partly through slander*. Howard Raiffa writes:

a week before the Senate vote there still were not enough Panamanian enthusiasts. At this point, a decisive role was played by a Frenchman named Philippe Bunan-Varilla... Three days before the deciding vote, he sent each senator a pretty Nicaraguan stamp showing a railroad wharf in the foreground and, in the background, Momotombo in magnificent eruption. 'What have the Nicaraguans chosen to characterize on their coat of arms and on their postage stamps? Volcanos!' Bunan-Varilla made his point. On June 19, 1902, Panama won the Senate...

--Raiffa (1982), The Art and Science of Negotiation

If Bunan-Varilla's postage stamp maneuver actually turned the tide, then I think what it mainly demonstrates is the real lack of any deep interest group maneuvering behind this decision. If senators' positions were so weak (and their background research so shallow) that their opinions could be reversed by "Hey, did you know Nicaragua has a volcano?", it's hard to imagine that anyone much on the domestic side had cared enough to put a lot of pressure on them to choose one way or another (other than the above-mentioned political machinations).

Also, China officially ahead in wind capacity now.


* Dear lawyer friends: I use the term in a colloquial rather than a technical sense.

Today is mildly depressing...

Hooray! More corn ethanol! (/sarcasm)

Also, a Canadian couple is claiming that leaking carbon dioxide from a carbon capture and storage test project in Saskatchewan has their local pond "fizzing like soda pop." Exciting!

Last Schelling, I promise

I read the last chunk of Schelling today. It's somewhat less relevant to what I'm doing, being more concerned with the conflictual end of the mixed-motives spectrum - limited war and whatnot - but I figured that given I'd already read 2/3 of the book I might as well finish up while it was fresh.

I actually think Schelling does better with this end of the spectrum. Partly this is because I find his "weakness can be good" thread of argument more compelling in this case, oddly (is it odd?). When Schelling suggests that there are "military capabilities we might prefer not to have" this seems intuitively satisfying to me. Though, note, I think it's only true when we're talking absolutes and not relatives; we might prefer not to have nukes, or not invent missile defense, but only if the Russians also don't have nukes or missile defense. I think Schelling would mostly agree with that.

However, on a deeper level, I think the general rationalist/game theory-friendly approach just suits conflict (even limited conflict) better, for psychological reasons. My intuition is that war is not in fact "a continuation of policy by other means"; I think there's actually a qualitative difference in how we think about appropriate behavior and what our expectations are when we're trying to get something by bargaining than when we're trying to get something by war, whether or not it's true that limited wars have tacit "cooperative" aspects. I think the two mindsets have entirely different sets of cognitive biases, and that the set of cognitive biases associated with conflict is much closer to the set of cognitive biases displayed by game theorists than is the set of cognitive biases associated with bargaining.

Anyway, there were some bits that I quite liked in this last chunk. For instance:

The argument of this paper leads to a definition of brinksmanship and a concept of the 'brink of war.' The brink is not, in this view, the sharp edge of a cliff where one can stand firmly, look down, and decide whether or not to plunge. The brink is a curved slope that one can stand on with some risk of slipping, the slope gets [sic] steeper and the risk of slipping greater as one moves toward the chasm. ... One does not, in brinksmanship, frighten the adversary who is roped to him by getting so close to the edge that if one decides to jump one can do so before anyone can stop him. Brinksmanship involves getting onto the slope where one may fall in spite of his own best efforts to save himself, dragging his adversary with him. Brinksmanship is thus the deliberate creation of a recognizable risk of war, a risk that one does not completely control. It is the tactic of deliberately letting the situation get somewhat out of hand, just because its being out of hand may be intolerable to the other party..." (199-200)

That seems to me to accurately describe many real situations.

Still, even this section has a fairly high density of Dr. Strangelove-esque "solutions" proposed.

And now, a message from our sponsors...

Some days just aren't dissertation days. The most academic thing I was able to get done today was go to a job talk and looong lunch with a candidate interviewing at the department. She had an interesting talk, though. She was looking at why African states intervene to do peacekeeping in other African states - when they often have their own stability problems at home, and even when there's no obvious direct security benefit to intervening in the target country. She concluded that these peacekeeping interventions occur because they elicit rewards from Western countries who otherwise might feel pressure to intervene themselves - rewards like easier aid with fewer good-governance conditions attached; or like military training and aid, which has a primary intent supporting the peacekeeping efforts, but which of course also helps leaders maintain stability and control at home... cynical, but plausible!

Solar, wind, and market takeovers

Possibly the headline of this Reuters article should have been rephrased as, "Has China already kicked all of our asses, and is there anything we can do about it at this point?" because when you've managed to overcome Germany's substantial head start in solar in, like, three years, you are not kidding around.

This is a good backgrounder for an interesting conversation I had with my advisor today, about why China is taking over in solar (two thirds of solar cell production in the global market, according to this article) while not yet (or are they? see below) administering the same ass-kicking in wind. We discussed the possibility that it's a case of suitability of the domestic market as a lead market (solar isn't actually a very well-suited technology to Germany's climate, while wind is quite well-suited to the Danish domestic market). But this article suggests it's just different subsidy structures - both Germany and China subsidize solar power pretty heavily, but Germany doesn't discriminate on country of manufacturing, while China does. This raises the question of whether there's a similar subsidy structure difference with regard to wind, China, and Denmark; and if not, why not?/if so, why different outcomes? I don't know.

However, this article suggests in fact the story is going just the same way in wind, and there's no discrepancy to account for. One of the frustrating things about these industries is they're growing and changing so fast that one year's difference in data (say, on market share) can tell a completely different story. It's hard to keep up, and dangerous to predict.

In any case, supposedly the US is considering WTO trade dispute proceedings against China over this stuff, which will be an interesting line for it to walk, given that it's also been trying to initiate significant R&D cooperation on green energy technologies with China.

By the way, why is there this big counter-wind movement based on the supposed eyesore value of wind installations? I find wind installations tend to be quite beautiful.

A bit more Schelling: irrationality!

One possible exception to my "weakness is not as useful as Schelling would like us to believe" rant centers on irrationality. There is a lot of literature out there that suggests that it's actually useful for most states to appear a bit irrational in many situations. Not North Korea irrational, mind you. Just enough for specific purposes. The classic case I had to teach in a class on war a couple of semesters back is nuclear deterrence: under a lot of definitions of rationality, it's pretty much never rational to launch a nuke - yet for nuclear deterrence to work, states have to believe other states really will launch that nuke even though it's not rational. A little bit of (perceived) irrationality is key. Yet another case where an apparent weakness is useful!

I'm unconvinced of this, however. I don't think it's actually irrationality that's at issue in these cases. I think what's actually in states' best interests is to convince other states that their preferences deviate somewhat from an ideal model of "normal" preferences, such that it might be in their best interests, as they define them, to do something that would be irrational under a more standard  or ideal preference set.

Possibly this seems like an overly fine distinction, but I think it's important. Convincing other states that you're irrational means convincing them that you might do things even though you know they're not in your best interests, and even though we all know they're not in your best interests: in other words, that you're fundamentally unpredictable and crazy. When faced with an unpredictable and crazy partner, bargaining and cooperation become difficult or impossible. Nobody's making trade deals with North Korea.

But convincing other states that you have a slightly unexpected set of preferences doesn't imply that you can't be predicted or will do things you know aren't in your best interests. It just means, basically, that other states need to understand what you believe your best interests are in order in order to predict how you'll behave - and in turn, that they probably have to pay attention to what you're saying your preferences are in order to understand this. That gives you the leverage to shape their expectations of your behavior, and hence, how they behave toward you. But it doesn't suggest you can't be predicted or cooperated with productively. It just gives you a bit more leverage over the set of expectations under which cooperation happens.

Critiquing the value of weakness

I'm catching on Thomas Schelling. I'm supposed to know Schelling well already, because his Strategy of Conflict (1960) is one of the seminal texts on bargaining and the application of power and influence; but in practice, I don't know him as well as I should and today I'm fixing that.

The thing about Schelling is that he's not as clever as he thinks he is.

The basic message of Strategy of Conflict is that weakness can be useful. Being constrained in various ways can strengthen one's position. An abstract example: let's say I want to sell a house and you want to buy one. This is an abstract example, so I'm the only seller in town and you're the only buyer; we don't have to consider competition. We both know that the other will probably take a range of possible prices, say from roughly $94,000 to roughly $108,000. If we negotiate, there's a good chance we'll settle on a price somewhere in the middle - maybe at $100,000 because it's a nice round number. But let's say you're leaving on a trip to Namibia tomorrow, where you won't be accessible, even by cell or email, for the next year. Just before you leave, you look at my house, decide you'd like to buy it, and send me an email that says you're willing to buy the house at $95,000. If I want to take your offer, I can settle with your lawyer, who can sign for you, but who's not empowered to negotiate price on your behalf. I'll take the offer, because it's in my range of acceptable offers, and I know it's a choice between taking the offer or not selling the house for (at best) a year. Your bargaining position improved because you lost the ability to communicate, and hence to be bargained with.

Schelling LOVES this kind of stuff, and that's pretty much what the book is about. In fact, Schelling defines strategy as follows: "A strategic move is one that influences the other person's choice, in a manner favorable to one's self, by affecting the other person's expectations on how one's self will behave. One constrains the partner's choice by constraining one's own behavior." (160)

But how to apply this to the real world? Consider the types of examples Schelling comes up with when he discusses the kind of behavior his theoretical findings might lead us to engage in in real problems (bear in mind it was written during the Cold War):

1) We might agree to an exchange of kindergarteners with Russia; all US 5-year-olds would spend their 5th year in Russia, while all Russian 5-year-olds spend their 5th year in the US. Thus, both countries constrain themselves; neither can launch a nuclear attack without killing it's own 5-year-olds.

2) We might agree with the Russians to remove, in parallel, any defensive weaponry - basically the same logic as the child exchange, except that the whole population of each country becomes a hostage.

3) "There was a time, shortly after the first atomic bomb was exploded, when there was some journalistic speculation about whether the earth's atmosphere had a limited tolerance to nuclear fission; the idea was bruited about that a mighty chain reaction might destroy the earth's atmosphere when some critical number of bombs had already been exploded. Some proposed that, if this were true and if we could calculate with accuracy that critical level of tolerance, we might neutralize atomic weapons for all time by a deliberate program of openly and dramatically exploding n - 1 bombs." (138) Hence constraining our options - removing the middle options between "no nuclear explosions" and "total destruction".

4) "When the outcome depends on coordination, the timely destruction of communication may be a winning tactic. When a man and his wife are arguing by telephone over where to meet for dinner, the argument is one by the wife if she simply announces where she is going and hangs up."

I mean, I ask you! Does a single one of these strike you as a good idea? Of course not. There are certainly specific situations in which a specific weakness is useful - but there are, on average, more situations where not having the weakness is more useful. Unless we can turn the weakness off and on at will, we're likely to weigh the probabilities and decide that on average, we're better off not having the weakness. And if we can turn it off and on at will, it's not really a weakness - and our bargaining partner is likely to realize this in fairly short order, with unpleasant consequences. The wife may get her husband to show up at the restaurant she wants by using that tactic once - but the consequences aren't likely to be pleasant.

Thus, Schelling's book in the real world is, at best, a handbook of how you might turn existing weaknesses you can't escape to advantage. North Korea may in practice derive some advantage from appearing crazy (a weakness that allows it to escape many forms of bargaining and succeed with unilateral moves it otherwise might not be able to get away with). But it doesn't act crazy because it was a powerful state that decided that was the best strategic option overall. It acts crazy either because a) it is crazy, or b) because it is a weak state that can't get what it wants any other way than by exploiting one of its apparent weaknesses. (Probably a bit of both.)

Being a successful negotiator

I had a more serious post planned out, but I can't resist this instead. Serious posting tomorrow! Today, an excerpt from a chapter on culture and custom in diplomatic practice, which quotes Erasmus (1546) on how to behave so as not to embarrass yourself at table, a common theme (!) in early treatises on diplomacy:

When you spit, turn your back so that you do not dirty anyone else; do not spit on the table.

Do not blow your nose in the tablecloth; it is to wipe your greasy fingers on.

Do not blow your nose with the same fingers with which you reach into the common dish.

Do not use both hands in the dish. Do not dip half-eaten morsels in the common sauce a second time.

Vomiting is no disgrace provided one does not dirty others.

So now you know: complaints about double-dipping are at least 500 years old.

What am I?

In some ways, it's very hard for me to find "my literature." What I'm interested in is how countries get each other to cooperate to do things they want each other to do. I often refer to this as international negotiation, but actually, if you search on "negotiation" or "international negotiation" in the literature, you tend to get a lot of very details-oriented process-based stuff. Sometime that can be interesting, but it's a little peripheral to my interests; I tend to think that most of the outcomes of actual negotiations are predetermined by the time negotiators get to the table - by prior maneuvering, domestic-level interest aggregation, and background conditions.

On the other hand, if you try to take a step back and look at a higher level, much of the literature becomes too distant, too abstract. There's a lot of international relations literature that wants to abstract international behavior to very basic drivers, like the distribution of power. In a lot of these strands of literature, treaties just don't matter much at all; they're epiphenomenal.

What I want is a strand of literature that presumes treaties matter - ie, that countries do care about deal-making and will put efforts into obtaining deals they want, and that subsequent behavior will differ depending on whether a deal is or is not obtained - but doesn't focus on the often rather quotidian details of actual negotiation conferences and so on. What I care about is stuff like the prior maneuvering, domestic-level interest aggregation, and background conditions, and how countries manipulate those (or fail to) such that when they come to the table they get the deal they want (or fail to).

(There's a branch of literature on pre-treaty preparation, but from what I've seen it's small and not very good - not really what I'm looking for, more focusing on bureaucracy and agenda-setting - in other words, the pre-treaty version of the existing negotiations literature - though I'm not fully up on it.)

LNG

Recall how I said that Qatar is a bit geographically screwed, with large natural gas reserves but no stable countries between it and Europe through which to build a pipeline?

Guess who's leading the world in production of (shippable) liquified natural gas (LNG)?

Trade requires buyers, so who will they ship to? I took a very rough look at this based on Wikipedia's list of regasification terminal locations; the list has the usual Wikipedia lack of accuracy guarantee, and there's an additional issue that not all terminals have the same capacity. But percentage of existing terminals probably provides a rough cut of commitment to using LNG:

ASIA: 54%
EUROPE: 23%
NORTH AMERICA: 19%
SOUTH AMERICA: 5%

Adding in planned terminals, we have:

ASIA: 50%
NORTH AMERICA: 24%
EUROPE: 22%
SOUTH AMERICA: 4%

But that likely understates Asia's plans, because China has recently planned a bunch that aren't listed in the Wikipedia article, I believe. Incidentally, a huge chunk of Asia's existing terminals in the Wikipedia list are in Japan: 32 of 43 existing terminals (though with only one planned terminal listed).

In a way, it would be much better for the world if LNG was the primary form of trade in gas. For all you hear talk about the "oil weapon," it's virtually impossible to use effectively. A big slow-down in production by OPEC can boost prices worldwide for everyone, but that's a VERY blunt weapon. Embargoes on specific countries are essentially impossible; oil is so tradable that they just buy it elsewhere or through middlemen, which boosts prices for everyone a bit, but is quite survivable. Non-LNG gas, though, because it trades in one-to-one trading arrangements with huge sunk costs attached and low ability to quickly shift quickly to other fuels, makes a darn good weapon. Like any weapon, it's used at a cost, but it's very effective if you decide you want it.

Negotiation systems

It really can be shockingly hard to force oneself to skip over articles or chapters one knows are of no earthly use or interest, but which are on the general topic one is researching. "Maybe I should just skim the first lines," one thinks. "Sure, it doesn't look interesting, but maybe that's just because I don't yet understand this really important chunk of the literature.

The best thing I found today was a quote:

...once it is part of a system [of international negotiations], a negotiation has to respond to the needs and demands of that system. The main demand is that it should contribute to the stability and growth (optimization) of the system.

--Victor Kremenyuk, "The Emerging System of International Negotiation", International Negotiation: Analysis, Approaches, Issues (2002)

I find this a bit overstated, but I think it's basically true. The international negotiation structure is biased toward protecting and stabilizing consolidated parts of itself. Thus, for instance, everyone knows that one possible way to force emissions mitigation commitments from reluctant countries would be to tie them to trade - no commitments, no favorable trade terms. But it's a non-started, because there's a whole, existing, relatively stable chunk of the international system built around the idea that most of the nations have agreed not to pull stuff like that. Nobody seriously talks about messing with the WTO in order to push climate change action. A big part of that, of course, is that there are sets of countries that have, or believe they have, individual interests in preserving that chunk of the system. But I do also think there's a big psychological and institutional inertia as well. The WTO has a kind of normative and structural precedence because it is stable and settled.

Of course, if you didn't buy that a priori, how would I prove it to you? How would I separate out effects of individual interests from effects of normative stability?

Treaty theory - applied systems analysis

Today I read on treaty theory, which is a fancy way of saying that today was a kind of boring day. The treaty theory in question called itself Applied Systems Analysis. What might that mean? Good question. In practice it seems to mean an approach that is quite broad in scope (looks at all sorts of aspects from two-level negotiation problems to agenda-setting, issue linkage, and negotiators themselves - rather than focusing on a particular aspect assumed to be most important) and takes an attitude that is more pragmatic and descriptive (that is, more interested in describing actual practice than deriving it from principles) than many sectors of IR theory. That's about as specific as I can get.

If my implication that this approach doesn't strongly define itself seems at all dismissive, consider this quote on the history of the formation of the (international, West-Soviet cooperative) institute from whence the book issued. The author

"hesitatingly suggested to the founding negotiators the title 'Applied Systems Analysis.' That caught on because no one had a previous conception of what it really meant. It was what I call 'creative obfuscation,' a technique that was used at several junctures in the writing of IIASA's charter. Another example of creative obfuscation: since we got hung up on the term advanced societies, we substituted the term modern societies, and again no one really knew what that meant."

--Howard Raiffa, "Contributions of Applied Systems Analysis to International Negotiation." International Negotiation: Analysis, Approaches, Issues. Ed. Victor A. Kremenyuk. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002.

Heh.

The work thus far is a clear illustration of the central analytic trade-off in international relations; if you try to take a pragmatic, descriptive approach, you find yourself doing work that either does not generalize or (as in this case) becomes quite vague in expression - at best a set of recommendations about general issues and tradeoffs that ought generally to be considered when approaching a specific problem. Works that make simplifying assumptions and attempt to reduce political behavior to a more manageable set of principles allow the analyst to make observations that seem much more powerful and pointed - but at the price of becoming ever less plausible as descriptions of real-world behavior.

Anyway, the reading today tangentially got me thinking about the relationship of bargaining to the size of the negotiating pool. It seems intuitively likely that the complexity of "horse-trading" - that is, bargaining where I offer concessions in an area you care about but I don't in return for different concessions in an area I care about but you don't - goes up as the number of discreet parties to a negotiation increases. This would suggest that the more parties you have to a negotiation, the more likely you are to have to default to a solution built around equity - the same outcome for everyone - as opposed to trying to horsetrade among 50 different parties. (This would be unfortunate because "everyone gets the same thing" solutions are less complex but also generally less efficient.) But is it so in practice?

Two energy systems

This is a quick thought rather than a big post - something that's stated very nicely by Arati Prabahkar at the GTL conference some of you may remember me linking to. It's worth keeping in mind something that's obvious once you hear it, but easy to forget. I may talk about the "energy system", but in fact right now we have two energy systems: one for electrical power and one for transportation.

These systems don't always have the same interests and incentives attached. For instance, the US is basically energy-independent when it comes to electrical power. But it's highly dependent when it comes to transportation power - given our current system. That's one different driver right there (and it varies by country; for instance, much of Europe is energy-dependent in both systems - the exceptions being France and I think some of the Scandinavian countries). The infrastructure/sunk costs issues are different; the constituents and interest groups involved are different; and so on.

Major Players: Cancun update

So the major players in climate negotiations are the US, China, the EU, Japan, India, and Russia. Of these, the US refused to sign Kyoto, while the others all did. However, as I've mentioned, Kyoto didn't require any emissions reduction commitments from developing countries (China and India) and to date those countries have refused to discuss making such commitments. Russia did commit to "emissions reductions" but its target was so utterly inflated by "hot air" for a variety of reasons that it's promise was essentially meaningless. Russia signed Kyoto because fulfilling it was no burden, and in return, it got EU support on entry to the WTO.

Where do things stand for the majors after Cancun?

US: got most of what it wants. People were so disenchanted with China after Copenhagen that the US got a bit of a break, I think; and it played its cards very wisely in Cancun, going after a useful procedural goal (measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV).) Not much shift in the US's position. Obama's negotiators continue to maintain that the US can meet the 17% reduction pledge we made at Copenhagen, in spite of complete failure to craft a legislative emissions solution.

China: Softening... I think. In Cancun, China tried to play nice, and made some concessions on stuff like MRV. It also offered a stop-gap solution on reduction commitments: to put a voluntary pledge, backed by domestic legislation, on paper in the Convention. I don't think it would have done even that much a few years back. This makes sense though, because there are two new drivers in China. One is the growin green industry that China has been pushing hard on. That's starting to materialize in a real way, and China has to realize that once it has a green industry, it would be best if the world had a climate treaty to drive that market. Additionally, China has already set and continues to set internal goals to reduce emissions intensity*. Thus far, it's pretty solidly on track to meet them. At the point that it's setting and meeting goals internally, why not garner goodwill by acknowledging them formally in the international arena?

* Near-term emissions reduction goals for developing countries aren't usually proposed as absolute cuts - they're typically downward deviations from projected baseline - reductions in energy intensity per capita or per unit GDP, but not absolute reductions.

EU: Very, very quiet at Cancun, given that Europe has traditionally spearheaded this stuff. I don't know - maybe it felt spanked at Copenhagen? It basically played support on stuff, and was willing to extend Kyoto if other people did, but didn't insist one way or another. I think Europe is taking a wait-and-see-and-do-what-we-can-internally approach right now.

Japan: As noted in my last post, most of the drama around Copenhagen revolved around Japan's steadfast public refusal to consider extending Kyoto. It's in Japan's best interest to support a treaty that drives a market for its green technology industries (particularly efficiency technologies) but it isn't in its interest to have a treaty that effectively includes only Japan and Europe - the two most experienced green-tech players, trying to sell to each other. The market it really lusts after is manufacturing efficiency tech in China; so what it really wants out of a climate treaty is commitments from China. I also can't help wondering what, if any, was the back-channeling with the US on this. It was very convenient for the US that someone was pushing hard for commitments from developing countries without things turning into another round of US vs. China. I don't know enough about the US-Japan relationship right now to have an opinion on that, though. Maybe it was just convenient.

India: Made waves by being surprisingly supportive in this round. Previously India has been pretty adamant that climate change is the developed world's problem. This round it materially helped get MRV fixed, and started talking about maybe making reduction commitments in the future.

Russia: I doubt Russia will under any circumstances commit to a real (not hot air) reduction pledge, unless it's getting something very big in exchange, and Europe already played the WTO support chip. An extension of Kyoto isn't in Russia's best interests and, surprise surprise, they were one of Japan's two big supporters on not extending. Probably more because they thought it would be the best spoiler tactic than because they think a new, more comprehensive treaty could be negotiated if we ditch Kyoto.

Bolivian Drama Coverage: near the beginning of the conference the Bolivian ambassador was quoted referring to climate change as "genocide." Near the middle he was quoted referring to "ecocide." By the end, he was calling it "genocide and ecocide."

Cancun

Okay. Let's try this again.

So, Cancun. What does it all mean?

Some very brief background. Climate negotiations are carried out under the UNFCCC framework. That's United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The idea is that the Convention represents a regular, rules-bound forum for nations to meet and negotiate over draft texts of agreements relating to climate change. Most meetings produce some sort of text or texts that are formally accepted into the Convention. Sometimes these are minor tweaks; sometimes they've very important milestones, like the Kyoto Protocol. The meetings (and the major treaty texts produced at them) are named for where they take place. Hence "Kyoto Protocol" and last year's "Copenhagen Accord".

The Kyoto Protocol grouped signatories into two groups - basically, developed nations and developing nations. It contained a list of emissions reductions targets, one for each of the developed nations, which they committed to meeting by 2012 (the "first commitment period"). Most of these were baby-steps targets. It did not require developing nations to commit to any emissions reduction targets (though the hope was that eventually, they would, and in the meantime, Kyoto contained mechanisms - ultimately not very successful ones - for funneling aid to developing nations to support emissions reduction and low-carbon growth).

Because the first Kyoto commitment period runs out in 2012, and there are no existing targets beyond that, the goal of Copenhagen, last year, was supposed to be to come up with a new set of targets and get everyone to commit to those targets, creating a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol framework so things could move on. That didn't happen; negotiations fell apart. At the last minute, negotiators tried to salvage things with the Copenhagen Accord, a document which records voluntary pledges from any nations willing to make them, for whatever amount they're willing to promise. About 80% of the world's nations - including many developing nations - have made voluntary pledges at this point. That sounds great, right? The problem is that the Copenhagen Accord is totally non-binding. In fact, it isn't even formally accepted into the UNFCCC framework. (Why? Because the UNFCCC works by consensus, and there was one nation at Copenhagen that refused to consent to accept the Copenhagen Accord. Bolivia, in case you're wondering. They did it again at Cancun.)

So what happened at Cancun? Depending on who you ask, there were three major strands of conversation going on. These were as follows:

1) Incremental Progress on Multiple Related Areas

The establishment line, basically, promulgated by the UN and lots of secondary powers. From this perspective, Cancun was about rebuilding trust between negotiators following Copenhagen. This was to be done not by trying to come up with a major breakthrough or negotiating a new round of emissions targets, but by making solid if limited progress on several subsidiary issues, including deforestation, establishing mechanisms for technology transfer to developing nations, and coming up with a framework for administering the Green Fund promised by developing nations at Copenhagen. Progress on these would rebuild confidence and set the stage for a renewed attack on core problems at the next meeting.

2) Transitioning Away from Kyoto?

However, a more pointed argument quickly blew up when Japan announced at the beginning of the talks that they would not under any circumstances sign on to an extension of Kyoto through a second commitment period. They felt Kyoto was unfair (because it required commitments from developed but not developing nations) and wanted to ditch it entirely and reopen negotiations on a new basis, perhaps the Copenhagen Accord, that didn't assume from the outset that developed countries alone must necessarily make mitigation commitments.

The problem is that for many developing nations, Kyoto has great weight - newspapers' favorite phrase was "totemic status" - and so this caused an unholy fuss. The Japanese were joined by Canada and Russia. They were opposed by most of the developing world, including at least two specific factions. On the one hand, a radical group led by Bolivia that threatened walkouts if Kyoto was abandoned. On the other, China, which also took a strong line against abandoning Kyoto, but suggested that a two-track negotiation was possible, in which Kyoto was renewed, but some kind of second track of negotiation around developing country commitments could take place in parallel.

The Japanese refused to budge throughout most of the meeting, in spite of supposedly quite a lot of diplomatic pressure from pretty much everyone.

3) MRV and Expansion

Basically, this was what the US went in wanting. Two things: first, the establishment of a mechanism for measuring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of emissions reductions amongst participants (to keep everyone honest). Second, a continued push to expand emissions reduction commitments into the developing world. This second is of course sort of what the Japanese wanted, but the US was being much less specific and aggressive about what form this should take than Japan was.

Who got what they wanted?

Well, (1) was the most obvious winner. Incremental progress was made on all the areas the UN was pushing to make progress on, though personally I think only time will tell how useful the specifics are; for instance, although there is now a UN technology transfer mechanism, it has no formal power to enforce transfer; it acts entirely in the advisory/encouragement/networking/facilitation sphere.

(3) was also a winner. There is now language in the Cancun texts calling for MRV, and China was apparently less obstructionist about this than expected. Moreover, although the US pooh-poohed it and perhaps I'm being naively optimistic, it seems to me that both China and India are thinking hard about ways to commit to reductions in some acceptable way, even if they avoid a formal binding promise. A psychological shift, if you will.

Nobody really got what they wanted on (2). The Cancun texts ended up using ambiguous language that essentially came down on nobody's side, and failed to settle the issue.

Does Cancun provide reason for optimism?

Lately, people ask me this as soon as they hear what I'm researching. This review hasn't changed my initial opinion: basically, the answer is, very very cautious optimism. Cancun didn't end in failure. That's important. And it did take some baby steps forward. That's good. And I do think there are signs of a psychological shift on reduction commitments from the biggest developing players. That's also good. But psychological shifts, even if real, can take years to play out. And the next steps climate negotiations have to take are more like leaps: getting a second round of reduction commitments (under whatever framework works), figuring out where the funding that now has a mechanism will be raised from, seeing if we can really solve tech transfer in practice. The fact that we successfully took baby steps at Cancun is nice, but it doesn't prove we're ready for leaps.

Tomorrow: a quick rundown on where I think the individual key players stand, following Cancun, and where there are shifts.

[Sigh. Just had a truly epic post about Cancun eaten by the posting interface. Will rewrite tomorrow.]

Whither China?

Following holiday and illness-induced hiatus, I'm back! Damaged rib and all.

What I'm starting with this week is a review of the Cancun negotiations that took place in the first week of December. Possibly it's sort of heresy, but I don't tend to follow these UN rounds very closely while they're actually happening. I find it much more useful to do a full sweep all at once after it's over; when I get it in dribs and drabs day by day, I feel like it's too easy to give uneven attention to the news from one day over another (either by paying more attention on one day or by being more impressed by the news from a particular day). Reading it all at once, I get a sense of the sweep of things.

Anyway, that's what I'm doing. It's not finished yet, but here's the question I want to answer: has China moderated its position, and if so, how? A few entries back, I suggested that China and the US were in similar positions - relatively rich in fossil fuel resources, and with partially developed but still weak green industry sectors. My impression, though, is that China is drifting more toward a middle ground, one in which its fossil fuel resources drive it less (because they can't, alone, keep up with its needs) and its growing green industry drives it more (China is pushing hard on green technology; this means it has ever-higher incentives to make sure a robust market exists globally for those products).

So - is this true, and if so, will it show in China's negotiating stance? Check back, oh, late on the 4th!