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.