Friday, April 29, 2011

What works

I was reading more stuff on regime complexes tonight and thinking that really all this complicated literature on regimes and treaties and international institutions and organizations boils down to a bunch of people who would really like to be able to say something useful about how to make international cooperation work.

But the problem is that the question of success, of what works, is in itself very complicated. So you get all these fiddly arguments about whether fragmentation is good or not; whether long or short treaty process are good; whether small-n or large-n treaties are good; and so on.

This all misses the point, really. The question is when is a fragmented process successful? When is a long treaty process good vs. a short treaty process? When is it useful to have larger or smaller groups of players?

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Fragmentation

One of the big debates in climate negotiation and environmental governance literature is, how fragmented should environmental governance institutions be? Should we be shooting for one big (complicated, unwieldy) climate regime - or even one even bigger (more complicated, more unwieldy) environmental regime? Or should we instead move toward a more diverse set of (competitive, low inter-institution accountability, uncooperative) mini-institutions that each handle a part of the problem?

A single big regime would, from a theoretical perspective, be the most efficient way of handling things, and be most likely to prevent the potential abuses of forum-shopping and race-to-the-bottom that you could get if different areas, sectors, or groups of states set up different rules rather than all adhering to the same rules. On the other hand, a fragmented set of regimes, divided amongst different regions, sectors, or groups of states could be more tailored to individual needs, more politically realistic, and more practically manageable.

And as far as I'm concerned, that's most of what you can productively say about the issue. There are trade-offs.

This should not be taken to imply that that's all that has been said about it. For instance, Biermann, Pattberg, van Asselt, and Zelli (2009) provide a lengthy run-down of the various debates about unification (large-n agreements or "broad-but-shallow") vs. fragmentation (small-n agreements, or "narrow-but-deep"). Here's a small sub-set (just skim this, it's just here so you can share my pain):
So-called "narrow-but-deep" agreements that achieve substantial policy goals with relatively little participation may be superior to a situation of a less demanding regime even if it has full participation and compliance...  Some strands of the literature on environmental policy analysis also suggest that fragmentation and regulatory diversity increase innovation and thus overall governance performance. ...
However, quickly negotiated small-n agreements might decrease also the level of ambition in the long run. At a later stage, when interest-constellations change and new situations arise, it might be difficult to reach agreement within the international community without an existing overall agreement that includes those structural elements. In addition, smaller agreements only with few like-minded countries will decrease the opportunity for creating package deals...
Economic modeling projects that compared different hypothetical universal and fragmented climate regimes - based on criteria of environmental effectiveness, cost effectiveness, and cost distribution - also concluded that the more fragmented a regime is, the higher the costs are to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at low levels, because more ambitious reduction targets need to be achieved by a smaller number of countries. As Aldy, Barrett, and Stavins concur, '[c]urrent understanding of the benefit and cost functions characterizing climate change suggest that the latter type of policy [broad-but-shallow] is more likely to satisfy the dynamic efficiency criterion. ...
Similarly, economic model calculations show that emissions trading brings both higher environmental effectiveness and cost-effectiveness if based on a universal architecture. (26-28)
Biermann et al. 2009, "The Fragmentation of Global Governance Architectures: A Framework for Analysis." Global Environmental Politics 9:4.

Yeah. Don't you feel that if you were a policy-maker, you'd come out of this review with a good idea of what to push for?

Anyway, it was refreshing to read Keohane & Victor's 2011 paper this month, which I think I can basically sum up as saying, "Look, we can spill all the ink we want about this, but let's face it: how fragmented the regime is in a particular issue area is mostly an inevitable result of the characteristics of the issue area. There's really only so much we can do about it."

They're right about that! Sadly, I don't think they provide a very good answer about what that means for us (and policy-makers). My answer is that the point is not how fragmented the regime is or how long it takes to gain increasing coherence; rather, regimes (fragmented or otherwise) are successful based on entirely different criteria. Heh. Yep, I'm vague too; but only because I'm protecting my embryonic dissertation, y'all.

Friday, April 15, 2011

How to read climate news

I'm back from Denmark!

I've mentioned before that if you're looking at news about green industry, it's important to be aware of whether an article that talks about success or leadership in something like, say, solar is talking in terms of installed capacity or market share of products.

Something that's even MORE pernicious, though, is the inability of journalists to effectively communicate about emissions reduction. You should always be very wary about any article that talks about emissions reduction targets. If an article says something along the lines of "China pledges to cut emissions 20% by 2015", you haven't yet learned anything substantive. The article might mean one of several things:

1) [Most likely] China has pledged to cut emissions per unit GDP by 20% by 2015. (This is most likely because it's how China tends to make pledges. Obviously, if it's growing at 10%, over a 5 year period, this target still results in a meaningful emissions RISE in absolute terms.)

2) [Meaningfully less likely] China has actually pledged to cut emissions by 20% relative to today's emissions. (Less likely, because right now China hasn't made any absolute emissions cuts, and this kind of number would most likely have had to have been backed out of a per-unit pledge, which news people don't seem to know how to do.)

3) [Highly unlikely] China has pledged to cut emissions by 20% from 1990 numbers. (Ha ha hah, don't expect to see this anytime soon. It's an even harder bar to clear, but it's what Europe is usually talking about when it talks about its emissions cuts - absolute cuts, relative to 1990 - because that's the Kyoto framework. So that's the standardized format for pledges, so to speak.)

4) [Possible] China has pledged to cut emissions by 20% from business as usual (BAU) by 2015, ie what they're expected to be emitting by 2015 if they did nothing and let society take its course. (Usually you'd only see this if a journalist was reporting on a third-party analysis, because it's not how China does its pledges, and there's the question of whose BAU scenario you're using, etc.)

Europe, as noted, tends to report in absolute cuts relative to 1990 (though it doesn't hurt to check). I'm actually unsure offhand what the US does - ie, I am uncertain whether the voluntary 17% pledge cut we made at Copenhagen in 2009 is relative to 2009 or to 1990, although I'm pretty sure it's an absolute and not a per-unit cut. Hey, I should check that. But not before I post!

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Google

So Google, in its apparent pursuit of the goal of being involved in every single tech-related thing in the world, has apparently just announced that it's spending $168 million on a giant solar power plant in the Mojave Desert.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Hot air for Europe?

...and by normal posting I mean no posting at all for a week. That's what happens when I'm on tight deadlines, apparently.

Anyway, I speculated a while back that absorbing Eastern Europe might have made it easier for Europe to promise climate reductions, via joint implementation of goals. I think this graph suggests that it did, and even more directly than I was imagining:

IPCC 2007, Climate Change 2007: Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg3/en/figure-4-6.html

The red line roughly in the middle of the graph, labeled "Non-OECD Europe and EECCA", contains Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. This reminds me that Russia caught a huge break in the Kyoto Protocol (not by accident, either). The emissions reductions called for in Kyoto are indexed off of 1990, but Russia's economy cratered right after 1990, and when economies crater, their emissions crater as well. So Russia's emissions as of 1997, when Kyoto were signed, were already well below their "target". This made it easy for them to sign. Russia isn't broken out, so for all I know, that big dip in the red line is driven entirely by Russia. But presuming something similar happened in the former Soviet Eastern European countries, they too would have had some hot air - which they would then have brought with them into the EU.