Inclusivity

Much has been made by people who dislike the UNFCCC treaty process of the fact that a global treaty-making process creates huge obstacles for success. When any given treaty has to satisfy roughly 200 nations, the argument goes, you are setting yourself up for failure, because no treaty (that has any bite to it at all) will satisfy 200 nations. Therefore, if you’re lucky, the best you’ll get is some sort of watered-down aspirational document.

I’m not sure I believe this argument (which is not to say I don’t think the UN process is flawed. I just think it's most important flaws are other things). I think it’s true that if you look at the day-to-day workings of the UNFCCC process, you’ll see a lot of static produced by the Bolivias of the world. Indeed, the recent canonical example would be the fact that Bolivia, with its lone refusal to sign the Copenhagen Accord that emerged from COP-15 in 2009, single-handedly prevented it from being entered into the UNFCCC canon.

But so what? The Copenhagen Accord still exists. It was signed by everyone else, and it seems to have some meaningful sense of legitimacy, given that nations continued entering the non-binding pledges it called for well after the conference. Whether countries will fulfill their non-binding pledges is another matter, but that’s a built-in problem of the non-binding pledge format. And why do we have that? Because that’s what the key players could agree on, not because Bolivia or the UAE scuppered an otherwise promising deal.

I tend to think that the argument about the difficulty of a global treaty is a bit of a smokescreen that stands in for opposition among the key players. If the US, EU, China, India, Japan, and maybe Russia/Brazil/Indonesia all agreed to a course of action and a way to divide emissions reductions amongst each other, Bolivia’s refusal or lack thereof would be pretty meaningless. It’s the fact that the US, EU, China, and Japan can’t agree that repeatedly torpedoes significant action. It’s probably true that the general static produced by all the secondary and tertiary players makes things harder on the margins*, but I doubt it’s a really decisive problem.

Similarly, I've heard it argued that there are complicated treaty formats that could work if we chopped the number of players involved down to 5-10, but otherwise get too complicated. I find this more convincing, but I'm still not convinced it's a decisive problem - at least in the climate case. My intuition is that a complicated treaty format will be no more workable for 10 countries than would be for 200.