The UN’s recent 17th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) in Durban, South Africa, succeeded in renewing the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions. However, the meeting also highlighted the two major problems that plague international environmental negotiations. The first, unscientific skepticism, has an impact on the second: collective-action failure. Ultimately, only legislative bodies have the power to overcome this failure.
Skepticism regarding the need for environmental action arises from the relationship between environmental degradation and per capita income.
According to the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), degradation and pollution increase enormously at the early stages of economic growth. However, above a certain per capita income threshold, that trend reverses itself: At high income levels, economic growth correlates with environmental improvement, leading to the dubious conclusion that it might be possible to achieve sustainable growth without deviating from “business as usual” (maintaining current emissions levels).
This theory informs some countries’ reluctance to commit to the Kyoto Protocol’s second term. It is clearly wrong. The US continues to have the world’s highest per capita emissions levels, at 19 tons of carbon dioxide per person annually, even though average US annual income, at US$42,385 per capita, is also among the highest in the world. Clearly, wealth in itself is no guarantee of reduced carbon dioxide emissions.
Likewise, China’s annual per capita income is US$5,450, but it emits only 4.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person (though, overall, it is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases). South Africans earn an average income of US$8,857 per capita, but they emit a disproportionate 9.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person.
Moreover, the EKC perpetuates an erroneous assumption — that environmental damage will not curtail economic growth. In fact, research by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change strongly suggests that a business-as-usual approach would lead to an era of irreversible environmental destruction that would preclude economic growth. We cannot afford such a strategy, especially as the poor would bear the brunt of the resulting climate change.
The educated consensus is that the global climate’s current trajectory must be reversed much more rapidly than business as usual would allow. Here, however, a second set of problems — divergent interests and the complexity of international negotiations — presents itself.
When countries believe that high emissions levels are necessary to economic growth, they naturally become reluctant to agree to any binding protocol that would curtail emissions and thus stifle growth. This leads to a situation in which one participant can prevent the resolution of the larger group’s dilemma.
In 1988, Harvard University’s Robert Putnam wrote a groundbreaking paper called “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games.” According to Putnam, international diplomacy and domestic politics represent a liberal democracy’s two negotiating levels. A “win-set” occurs when a country’s domestic and international interests harmoniously overlap. This overlap thus represents the room for compromise that countries’ international negotiators have.
If a country’s domestic politics are weak — no executive accountability, no genuine legislative oversight and a poor relationship between citizen and state — its negotiator has a large win-set. For example, South Africa’s international negotiators — executive ministers and senior civil servants — can compromise on just about anything, because they are not truly accountable to their population through the parliament.
Logically, one would expect this to strengthen South Africa’s diplomatic negotiating position. In fact, the diplomat who arrives at the international negotiating table with a smaller win-set — with less room for compromise — almost always secures a better deal for his or her country. Generally, a strong legislature results in a smaller win-set.
However, current COP negotiations make a mockery of most legislatures. Government ministers use international meetings to mouth platitudes, while ordinary citizens’ voices are muted. There is, quite simply, an excessive focus on executive power at many negotiating forums.
Of course, a strong domestic legislature by itself is not enough to address the global collective-action problem: Legislatures in countries like the US are overexposed to special interests that want to continue polluting.
However, if US citizens were serious about securing a Kyoto commitment from their government, they would almost certainly get it. South Africans would not, because their parliament is hamstrung by the conflation of the state with the country’s governing political party, the African National Congress.
Strong legislatures, while not a sufficient condition for securing binding global agreements, are certainly necessary for that purpose. A country’s legislature is the single most important institution for protecting its citizenry from the excesses of the elite and the costly demands of narrow interests.
The irony of most internationally binding agreements is that they are not actually binding. There is no supra-national body that would enforce the Kyoto Protocol; hence Canada’s disappointing decision to leave the process. And who would police emissions from China and the US, even if they did commit to an international agreement?
In the absence of a global Leviathan, stronger domestic legislatures are the key to resolving the world’s collective environmental problems.
The less accountable a government is to its people, the less it will do for the world.
Lindiwe Mazibuko is parliamentary leader of South Africa’sDemocratic Alliance.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers