Mathias Friman

Technology obscuring equity: historical responsibility in UNFCCC negotiations

According to the concept of historical responsibility, the commitments of individual countries to take action on climate change are distributed based on the relative effects of their past emissions as manifested in present climate change. Brazil presented a comprehensive version of the concept to pre-Kyoto negotiations in 1997. The ‘Brazilian proposal’ originally combined several justice principles; however, following referral to the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, discussion soon became confined to technical calculations. This case illustrates how disparities in knowledge production and framing can influence the inclusiveness of negotiations. Southern participation in the policy process was restrained due to lack of scientific expertise on the part of Southern countries and due to the non-inclusive biophysical discourse traditionally preferred by Northern policy-makers. The historical responsibility issue became stranded on problems of how to correctly represent physical nature in climate models. This marginalized the original intention that equity should be the guiding principle of the North—South interaction, arguably undercutting a potential angle of approach to advance the climate change negotiations. The article concludes that in the interest of facilitating the North—South dialogue in climate change negotiations, any framing of historical responsibility that excludes equity needs to be redefined.

Consensus rationales in negotiating historical responsibility for climate change

This article explores strategies in consensus-making processes in international climate diplomacy. Specifically, it examines the consensus-making politics, in the case of negotiating historical responsibility within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In doing so, analytical concepts from the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe are utilized to look for rationales that underpin discursive structures as well as agreement. To conclude, three rationales have dealt with conflicts over historical responsibility. While the first rationale hid conflict behind interpretative flexibility, the second reverted to “reasoned consensus,” excluding perspectives commonly understood as political rather than scientific. The third rationale has enabled equivocal use of the concept of historical responsibility in several parallel discourses, yet negotiators still stumble on how to synthesize these with a potential to foster future, more policy-detailed, consensuses with higher legitimacy. Understanding the history and current situation of negotiations on historical responsibility from this perspective can help guide policy makers toward decisions that avoid old pitfalls and construct new rationales that generate a higher sense of legitimacy.