Think tank: UN is losing climate monopoly, and that’s a good thing

A new paper from the Council on Foreign Relations is the latest to suggest the messy Copenhagen climate talks last year were a wake-up call showing that progress on greenhouse gas emissions means looking outside the United Nations' mega-summit model.

CFR’s Joshua Busby writes that while the U.N. will remain vital, an alphabet soup of other international institutions will have key roles to play in the aftermath of the U.N.’s Copenhagen talks last December, which produced a weak and nonbinding accord.

Copenhagen “showed that global conferences (with hundreds of governments and thousands of observers) focused on elaborating international treaties are not conducive to substantive breakthroughs,” writes Busby, an assistant professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Moving forward, countries must diversify the institutions and instruments they use to pursue effective climate governance. In short, climate change requires complementary action in smaller negotiating venues; parallel domestic efforts; and a wider range of formal and informal, bilateral and multilateral, institutions,” he writes.

Among the places where the action will be: the Major Economies Forum (which links up big emitters including the U.S. and China), the G20, the World Trade Organization and others.

“The [U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change] will remain a critical policy hub, but in the coming months and years, other institutions and processes will also have an opportunity to show their worth. The Major Economies Forum may helpfully lead on strategies for sectoral emissions reductions, the G20 on the removal of energy subsidies, the G2 on U.S.-China technology agreements, the WTO or the OECD on trade adjustment, and new issue-specific institutions on forests and other topics,” he writes.

“While this new landscape may look more confusing at first, the vigorous competition of numerous institutions for progress on climate change offers a productive way forward over the debilitating stalemate of recent years,” he adds.

Several other experts — including Robert Stavins of Harvard and Sarah Ladislaw of the Center for Strategic and International Studies — have also looked at the role of international bodies outside the U.N. in climate negotiations. See our pieces here and here.