David Victor Referenced in the Council on Foreign Relations
Is It Time To Move Beyond The UN Climate Talks?
12/12/2011
Michael Levi,
Council on Foreign Relations
It has become a tradition after the annual United Nations climate negotiations for analysts to lament the dysfunctional nature of the process, and to argue that we'd be better off cutting the talks down to the few countries that really matter. After all, the world's twenty top greenhouse gas emitters account for north of eighty percent of global emissions. Why bother with all the extra complexity entailed in the UN talks?
I've been guilty of making the argument myself. In 2008, a task force for which I was staff director argued that if the UN talks couldn't be made to work, a smaller group would need to take up the task. I made an even more categorical case for a shift away from the UN talks in a Foreign Affairs article the next year, and followed that up, after Copenhagen, with further arguments in the same vein.
Over the past year, though, I've become considerably more skeptical of the idea. To understand why, it's useful to ask why one would expect a smaller group to make progress where the UN talks haven't. The most popular argument proceeds on simple efficiency grounds: with nearly two hundred countries, energy is sucked away by fundamentally unimportant negotiations, leaving little time to make real progress. As defenders of the UN talks point out, though, the big countries regularly step aside to negotiate final outcomes. There is little to prevent them from negotiating efficiently within the broader UN milieu.
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David G. Victor is a professor at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation (ILAR). Looking across a wide array of issues from environment and energy to human rights, trade and security, the Laboratory explores when (and why) international laws actually work.
