Time to reform climate institutions?

The last climate Conference in Copenhagen and the difficulty to reach a comprehensive agreement, pointed out three main problems with the negotiating process under the United Nations:

1. it involves too many countries: 194, when 20 account for about 90% of global emissions;
2. the voting rules require consensus for nearly all decisions, this often makes the decision-making too difficult;
3. the discussion is polarized in two factions: developed vs. developing countries.

So, for these reasons the academic world is questioning the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as the major institutional venue for international climate policy negotiation. The matter is not new, but in recent years something is changing.
Indeed, States have begun to negotiate plurilateral, non-legally binding climate agreements outside of the UNFCCC umbrella. In particular, there are four nascent “clubs” addressing climate change cooperation: the Asia Pacific Partnership (AP6), the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF), the G8 and the G20 meetings. Among these, the MEF, which brings together 17 developed and developing nations accounting for about 90% of global emissions, and the “Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors,” could be considered as possible alternatives to the too inclusive UNFCCC process. Countries have also created various bilateral and multilateral institutions as well as transnational agreements addressing climate changes.
The rise of these institutions could be viewed as a shift to new modes of climate governance, which build non-hierarchical steering and are characterized by decentralized, voluntary, market-oriented interaction between public and private actors.
These circumstances have led to an extensive debate on the best way to address climate change: is the universal approach, represented by the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol, the best way to tackle climate change, or is it better to follow a strategy that includes a variety of agreements? The implications of these alternative institutional architectures are several and involve, at the same time, elements from institutional theory, environmental policy, and international law.
The following Table summarizes pros and cons of a fragmented climate governance (Click to enlarge):



These and other issues were the subject of the International Workshop on "Institutions for Climate Governance" organised in Venice, on May 20th-21st, 2010, by the International Center for Climate Governance (ICCG), the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM), the Centro Euro-Mediterraneo per i Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC) and the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, in which experts from different disciplines provided important insights on the future of climate institutions.

See also:
Stavins (2010) “Another Copenhagen Outcome: Serious Questions About the Best Institutional Path Forward”, An Economic View of the Environment, Blog post Jan. 15, 2010.

Biermann F., P. Patterberg, H. van Asselt, F. Zelli (2007) “Fragmentation vs. Universalism? Assessing Options for the Polity of Post-2012 Global Climate Governance”, ADAM project manuscript.