UC Berkeley GAIA Books Title Institutionalizing Unsustainability: The Paradox of Global Climate Governance Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4zp9f66p ISBN 9781938169021 Author Stevenson, Hayley Publication Date 2013 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Institutionalizing Unsustainability The Paradox of Global Climate Governance Hayley Stevenson Published in association with the University of California Press “Presents a compelling and novel argument: that collective efforts to combat climate change have actually contrib- uted to less sustainable modes of industrial growth. Much work has looked at the details of national and international climate change policy, but no one has addressed whether any of this effort is likely to make a real difference, and what the broader factors are that account for policy changes. Will be attractive both for scholars of climate change and for policy makers.” PETER HAAS, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Climate change is a global phenomenon that requires a global response, and yet climate change governance depends on the ability of individual states to respond to a long-term, uncertain threat. Although states are routinely criticized for their inability to respond to such threats, the problems that arise from their attempts to respond are frequently overlooked. Focusing on the experiences of India, Spain, and Australia, Hayley Stevenson shows how these countries have struggled to integrate global norms around climate change governance with their own deeply unsustainable domestic systems, leading to profoundly irrational ecological outcomes. hal y Ey stevEnSon is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sheffield. Studies in Governance, 1 Institutionalizing Unsustainability StudieS in Governance Christopher Ansell and Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley, Editors 1. Institutionalizing Unsustainability: The Paradox of Global Climate Governance, by Hayley Stevenson Institutionalizing Unsustainability The Paradox of Global Climate Governance Hayley StevenSon Global, Area, and International Archive University of California Press Berkeley loS anGeleS london The Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA) is an initiative of the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the University of California Press, the California Digital Library, and international research programs across the University of California system. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Manufactured in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of anSi/niSo z39.48 – 1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). Contents Acknowledgments ix Preface ix Abbreviations xi 1. Institutionalizing Unsustainability: Global Climate Governance 1 part i. Scientific, political, and normative foundationS 2. The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change 19 3. Understanding the Paradox of Global Climate Governance 40 part II. CaSe StudieS 4. Australia 63 5. India 107 6. Spain 154 7. The Future of Global Climate Governance: Prospects for Ecological Rationality 199 Notes 217 References 225 Index 265 Acknowledgments This book has benefited from the generosity shown to me by numerous people since I began the study in 2005, at the University of Adelaide. Tim Doyle, Juanita Elias, and Ian Hall all offered valuable critiques, advice, and encouragement, for which I am very grateful. John Vogler and Sanjay Chaturvedi read an earlier draft of the entire manuscript; the final work is better for their helpful comments. I owe special thanks to John Dryzek, who gave me the opportunity to revise and complete this manuscript at the Australian National University. John’s insightful comments and advice have helped greatly in focusing my argument and navigating the unfamiliar path toward publication. For his interest and support I am immensely grateful. I also thank Sanjay Chaturvedi for hosting me at the Centre for the Study of Geopolitics in Chandigarh in 2007, and for assisting with the logistics of spending time in Delhi. The Chaturvedi family hosted me for an enjoyable period of time and I am very grate- ful to them for welcoming me into their home. Fellow researchers at the Centre for the Study of Geopolitics were extremely welcoming and help- ful; in particular I thank Eva Saroch and Monica Thakur. In Madrid I learnt a great deal about climate policy by talking with a number of peo- ple who work in this field, either in government agencies or civil society organizations. I appreciate the time they took out of their busy sched- ules to help me understand climate change in the Spanish context. Earlier and condensed versions of my Australian and Indian case studies were published in the Australian Journal of International Affairsand Review of International Studies, respectively. Comprehensive comments pro- vided by anonymous reviewers for these journals were extremely impor- tant for improving my work. I appreciate the interest in my work shown by Mark Bevir and Christopher Ansell, editors of the series Studies in vii viii / Acknowledgments Governance. Their comments and suggestions, and those of anonymous reviewers, have also been valuable for improving this text. Thanks, too, to Nathan MacBrien at the Global, Area, and International Archive for his attentive communication, careful editing, and assistance during the publication process. Closer to home, I’ve been fortunate to have the sup- port of some wonderful people since beginning the project in Adelaide; my family and some good friends helped me in countless ways, for which I am grateful. Above all I thank Mauro Aviles, who shared the highs and the lows of this project from the beginning; completing it would have been much more arduous without his encouragement and support. Preface Global climate change may well be the greatest environmental, political, economic, and moral challenge of our times. Much popular and scholarly concern centers on the exceedingly slow pace of international negotia- tions and national planning and action. Indeed, the pace of decision-mak- ing does seem entirely disconnected from the urgency of the problem. These concerns about inaction and slow action, however, are not the focus of this book. My purpose is rather to draw attention to the problem- atic action that has been and is being taken. In the process of dissecting the foundations of global climate governance that have been successfully institutionalized over two decades, I expose a paradox. Of course, this is not the first paradox of crisis that has been brought to our attention in recent times — Sir Anthony Giddens has lent his name to “Giddens’s paradox,” which refers to the long-recognized dilemma that people do not address intangible and incremental dangers until they are visible and acute, by which time it is too late to avoid them (Giddens 2009, 2). This is undoubtedly a valid concern. But here I look beyond this classic dilemma and highlight a paradox of more recent salience and considerable concern. In the process of negotiating international agreements to mitigate cli- mate change, attention has gradually shifted from historical emissions to future emissions and from domestic mitigation efforts to transna- tional ones. In this book, I show how this shift has produced a paradox in global climate governance. Although successful global action to avoid climate change depends on states complying with international agree- ments, the present system induces states to comply with global norms in ways that actually exacerbate unsustainable development. By shift- ing attention away from historical emissions to future emissions, and from domestic mitigation to transnational mitigation efforts, a techni- ix x / Preface cal representation of the climate change problem has been institutional- ized. Viewed through a technical lens, the specific sources of emissions, as well as the social and political objectives they serve, are treated as irrelevant: avoiding dangerous climate change simply requires limiting overall global emissions. Global climate governance has thereby become a task principally of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions at the cheap- est possible source, rather than one of transforming the political, eco- nomic, and cultural drivers of excessive emissions. By inducing wealthy states to offset their ecologically insensitive policies, practices, and sys- tems in distant, poorer states, global climate governance is institutional- izing unsustainability. Whereas states are routinely criticized for their inability to respond to threats of a long-term and uncertain nature, less attention has been given to the problems that arise from their actual efforts to respond to such threats.