Climate Governance in the Developing World

Climate Governance in the Developing World

Edited by

David Held, Charles Roger and Eva-Maria Nag

polity

Copyright © David Held, Charles Roger and Eva-Maria Nag 2013

The right of David Held, Charles Roger and Eva-Maria Nag to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

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Contents

Contributors

Preface

Abbreviations

1.     Editors’ Introduction: Climate Governance in the Developing World

David Held, Charles Roger and Eva-Maria Nag

Part I   Asia

2.     A Green Revolution: China’s Governance of Energy and Climate Change

David Held, Charles Roger and Eva-Maria Nag

3.     The Evolution of Climate Policy in India: Poverty and Global Ambition in Tension

Aaron Atteridge

4.     The Dynamics of Climate Change Governance in Indonesia

Budy P. Resosudarmo, Fitrian Ardiansyah and Lucentezza Napitupulu

5.     Low Carbon Green Growth and Climate Change Governance in South Korea

Jae-Seung Lee

Part II  Americas

6.     Discounting the Future: The Politics of Climate Change in Argentina

Matías Franchini and Eduardo Viola

7.     Controlling the Amazon: Brazil’s Evolving Response to Climate Change

David Held, Charles Roger and Eva-Maria Nag

8.     Making ‘Peace with Nature’: Costa Rica’s Campaign for Climate Neutrality

Robert Fletcher

9.     A Climate Leader? The Politics and Practice of Climate Governance in Mexico

Simone Pulver

Part III  Africa

10.   Resources and Revenues: The Political Economy of Climate Initiatives in Egypt

Jeannie Sowers

11.   Ethiopia’s Path to a Climate-Resilient Green Economy

David Held, Charles Roger and Eva-Maria Nag

12.   Reducing Climate Change Vulnerability in Mozambique: From Policy to Practice

Angus Hervey and Jessica Blythe

13.   Reaching the Crossroads: The Development of Climate Governance in South Africa

Lesley Masters

Index

Contributors

Fitrian Ardiansyah has over fifteen years’ experience in the fields of natural resource management, climate change and energy. At present, he is finalizing his doctoral research at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He is also the Program Development Director for Pelangi Indonesia and Fellow at the International League of Conservation Writers. In previous years, he was a Program Director for Climate and Energy (WWF-Indonesia) and an expert member of the Indonesia Forest Climate Alliance and the Indonesian Official Delegates to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. He has received Australian Leadership and Allison Sudradjat Awards from the Government of Australia.

Aaron Atteridge is a Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden. His work focuses on different aspects of climate policy, with a particular emphasis on understanding the interaction between international policy processes and the needs of developing countries. This includes analysis of climate politics in different countries and of climate finance, as well as the development of guidance on national adaptation planning and the examination of traditional biomass energy economies in developing countries. Among his previous roles, he has worked as a Senior Policy Officer on climate change and energy issues for the New South Wales government in Australia.

Jessica Blythe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria, Canada. She investigates the dynamics of change in social-ecological systems and has worked with fishing communities in southern Africa since 2004. Her current research explores how coastal communities respond to environmental change in Mozambique in order to contribute to the development of adaptive actions that promote human well-being and ecological health.

Robert Fletcher is Associate Professor of Natural Resources and Sustainable Development in the Department of Environment, Peace, and Security at the United Nations mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica. His research interests include climate change, conservation, development, ecotourism, environmental governance, globalization, and resistance and social movements. He has conducted field research concerning these topics in a number of sites in North, Central and South America.

Matías Franchini is a member of the Brazilian Research Network on International Relations and Climate Change at the University of Brasilia, and a member of the Department of Environment at the University of La Plata, Argentina. He is a PhD candidate and holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Brasilia. His main research interests are climate change, global environmental governance and Latin American studies. With Eduardo Viola and Thaís Ribeiro, he is co-author of Sistema Internacional de Hegemonia Conservadora: Democracia e Governança Global na era da Crise Climática (International System with Conservative Hegemony) (2012).

David Held is Master of University College, Durham, and Professor of Politics and International Relations at Durham University, UK. Among his most recent publications are Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing When We Need It Most (2013), The Governance of Climate Change (2011), Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities (2010), Globalisation/ Anti-Globalisation (2007), Models of Democracy (2006), Global Covenant (2004), Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (1999) and Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (1995). His main research interests include the study of globalization, changing forms of democracy and the prospects of regional and global governance. He is a Director of Polity Press, which he co-founded in 1984, and General Editor of Global Policy.

Angus Hervey is a PhD candidate and Ralph Miliband Scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. He is an expert on environmental issues in southern Africa, and has published a number of articles on land use change, deforestation and the impacts of climate change in the region. With David Held and Marika Theros, he is co-editor of The Governance of Climate Change: Science, Economics, Ethics and Politics (2011).

Jae-Seung Lee is a Professor in the Division of International Studies, Korea University. He is currently an Editor-in-Chief of Korea Review of International Studies and Vice-Director of the Institute of Sustainable Development. He also serves as a member of the Policy Advisory Board of the Presidential Secretariat (Foreign and Security Affairs). During the year 2011–12, he joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Center for East Asian Studies of Stanford University as a visiting scholar. He holds a BA in political science from Seoul National University and an MA (1993) and PhD in political science from Yale University.

Lesley Masters is a Senior Researcher within the foreign policy and diplomacy programme of the Institute for Global Dialogue (IGD) at the University of South Africa. Her research focuses on environmental diplomacy, South Africa’s foreign policy, the international politics of climate change and the governance of natural resources. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Leicester, UK, and joined the IGD as a researcher in 2008 as part of its Multilateral Programme.

Eva-Maria Nag received her PhD on Indian political thought from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK. She has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses on political theory, ethics and public administration, and South and East Asian politics at the LSE, the School of Oriental and African Studies, King’s College London and the American University in London, UK. She has also worked on global corporate issues with the Bertelsmann Foundation (Germany) and Tomorrow’s Company (UK). She is one of the founding editors of Global Policy, an innovative and interdisciplinary journal bringing together world-class academics and leading practitioners to analyse both public and private solutions to global problems and issues. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, UK, where she works on comparative political thinking.

Lucentezza Napitupulu is an Affiliated Lecturer and Researcher in the Department of Economics, University of Indonesia. Having worked in climate change policy for the last eight years, she has provided consulting services for numerous stakeholders, including the Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Finance in Indonesia. She holds a Master’s degree in Economics from North Carolina State University, USA, and is currently pursuing her PhD in Environmental Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Her research interests are in environmental management and community governance.

Simone Pulver is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California (UC), Santa Barbara, USA. She received her doctorate in Sociology from UC Berkeley and also holds an MA in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley, as well as a BA in Physics from Princeton University, USA. Her research investigates organizational responses to environmental challenges. She has been analysing international climate politics for the past fifteen years, with a particular focus on transnational corporations and developing economies. Before joining UC Santa Barbara in 2009, she was the Joukowsky Family Assistant Research Professor at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, USA.

Budy P. Resosudarmo is an Associate Professor and Head of the Indonesia Project at the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. His research interests include determining the economy-wide impact of environmental policies and understanding the political economy of natural resource utilization. In 2005, he edited The Politics and Economics of Indonesia’s Natural Resources, and in 2009, he co-edited Working with Nature against Poverty: Development, Resources and the Environment in Eastern Indonesia. He received his PhD in Development Economics from Cornell University, USA.

Charles Roger is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia and Liu Scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, Canada. His research focuses on transnational governance, global environmental politics and international political economy. He holds a BA from Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada, and an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. His research has been supported by the Liu Institute for Global Issues, the Centre for International Governance Innovation, the Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Jeannie Sowers is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New Hampshire, USA. Her research focuses on the politics of environment and development in the Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Environmental Politics in Egypt: Activists, Experts, and the State (2013) and co-editor of The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt (2012). She has published articles in Climatic Change, Development and Change, Journal of Environment and Development and Middle East Report and is on the editorial boards of Global Environmental Politics and Middle East Report.

Eduardo Viola is a Full Professor at the Institute of International Relations, University of Brasilia, Senior Researcher of the Brazilian Council for Scientific Research and Chair of the Brazilian Research Network on International Relations and Climate Change. He has published four books and more than one hundred journal articles and book chapters. He has been visiting professor at several international universities – Stanford, Colorado, Notre Dame and Texas, USA, and Amsterdam, Netherlands – and a consultant with Brazilian Ministries – Science and Technology, Education, Defence and Environment. He has also been a member of the Committee on Global Environmental Change of the Brazilian Academy of Science.

Preface

The problem of climate change cannot be overstated. It is an issue of global significance with far-reaching transnational as well as intergenerational consequences for the life chances of people across the world. The brute fact is that greenhouse gas emissions are rising at an alarming rate and we have done far too little to reverse this shocking trend. We seem to be racing towards a tipping point after which the risks of climate change become tragic, irreversible realities. Having said this, there have been many important efforts, locally, nationally and globally, to address this threat. Some have been more promising than others, but where there have been some successes it is important to understand how this has occurred and to try and build on these relative achievements. By understanding what works and what does not we shed light on a path to more effective climate governance.

The responsibility for addressing climate change has conventionally been placed on the shoulders of the industrialized world. Indeed, this notion is more or less enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and, especially, in the Kyoto Protocol. Since the dawn of industrialization, now-developed states have contributed immensely to global stocks of greenhouse gas, and they must take action to mitigate future climatic changes and reduce the effects of those already imminent. However, with the rapid development of Asia and many other regions of the world, developing countries are now becoming major contributors to climate change as well. China has become the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases; Brazil, India and Indonesia now produce more greenhouse gas emissions individually each year than Japan or Germany; and South Korea and Mexico’s emissions outstrip those of France and Italy. As a result, the prospects for addressing climate change without major efforts by states in the developing world are rapidly diminishing. It is essential for them to shift their emissions trajectories downwards as they grow.

It is striking and encouraging that some developing countries have established sophisticated responses to climate change. This is a trend that warrants much greater attention. China, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico and others are increasingly on the frontline of climate policymaking and can be considered global leaders in a number of significant ways. Some of the actions they are taking are comparable to the finest efforts made by the wealthier, industrialized world. Others, such as Argentina and South Africa, are clearly laggards, and most developing states probably come closer to their poorer record. Yet this observation gives rise to an important question: how are some developing countries becoming more ambitious and successful than others in responding to climate change? Since many – perhaps most – developing countries remain unprepared for climate change and face immense political and economic barriers, the answer to this question is not obvious. This book explores this issue by closely analysing the experiences of twelve different countries in three regions of the globe, in Asia, the Americas and Africa. By examining these countries, it offers the most comprehensive study thus far on climate governance in the developing world.

The research undertaken in this book initially developed as a result of a generous grant provided to the editors by L’Agence Française de Développement (AFD). We are very grateful to the AFD for having provided the resources to conduct this work, which was undertaken over a three-year period and involved extensive travel, interviews and data gathering in several countries. While the original AFD-funded research focused on only a subset of those countries covered in this book, it revealed empirical complexities that had gone largely unnoticed and, in our view, presented a number of interesting puzzles. Thus, we expanded the project’s scale and scope by bringing a series of additional researchers on board in order to examine these new dimensions of climate policymaking across a wider range of countries.

The editors would like to thank the many people who have contributed to the development of this volume and the research that underpins it. Above all, the contributors have been more than generous in sharing their expertise for the benefit of this book. Working alongside them has been a learning experience in the best sense. Many more were involved in producing this book in other ways. For their support and/or for very helpful comments and discussion at various stages of research and writing, we would like to thank Richard Balme, Satishkumar Belliethathan, Jean-Marc Coicaud, Olivier Charnoz, Björn Conrad, Robert Falkner, Tony Giddens, Tom Hale, Jin Xiaoting, Vannina Pomonti, Eduardo Viola, Robert Wade, Anna Wishart, Zha Daojiong and Zhang Haibin. Angus Hervey and Kyle McNally are also to be thanked for providing important research support, as well as Aida Kowalska, Danielle Da Silva and Dave Steinbach. Finally, we would like to thank everyone at Polity for all they did to turn the manuscript into the book that is now in your hands.

David Held

Charles Roger

Eva-Maria Nag

5 November 2012

Abbreviations

1

Editors’ Introduction: Climate Governance in the Developing World

David Held, Charles Roger and Eva-Maria Nag

FOR most of the period since the early 1990s, the locus of action on climate change has largely been in the industrialized world. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol is, for example, the most ambitious international effort to establish quantitative limits on countries’ greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. During the first commitment period, it obliged a group of thirty-seven countries to reduce their emissions collectively to 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008–12. Yet this only applied to industrialized states, known as ‘Annex I’ countries in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Developing countries, known as ‘non-Annex I states’,¹ were effectively excluded from any binding obligations. Within the industrialized world, the European Union in particular has been at the forefront of efforts to govern climate change. The European Emissions Trading System, the world’s first multinational emissions trading scheme, was launched in 2005, and a range of other Europe-wide climate policies have been enacted since then. Many European states, like the United Kingdom, Denmark and Germany, have also established policies to promote the adoption of renewable sources of energy, created policies to encourage energy efficiency, or implemented national carbon taxes designed to put a price on carbon and abate emissions.

Action in the industrialized world is, of course, not confined to the European continent and the British Isles. Outside of Europe, Japan has created a range of climate mitigation policies, New Zealand operates a mandatory emissions trading system, and Australia now plans to establish one as well. National policies in North America are much less developed and coherent, but individual states, provinces and municipalities in the United States and Canada have taken the lead and created their own climate change policies despite the dearth of action at the national level. California, for instance, has set a goal of reducing its emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and has established a statewide cap-and-trade system to meet it; Quebec and British Columbia (in Canada) have implemented carbon taxes, while Alberta operates a baseline-and-credit emissions trading scheme; and a number of cities in both the United States and Canada have established climate action plans. Finally, many sub-national governments in North America have also worked together through regional carbon trading schemes such as the Western Climate Initiative and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Even though the above developments in the industrialized world have been insufficient to meet the challenge of global warming, they have traditionally constituted the ‘frontline’ in the global battle against climate change. By contrast, developing countries since the early 1990s have consistently maintained that they have little obligation to take immediate action. In the international climate change negotiations, they have proven deeply reluctant to adopt binding mitigation targets similar to those adopted by industrialized states under Kyoto. Doing so, they have argued, would reduce the space for economic growth and development, which are viewed as overriding priorities. Further, since currently developed states did not have to curb emissions during their own industrialization experience, it would be patently unfair for developing countries to have to do so, even if this were for the ‘global good’. They should be allowed to emit more in order to meet their legitimate socio-economic and developmental needs. Thus, the domestic climate change policies of most developing countries have traditionally been thought to be much less proactive than those in the industrialized world. While they occasionally took actions that had the side-effect of abating emissions (by reducing energy subsidies, for example; see Reid & Goldemberg 1998), one early review of climate change policies in low income countries by an analyst from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) summed up its findings by explaining that ‘most developing countries are neither prepared to address nor interested in climate change’ (Gómez-Echeverri 2000). Climate considerations have, for the most part, hardly figured in plans for economic development, policymaking has been limited, and those actions that have been taken have often been driven by multilateral and transnational actors from wealthier countries, with little domestic ownership (Olsen 2006).

To be sure, most developing states, especially least developed states, are still unprepared for, if not uninterested in, climate change. Yet, over the past several years, one of the most remarkable developments in the arena of climate change has been the growing number of non-Annex I states that have made unilateral commitments to mitigate emissions within their borders. China has recently pledged in its 12th Five-Year Plan to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 40–5 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020. Brazil, likewise, now aims to reduce national emissions by 36–9 per cent below its baseline emissions scenario by 2020. Mexico has announced that it intends to reduce emissions by up to 20 per cent from business-as-usual (BAU) by 2020, and plans to reduce emissions by 50 per cent by 2050. South Africa has set a goal of reducing emissions by 34 per cent below BAU by 2020 and by 42 per cent by 2025. Even Ethiopia, after playing a leading role representing Africa in the climate negotiations, has established a target of becoming ‘carbon free’ by 2022. Beyond the elaboration of such targets, however, many developing states have also been creating a welter of more specific plans, programmes and policies for meeting them. These include, for instance, policies for encouraging the use of renewable sources of energy, improving energy efficiency, reducing rates of deforestation and land use change, and raising emissions standards in manufacturing, buildings and vehicles, to name just a few. Some, such as China and South Korea, have even announced plans to establish emissions trading schemes of their own.

Despite these growing commitments, most developing states have not yet adopted more conciliatory negotiating positions at the international level. Many continue to argue that they should not be obliged to adopt binding targets and timetables. Nonetheless, the commitments that developing countries have been making can be seen in the many declarations of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) that were submitted to the UNFCCC Secretariat after the signing of the Copenhagen Accord in 2009. By the end of 2012, a total of forty-four developing states had submitted NAMAs, in addition to commitments by forty-two industrialized countries.² NAMAs are, essentially, a set of targets or policies or actions that a country intends to undertake voluntarily in order to reduce their emissions. They do not establish binding international obligations and there are no legal requirements for states to follow through on their promises. Further, NAMAs vary considerably in their level of detail and ambition. Some set out precise quantitative emissions targets, such as those mentioned above, while others simply list actions without specifying their proposed scope and expected impact. Having said this, NAMAs do broadly offer a rough indicator of the growing scale of the commitments developing states have been making. Together, the commitments made by developed and developing countries cover more than 80 per cent of global emissions, and, if delivered, could reduce emissions from BAU by 6.7–7.7 billion tonnes (Stern & Taylor 2010). But, most interestingly, there now appears to be ‘broad agreement’ that the actions that have been proposed by developing countries may do more to reduce future global emissions than those pledged by industrialized states (Kartha & Erickson 2011).

Of course, not all plans are likely to be successful. Developing countries continue to face a number of challenges that make implementation especially difficult. In some countries, targets are also far less ambitious, meaningful and credible than elsewhere. Estimates of the stringency of seemingly ambitious plans have been questioned as well. Some, such as Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, have optimistically estimated that China’s recent commitment may reduce projected emissions by as much as one gigatonne or 25 per cent of the total world reduction needed to stabilize average global temperature rise at 2 °C (see AFP 2009). Critics of China’s target argue, on the other hand, that its pledge represents nothing of the sort and, in fact, is little more than the continuation of current policies and measures. This is certainly an important matter for empirical investigation and debate. What is undeniable, however, is that there appears to be a new level of interest in climate change in certain parts of the developing world, a host of new unilateral commitments, and, in some places, seemingly ambitious domestic policies and programmes for achieving them. The locus of climate change policymaking appears to be shifting.

While the contexts within which developing and emerging economies are making their plans and commitments are different, as are their intentions and abilities to achieve them, we argue that there seems to be a new political dynamic underlying this remarkable set of developments that deserves careful scrutiny by both scholars and policymakers. Once considered perennial laggards, some developing countries are now widely regarded as climate policy leaders. Some commentators have even argued that a number of these countries are taking actions that are comparable to – or even more ambitious than – almost anything being done in the industrialized world. Our aim in this book is to explore such claims by closely examining the experiences of twelve important countries across three different regions: Asia, the Americas and Africa. In Asia we look at China, India, Indonesia and South Korea; in the Americas, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and Mexico; and in Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mozambique and South Africa. Together, these countries account for around 50 per cent of the world’s population, about 25 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) and almost 40 per cent of the world’s annual emissions of GHGs at present (when land use change is taken into account) (see table 1.1).

Four of the countries analysed in this book – Brazil, China, India and Indonesia – are ‘major’ emitters, accounting for almost 85 per cent of all the emissions produced by the countries we consider. They are all among the top ten annual emitters of GHGs globally, and account for over 50 per cent of the developing world’s total emissions. These states are therefore intrinsically important from a normative or policy perspective, and have attracted a great deal of interest in scholarly and policymaking communities. Five of the countries – Argentina, Egypt, Mexico, South Africa and South Korea – are ‘middle range’ producers of GHGs. Their annual emissions are often comparable to those of many European states in absolute and, in some cases, per capita terms (South Korea, for instance). Although they are not individually decisive, the participation of a large number of such states in global mitigation efforts is essential, as they account for a significant share of emissions as a group. Together, the annual emissions produced by these five are similar to India’s or Brazil’s. Finally, we also consider several smaller ‘minor’ emitters – Costa Rica, Ethiopia and Mozambique – which are interesting precisely because they are not decisive, and yet (at least in the cases of Costa Rica and Ethiopia) have announced commitments to becoming ‘carbon neutral’ or ‘carbon free’ in the near future.

The cases we have chosen are not of course representative of the total ‘universe’ of developing countries. Indeed, several lacunae should be immediately apparent. We do not analyse countries from West and Central Asia, some of which may fall into the category of ‘middle range’ emitters, nor do we consider small island developing states, some of which have made commitments to carbon neutrality (the Maldives and Tuvalu, for example). Exploring the dynamics of climate governance in such states offers an opportunity for future research and comparative analysis, but they are not dealt with in this study. Our cases were chosen primarily because they have submitted NAMAs or made unilateral commitments of various kinds to taking action on climate change. Overall, only 30 per cent of all non-Annex I countries have submitted NAMAs to the UNFCCC secretariat. Of the twelve analysed in this book, only Mozambique and Egypt have not developed NAMAs, though their experiences are interesting in other highly suggestive ways, discussed further below. These cases therefore constitute a unique group, but one which is intended to be broadly representative of the subset of developing countries that claim to be taking a more ambitious approach to the climate. The aim of each chapter is to examine the international and domestic contexts within which these commitments have been made, the interests at stake, the actors involved and the strategies and policies that have been developed.

In the rest of this introductory chapter, we first discuss why it is increasingly essential to understand the way climate governance is evolving in the developing world. We argue that it is important, above all, because developing countries are having a much greater effect on the climate than in previous decades. However, there are major theoretical issues at stake as well, as current theories of climate politics are not optimistic about the potential for effective climate governance in developing states. Thus, the finding that developing countries are taking action on the issue seems fundamentally to overturn some widely held assumptions about climate and environmental politics in the developing world. Having explored these issues, we then provide a brief overview of the individual cases, highlighting some of the most salient or interesting features and findings that they bring to light. Finally, we conclude by discussing some broad themes that appear across a number of the cases, and which bear upon the theoretical and policy-oriented questions that motivate this book.

What is at Stake?

Understanding how and why some developing countries have become more ambitious with respect to climate change is important, first of all, from a policy or normative perspective. Some developing countries are now major contributors to climate change on a number of measures. Indeed, the annual contributions of some developing states to total annual greenhouse gas emissions are comparable to or even greater than those of states in the developed world. China’s share of total annual CO₂ emissions rose from 11 per cent in 1990 to nearly 24 per cent by 2006, and it is now the world’s single largest emitter of GHGs. Individually, Brazil, India and Indonesia each now produce more GHGs each year than Japan or Germany, Asia’s second largest and Europe’s largest economy. South Korea produces more GHGs than France or Italy. Iran produces more GHG in absolute terms than all of Australia. Although many smaller developing countries are not yet major producers of GHGs, if we look at another measure – per capita emissions – it is clear that many are relatively large contributors on a per person basis. The list of top per capita emitters includes a great number of non-Annex I states, such as Belize, Guyana, Qatar and Malaysia. Among industrialized states, only Australia (the ninth largest per capita emitter in the world) makes the top ten.

In total, non-Annex I states currently account for just over half of all GHG emissions in absolute terms, with a few states like China, Brazil and India making up about half of that number in turn. Yet, as economies in the developing world grow, their contributions are only likely to get much larger if major changes do not take place today. As figure 1.1 shows, annual emissions from Annex I states are expected to be relatively stable between now and 2050. Emissions in the United States and Canada are rising and will continue to do so, while emissions in the European Union are expected to fall, though not nearly fast enough for the total level for all Annex I countries to decline. Annual emissions from non-Annex I states, on the other hand, are expected to grow by around 45 per cent. Emissions from Asia are likely to rise by about 53 per cent while those from Latin America and Africa will rise by about 26 per cent each, albeit from very different bases. Thus, developing states will naturally comprise a much larger share of total annual GHG emissions in a relatively short period of time, and their participation in mitigation efforts will be absolutely necessary if global levels of GHGs are to be stabilized at safe levels. In fact, emissions in the developing world are expected to grow so fast according to most ‘business-as-usual’ scenarios that, even if the industrialized world managed to reduce its emissions to zero by 2040, total global emissions will still be higher than they are today if no changes are made. At the very least, therefore, developing states will have to shift downward the trajectory of their emissions pathways, though many will need to make absolute reductions as well (for further discussion of required non-Annex I commitments see Elzen & Höhne 2008).

One of the best known and most often heard claims about climate change is that it is the historical emissions of industrialized countries that are largely responsible for triggering climate change. For this reason, the UNFCCC states that it is the now-developed world that ‘should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof’ (UN 1992, p. 4). Historical emissions in developing countries, it also states, are relatively low, and therefore their share of global emissions should be allowed to grow in line with their developmental needs. This picture of things constitutes the ‘conventional wisdom’ on climate change and undergirds the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities that is enshrined in the UNFCCC: since developed countries have largely been responsible for the problem of climate change and developing states are expected to feel the worst effects, the former have a duty to mitigate and compensate for the harm to the latter by shouldering the main burden of abating emissions and providing funds for adaptation. Undoubtedly, there are important truths here. Yet this picture is swiftly becoming more complex and, in some places, outdated. Some developing states are already among the greatest contributors to global stocks of GHGs, and in upcoming years the historical contributions of many more will be on a par with industrialized states, as their emissions grow at unprecedented rates (Botzen et al. 2008). This is especially true when emissions arising from deforestation and land use change are taken into account, since they are primarily a phenomenon confined to the developing world (Baumert et al. 2005). Thus, many have come to argue that certain developing states have important ethical obligations to reduce their impact on the climate as well (Posner & Weisbach 2010; Harris 2011).

Given the burgeoning absolute, per capita and historical emissions of the developing world as a whole, proactive climate change policies by developing countries – and especially by several large developing states – are becoming increasingly urgent and, in some cases, ethically appropriate. The world can no longer afford the rigid division of responsibilities among Annex I and non-Annex I states that became entrenched in the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol at the First Conference of the Parties (COP1) in Berlin in 1995. To some extent, this has begun to change after COP16 in 2011 in Durban, where developing countries agreed to negotiate an agreement with ‘legal force’ that will be applicable to all parties by 2015. The Durban Platform for Enhanced Action contains no mention of the terms ‘Annex I’ and ‘non-Annex I’, suggesting that this distinction may be on its way out. This is a promising step, but one that underlines the need to understand why some developing states are becoming climate leaders while others are remaining laggards. Gaining insights into how some developing countries have managed to shift towards, if not attain, a low carbon, climate-resilient development trajectory can help us to understand how climate laggards might become leaders in the future, as well as how to avoid some of the pitfalls along the way.