The Climate Establishment and Incremental Policy in the Global Climate Regime

• In Event: Climate Politics from Top to Bottom

Abstract

This paper examines the role of the “climate establishment” in creating and perpetuating the current ineffectual global climate regime. The climate establishment includes insiders in the multilateral climate regime (i.e. the UNFCCC) who have chosen to cooperate with large emitters as a key approach to climate change. While there are a variety of actors who fall within this definition, I focus on one specific subset: the international NGOs that are active in the global climate negotiations. These insider INGOs denature climate politics by focusing on technocratic solutions, largely divorced from democratic politics and broader questions of climate justice. In particular, the climate establishment remains narrowly focused on how to measure and account for tons of greenhouse gases – a process I call “fetishizing the ton.”

The paper first describes how the UNFCCC has created a demand for the climate establishment by emphasizing cooperation over conflict. The climate establishment has been instrumental in creating and implementing policies to cooperate with large emitters such as through carbon offsets and voluntary emissions reductions like “net zero” pledges. It then provides an empirical evaluation of the international NGOs that are most active in the global climate negotiations. Using data from the UNFCCC, and organizational annual reports, I identify key members of the climate establishment, and examine their links to large emitters as evidenced by board memberships, funding arrangements and programmatic partnerships. In short, the paper demonstrates how the climate establishment promulgates policies that will win the approval of big emitters, through a sort of regulatory capture. Regulatory capture can be understood as the absence of regulation where such regulations would impose costs on regulatory targets, or the creation of policies that fail to produce the desired public goods. I demonstrate how this capture functions by analyzing which INGOs in the climate establishment receive funding from large emitters, cooperate with them programmatically, and have representatives of large emitters on their boards.

Author

• Jessica Green, University of Toronto