Beyond the North-South Divide? Global Climate Politics in the New World Order

• In Event: 382 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Paper Session. Can Comparative Historical Sociology Save the World? (5) Climate Change

Abstract

As currently configured, the UN’s greenhouse gas mitigation framework will allow temperature rise above what scientists predict will trigger catastrophic environmental events around the world, particularly in the poorest countries. This inadequate framework emerged at the negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009, which laid the groundwork for future agreements in Durban in 2012 and Paris in 2015. How did we arrive at an entirely inequitable and scientifically inadequate climate regime and what’s stopping us from changing course? We argue that the global political order shifted in important ways since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol a dozen years prior. Building upon the scholarship of neo-Gramscian scholar Robert Cox we identify major relevant historical shifts in three main areas: global political economy, geopolitics and ecological conditions. Drawing upon extensive empirical research in the negotiations, we argue that the historical developments in each of these areas largely structured the limits and possibilities for international action on climate change at the fateful Copenhagen conference and offered a new terrain upon which for new coalitions to emerge. In Gramscian terms, this conference was a microcosm of major shifts in the ‘balance of forces’ in the broader world order. As such, while there had always been tensions in the G-77 negotiating group, Copenhagen demonstrated that climate politics no longer hinged solely on a North-South divide.

Authors

• David M. Ciplet, Brown University

• J. Timmons Roberts, Brown University

• Mizan Khan, North South University