859642

research-article2019
EJT0010.1177/1354066119859642European Journal of International RelationsBernstein

Article
EJIR
European Journal of
International Relations
The absence of great power 2020, Vol. 26(1) 8­–32
© The Author(s) 2019
responsibility in global Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
environmental politics DOI: 10.1177/1354066119859642
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119859642
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt

Steven Bernstein
University of Toronto, Canada

Abstract
Great powers routinely face demands to take on special responsibilities to address major
concerns in global affairs, and often gain special rights for doing so. These areas include peace
and security, global economic management, development, and egregious violations of human
rights. Despite the rise in the importance and centrality of global environmental concerns,
especially climate change and issues covered by the new Sustainable Development Goals,
norms or institutions that demand or recognize great power responsibility are notably
absent. This absence is puzzling given expectations in several major strands of International
Relations theory, including the English School, realism, liberalism, and constructivism. Drawing
on the reasoning behind these expectations, the absence of great power responsibility can
be explained by a lack of congruence between systemic and environmental “great powers,”
weak empirical links between action on the environment and the maintenance of international
order, and no link to special rights. Instead, the institutionalized distribution of environmental
responsibilities arose out of North–South conflict and has eroded over time, becoming more
diffuse and decentered from ideas of state responsibility. These findings suggest a need to
rethink the relationship among great powers and special rights and responsibilities regarding
the environment, as well as other new issues of systemic importance.

Keywords
Climate change, environment, global governance, great powers, norms, responsibility

Introduction
Norms or institutional arrangements that demand or recognize great power responsibility
for the global environment do not exist. This absence comes despite great powers routinely

Corresponding author:
Steven Bernstein, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G3, Canada.
Email: steven.bernstein@utoronto.ca
Bernstein 9

facing demands for, gaining special rights or status in recognition of, and taking on special
responsibilities for other prominent concerns in global affairs. These areas include peace
and security, global economic management, and human rights, at least in the protection of
populations from the most heinous abuses such as genocide or crimes against humanity
(Bellamy, 2016; Bukovansky et al., 2012; Bull, 1977). If, as in these other areas, one
expects great power responsibilities to follow from the importance or centrality of an issue
in global affairs, their absence in the environmental area is especially puzzling. This article
aims to address why.
Evidence for the importance of the environment in global affairs is overwhelming. Its
formal recognition as a global concern, including the institutionalization of environmen-
tal norms in numerous United Nations (UN) and regional declarations and well over 500
multilateral legal instruments (Mitchell, 2018), has led English School (ES) scholars to
argue that “environmental stewardship” is a “primary institution” in international society
(Falkner and Buzan, 2019).1 Climate change in particular has risen to the highest levels
of the international agenda by almost any measure of prominence in diplomatic and
institutional activity, or societal attention. Global markets and transnational corporate
actors are also increasingly pressured to incorporate environmental concerns into their
regulatory structures and business practices through domestic and transnational hard and
soft mechanisms. Such mechanisms include the proliferation of carbon markets (IETA,
2018), transnational sustainability standard setting in areas like forestry, fisheries, and
coffee (Auld and Gulbrandsen, 2013), and corporate reporting, benchmarking, and rank-
ings that include environmental components, such as the CDP (formerly known as the
Carbon Disclosure Project) and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI, no date; Janzwood,
2017). In addition, the European Union (EU) and US have sought to internationalize
their environmental standards directly and indirectly through voluntary cooperative
agreements, writing standards into trade agreements, or using trade and standard-setting
bodies to promote environmental goals (e.g. DeSombre 2002; Jinnah and Lindsay, 2016).
Furthermore, environmental concerns are arguably central to the broader global develop-
ment agenda, now framed around Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN, 2015).
Yet, even informal recognition or acceptance of great powers’ individual and collec-
tive responsibility is weak and, if anything, on the decline. While some of this shirking
can be attributed to the politics of the current US administration, it is not alone. The final
communiqué of the 2018 G7 summit offers just one stark example of this more general
decline (G7, 2018; see also Banda, 2018). Even without the US’s disavowal shortly after
its release, the final communiqué contained separate paragraphs on the US and the
remaining “G6” positions on climate change. The former (G7, 2018: para. 26) included
a pledge to support access to “all energy sources” and to “endeavor to work with other
countries” to “use fossil fuels more cleanly.” This, and subsequent, wording makes clear
the US retreat from any serious commitment to decarbonization. While other G7 mem-
bers reaffirmed their “strong commitment” to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate
change and a “just transition,” their statement (G7, 2018: para. 24) backed away from
specific pledges made in earlier communiqués that set 2050 as a target for ambitious
emission reductions and “a transformation of the energy sectors,” or to end fossil fuel
subsidies (G7, 2015). Even more significant for the argument here is the shift in the lan-
guage of responsibility. In 2015, “The G7 feels a special responsibility for shaping our
10 European Journal of International Relations 26(1)

planet’s future” in reference to the then expected Paris Agreement and just agreed SDGs
(G7, 2015). The 2018 communiqué makes no mention of environmental responsibility,
even though it explicitly states that “we share the responsibility” to stimulate sustainable
economic growth (G7, 2018: para. 2) and “a responsibility to build a more peaceful and
secure world,” foregrounding recognition of respect for human rights as necessary for
that goal (G7, 2018: para. 13). Thus, even in the current diplomatic context, acknowledg-
ment of great power responsibility is alive and well, but nowhere in the two environmen-
tal paragraphs.
This article will explain the failure to entrench great power responsibility and identify
the weaker and more diffuse ideas of responsibility that prevail instead. The failure, I
argue, has resulted for the following reasons: a lack of congruence between systemic and
environmental “great powers”; weak empirical links between action on the environment
and the maintenance of international order; and no link to special rights. The hypothe-
sized links between great powers and special responsibilities are drawn from not only ES
scholars, but also constructivists, liberals, and realists, who might expect great powers to
take on responsibilities for normative, self-interested, or stability reasons, respectively.
Absent these links, institutional and normative developments have framed responsibility
as a function of capacity and historical culpability, as opposed to great power responsi-
bility for management, as in other issue areas.
For evidence of these links or their absence and of how responsibilities have been
assigned in practice, I rely on the following: official documents from major UN confer-
ences on the environment and sustainable development; treaty and other legal texts and
negotiating histories, especially focusing on arguably the most central systemic environ-
mental concern — climate change; collective statements of great powers such as G7
communiqués; and secondary sources on these processes, as well as comparative schol-
arship on great power responsibility in other issue areas.
The article proceeds as follows. The next section discusses why great power accept-
ance of special responsibilities for ensuring planetary environmental integrity would be
useful and what it might entail given concerns over irresponsible and self-interested
behavior to date. The second section reviews the theoretical debate on great power
responsibility to identify the hypothesized links between great power status and special
rights and responsibilities from a variety of theoretical traditions. The third section
explains why those links failed to develop in the case of the environment. The fourth
section examines the assignment and erosion of global environmental responsibilities in
practice. The fifth section identifies trajectories that point to the further erosion of great
power responsibility and the diffusion of environmental responsibility. Finally, the con-
clusion discusses the implications of these arguments for the prospects of great power
responsibility more broadly to address new issues of systemic importance and argues
that a rethinking of responsibility and global politics, in IR theory and practice, is needed.

Why great power responsibility for the environment?

The idea of great power responsibility dates to the Congress of Vienna and attempts by
the victorious conservative powers to restore order following the Napoleonic Wars.2 The
ES tradition is most closely associated with this idea. However, my argument draws on
Bernstein 11

multiple theoretical traditions to highlight their overlapping analytic underpinnings, and

to strip away their logic from the anachronistic and paternalistic preoccupation in some
early ES writings that (implicitly or explicitly) connected responsibility to preserving
imperial or Eurocentric orders (Hall, 2011: 47–55). Contemporary ES scholars acknowl-
edge this legacy and actively debate the morality of assigning special responsibilities and
rights to great powers. However, even normative critiques generally acknowledge the
importance of taking on responsibilities for maintaining order or supplying global public
goods. Recent ES-inspired scholarship has thus mostly focused on great powers’ tenden-
cies in practice to shirk responsibilities, act irresponsibly (e.g. Brown, 2004; Bull, 1980),
thwart attempts by other (e.g. middle) powers to promote or support more collectively
responsible behavior or institutional arrangements, or prevent alternative visions of
responsibility put forward by emerging powers (e.g. Bukovansky et al., 2012; Gaskarth,
2017). While acknowledging these critiques, I accept the premise of ES scholarship that
great powers bear some responsibility for both order and the provision of collective
goods (e.g. Bukovansky et al., 2012; Bull, 1977; Falkner, 2018). This view is consistent
with positive interpretations of desirable responsibility in contemporary international
discourse that support great power responsibility to contribute to order in the pursuit of
widely accepted norms and collective goals (Gaskarth, 2017: 290–294). The environ-
ment is no different than other major concerns in global affairs in this regard.
There may be disagreement over exactly which states to classify as great powers and
the form that great power responsibility should take, whether it should be attached to
special rights, or its moral character. However, there is both a demand for and good rea-
sons to want great powers, however defined, to take on differentiated responsibilities for
ensuring the environmental integrity of the planet or avoiding dangerous environmental
change to planetary ecosystems. Two reasons stand out.
First and foremost, great powers, by virtually any definition, have a disproportionate
ability to address or mitigate the most serious global environment problems because of
their greater capabilities. Great powers such as the US, Germany, and China have dispro-
portionate financial and technological resources to contribute to global collective action
in the environmental arena. Failures to take on responsibilities would not only create
collective action problems, but could also easily undermine collective efforts (Falkner,
2005; Keohane and Victor, 2016). Moreover, nearly all versions of the moral argument
for special responsibilities rest in some way on great powers “alone enjoy[ing] the capac-
ities and conditions necessary to act” (Erskine, 2008: 706, quoted in Bukovansky et al.,
2012: 41). There is added irony in the comparative lack of environmental great power
responsibility. As Bukovansky et al. (2012: 41) observe, in other areas of major global
concern — for example, humanitarian crises, financial crises, and peace and security —
there is not necessarily a link to “greater responsibility for causing the problem,” while
such a link is apparent in the environmental area. Thus, even critics of great power man-
agement (GPM) or of the moral underpinnings of a doctrine of responsibility that assigns
it to those arguably most responsible for negative effects support such responsibility. For
example, Conca (2015) has proposed a positive “environmental responsibility to pro-
tect.” While cautioning against importing the institutional arrangements of the
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, especially the backstop of the UN Security
Council owing to the moral contradiction in its current structure where the largest
12 European Journal of International Relations 26(1)

emitters have veto power, Conca (2015: 197) sees the benefit of a layered responsibilities
doctrine linking human rights and the environment: “the state’s responsibility to protect,
the international community’s responsibility not to neglect, and the leading emitters’
responsibility for the effects.”
Second, special environmental responsibilities for great powers would be desirable
to support, encourage, and legitimate an international order that reflects in practice a
commitment to environmental protection and sustainability. Whereas theoretical sup-
port for this idea, discussed later, is well established, empirical work on environmental
governance also supports this view. It shows that while a hegemonic power is not
required for environmental cooperation, great power leadership and resources, indi-
vidually or collectively,3 can significantly contribute to action in cajoling, pressuring,
persuading, or providing side payments to other states to take up policies or goals
(Falkner, 2005; Young, 2011). Conversely, the lack of great power responsibility for
supporting a particular order, even when others are willing to lead, can make action dif-
ficult. While the EU’s status as a “great power” can be debated, even leaving aside
questions about its collective agency, the perceived shift from US to EU leadership on
many global environmental issues since the 1990s arguably hampered progress on a
variety of international environmental concerns since the US has “refused to follow the
EU lead” in issues “ranging from electronic recycling, to chemical regulation” (Keleman
and Vogel, 2010: 452). US opposition to, withdrawal from, or declining commitment to
international environmental agreements have proven harmful to sustained international
action even when other countries seem willing to take the lead (Falkner, 2005: 587–588,
591–592).
Conversely, progress in international negotiations that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement
only became possible following the November 2014 US–China bilateral agreement
(Eckersley, 2018; Falkner, 2016: 1114; Keohane and Victor, 2016: 571). As Laurent
Fabius, the President of the Paris Conference of the Parties who led the negotiations,
noted: “having some agreements on paper between the US and China was key…. It was
much better than having statements individually from the US and China.”4 Not only did
the US–China agreement overcome sticking points in earlier negotiations, it also sig-
naled the commitment of the two largest greenhouse gas emitters, which generated
momentum and “incentives for other countries to make meaningful pledges of action as
part of the Paris process” (Keohane and Victor, 2016: 571).
What exactly special environmental responsibility for great powers would entail, or
how it might be prevented from serving narrow, as opposed to broader common or plu-
ralist, interests is trickier to articulate in the abstract. In evaluating its presence or
absence, I follow the ES’s guidance by looking for evidence of some public acknowledg-
ment by, and of, great powers of obligations to take on special or differentiated responsi-
bilities in the promotion and pursuit of core environmental norms in the interest of
international society as a whole, and some institutionalization of that obligation (Cui and
Buzan, 2016: 174; Loke, 2016: 851). Differential responsibilities demanded in the envi-
ronment area typically take the form of commitments to lead, to act first and to a greater
degree (e.g. deeper cuts to harmful emissions), or to provide greater resources (e.g. tech-
nology, financing, or aid). There are also demands to acknowledge responsibility for
present and historical contributions to problems. However, contestation over the shape of
Bernstein 13

such responsibility and to whom it might apply is precisely one of the problems militat-
ing against great power responsibility for the environment.

Great powers and responsibility in IR theory

ES scholars understand great power responsibility to stem from their duty to maintain the
order and norms of international society since they enjoy special rights and privileges
that violate the formal equality of states on which the sovereign state system rests.
Contemporary examples include institutionalized authority and status such as permanent
veto-wielding seats on the UN Security Council or voting rights at the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) linked to a country’s position in the world economy. Special
responsibilities now also extend into new areas such as human rights. For example, this
reasoning underpins the R2P doctrine. Despite ongoing controversy over its acceptance
and implementation in practice, as Bellamy (2016: 249) has argued, “paragraph 139 of
the 2005 World Summit agreement identified the [UN Security] Council as bearing spe-
cial responsibilities for the protection of populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic
cleansing, and crimes against humanity.” Acting on R2P requires great power consensus
in the UN Security Council, thus recognizing their special rights. The UN General
Assembly is also increasingly demanding that they accept responsibilities associated
with the evolving doctrine (Bellamy, 2016). Moreover, failures to take on responsibility
(e.g. in Syria) contributed to just the sort of consequences that ES scholars predict: the
undermining of the legitimacy of great power roles and institutions, such as the UN
Security Council, that support them and the weakening of international order. Even a
rising power such as China faces criticism for not taking on such responsibilities when it
opposes UN Security Council action (Gaskarth, 2017).
Hedley Bull’s (1980: 437) observation that the concept of great power has “normative
as well as positive connotations” highlights the normative underpinning of ES arguments
on responsibility. As he put it:

To say that a state is a great power is to say not merely that it is a member of the club of powers
that are in the front rank in terms of military strength, but also that it regards itself, and is
regarded by other members of the society of states, as having special rights and duties. (Bull,
1980: 437)

Similarly, Clark (2011: 4) defines a great power as a state with the capability or “resources
to lead.” Whereas responsibility stems in the first instance from the position of great
powers as necessary for preserving international order, Bull and Clark recognize that to
be compelling, arguments for special status should not only rest on self-interest, but also
invoke a moral imperative or duty by virtue of their capability. Normative connotations
come mainly at the back end of the equation: social recognition by others that grants
legitimacy to the special rights and authority claimed by great powers, and, in turn, their
obligation to shoulder an extra burden.
Constructivists have picked up and expanded on the idea of great power responsibility
as a social relationship. Loke (2016: 848) treats it as “a socially constructed and negoti-
ated concept.” This move allows her to address questions of who is responsible, to whom,
14 European Journal of International Relations 26(1)

for what, and why by examining its historical construction, especially as individual states
seek great power status and recognition and pursue order-building goals. That is, they
negotiate, resist, and/or contest ideas of order for which great powers might be responsi-
ble. Similarly, Bukovansky et al. (2012) argue that norms and rules constitute or legiti-
mize special responsibilities. They focus on the social power that derives from assigning
special responsibilities, particularly regarding status, recognition, and rights to act legiti-
mately. The constructed character of special responsibilities, they argue, means that the
social domain dictates the conferring of great power responsibilities by virtue of both
material and ideational elements. For example, “in the realm of climate change it is
aggregate emissions and the economic and technological capacity to facilitate national
and international adjustment” that defines who should have special responsibilities and
that also attaches meanings “to levels of economic and social development” on which
basis responsibilities are assigned (Bukavansky et al., 2012: 73).
The view that “different domains of world politics have different [material and idea-
tional] structures” (Bukovasnky et al., 2012: 74) is in tension, however, with ES scholars’
portrayal of primary institutions of international society as identifying the deep structure
of international society as a whole, reflecting the common values that underpin an inter-
national order. Loke’s (2016) attention to contestation and negotiation as defining the
basis of responsibility over time is similarly in tension with the more stable and systemic
basis of GPM in ES scholarship.
This tension is pervasive in the environmental domain, where there is contestation
over the norms that underpin responsibility claims and demands. Responsibility is
framed not only in terms of protections from the externalities of other states and univer-
sal planetary interests, but, for many actors, as a moral obligation that falls on countries
that benefited from industrial pollution as they developed, whether or not they gained
great power status. Such arguments parallel those that stem from more general strains on
international order — such as from the uneven consequences of globalization or the
spread of liberal values at the end of the Cold War (e.g. Ikenberry, 2017; Stiglitz, 2002)
— that put pressure on great powers to expand the areas in which they have responsibili-
ties, especially to those left behind or hurt by such developments. One implication of
these tensions is disjunctures between the systemic and issue-specific assigning of
responsibilities that can militate against great powers taking on special responsibilities in
a particular domain like the environment.
On the question of links between international order and great power responsibility
more generally, ES scholars are much closer to realists and liberals than constructivists.
While ES scholarship suggests that the order promoted and defended ought to link to the
universal values of international society within a particular historical context (Brown,
2004), in practice, such normative arguments are largely derivative of power relations:
the values that underpin international society are assumed to be those of the great powers
and to serve their material and ideal interests. As Bull (1980: 438) put it, “The order [the
great powers] are maintaining … is their preferred order, and there are always forces
abroad in the international system that will seek to replace this order with one that will
embody some different set of values.”
Systemically oriented liberals also posit an alignment between the great powers’
interests and the benefits that international order and stability provide, which suggests
Bernstein 15

that taking on special responsibilities is both materially necessary and shores up legiti-
macy for that order. Ikenberry (2001, 2017) has argued, for example, that great powers
are generally willing to bind themselves to special responsibilities to maintain legitimacy
for an order in which they have a dominant position. For example, the US built a multi-
lateral system following the Second World War in part as a form of “strategic restraint,”
recognizing that its partners, particularly in the North Atlantic security community,
would be more likely to grant legitimacy to a rule-based order that also bound the
hegemon in its responsibilities, a historical pattern that Ikenberry (2017: 63) argues is
increasingly necessary for great powers to maintain order.
Similarly, great power scholars in the realist — and especially neorealist — tradition
argue that special responsibilities stem from the preponderant material, especially mili-
tary, capabilities of states. The question for them is who qualifies as a great power.
While debates persist on the exact criteria, realists generally rank great powers on
aggregate measures of capabilities, their ability to project political or military power
outside their region (Monteiro, 2014: 42–47), and sometimes Waltz’s (1979: 131, 180)
notion of “political competence.” Debates tend to focus on the difference between
superpowers, great powers, major powers, and regional powers, and their import for the
structure of the system (e.g. compare Brooks and Wohlforth (2016) with Monteiro
(2014, or Mearsheimer, 2001), or disagreements with liberals or constructivists about
relevant capabilities for different arenas or issue areas. Nonetheless, realists, dating
back to Morgenthau, who argued explicitly that US preponderant power following the
Second World War gave it “foremost responsibility” (Morgenthau, 1978: 24), widely
agree with liberals that great powers have a special role to play in the management of
important global issues. Even Waltz (1979: 194–210) acknowledges that great powers
have an incentive to provide public goods owing to their greater interest in system sta-
bility, and briefly discusses the impact of socially derived ideas of responsibility (Waltz,
1979: 198).
Realists also largely align with Bull’s logic that great powers are defined, in part, by
their systemic, as opposed to issue-specific, importance. For Bull (1980: 438), the links
among great powers’ capabilities and special rights in areas such as international peace
and security is their claim to be responsible “to international society as a whole.” Many
positive arguments for great power responsibility and management in other issue areas
thus come down to power and self-interest. Great powers have an interest not only in
order, but also in avoiding the negative spillovers from local or regional conflict or pov-
erty, such as refugees or terrorism, and should therefore take responsibility for conflict
management or other systemic problems. While I therefore focus especially on the US as
the only undisputed systematically important power, I relax strict divisions in some of
the realist literature to ensure that my specific arguments are fair to competing defini-
tions of great powers. For example, my arguments on the missing links between great
powers and environmental responsibility should still apply even if one includes the EU
(collectively, or at least Germany as the dominant power within Europe) and China as
great powers, when the latter especially is arguably emerging as a systemically important
power even if it is not yet a superpower.
To summarize, IR theory identifies three broad reasons and/or conditions that would
lead to great power responsibility for the global environment: the congruence of
16 European Journal of International Relations 26(1)

systemic and environmental powers (realism, ES, constructivism); clear linkages

between environmental integrity and the preservation of international order (realism, ES,
liberalism); and linking the assigning of special responsibilities to special rights or privi-
leges (ES, constructivism).

Great powers and environmental responsibility: The

missing links
Despite relatively clear and compelling linkages to global responsibilities for great pow-
ers on both material and normative grounds in other issue areas where the conditions
identified earlier generally hold, this section shows that these linkages are missing in the
case of environmental concerns.

Lack of congruence of systemic and environmental “great powers”

Most definitions of great powers translate poorly when applied in the environmental
arena. While some systemically important countries, the US in particular, could clearly
be considered “environmental” great powers, others that are vital for environmental
stewardship are not. As noted earlier, the response from constructivists such as
Bukovansky et al. (2012) is that arguments for great power responsibility ought to disag-
gregate relevant forms of power by domain, which could lead to different expectations
of how great power responsibility can or should play out, or alternative distributions of
responsibilities, since “great” may apply to different states or different environmental
issues depending on the material and ideational structure and how it constitutes relevant
power characteristics.
This argument, however, pays insufficient attention to the prevailing logic or institu-
tionalization of great power responsibility in international society. Thus, while a disag-
gregated view of power may be relevant to the capacity to lead or help focus attention on
the politics and contestation around the construction of social power in an issue area,
there is little evidence of the international community assigning special responsibilities
or rights on this basis. To take just one illustrative example relevant to the environment
and climate change, during the height of high oil prices in the first decade of the 21st
century, the Canadian government began to refer to the country publicly as an “energy
superpower” owing to its large reserves of oil and natural gas (Hester, 2007). Yet, Canada,
like other major oil producers, neither claimed special rights nor took on any special
responsibilities to combat climate change or manage global energy resources. Instead,
the Stephen Harper government during this period actively backed away from previous
commitments, at least on climate change. While other major oil exporters such as Norway
have taken a more proactive leadership stance, the reasons arguably stem almost entirely
from domestic politics, not international responsibility (Lemphers, 2019).
This tension between domain-specific and systemically important powers is double-
edged when it comes to the environment. On the one hand, it suggests that for all the
efforts of middle or entrepreneurial leaders on particular issues (say, the Nordic countries
or middle powers like France on climate change, or a rising power like Brazil’s occasional
attempts to lead on forestry), they will be reluctant to take on special responsibilities and
Bernstein 17

special rights will not be available to them. On the other hand, the lack of existing special
responsibilities — or the formulation of responsibilities in ways that fail to link with great
powers — means that opportunities for many smaller or regional powers to play a leader-
ship (or spoiler) role will continue to be available. The reason for the lack of connection
is not that the domain-specific great or even regional powers do not matter. Indeed, the
most important players for many global environmental concerns — major fossil fuel pro-
ducers and consumers for climate change, Japan and Norway for whaling, or Brazil and
Indonesia for tropical forestry — clearly need to be involved in addressing them. However,
the framing of responsibility does not track linearly to their general importance in preserv-
ing international order or holding special rights.
In this regard, Eckersley (2018) usefully differentiates leadership from responsibility.
While she argues that there could, in theory, be a special responsibility on the part of
great or indispensable powers (e.g. the US and China in the case of climate change) to
lead, leadership — especially “substantive” leadership that attracts followers, but even
“structural” or positional leadership that may manifest as being a front-runner but not
inspire followers — and responsibility do not necessarily co-vary.5 There may be cases
of non-hegemonic or structural leadership that manage to encourage followers and gain
legitimacy for leader states in their role or irresponsible great powers who refuse to lead,
or lead irresponsibly (e.g. for overly self-interested or narrow goals). Empirically, there
are examples of great power leadership making a difference on particular issues at differ-
ent times (e.g. the US on ozone and the EU in regulating some harmful chemicals and in
the Kyoto Protocol negotiations (Kelemen and Vogel, 2010)), but also the waxing and
waning of leadership, often driven by domestic politics (Liefferink and Wurzel, 2017:
955). Others have documented the failure of rising powers to embrace systemic as
opposed to regional or selective leadership or responsibility. For example, despite its
structural leadership, China continues to act primarily as a leader of developing countries
as opposed to taking responsibility for a global leadership role in climate change
(Eckersley, 2018). Moreover, Brazil’s commitment to leadership, even by example, is
declining and it has failed to translate its stated commitment to addressing climate change
nationally into leadership or support for enshrining national commitments in interna-
tional agreements (Hochstetler and Milkoreit, 2015).
In practice, an “environmental” great power — though the term is rarely used — to
which responsibilities are assigned is defined by some combination of historical and
contemporary contribution to environmental harms and the capacity or capability to
address it. However, these are not the criteria generally linking great powers to special
responsibilities in the literature, nor does “the underlying notion of causality and culpa-
bility for environmental distribution … normally play a major role in common under-
standings of what constitutes a great power” (Falkner, 2018: 13). The reason that few
speak of environmental great powers is that the positionality that matters is only loosely
linked to great power status, is dependent on context, and is linked to responsibility with
a logic of culpability as much as capability creating obligation. The culpability rationale
has reinforced a discourse around responsibility much more focused on Western indus-
trial or post-industrial societies than rising economies who currently contribute as much
or more to many global environmental problems (e.g. China, at least, being widely rec-
ognized as both a great power and “indispensable” for environmental action (Terhalle
18 European Journal of International Relations 26(1)

and Depledge, 2013)). The normative and discursive argument for responsibility thus fits
poorly with the great power category. Divisions of responsibility remain much more
amenable to the developed–developing dichotomy even as those categories are being
abandoned in the practices of international environmental diplomacy.
These divisions are reflected in international law and practice, where the question of
who bears environmental responsibility has focused either diffusely on humankind gen-
erally or, when attached to states, to “developed” versus “developing” countries and the
related, but not equivalent, notion of respective capabilities. Whereas there may be
some overlap in these categories and great power status, “developed” country is obvi-
ously much broader. Moreover, attention to historical culpability — absent in most
other issue areas as a relevant link to great power responsibility — complicates the con-
nection when it comes to new or rising powers. Identities of developed and developing
remain sticky in environmental and sustainability politics and have complicated the
positive and normative dimensions of redistributing responsibilities for environmental
action and management.

Weak empirical links to international order

A second compelling argument found particularly in ES, liberal, and realist accounts of
great power responsibility is the alignment of taking responsibility and the benefits of
international order that accrue to great powers. However, the link between environmen-
tal stewardship and broader international order remains weak in international society. Put
simply, failures to follow through on environmental commitments or of great powers to
take the lead on pressing environmental concerns seem to have few consequences for
broader international order or legitimacy. The George W. Bush administration’s 2001
decision to not implement the Kyoto Protocol may have angered allies but it did not
affect US status or cooperation in other issue areas. Ironically, it was great powers — or
at least the US plus major powers including Japan and China — who sought alternative
institutional arrangements to the UN-based climate regime because they felt that the cur-
rent order, anchored in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, was not
serving their interests. Even as non-members looked upon these alternative arrangements
like the Asia–Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate with great skepti-
cism, no discernible negative consequences for members or general order occurred.
Contrast the lack of consequences with those that resulted from much less overt legiti-
macy challenges to the special rights of great powers following the 2008 financial crisis.
In that case, alternative institutions gained importance and demands for the reform of
existing arrangements mounted (e.g. the G20 vis-a-vis the G7, reforms to international
financial institutions including the IMF, and the eventual creation of the New Development
Bank by the BRICs countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa)). These
reactions, as well as mounting pressures on the international trading order, suggest that
much more serious repercussions for the international order follow failures of economic
leadership and responsibility than follow failures of environmental leadership or great
power responsibility.
The lack of material consequences suggests that the bonds of interest to great power
responsibility for the environment remain weak. One can imagine a variety of reasons
Bernstein 19

why this might be so: time lags for many of the most severe environmental problems;
long chains or “shadows” of consumption that externalize environmental harms away
from great powers or their populations and delay, obscure, or displace the consequences
of inaction onto other societies and the poor or marginalized (Dauvergne, 2010); or
ongoing contestation over the norms or values of environmental stewardship that com-
plicate strong norms around responsibility or social purposes. For example, elsewhere, I
have argued that as pressure increased in the 1970s and 1980s to respond to international
environmental problems, responses were framed as consistent with a liberal economic
order, supported by a discourse of sustainable development that premised environmental
protection on sustained economic growth (Bernstein, 2001). Such a “liberal environmen-
talism” framing militates against strong consequences for irresponsible action on the
environment if it is defended by being consistent with economic imperatives.
The disconnect between irresponsible behavior by great powers and threats to inter-
national order means that a greater reliance on the normative side of the great power
responsibility equation is necessary to create a strong sense of duty or obligation rather
than a simple projection of self-interest. The result is ad hoc responsibility when action
is in the immediate interest of great powers but a failure to develop a general sense of
responsibility. For example, US leadership on the 1987 Montreal Protocol to combat
ozone depletion owed much to a fortuitous combination of domestic pressure, available
alternatives to CFCs by the world’s most important (and US-based) producer (DuPont),
and known harms to fair-skinned populations in the North in the form of increased skin
cancer risks (Parson, 2003). An upswell in feelings of responsibility did not cause action
on ozone. More likely, US leadership arose from a combination of domestic pressure,
publicity over the Antarctic ozone hole that galvanized the public and relevant policy
communities, and self-interest (Litfin, 1994).
This argument is not meant to suggest an absence of attempts to entrench norms of
general or differential responsibility to address environmental harms. However, the idea
of differential responsibility has not been aligned with the interests of the great powers
or seen as central to their leadership or status, or the legitimacy of the international order.
Instead, notions of responsibility have evolved largely out of North–South conflict, their
uptake being dependent on claims against major economic powers rather than because
of links to the benefits of world order or the legitimacy of great power status. In other
words, even accepting Falkner and Buzan’s (2019) argument that environmental stew-
ardship is now a primary institution, evidence does not support the view that failures by
great powers to take responsibility for the environment would challenge their legitimacy,
recognition, or status in the system. As Falkner (2005: 586) notes: “unlike trade and
monetary policy, environmental policy has never been central to the US effort to create
international order.”

No link to special rights

A third missing link is failures to claim any special rights or privileges, or the need for
such rights, in the environmental case. As Bukovansky et al. (2012: 58) acknowledge,
“the special responsibilities needed to address climate change [or, arguably, other major
environmental concerns] bring few if any desirable rights.” In practice, rights claims
20 European Journal of International Relations 26(1)

have been made by smaller and developing, not great, powers. For example, they have
long argued for a “right to development,” with attempts to insert it into various environ-
mental agreements, including most recently its successful inclusion in the decision to
adopt the Paris Agreement (though not in the agreement itself) (Paris Agreement, 2015).6
The idea of focusing on individuals as the holders of rights to a healthy environment has
also gained momentum (Knox and Pejan, 2018). In contrast, no such link between great
powers and justifying claims for special rights has been made, nor has any doctrine of
environmental human rights been linked — except as an academic proposal (Conca,
2015) — to a notion like R2P that creates responsibilities for great powers.7 Again, the
problem is not weakness in environmental norms; it is the lack of arguments for requir-
ing, or supporting, special rights to implement them. In theory, this situation could
change in the future if governments start to perceive climate change as an emergency. In
such a scenario, one could imagine great powers asserting special rights to make deploy-
ment decisions for geo-engineering, to govern the technology, or for the overall manage-
ment of a system that intervenes on a planetary scale. However, writings on the
governance of geo-engineering already reflect resistance to the idea of special rights for
great powers even in a climate emergency. They associate such scenarios with the cri-
tique that geo-engineering might encourage authoritarianism (Horton et al., 2018).
The problem is not the limited normative ambition of international society, but the
failure to link the myriad forms of collective international and transnational action on the
environment to institutionalized expectations on great powers to take on responsibility.
Put another way, turning to another primary social institution identified by ES scholars,
international society has so far failed to embody an ethic of responsibility for the envi-
ronment as worthy of GPM. Rather, the discourse of responsibility has historically vacil-
lated between a universalistic “common” responsibility and one differentiated based on
capability and historical culpability. Other values have also complicated the question of
responsibility, creating tension between an ethic of, or responsibility to, the environment
and one that also incorporates equity within and between societies (Okereke and
Coventry, 2016). Active contestation over to whom and for what responsibility is owed
further complicates matters when the norms entrenched in the “primary institution” of
environmental stewardship reflect a contested environmentalism. While the nature of
that contestation has evolved, it is now playing out in attempts to address environmental
concerns under an overarching goal of sustainable development, as embodied in the 2015
SDGs. How that translates into practice remains the subject of much debate, as the envi-
ronment is but one constitutive component of the SDGs, to be “integrated” and “bal-
anced” with economic and social components (UN, 2015).
Taken together, the absence of these three linkages means that the conditions for great
power environmental responsibility are lacking despite the systemic importance of the
issue. The following section elaborates on how the evolution of global environmental
responsibility has played out instead.

The assigning of responsibility in practice

International environmental norms identify states, individually and collectively, as the
holders of responsibility and, like in other areas of international law, pair responsibility
Bernstein 21

with external sovereignty understood vis-a-vis other states. Principle 21 of the 1972
Stockholm Declaration of the Human Environment identifies states as the only specific
holders of responsibilities, and only vis-a-vis other states (UN, 1972). Often recognized
as the foundational norm of international environmental law, Principle 21 builds on ear-
lier UN resolutions and the historical context of then emerging claims for a new interna-
tional economic order. It asserts that states have the:

sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental policies, and
the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause
damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction.

Principle 2 of the 1992 Rio Declaration reproduces this language, adding only that states
have a right to exploit their own resources “pursuant to their own environmental and
developmental policies” (UN, 1992). In sum, responsibility is framed as “state responsi-
bility” internally, with some limited notion of liability for external environmental harms
that directly result from domestic pollution. In practice, though, international environ-
mental law has rarely operationalized, created, or used mechanisms to enforce liability.
The reason, legal scholars have argued, is the formalism of state responsibility mecha-
nisms (Brunnée, 2005). Hence, even that acknowledgment of responsibility is only
weakly linked in practice to accountability mechanisms unless they are formally estab-
lished within specific legal instruments.
Similarly, the norm of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capa-
bilities (CBDR), the most directly relevant norm for the assignment of special responsi-
bilities for the environment, applies to states vis-a-vis obligations to one another. Any
other holders or targets of responsibilities implied by the norm are stated so generally as
to limit any direct application or specific obligation or duties. For example, the first part
of Principle 7 of the Rio Declaration suggests that the overall purpose to which CBDR
applies is to protect the environment generally, saying that “states shall cooperate in the
spirit of global partnership to conserve, protect and restore the health and integrity of the
Earth’s ecosystem.” Twenty years earlier, Principle 1 of the Stockholm Declaration more
explicitly assigned responsibility to “improve the environment,” but to no one in particu-
lar. Instead, humankind collectively holds responsibility:

Man [sic] has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an
environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being, and he bears a solemn
responsibility to protect and improve the environment for present and future generations.8

The wording of both principles vitiates any possibility of accountability other than to
states, thus leaving the doctrine of state responsibility primary in practice.
Due to these initial framings around state responsibility, subsequent debates and con-
testation have rarely questioned the targets of responsibility, but rather the form, type,
justification, and distribution of the responsibilities of states to each other in pursuit of
environmental goals. One notable shift has been from common responsibility to preserve
and share the benefits of areas or resources designated as the “common heritage” of
humankind (i.e. areas beyond any state’s jurisdiction such as the deep seabed, outer
22 European Journal of International Relations 26(1)

space, oceans beyond national jurisdiction, and plant genetic resources) to differentiated
responsibilities. While that shift has multiple dimensions — including a move to open
some of those previously designated areas to private commercial use and ownership — it
also reflects a movement away from undifferentiated “common” responsibilities to spe-
cial responsibilities. These arguments, as per the discussion earlier, came out of North–
South bargaining dynamics, not a focus on the responsibilities of great powers. For
example, by 1992, developing countries argued against the idea of common heritage in
negotiations on forestry and biodiversity in the lead-up to the 1992 Earth Summit, fear-
ing the loss of sovereign control. Meanwhile, developed countries opposed it because
they associated it with global economic management and redistribution in opposition to
market-based principles (Bernstein and Van der Ven, 2017a).
The corollary to this shift away from common heritage of relevance here is Principle
7 of the Rio Declaration, which explicitly turns from the language of common goals, and
the implicit idea of collective responsibility to address and manage them, to differentia-
tion. It states that:

In view of the different contributions to global environmental degradation, States have common
but differentiated responsibilities. The developed countries acknowledge the responsibility that
they bear in the international pursuit of sustainable development in view of the pressures their
societies place on the global environment and of the technologies and financial resources they
command.

Notice that the principle assigns no historical responsibility even though intergenera-
tional equity underpins the notion of sustainable development. The shift is even more
explicit in the climate change convention, where differential obligations derive from
their current contributions to the problem and their “respective capabilities” (UNFCCC,
1992: Article 3(1)). Although the argument for differentiation on historical grounds con-
tinues to be made in negotiations and discourse, no language in any multilateral climate
change agreement endorses this justification.
While most of the attention in the literature on the CBDR norm focuses on differentia-
tion, the question of responsibility has been much more politically contentious. The idea
of differentiation is opposed more in theory than in practice, while the opposite is true for
contestation over responsibility. Whereas the US, especially, fought against the formali-
zation of differentiation in the Kyoto Protocol, which committed only developed coun-
tries to binding emission targets, it has accepted differential obligations and time lags for
implementation, even if obligations are eventually supposed to harmonize as capacities
allow, and commitments to provide technical or financial assistance for countries to meet
their obligations in several treaties. For example, the Montreal Protocol to combat ozone
depletion and subsequent amendments allowed longer phase-out periods for developing
countries and set up a Multilateral Ozone Fund to help fund the transition. The CBDR
norm has been increasingly incorporated into multilateral environmental agreements
since 1992, including the Biodiversity Convention, the Convention to Combat
Desertification, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, and the
Minamata Convention on Mercury. Furthermore, despite US rejection of the CBDR
norm as the foundation for blanket differentiations of developed and developing
Bernstein 23

commitment categories in climate change agreements following the Kyoto Protocol,

subsequent negotiating positions suggest that it has accepted the principle but contests its
meaning and interpretation (e.g. Brunnée, 2011). For example, in the lead-up to the 2009
Copenhagen climate conference, US insistence that developing countries accept emis-
sion commitments was phrased as something “that CBDR actually demands, or at least
accommodates … suggesting that major developing economies with large emissions
must accept some emissions commitments” (Brunnée, 2011: 57–58).
The legitimation of differentiation based on level of development extends back at
least to the 1972 Stockholm Declaration’s statement that most environmental problems
in developing countries result from underdevelopment. Negotiations then and since have
prioritized development, aid, and technology transfer as preconditions to developing
countries accepting responsibility for environmental integrity. Not surprisingly, the
underlying historical context of differentiation rooted in North–South dynamics has
played out in parallel in other issue areas. For example, in trade, the norm of “special and
differential treatment” has gradually become entrenched in World Trade Organization
(WTO) agreements, although it is controversial when there are attempts to apply it in a
blanket way. The practice of special treatment gained traction beginning in 1964, when
parties amended the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to include a new
Part IV on Trade and Development with special provisions for “less developed coun-
tries.” While it resulted in few commitments in the 1970s and 1980s, the Tokyo Round,
completed in 1979, included a so-called “enabling clause” that extended the generalized
system of preferences (to favor imports from developing countries) indefinitely and dif-
ferentiated between obligations for different categories of developing countries. When
developing countries were brought fully into the agreement following the creation of the
WTO in 1994, it included many special provisions for developing countries based on
circumstances and issues. The most recent round of decisions at the 2015 Nairobi
Ministerial Conference included (non-binding) texts on preferential rules of origin, duty-
free and quota-free market access, and a monitoring mechanism on special and differen-
tial treatment (Wilkinson et al., 2016). Even prior to this round, Pauwelyn (2013) counted
145 WTO provisions related to special advantages, technical assistance, phase-in peri-
ods, and more lenient obligations for developing countries, but no official list of who
those countries are, in contrast to what existed under the Kyoto Protocol.
However, including “responsibility” in the CBDR norm raises the stakes signifi-
cantly: first, it implies an obligation; and, second, in the environmental area, it has been
linked to liability as an accountability mechanism. Thus, acknowledging responsibility
invokes a legalistic view of accountability that includes obligations to compensate. As a
result, the main target of contestation is the notion of the differentiation of a specific
identifiable group based on its status or history as a basis on which to assign it, or forgive
it, responsibility. Liability and compensation are at the heart of the political fight over the
idea of “loss and damage” in climate change negotiations, based on the acknowledgment
that there will be unavoidable loss and damage — both economic and non-economic
(culture and ways of life, species loss, landscapes) — from climate change. Loss and
damage made it into the Paris Agreement (2015: Article 8), but the enabling Conference
of the Parties decision states that “Article 8 of the Agreement does not involve or provide
a basis for any liability or compensation.” The US has held this position consistently
24 European Journal of International Relations 26(1)

through successive administrations from the earliest articulation of the CBDR norm in
Principle 7 of the Rio Declaration. A US interpretive statement accompanying the UN
resolution adopting the Rio Declaration reads:

The United States does not accept any interpretation of principle 7 that would imply a
recognition or acceptance by the United States of any international obligations or liabilities, or
any diminution of the responsibilities of developing countries under international law. (UN,
1993: ch. III, para. 16)

Moreover, the US has consistently resisted any stated or implied linkage between CBDR
and obligations or responsibility for additional financing or the diminution of common
responsibilities for global problems, even as it recognizes differential abilities to address
problems. In the case of the Paris Agreement, loss and damage is framed as a problem of
risk management, adaptation, and sustainable development, but with no specific respon-
sibility assigned or obligation that flows from it.
In sum, the practices of assigning responsibility in the environmental domain depend
almost wholly on current contributions to a specific problem and the capacity to address
it. While, notionally, the idea of assigning responsibilities based on capacity overlaps
with constructivist notions of domain-specific great powers, the link to great power
responsibility for broader management or order is never made and developed/developing
country categories, although they are eroding, remain sticky and linked to ongoing con-
testation over historical liability. Meanwhile, responsibility as a principle of historical
justice (or culpability) has had no formal traction, and links between historical responsi-
bility as a financial principle or a legal principle of liability are actively resisted. The
ability of climate negotiators to successfully link loss and damage to financial compensa-
tion depended on avoiding any explicit acknowledgment of historical responsibility.
Instead, the expectation is increasingly that as emerging economies and rising powers
gain capabilities, the distribution of responsibility will evolve with them.

Trajectories of environmental responsibility

The decentering of state responsibility
Recalling that the tension over responsibility to whom has never been fully resolved,
there are some who want to link responsibility as a moral principle to the protection of
individuals and vulnerable communities, which would imply a radical shift in the domi-
nant understandings of responsibility in international society. While a significant depar-
ture from current practices, linking environmental protection to human rights has a long
tradition dating back to Principle 1 of the Stockholm Declaration, which begins with a
statement of collective responsibility to uphold human rights. Since then, the relationship
between human rights and the environment “has been recognized at every level of the
world’s legal systems, from domestic courts to multilateral treaties,” although a right to
a healthy environment has never been recognized globally and operationalization has
been challenging (Knox and Pejan, 2018: 1). Similarly, Conca (2015) documents several
attempts to link the environment, development, and human rights agendas within the UN
system, but also notes significant institutional barriers to doing so. Conca’s proposal for
Bernstein 25

an “environmental responsibility to protect” mentioned earlier builds on these legal, nor-

mative, and institutional developments to make a moral and pragmatic case that the
existing UN human rights machinery could be adapted to support such a doctrine. The
main barrier, he argues, is the firewall between the law and development frame that
underpins sovereign rights and responsibilities in environment and sustainable develop-
ment institutional arrangements, and the UN human rights and peace and security
machinery. If endorsed, however, a responsibility for environmental protection would
empower individuals and encourage accountability. It would shift the focus of responsi-
bility onto states not vis-a-vis each other, but for the well-being of people and vulnerable
groups such as indigenous communities, whose environmental rights have already been
acknowledged in the 2007 UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or popula-
tions displaced by or in regions severely affected by climate change, natural disasters,
conflicts, or other environmentally harmful human activities.9 In practice, an environ-
mental R2P would first require “defining the responsibilities that correspond to human
rights, identifying the parties to whom such responsibilities attach, and highlighting the
(in)effectiveness with which those responsibilities are carried out” (Conca, 2015: 195).
Like R2P, this new doctrine would put responsibility on states and the international com-
munity when states are unable or unwilling to fulfill their duties. As noted earlier, how-
ever, there is little prospect of support for the UN Security Council to play this role, so
institutional innovations would be needed, even if great powers played a special role.

From external to internal responsibility?

While Conca’s vision suggests the possibility of the environment looking more like other
systemically important issue areas that support special rights and duties for great powers,
trends in global environmental and sustainability governance appear headed in the oppo-
site direction: the dilution of, and diffusion from, direct assignments of responsibility to
states for the maintenance of international order. For example, a shift is underway from
external to internal responsibility (i.e. country ownership), where states are increasingly
responsible for their own environmental and developmental outcomes. This trend coin-
cides with a shift from formal rules and treaties based on state responsibility to reliance
on softer modes of governance like best practices, standards, benchmarks, or goal-based
strategies like the SDGs (Bernstein and Van der Ven, 2017b; Best, 2014; Kanie and
Biermann, 2017). The combination of these trends, though incomplete, implies a more
horizontal assignment of responsibility, not only away from differentiation to country
ownership, but also to other actors such as partnerships and corporations.
Pouliot and Thérien (2018: 64) observe a similar tension playing out in the develop-
ment domain between what they label “global solidarity” and “national duty” positions.
The tension originally became visible leading up to the 2000 Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs):

The main value conflict in the MDG debate revolved around … who should be responsible for
development policymaking…. [Advocates of global solidarity] maintained that the rich have a
moral responsibility toward the poor, and sought to link the MDGs with human rights
obligations. While conceding that international support for development can sometimes be
26 European Journal of International Relations 26(1)

justified, [advocates for national duty] basically argued that the responsibility of development
rests primarily with each individual state. (Pouliot and Thérien 2018: 64)

This debate arose in the context of rising inequalities and a growing sense of winners and
losers from globalization, as well as the failures of IMF and World Bank structural
adjustment programs and the legitimacy crises of major international security and eco-
nomic institutions (Best, 2014). One consequence of attempts to manage such “failures”
has been to push responsibility down to countries themselves, while supporting soft gov-
erning modes (Best, 2014: 16).
In the environment and sustainability area, the 2015 SDGs take a similar approach,
where accountability mechanisms focus on country-level reporting on progress as
opposed to the fulfillment of external responsibilities and commitments. While there are
many possible benefits to this shift — including avoiding one-size-fits-all policies, sen-
sitivity to domestic contexts, and encouraging accountability to a country’s own citizens
— such practices and mechanisms are notoriously uneven. Similarly, the shift from
developing-country-focused MDGs to universally applicable SDGs has many virtues,
including generating a greater sense of collective responsibility. However, it can have the
unintended effect of undermining special responsibilities or the idea of global partner-
ship. For example, SDG 17 has the official aim to “strengthen the means of implementa-
tion and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.” However, in
practice, it focuses almost exclusively on multi-stakeholder partnerships, voluntary com-
mitments, and national responsibility for the domestic mobilization of resources as a
means of implementation. This orientation marks a significant move away from “global
solidarity” understandings of “partnership,” which focused much more on the responsi-
bility of major economic powers and pressures for structural and institutional change in
areas like development finance and trade.
Similar trends can be seen in the Paris Agreement. It too exhibits a shift to accounta-
bility for nationally determined commitments, that is, voluntary pledges as opposed to a
negotiated distribution of commitments and obligations to meet the overall goal. While
a global stocktake every five years will assess collective progress, its specific purpose is
to use the monitoring and review of each party’s performance to lead to the “updating
and enhancing” of their pledges, again leaving the focus on countries’ national responsi-
bility. The agreement and other decisions made in Paris also emphasize greater responsi-
bility for action from non-state and sub-state actors, with still uncertain accountability
mechanisms (Falkner, 2016; Kuyper et al., 2018). These trends indicate a steady drift not
only toward the “national duty” end of the responsibility spectrum, but to a horizontal
and non-differentiated diffusion of responsibility more broadly.

Conclusions
The environmental governance domain is currently ill-suited to generate meaningful
great power responsibility. Rather, evidence suggests a decline and diffusion of respon-
sibility. It might be tempting to conclude that a return to, or adaptation of, GPM is needed
in response (Cui and Buzan, 2016). However, while I have argued that great powers tak-
ing on differentiated responsibilities for ensuring the environmental integrity of the
Bernstein 27

planet is desirable, the preceding analysis suggests that institutionalizing such responsi-
bility, especially if attached to special rights, is not only unlikely, but also a poor fit
practically and morally with what is needed to address global environmental problems.
One implication of these findings is that IR theory across traditions has been too
accepting of a presumed link between great power responsibilities and special rights.
Unlike traditional security issues, for example, special rights and responsibilities may be
less important for many major environmental problems such as climate change. While
some areas of environmental protection may look like classic global management and
collective action problems (e.g. ozone depletion or declining high seas, or straddling,
fish stocks), others are much more about societal transformation where multilevel change
and wider ranges of actors are equally as important (Bernstein and Hoffmann, 2018;
Chan et al., 2019; Kanie and Biermann, 2017). Even if increased great power responsi-
bility, at least for their own behavior, would be welcome and valuable, progress on cli-
mate change has arguably been driven more by diffuse and decentralized practices at
multiple scales than by top-down collective management, and a reliance on the latter
misunderstands the structure of the problem (Bernstein and Hoffmann, 2018). There may
also be benefits of directing attention to promoting a broader sense of responsibility and
improved accountability as ways to pressure and support greater and more widespread
transformative action and a just transition that might also eventually bring great powers
along, although work is needed on how to develop those links.
Instead of hand-wringing over the lack of institutionalized GPM in such circum-
stances (Cui and Buzan, 2016), a more pragmatic alternative is to embrace arrangements
that encourage more diffuse responsibility and accept that leadership will be required at
multiple levels and in different locations simultaneously. This is not to diminish the con-
cern that “a lot could go wrong in a decentred globalist world, especially if that world is
dominated by a set of autistic, irresponsible great powers” (Cui and Buzan, 2016: 206).
However, it does call for reorienting thinking on responsibility to recognize both the
changing structure of global order and the problem structure of many of the most serious
systemically important global issues variously characterized as non-traditional security,
shared fate, and/or complex, including, at least, the environment (especially climate
change), global inequality and several other sustainable development concerns, cyberse-
curity, and migration.
Regarding global order, the very idea of GPM with which great power responsibility
is so closely linked makes less sense in an order variously described as “multiplex”
(Acharya, 2017) or “multi-order” (Flockhart, 2016), or that takes seriously a “pluralist”
commitment to “value diversity and difference” (Hurrell, 2018: 98). Regarding problem
structure, global environmental politics scholars have long observed the increasingly
complex authority arrangements in operation to govern environmental problems.
Similarly, concepts that initially attracted them, such as polycentrism and orchestration
(Abbott et al., forthcoming; Jordan et al., 2018), are now being employed widely in other
issue areas. Research on them captures not only the range of state and non-state actors
involved in governing, as well as the opportunities for innovation and experimentation to
mobilize necessary resources, but also the challenges of creating sufficient authority,
coordination, and accountability across a range of global governance challenges (Coen
and Pegram, 2018). Thus, this article is certainly not the first to recognize
28 European Journal of International Relations 26(1)

that the structures of many of the most important contemporary challenges do not lend
themselves easily to top-down management, whether conceptualized as GPM or liberal
ideas of multilateralism (e.g. Cui and Buzan, 2016; Deibert, 2018; Morse and Keohane,
2014). Furthermore, each of these newer systemic concerns will have slightly different
problem structures, and generate their own configurations of responsibility, accountabil-
ity, and authority relations best able to address the governance challenges. Nonetheless,
if the environment is typical of this new class of systemic challenges, the findings here
suggest avoiding assigning special rights and privileges — which can inadvertently let
other actors off the hook or undermine action if one or more great powers acts irrespon-
sibly — and focusing instead on governance innovations that encourage responsibility
and accountability at multiple levels and locations commensurate with the nature of the
problem. That is surely no easy task, but it is increasingly an essential one.

Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Liliana Andonova, Barry Buzan, Ken Conca, Robyn Eckersley, Robert
Falkner, Jessica Green, Seva Gunitsky, Peter Haas, Thomas Hale, Hannah Hughes, Christopher
LaRoche, Joseph MacKay, participants in a workshop on “Great Power Responsibility and Global
Environmental Protection” (LSE June 2018), and the anonymous reviewers and editors of EJIR for
detailed comments and constructive criticisms on earlier drafts.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. Primary institutions are “deep and relatively durable social practices [that] must not only
be shared amongst the members of international society, but also be seen amongst them as
legitimate behaviour” (Buzan, 2014: 16–17). Other primary institutions include the balance
of power, great power management and, more recently, human rights and development.
2. The term “great power” to denote a special class of states above the rest first appeared in
the official diplomatic record in the treaties to end the wars, being used to describe the Four
Powers of Europe (literally “les Quatres Puissances”) (LaRoche, 2018: 63).
3. For example, members of a “privileged” group who benefit from the overall order or good
provided may therefore contribute disproportionally to providing it.
4. Author and colleagues’ joint interview with Laurent Fabius on 14 December 2016, Paris.
5. Other possibly relevant typologies of leadership also support this differentiation. For example,
Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) identify four types of leadership — structural, entrepreneurial,
cognitive, and exemplary. While, by definition, “structural” leadership is only available to
great powers, any state could engage in the other types. They also note that the external ambi-
tions of leaders are not linked to positionality, smaller states can be other types of leaders, and
that “over the years … leaders come and go” (Liefferink and Wurzel, 2017: 955).
6. However, it has been criticized as so vague and devoid of specifying any parties with obliga-
tions that it is “operationally meaningless” (Uvin, 2007: 598–599).
7. Attempts to address climate change in the UN Security Council have consistently met with
resistance by permanent and non-permanent members, who argue that it is not the appropriate
institutional setting. The one attempt by a UN Security Council member (France) to extend
Bernstein 29

R2P to the environment — for disaster relief when Myanmar refused international aid after
Cyclone Nargis in 2008 — was rejected, a position later echoed by a 2012 International Law
Commission report that explicitly rejected the extension of its scope (Conca, 2015: 196).
8. In addition, para. 7 of the preamble states that achieving environmental goals will “demand
the acceptance of responsibility by citizens and communities and by enterprises and institu-
tions at every level, all sharing equitably in common efforts.” While it notes that governments
bear responsibility for policy, domestic and international, it makes no mention of specific or
differential responsibilities.
9. For a detailed discussion of how human rights bodies and tribunals have interpreted or inferred
such rights for vulnerable individuals and groups, see Knox and Pejan (2018), particularly the
chapters by Magraw and Winhöfer and Atapattu (see also Duyck et al., 2018).

ORCID iD
Steven Bernstein https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0115-084X

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Author biography
Steven Bernstein is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Canada, where he
also co-directs the Environmental Governance Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and
Public Policy.