Robert Falkner (Editor), Barry Buzan (Editor) - Great Powers, Climate Change, and Global Environmental Responsibilities-Oxford University Press (2022)

Great Powers, Climate Change, and Global
Environmental Responsibilities
Great Powers, Climate
Change, and Global
Environmental
Responsibilities
Edited by
ROBE RT FA L K NE R
BAR RY BU Z A N
1
3
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Acknowledgements
This book has its origins in a workshop on ‘Great Power Responsibility and
Global Environmental Protection’ that we convened in June 2018. Hosted by the
Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the two-day workshop
brought together 12 scholars to discuss how existing and emerging global powers
have defined their responsibilities towards the global environment. We are grate-
ful to all presenters and discussants that participated in the workshop, including
Steven Bernstein, Nicholas Chan, Carlotta Clivio, Heidi Wang-Kaeding, and Lucie
Quian Xia.
The initial workshop would not have been possible without the generous
funding provided by the LSE’s Department of International Relations and the
Grantham Research Institute. We are also grateful for the organizational sup-
port offered by the Grantham Research Institute, and especially Ginny Pavey, Zoe
Williamson, and Stuart Rodgers.
A selection of the workshop papers was presented at the 2019 Annual Conven-
tion of the International Studies Association (ISA) in Toronto. The ISA panel on
great power responsibility and global environmental protection provoked many
helpful reactions and suggestions from the participants and audience members,
and we are particularly grateful to the discussant, Andrew Hurrell, for his insightful
comments on the conference papers.
When we first proposed the idea for this book to Oxford University Press
(OUP), Dominic Byatt, the commissioning editor for politics and international
relations at OUP, gave it an enthusiastic reception. We are grateful for his
unwavering support and patience throughout the book’s gestation. Our thanks
also go to the other members of OUP’s editorial team for successfully steering the
manuscript through the production process. We are particularly grateful to OUP’s
two anonymous reviewers, whose perceptive comments and suggestions greatly
helped us to sharpen the focus of the book and improve the final product.
Finally, we thank Colin Vanelli and Achille Negrier, two undergraduate stu-
dents in the Department of International Relations at LSE, for providing research
assistance and helping us compile the index for the book.
Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan
London, September 2021
Contents
List of Tables and Figures ix

List of Abbreviations x
List of Contributors xiii
PART I . IN T RODU C TION

1. Introduction 3
2. Great Powers and Environmental Responsibilities: A
Conceptual Framework 14
Barry Buzan and Robert Falkner
PA RT II . E NVI RON M E N TAL POW ER S

3. Great Expectations: The United States and the Global
Environment 51
Robyn Eckersley
4. China as a ‘Partial’ Environmental Great Power 71
Pichamon Yeophantong and Evelyn Goh
5. The European Union: A Green Great Power? 95
Katja Biedenkopf, Claire Dupont, and Diarmuid Torney
6. Brazil: A Boundary Case of Environmental Power 116
Kathryn Hochstetler
7. Politics of Responsibility: India in Global Climate
Governance 139
Miriam Prys-Hansen
8. Great Power Ambitions and National Interest in Russia’s
Climate Change Policy 164
Alina Averchenkova
viii contents
PA RT I II . INTE R NAT IONA L I N STI TU T ION S AND

I SSU E - A R E AS
9. Great Power Responsibility for Climate Security in the
United Nations Security Council 189
Shirley V. Scott
10. Great Power Responsibility and International Climate
Leadership 208
Sanna Kopra
11. Environmental Great Powers and Multilateral
Environmental Agreements 227
Susan Park
12. World on Fire: Coal Politics and Great Power Responsibility 249
Stacy D. VanDeveer and Tim Boersma
PA RT IV. C ONC LU SION S

13. Great Powers, Climate Change, and Global Responsibilities:
A Concluding Assessment 279
Index 290
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
5.1. Global GHG emissions of the top six emitters 101

6.1. Review: Claimed causes of the drop in deforestation in Brazil after 2005 122
8.1. Key periods in Russia’s international and domestic climate change policy 169
8.2. Summary of climate change targets committed to internationally by Russia 170
11.1. Environmental great powers in select multilateral environmental
agreements 234
12.1. Coal trends and responsibility in Australia, India, Indonesia, and Russia 269
Figures
5.1. EU 27 member states’ total GHG emissions, 1990–2018, measured as

percentage compared to base year of 1990 102
6.1. Brazilian greenhouse gas emissions (t CO2 eq) by sector, 1990–2019 121
6.2. Wind and solar power in Brazil, 2002–2019 (built and contracted grid-scale
supply) 124
6.3. Number of technical cooperation projects and activities 132
8.1. Greenhouse gas emissions in Russia, Mt CO2 eq 167
8.2. Global greenhouse gas emissions, Mt CO2 eq 168
11.1. Multilateral environmental agreements, 1850–2016 231
11.2. Great powers’ adoption of multilateral environmental agreements 232
List of Abbreviations
ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations

BASIC Brazil, South Africa, India, and China
BNDES Brazilian Development Bank
BRI Belt and Road Initiative
BRICS Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa
CBD Convention on Biological Diversity
CBDR common but differentiated responsibilities
CBDR-RC common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities
CCUS carbon-capture utilization and storage
CDM Clean Development Mechanism
CEQ Council for Environmental Quality
CFC chlorofluorocarbon
CITES Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
CLRTAP Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution
COP Conference of the Parties
DoD Department of Defense
DoE Department of Energy
DRM disaster risk management
ECOWAS Economic Community of West African States
EITI Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
EPA Environmental Protection Agency
ES English School of International Relations
ETS emissions trading system
EU European Union
FERC federal regulatory agency
GCF Green Climate Fund
GEP global environmental politics
GDP gross domestic product
GHG greenhouse gas
GIP Green Investment Principles for the Belt and Road
GIS global international society
GM genetically modified
GMO genetically modified organism
GPM great power management
GW gigawatt
HCFC hydrochlorofluorocarbon
HFC hydrofluorocarbon
IAF International Arrangement on Forests
list of abbreviations xi
IBSA India, Brazil, South Africa

ICJ International Court of Justice
IEA International Energy Agency
IGO intergovernmental organization
INDC intended nationally determined contribution
IO international organization
IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
IR International Relations
IRENA International Renewable Energy Agency
ISFR India State of Forest Report
IWC International Whaling Commission
LDC least developed country
LMC Lancang-Mekong Cooperation
LULUCF land-use and land-use change and forests
MEA multilateral environmental agreement
MENA Middle East and North Africa
MEP Ministry of Environmental Protection
MOFCOM Ministry of Commerce
MOP Meeting of the Parties
MSF Médecins Sans Frontières
MtCO2 e mega tonnes of CO2 equivalent
MW megawatt
NAPCC National Action Plan on Climate Change
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NDC nationally determined contribution
NGO non-governmental organization
NTS non-traditional security
OCI Oil Change International
ODS ozone-depleting substances
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
OPEC Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
OSCE Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
P5 five permanent members (UN Security Council)
PAC Program for Growth Acceleration
POPs persistent organic pollutants
POWER Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitaliza-
tion
PPCDAM Plan to Prevent and Control Amazon Deforestation
PV photovoltaic
REACH Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation, and Restriction of Chemicals
REDD+ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation
SAARC South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
SDGs sustainable development goals
SOE state-owned enterprise
SPS sanitary and phytosanitary measures
xii list of abbreviations
SSCAF South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund

UK United Kingdom
UN United Nations
UNCED United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
UNCLOS United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNEP United Nations Environmental Programme
UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
UNGA United Nations General Assembly
UNSC United Nations Security Council
US United States
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
WMO World Meteorological Organization
WTO World Trade Organization
List of Contributors
Alina Averchenkova is a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute

on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political
Science, UK, where she leads the Governance and Legislation research theme. Her current
work focuses on the analysis of the implementation of the Paris Agreement, in particular
on national climate governance and climate change legislation, as well as on international
climate finance. She also advises policy makers and parliaments on the design and imple-
mentation of climate change laws and policies. She has published widely on the subject,
including co-editing Trends in Climate Change Legislation (2017).
Katja Biedenkopf is an Associate Professor of Sustainability Politics and the team leader
of the Sustainable Futures research group at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She has
published on European Union external environmental governance and global environ-
mental politics in various journals, including the Journal of European Public Policy, Global
Environmental Politics, and International Studies Quarterly.
Tim Boersma is a Fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. In
his full-time capacity he works at the Dutch bank ABN AMRO, where he leads the Sustain-
ability & Strategy Advisory in North America. Previously, Boersma was a Senior Research
Scholar and Natural Gas Program Director at Columbia University, a Fellow and Acting
Director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution, and
worked in the Dutch electricity sector. He has (co-)authored three books, and has published
in Energy Economics, Energy Policy, Foreign Affairs, and other leading journals.
Barry Buzan is Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics and Political Sci-
ence, UK, and a Senior Fellow at LSE IDEAS. Previously, he was Montague Burton Professor
of International Relations at the LSE, and in 1998 he was elected a fellow of the British
Academy. His books relevant to the English School include: From International to World
Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation (2004); Contesting
International Society in East Asia (2014, co-edited with Yongjin Zhang); An Introduction
to the English School of International Relations: The Societal Approach (2014); The Global
Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations (2015, with
George Lawson); and Global International Society: A New Framework for Analysis (2018,
with Laust Schouenborg).
Claire Dupont is an Assistant Professor of European Governance at the Department of
Public Governance and Management at Ghent University, Belgium. Her research focuses
on the policy, politics, and governance of sustainability transitions, with a particular em-
phasis on climate governance in the European Union. She has published in journals such
as West European Politics, Journal of European Integration, and Politics and Governance.
xiv list of contributors
Robyn Eckersley is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in the Discipline of Political

Science, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, and a Fellow of
the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She has published widely in the fields of
environmental political theory, the state and the environment, ecology and democracy,
international relations, and global environmental governance, with a special focus on cli-
mate change. Her books include Environmentalism and Political Theory (1992), The Green
State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (2004), Special Responsibilities: Global Prob-
lems and American Power (2012, with Mlada Bukovansky, Ian Clark, Chris Reus-Smit, and
Richard Price), Globalization and the Environment (2013, with Peter Christoff), and The
Oxford Handbook of International Political Theory (2018, co-edited with Chris Brown).
Robert Falkner is Associate Professor of International Relations and Research Director of

the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London
School of Economics and Political Science, UK. He has published widely on global envi-
ronmental politics and international political economy, including Environmentalism and
Global International Society (2021), Business Power and Conflict in International Environ-
mental Politics (2008), and The Handbook of Global Climate and Environment Policy (edited,
2013). He is currently working on a book (with Barry Buzan) that explores the fluctuating
fortunes of the market norm in global international society.
Evelyn Goh is the Shedden Professor of Strategic Policy Studies at the Australian National
University, where she is also Research Director at the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre.
She has published widely on US–China relations and diplomatic history, regional security
order in East Asia, Southeast Asian strategies towards great powers, and environmental
security. Her recent books include the edited volume Rising China’s Influence in Develop-
ing Asia (2016) and Re-thinking Sino-Japanese Alienation: History Problems and Historical
Opportunities (2020, with Barry Buzan).
Kathryn Hochstetler is Professor of International Development and Head of Department

at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. She has published widely
on the role of Brazil and other emerging powers in environmental politics, both in national
policy and international negotiations. Her most recent book is Political Economies of Energy
Transition: Wind and Solar Power in Brazil and South Africa (2021).
Sanna Kopra is an Academy of Finland postdoctoral research fellow in the Arctic Centre
at University of Lapland and a visiting scholar in the Aleksanteri Institute at the University
of Helsinki, Finland. She is the author of China and Great Power Responsibility for Climate
Change (2019) and co-editor of Chinese Policy and Presence in the Arctic (2020, with Timo
Koivurova).
Susan Park is Professor of Global Governance in the Department of Government and

International Relations at the University of Sydney. She focuses on how international or-
ganizations and global governance can become greener and more accountable. Her most
recent books are: Environmental Recourse at the Multilateral Development Banks (2020),
Global Environmental Governance and the Accountability Trap (2019, edited with Teresa
Kramarz), and International Organisations: Theories and Explanations (2018).
list of contributors xv
Miriam Prys-Hansen is a Lead Research Fellow and Head of Research Programme 4:

Global Orders and Foreign Policy at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies
(GIGA). Previously, she was the Academic Director of the Doctoral Programme at GIGA.
She has published on global and regional environmental politics, and emerging powers and
the BRICS, as well as regionalism and regional institutions. Her regional expertise is in
South Asia. Her publications have appeared in journals including International Studies Re-
view, Journal of International Relations and Development, and International Relations of the
Asia-Pacific.
Shirley V. Scott is Professor of International Law and International Relations and Head of
the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra. She has published widely
in leading journals of international law and international relations on the role of interna-
tional law in realpolitik and global governance. One specific line of research since 2007 has
been that of the scope for the UN Security Council to play a constructive role in the global
response to climate change. She is President of the Asian Society of International Law and
a Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. She is co-editor of International
Law in the Era of Climate Change (2012, with Rosemary Rayfuse) and Climate Change and
the United Nations Security Council (2018, with Charlotte Ku).
Diarmuid Torney is an Associate Professor in the School of Law and Government at Dublin
City University. His research focuses on comparative and global politics of climate change,
environment, and energy. He is author of European Climate Leadership in Question: Policies
toward China and India (2015) and co-editor of European Union External Environmental
Policy: Rules, Regulation and Governance Beyond Borders (2018) and Ireland and the Climate
Crisis (2020). He is the chair of Future Earth Ireland, the national committee convened by
the Royal Irish Academy of Future Earth, a 10-year global research initiative to develop
knowledge for responding effectively to the risks and opportunities of global environment
change.
Stacy D. VanDeveer is Professor of Global Governance and Human Security and Chair of
the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance in the
John C. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of
Massachusetts Boston. His research interests include European Union environmental and
energy politics, global environmental policymaking and institutions, comparative envi-
ronmental politics, connections between environmental and security issues, the roles of
expertise in policymaking, and the global politics of resources and consumption. In addi-
tion to authoring and co-authoring over 100 articles, book chapters, working papers, and
reports, he has co-edited or co-authored 10 books, including Routledge Handbook of the Re-
source Nexus (2018); The European Union and the Environment (2015); Waste, Want or War?
(2015); Transnational Climate Change Governance (2014); and Comparative Environmental
Politics (2012).
Pichamon Yeophantong is an Australian Research Council Fellow and Senior Lecturer
in International Relations and Development at the University of New South Wales
(Canberra)—Australian Defence Force Academy. Her research interests lie at the intersec-
tion of Chinese foreign policy, environmental politics, and sustainable development in the
Asia-Pacific.
PART I
INTRODUCTION
1
Introduction
Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges of the twenty-first
century. To avert catastrophic global warming, international society needs to take
urgent, and internationally coordinated, action. Although virtually all nations are
united in their desire to tackle the man-made causes of global warming, they have
yet to reverse the long-term trend of rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The
Covid-19 pandemic provided temporary relief in that it led to a drop in global
emissions by up to 7% in 2020 (UNEP, 2020), but the post-pandemic economic
recovery seems likely to return the world to a path of rising emissions again.
As yet, states’ climate policy intentions and emission pledges have proved to be
inadequate.
Climate change is a truly global problem, requiring all nations to undertake mit-
igation and adaptation measures. At the same time, the responsibility for causing
the problem is unequally distributed, as is the capacity to respond to the climate
threat in an effective manner. Two-thirds of current global emissions originate
from just 10 major economies, and by and large it is the same countries that
also have the economic and technological clout to develop and finance the re-
quired global solutions. Climate change and international power inequality are
thus closely entwined. Indeed, if the major emitters were to act decisively and in
a coordinated manner, the chances of averting a climate catastrophe would be
much improved. By the same token, even if only some of them fail or refuse to
act responsibly, the world faces a bleak future.
The International Relations (IR) literature on global environmental politics
(GEP) has tended to acknowledge, implicitly at least, the important role that a
few select major powers play, either as international leaders that set an example
for others and shape international environmental agendas, or as veto players that
block progress in multilateral environmental negotiations (Kelemen and Vogel,
2010; Liefferink and Wurzel, 2017; Eckersley, 2020). GEP scholarship has also
highlighted the inherent inequalities that structure the environmental policy area,
both within societies and between them, and especially with regard to unequal lev-
els of economic development and consumption levels (Roberts and Parks, 2007;
Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan, Introduction. In: Great Powers, Climate Change, and Global Environmental
Responsibilities. Edited by Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press (2022). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866022.003.0001
4 falkner and buzan
Ciplet, Roberts, and Khan, 2015). However, questions of power asymmetry in

international environmental politics, the nature of states’ environmental power,
what counts as a great power in the environmental field, and whether great envi-
ronmental power comes with special responsibilities have not attracted the kind
of systematic attention in GEP that they deserve.
This book seeks to fill that gap. By connecting the IR literature on great powers
and great power responsibility with GEP scholarship, it develops a new analytical
perspective on international power inequality and the role of environmental great
powers in GEP, with a special focus on international climate politics. The contri-
butions to this volume develop and apply a conceptual framework for the study of
environmental great powers and their special international responsibilities. They
examine how individual great powers have responded to the global climate chal-
lenge and whether they have accepted a special responsibility for stabilizing the
global climate. And they place emerging discourses on great power responsibility
in the context of wider debates about international environmental leadership and
climate change securitization.
Great Powers and the Global Climate Challenge
The urgency of the climate change problem is now well understood. Man-made
global warming, which is caused by GHG emissions from the burning of fossil fu-
els (coal, oil, gas) and land use changes (e.g. deforestation), has already led to a 1°C
increase of average global temperatures since pre-industrial times. If current net
emission trends continue unabated, the world is likely to face a global warming
trend of between 3°C and 5°C by the end of the twenty-first century. The eco-
logical consequences of such runaway global warming would be catastrophic. If
left unchecked, climate change is expected to result in the melting of glaciers and
rising sea levels, more extreme weather patterns, heat waves and wild fires even
in arctic lands, the destruction of biologically diverse ecosystems, and changes in
the amount, frequency, and intensity of precipitation. Some of these changes are
already occurring (disappearance of glaciers, coral bleaching, wildfires) while oth-
ers will only kick in at a later stage. The challenge for humanity is that the longer
global warming is allowed to carry on, the stronger future ecological stresses will
be and the sooner we may reach ecological tipping points that lock in large-scale
and irreversible environmental damage (Lenton et al., 2019; Dalby, 2020).
International society has recognized the threat that global warming poses to
human well-being and prosperity. What is unclear, however, is whether the UN’s
multilateral climate regime can quickly enough come up with an effective re-
sponse. The 197 countries that negotiated the 2015 Paris Agreement to the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreed to keep global
warming to well below 2°C. In order to stay within this temperature target, they
introduction 5
will need to bring GHG emissions under control, first by reaching a global emis-
sions peak as soon as possible and then by bringing them down to reach a balance
between GHG emissions and sinks (so-called net zero) by the second half of this
century. All of this is to be achieved through a system of voluntary climate mitiga-
tion pledges that are to be reviewed internationally. The key question is whether
the Paris Agreement’s framework for ratcheting up national climate ambitions
can set the world on the path towards deep decarbonization, and within a time-
frame that keeps global warming below 2°C (Falkner, 2016b). The past record of
multilateral efforts is far from encouraging. Issue complexity, institutional inertia,
and diverging national interests have turned climate change into a ‘wicked’ global
problem that seems to exceed the problem-solving capacity of environmental
multilateralism (Levin et al., 2012; Keohane and Victor, 2016).
The shortcomings of UN-centred climate multilateralism have raised the ques-
tion of whether an alternative, minilateral approach is needed to advance inter-
national climate mitigation. In climate change as much as in other global policy
arenas, overcoming political and economic conflicts among the most powerful
countries is a critical first step towards international cooperation. This also ap-
plies to multilateral regimes that grant every member an equal vote and make
consensus-based decision-making the norm. In the WTO trade regime as much
as in the UNFCCC climate regime, and indeed in the UN Security Council, some
states are ‘more equal’ than others. As The Economist noted in the run-up to
the UN Climate Summit in September 2019, with three-quarters of global GHG
emissions coming from just 12 economies, a minilateral deal by the dozen ‘great
and middling-but-mucky powers’ might ‘break the impasse, pushing enough of
the world onto a steeper mitigation trajectory to benefit all—and be widely emu-
lated’ (2019: 14). Similar calls for a minilateral solution have been issued by others
too, particularly so since the 2009 Copenhagen conference, which failed to agree
a legally binding successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol (Falkner, 2016a: 88–89).
Focusing international environmental negotiations on the few powers that really
matter and that have the economic clout to solve global environmental problems
is seen by some analysts as a way out of widespread multilateral gridlock (Naı́m,
2009; Victor, 2011; Nordhaus, 2015) that has bedevilled not just the climate regime
but also other international environmental forums.
Irrespective of whether a minilateral solution to climate change is feasible, the
spotlight that global warming throws on the world’s leading powers raises broader
questions about their role in global environmental politics. For various reasons,
the great powers, whether established or emerging, occupy a central place in
debates around global environmental sustainability. Because their international
power is invariably based on a large domestic economy and industrial base, great
powers are usually a key source of global environmental degradation. Their over-
sized economic and ecological footprint gives them the power to inflict major
harm on global ecological systems. At the same time, most great powers also
6 falkner and buzan
possess significant technological and environmental capacities, as well as diplo-

matic clout and experience with international leadership. The great powers are
thus central to any international effort to advance global environmental protec-
tion. They are, in other words, of systemic importance to global environmental
sustainability.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, debates around the worsening climate crisis and how
to avert it have raised questions about the environmental responsibilities of the
most powerful nations. Most established great powers from the group of indus-
trialized economies (e.g. US, Germany, UK, Japan) have already accepted some
special responsibilities for the global environment, though they fail to agree on
how far these responsibilities should go. Ever since the creation of the interna-
tional environmental agenda in the 1970s, they have taken on more demanding
environmental obligations and provided environmental aid to poorer countries,
reflecting both their greater economic capability and larger historical responsi-
bility. In recent years, emerging powers from the developing world (e.g. China,
India, Brazil) have faced growing demands to make a greater contribution to
global environmental protection. Although still officially classified as developing
countries, they have come under pressure to redefine their position within GEP
in line with the growing environmental footprint of their expanding economies.
In the international climate negotiations, this has led to the emergence of more
fluid international alliances and bargaining groups. The BASIC group (Brazil, In-
dia, South Africa and China), for example, emerged in 2009 and helped steer the
climate regime in the direction of more balanced international mitigation efforts
among all major emitters. Emerging powers may be defending their developing
country status, but they cannot escape being asked to take on greater international
responsibilities.
In this way, the global climate crisis has brought into sharper relief the vexed
questions of how to define and differentiate global environmental responsibilities,
and how these should apply to the world’s leading powers. As yet, there is little
consensus among the great powers, whether established or emerging, about these
questions. However, as global warming accelerates and begins to threaten not just
major ecological systems but also the national sovereignty of states (e.g. low-lying
island states faced with rising sea levels) and the stability of the international or-
der (e.g. intensified resource conflicts, disruptive migration flows), climate change
may soon emerge as a systemic threat to international society that requires great
powers to take on special managerial responsibilities. As yet, coordinated great
power management (GPM) for climate change seems a distant possibility, and
the great powers can mainly be described as ‘great irresponsibles’ when it comes
to climate change mitigation. But ‘events’ could change that, and the question of
how international power inequality intersects with the global ecological crisis, and
what special role great powers should play, is already firmly established on the
international agenda.
introduction 7
As mentioned above, great powers have had an ambiguous presence in the IR lit-
erature on GEP. It has long been assumed—implicitly if not always explicitly—that
the world’s leading powers are deeply implicated in many global environmen-
tal problems. Simply by being major economies with an outsized industrial and
military presence, great powers are often blamed for causing pollution and ex-
cessive consumption of natural resources. There is also a widespread sense that
great powers are key to creating international rules for environmental protection,
whether as environmental leaders or veto players. Talk of great powers as ‘the
main actors in global environmental politics’ (Streck and Terhalle, 2013: 534) has
become commonplace, especially in the context of the climate regime, in which
geopolitical dimensions and great power cooperation have gained in importance,
not least since the 2009 Copenhagen conference (Brenton, 2013; DeCanio and
Fremstad, 2013; Terhalle and Depledge, 2013). Yet, paralleling the IR discipline
generally, despite recognising power inequality as an important structural condi-
tion, the GEP literature has never developed a clear and unambiguous definition
of what counts as a ‘power’, let alone a ‘great power’, in the environmental field.
The nature of international power, the role of great powers, and whether there is a
distinct group of environmental great powers thus remain undertheorized in GEP.
Overview of the Book
In this book we take a first step towards closing this gap by developing a theo-
retical framework that connects established IR approaches to the study of great
powers and GPM with GEP perspectives on the role played by major powers. We
apply this framework to a selection of countries that can claim to be environmen-
tal great powers and examine their evolving role in the context of international
climate politics.
In Chapter 2, the editors, Barry Buzan and Robert Falkner, set out the theo-
retical and conceptual framework that guides the contributions to this volume.
In a first step, they review the IR literature and distinguish between material and
social approaches to the study of great powers. They identify some of the diffi-
culties in determining which countries count as great powers at any given time
and discuss how the power shift from the West towards emerging powers and the
transition towards deep pluralism in international society is further complicating
the great power landscape. In a second step, Buzan and Falkner relate the great
power concept to global environmental politics. Applying a material and social
conception of power, the authors distinguish between two forms of environmental
power in international relations: negative power, which reflects a country’s control
over environmental resources and ability to cause environmental harm; and posi-
tive power, which rests on a country’s capability to promote global environmental
protection. Based on this dual notion of environmental power, they establish the
8 falkner and buzan
conditions under which individual countries can count as environmental great

powers before exploring the attribution of special international responsibilities
that comes with great power status. The chapter concludes with a review of the
historical evolution of special environmental responsibilities and the impact that
full securitization of the environment would have on great power responsibilities
in the environmental field.
In Chapter 3, Robyn Eckersley discusses the role that the US has played in
global environmental politics. As the world’s preeminent military, economic, and
environmental power, the US’s participation is essential if international environ-
mental policymaking is to succeed. Most scholars point to a long-term decline
in US environmental leadership and engagement, from an active role in shaping
the international environmental agenda in the 1970s and 1980s to a gradual re-
treat from leadership since the end of the Cold War, and particularly during the
anti-environmental Trump administration. Eckersley’s analysis offers a corrective
to this narrative of declining US leadership. She points to long-standing differ-
ences in US engagement across the wide range of international environmental
regimes and a persistent concern with projecting core economic interests and in-
dustrial competitiveness against intrusive international environmental regulation.
Her analysis shows that, despite playing an active role in international climate pol-
itics, the US has been reluctant to embrace special environmental responsibilities
in this area. Global environmental responsibility has never featured as part of US
grand strategy.
In Chapter 4, Pichamon Yeophantong and Evelyn Goh explore China’s rise
as a major environmental power and how it has come to define its global re-
sponsibilities towards the global environment. Thanks to its large population and
spectacular economic growth, the country has gained significant environmen-
tal power, with systemic consequences for global planetary health. The authors
argue that China has been slow to develop a positive and constructive role in
addressing environmental problems that could match its ability to cause envi-
ronmental harm, thus making it only a partial environmental great power. Yeo-
phantong and Goh point to the inherent tensions in China’s international climate
stance between its continued identity as a developing country that defends the
Global South’s reduced environmental responsibilities and an emerging discourse
of China’s great power status and responsibility for global climate cooperation.
China offers a prime example of how the strict North–South divide in defining
environmental responsibilities has started to break down, but without a new and
stable configuration of environmental great power responsibilities emerging.
The European Union’s emergence as a ‘green great power’ is the focus of
Chapter 5. As Katja Biedenkopf, Claire Dupont, and Diarmuid Torney point out,
the EU is not a fully fledged state and has therefore been neglected in the lit-
eratures on great powers and GPM. However, the EU has gradually acquired a
distinctive role in GEP, speaking and negotiating on behalf of its 27 member states.
introduction 9
Thanks to its unique quality as an international actor and considerable market

power, the EU has assumed a leading role in shaping international regulatory
standards, including in the environmental sector. Based on two cases studies of cli-
mate change and chemicals safety, Biedenkopf, Dupont, and Torney demonstrate
that the EU should indeed be considered a great power in GEP. It is internation-
ally recognized as a key player in global climate governance, which has become a
central element of the EU’s political identity and international diplomacy. How-
ever, given the EU’s success in reducing climate emissions and managing chemicals
pollution, its negative power has shrunk relative to other powers. Somewhat para-
doxically, the success of the EU’s environmental policy has therefore reduced its
veto power in global environmental politics, forcing it to rely ever more on its
positive environmental power to shape international environmental debates and
policies.
In Chapter 6, Kathryn Hochstetler focuses on Brazil as an emerging power, both
in international politics and in the field of environmental protection. She argues
that the country’s significant ecological endowments and impacts across a range of
environmental sectors make it, structurally at least, an environmental great power.
In the international climate negotiations at the Copenhagen conference in 2009,
Brazil joined other emerging powers in the BASIC grouping, thereby signalling its
intent to play a more active role in shaping the post-Kyoto climate treaty. However,
the country has struggled to exercise its newly found power in GEP in a consis-
tent manner. Despite earlier successes in fighting deforestation under President
Lula, the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest has gathered momentum again
under President Bolsonaro and the country has taken a backseat role in recent
international climate negotiations.
In Chapter 7, Miriam Prys-Hansen explores the shifting politics of responsibility
around India’s changing international status in global environmental and climate
politics. Building on the sociological understanding of great power responsibility,
she traces how different actors, both within and outside the country, have come to
attribute global responsibilities in line with India’s rising power and environmental
impact, and how the country has responded to such expectations. The Modi gov-
ernment has displayed some environmental leadership through its solar energy
initiative and as part of the BASIC group in the climate negotiations, suggesting
a certain degree of fluidity in the country’s traditional stance in climate politics.
However, Prys-Hansen’s close reading of government statements demonstrates
that India has largely resisted calls for enhanced environmental responsibility
that would reflect its rising power status. The country continues to defend the
long-established principle of a North–South division of responsibilities and sticks
to its identity as a developing country in the UNFCCC regime. Unlike China,
India has thus shown greater reluctance to respond to external and internal de-
mands for a realignment of its international environmental responsibilities in line
with its emerging power status and its own great power aspirations.
10 falkner and buzan
Chapter 8 discusses the case of Russia, which has received far less attention in
the literature on GEP than other major powers. Reviewing three decades of the
country’s involvement with the international climate regime, Alina Averchenkova
identifies several shifts in Russia’s approach. In the early 1990s, at a time when
Russia sought to reassert its claim to great power status after the collapse of the So-
viet Union, Russia offered initial support for international environmental norms
and alluded to a sense of great power responsibility. As the author points out, how-
ever, Russia struggled to gain international recognition for its early contribution
to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and took a more cautious approach in sub-
sequent negotiations on emission reduction targets. Russia supported the Kyoto
Protocol and briefly assumed a pivotal role in international climate politics in the
early 2000s, when its ratification of Kyoto ensured the treaty’s entry into force.
However, deep domestic divisions over climate policy and a worsening economic
outlook for the country have helped to marginalize ‘common responsibility’ and
‘international cooperation’ framings of the climate challenge in favour of a more
nationalist outlook. Russia has slowly but steadily taken a backseat role in the cli-
mate negotiations, adopting a conservative and sovereigntist approach to global
climate responsibility.
In Chapter 9, Shirley Scott explores the extent to which climate change has be-
come securitized in international society. Scott notes that existing concepts of
security have been broadened to include an ever wider range of global threats,
including climate change, and that this has created momentum to also expand
traditional notions of great power responsibility. Building on the Copenhagen
School of security studies, she argues that full climate securitization at the interna-
tional level would require a move towards an international emergency response,
with the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) accepting a climate governance
role based on its Chapter VII powers. Although the majority of countries now rec-
ognize climate change as a security threat and various UN members have initiated
UNSC debates on climate security, international society is still far from empow-
ering the Security Council with the authority to take decisive action against global
warming. Two of the five permanent UNSC members (Russia and China) oppose
such a move, while many developing countries express concerns about the use of
coercive measures in the fight against climate change.
In Chapter 10, Sanna Kopra discusses the link between great power respon-
sibility and leadership in international climate politics. Building on the English
School understanding of great powers, which combines material capabilities with
social recognition, Kopra asks whether any of the existing great powers can count
as ‘great climate powers’—powers that have a significant impact on global warm-
ing trends and are willing to act against the global climate threat. Her analysis of
international climate politics leads her to conclude that none of the conventional
great powers have so far assumed great power responsibility for climate stabil-
ity. A successful securitization of climate change might change this, as it would
introduction 11
turn climate change into a systemic threat to the stability of international society.
However, even if climate securitization were possible, it would most likely lead to a
minimalist great power response based on pluralist ethics, and not to a deeper sol-
idarist commitment to addressing the deep causes of climate change and its global
humanitarian challenges. Unsurprisingly, as Kopra concludes, the existing great
powers have proved themselves to be great climate irresponsibles.
In Chapter 11, Susan Park broadens the perspective beyond climate change to
consider how great powers have performed across a wider range of international
environmental issues, from ozone layer depletion to biodiversity, whaling, chem-
ical management, hazardous waste, forestry, and climate change. As Park argues,
environmental great powers have been at the forefront of creating multilateral en-
vironmental agreements (MEAs). They invariably play an influential role, acting
as leaders, laggards, swing states, or brokers in international environmental nego-
tiations. Reviewing great powers’ performance in seven environmental regimes,
Park concludes that they mostly act in accordance with their national interests and
identities. They have delegated some limited authority to the international envi-
ronmental institutions that underpin MEAs, but deep divisions remain over the
question of what technical capacity and resources these should be endowed with.
In Chapter 12, Stacy VanDeveer and Tim Boersma focus on the global politics
of coal, which is at the centre of global efforts to stop global warming and is closely
entwined with great power politics. With the help of three case studies—the US,
EU, and China—the authors explore what great power responsibility might look
like for coal politics in the context of an escalating climate crisis. VanDeveer and
Boersma contrast the existing ambition for international climate leadership with
a detailed analysis of the reality of coal politics in the three cases before expanding
the focus to consider the situation in other leading coal powers (Australia, India,
Indonesia, and Russia). Based on this analysis, the authors reach a sobering con-
clusion: leading coal powers have so far failed to follow up their environmental
rhetoric and claims to leadership in international climate politics with responsible
domestic action to phase out coal production and consumption.
In the last chapter, Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan draw some broad conclu-
sions from the contributions to this volume. Reviewing the great power concept
and how it applies to the environmental field, they argue that some major powers
do indeed count as systemically important in GEP, owing to their outsized ecolog-
ical footprint and environmental capabilities. The established great powers of the
Global North have accepted special responsibilities but lack a consensus on how far
these go, while the emerging powers of the Global South remain reluctant to match
their great power aspirations with comparable special responsibilities. Even if the
environmental great powers were to reach a consensus on their special respon-
sibilities, other barriers to developing a GPM approach to climate change persist.
Most importantly, the current international climate regime offers great powers few
privileges and rights that would balance their special responsibilities. The classic
GPM bargain that can be found in the international security arena does not eas-
ily apply to climate politics. However, should climate change be fully securitized
as the impacts of global warming further disrupt the international order, a move
towards great power responsibility and management cannot be ruled out. Indeed,
serious thought should be given about how to embed a stronger sense of environ-
mental raison de système, an ethic of collective responsibility for planetary health,
amongst the group of environmental great powers.
References
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2
Great Powers and Environmental
Responsibilities: A Conceptual Framework
Barry Buzan and Robert Falkner
Introduction
This chapter sets out the conceptual framework for this volume. The first section
opens with a discussion of the traditional concept of great power in International
Relations (IR). It explores how ongoing international transformations require a
new understanding of international order, what it means to be a great power,
and how great power capabilities can be mapped onto special rights and respon-
sibilities in global international society. The second section then explores the role
that great powers play in global environmental politics. It opens with a discus-
sion of the concept of environmental power, distinguishing its two principal forms
and uses: negative power to destroy the environment and block international
environmental action and positive power to engender positive change and pro-
mote effective environmental cooperation. Based on this conceptualization, this
chapter then explores which countries can count as environmental great powers
and whether their power operates within or across environmental sectors and at
global or regional levels. The third and last section examines the question of great
power responsibility and whether and how special responsibilities apply to great
powers in the environmental field.
Great Powers in Global International Society
Great Powers: Two Approaches
Ever since humankind began organizing itself into independent political com-
munities, it has almost always been the case that the distribution of power and
capabilities amongst them has been notably uneven. Powers with larger capabil-
ities than others generally have more expansive, far-reaching interests in trade,
Barry Buzan and Robert Falkner, Great Powers and Environmental Responsibilities: A Conceptual Framework.
In: Great Powers, Climate Change, and Global Environmental Responsibilities. Edited by Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan,
Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press (2022). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866022.003.0002
great powers and environmental responsibilities 15
ideology, and security. They may also be accorded higher status by other actors. In
the absence of government over the international system/society as a whole, such
great powers are the obvious place to look for any management of international re-
lations that might be possible. That is why the concept of great powers plays such
a large role in IR theory. The idea that great powers should take particular respon-
sibility for managing international society is, however, relatively recent. Holsti
(1991: 71–82, 114–137) shows how the institution of great power management
(GPM) emerged along with the balance of power during the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries as replacements for a declining dynastic principle. He argues that
this practice became much more evident and formalized from the Treaty of Vienna
(1815) and the Congress of Europe (see also Bull, 1977: 200–229; Wight, 1977: 42,
136–141; Watson, 1992: 138–262; Simpson, 2004).
Following Barnett and Duval (2005), we can define power as working in two
principal ways: as an attribute of actors in social interactions (e.g. a material re-
source such as military force), and as a constitutive social process that shapes
actors’ social identities and capabilities (e.g. recognition of actors as having legit-
imate authority). These two paths are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they usually
intersect.
The material approach is most closely associated with realism and looks at the
assets and capabilities of the leading powers, trying to define a small leading group
on that basis. As Barnett and Duval (2005: 40) put it, power is ‘the ability of
states to use material resources to get others to do what they otherwise would not’.
The difficulty with approaching the question in this way is that there is no consen-
sus on the prior question about how to define power in international relations. As
Waltz (1979: 131) acknowledges, the power of states depends on a whole range of
variables including military strength, economic development, societal cohesion,
the size and education of the population, political competence, and geographical
and resource endowments. But how one should weigh off these various compo-
nents remains far from clear. Do Russian nuclear weapons trump Japanese wealth
and technology? And if power in international relations is to be understood ba-
sically in terms of a potentially measurable set of capabilities, the problem is that
capabilities do not always correlate with outcomes (e.g. the defeat of the US in
Vietnam, or of the USSR in Afghanistan). Or is material power to be understood
in terms of its consequences in the changed behaviour of other actors who respond
to it? If so, the problem is that power becomes a circular concept, defining causes
in terms of effects.
The social approach is most closely associated with the English School (ES),
but it also works for constructivism. The English School views power as a multidi-
mensional concept, encompassing material as well as ideational factors. It is nicely
captured in two widely cited definitions. The first is Bull and Watson’s (1984: 1)
16 buzan and falkner
definition of international society, which establishes the key distinction between

the ES’s societal approach, and the system approach of materialists:
a group of states (or, more generally, a group of independent political com-

munities) which not merely form a system, in the sense that the behaviour of
each is a necessary factor in the calculations of the others, but also have estab-
lished by dialogue and consent common rules and institutions for the conduct
of their relations, and recognise their common interest in maintaining these
arrangements.
The second definition is Bull’s (1977: 200–202) societal understanding of a great

power. He stipulates that, in addition to being in the front rank of military
capability (the key material condition), great powers must be:
recognised by others to have, and conceived by their own leaders and peoples
to have, certain special rights and duties. Great powers, for example, assert the
right, and are accorded the right, to play a part in determining issues that affect
the peace and security of the international system as a whole. They accept the
duty, and are thought by others to have the duty, of modifying their policies in
the light of the managerial responsibilities they bear.
Note how this social definition makes space for material factors, even though it
could exclude a state that had front rank military capability but was not accorded
recognition as a ‘great responsible’ by others. This contrasts with more material
definitions that often accept victory in a great power war as conferring entry to
the rank of great power. History abounds with militarily formidable ‘barbarian’
powers, including the Xiongnu, the Huns, the Vandals, and the Crusaders, who
had little or no thought about ‘modifying their policies in the light of the manage-
rial responsibilities they bear’. Trump’s America came close to rejecting the idea
that it had any obligation to accept responsibilities for global order.
Both of these approaches are clear enough in principle, and being able to specify
what counts as a great power is central to important strands of IR theory. Neore-
alism and neoliberalism, especially as they depend on polarity theory, absolutely
must be able to make clear designations of who is a great power and who is not.
The same is true for the ES concept of GPM, which has been an important in-
stitution of international society for over two centuries (Buzan, 2014: 103–104,
145–147). Yet as Buzan (2004: chapters 3–5) argues, IR has so far failed to pro-
duce a settled, scientific definition of ‘great power’ on the basis of which the great
powers at any given time can be identified and listed in an uncontroversial way.
What gets counted has varied, and contestation over the list at any given time is
common. Even leading theorists such as Waltz (1979: 131) and Wight (1979: 41)
in the end resort to common sense. We are just supposed to know a great power
when we see one. But we often don’t.
Is the EU a great power, or does its non-state form exclude it from considera-
tion, as most realists would think? Was Japan a great power when its GDP overtook
that of the Soviet Union, which was generally categorized as a superpower? Was
the US a great power in the 1880s, by which time it had the world’s biggest
economy but had converted little of its wealth into military power and played an
isolationist role in the balance of power? Common sense can make the category
of great power uncomfortably broad. Before the First World War there were sup-
posedly nine great powers, but the gap between Britain, the US, and Germany, on
one end of the spectrum, and Italy, Japan and the Ottoman Empire, on the other,
was huge, both militarily and economically. Further confusing the issue are the
many cases of ‘honorary’ great powers, where status is given despite capabilities
having become inadequate: Sweden (after 1648), the Ottoman Empire (during the
nineteenth century), France and China (in 1945), Russia (during the 1990s).
Not surprisingly, this ambiguity has generated considerable taxonomical laxity,
both in public discussion and in IR theory, when it comes to categorizing states
by power. After the Second World War there was a general terminological shift
from ‘great power’ to ‘superpower’, accompanied by a widespread understand-
ing that the system structure had shifted from its longstanding multipolar form
(usually 5–10 great powers) to a bipolar one (two superpowers). This shift was
made without much thought being given to whether superpower and great power
were synonyms or represented different categories. In practice, Waltz, and the
many purveyors of polarity theory who followed him, operated on the assumption
that they were synonyms, with ‘superpower’ simply expressing what great powers
looked like when polarity was a low number. Consequently, their theories oper-
ated on the basis of a single distinction between great/super-powers on the one
hand, and all of the lesser states on the other. This created some theoretical ab-
surdities when it came to dealing with China in the 1970s, whose rise challenged
bipolarity, without China being seen as a superpower. One fudge was to talk of
a ‘great power triangle’ (or sometimes quadrangle) in Asia, thereby avoiding the
question of China’s global standing (Segal, 1982; Thomas, 1983). Another fudge
was to talk of China as a ‘half ’ pole (Hinton, 1975), while avoiding the crucial def-
initional question of what this might mean for the theory. When the Soviet Union
imploded, leaving the US as seemingly the sole superpower, some talked about
hyperpowers and suchlike, indicating that great and super-power were not syn-
onyms. But with the rise of China quickly forcing a reconsideration of unipolarity,
many assumed the return of a two-superpower system. Within this, a few writ-
ers inserted a category of ‘middle powers’, mainly aimed at the likes of Canada,
Norway, Sweden, and Australia, who punched above their weight in some areas of
international diplomacy (Holbraad, 1984). Hurrell (2006: 18–19) toyed with the
idea of ‘intermediate powers’ to talk about the BRICs.
Reacting against this taxonomical confusion, Buzan and Wæver (2003; see also
Buzan, 2004) argued that superpowers and great powers were in fact distinct clas-
sifications, and that the most useful next step down in this typology was regional
powers. Middle powers were not irrelevant, but they were a small, exceptional,
and generally Eurocentric category, whereas regional powers were numerous and
found everywhere. The essence of this classification was in terms of the geograph-
ical scope of their influence. For superpowers, the world was their region. Great
powers operated mainly within their own regions and the ones adjacent to them,
though they had to be taken into account in global calculations. Regional powers
operated mainly within their own regions. Britain during the nineteenth century
and the US after 1945 were clear examples of superpowers. The Soviet Union after
1945 just about made it into the superpower camp. During the Cold War, Britain,
France, China, Japan, and increasingly the EU operated as great powers, making
the system not bipolar but one with a mix of two superpowers and several great
powers.1 Post-Cold War, the system was not unipolar, but one superpower and
four great powers, plus many regional powers. Contemporary regional powers
include countries such as Pakistan, Iran, South Africa, Brazil, Nigeria, Indone-
sia, Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.2 There is a great deal of difference between
a system/society that has one superpower and then only regional powers and be-
low, and one with one superpower, several great powers, and quite a few regional
powers.
The terms superpower, great power, regional power, and middle power are all in
widespread use both academically and in public discourse. Polarity theory in IR
depends absolutely on there being a clear distinction between a small class of great
or superpowers and the rest, yet remains unembarrassed by the fact that no con-
sensus has yet been reached on either how to define these classifications in any
precise and non-controversial way, or on any taxonomy for ranking powers. This
longstanding and ongoing problem of how to define great powers at any given
time is now under pressure from two further problems, one very broad and gen-
eral, the other quite specific. The general one is the simultaneous decline in the
economic, political, and cultural dominance of the West, and the rising interest
in so-called emerging powers. We capture this development with the idea that the
system structure is moving towards deep pluralism. The more specific one is the
diffusion of some capabilities away from the powers at the top end of the spec-
trum to both state and non-state actors lower down the spectrum, as can be seen
1 Realists don’t generally acknowledge that the EU can be a member of this club because, even though
it has actor qualities in some internationally significant respects, it is not a state.
2 For the full definitions, see Buzan and Wæver (2003: 30–39).
in issue areas such as global environment, development, and health (Bukovansky

et al., 2012).
Deep Pluralism
What do these general thoughts about great powers and GPM tell us about the
condition of global international society now (in 2021) and how that will shape
the global politics of climate change? Since the global financial crisis that broke in
2007–2008, the relative wealth, power, and cultural and ideological authority of
the West, and of the US in particular, have been in decline. The leadership of the
US and the UK has been further undermined by the votes for Trump and Brexit
in 2016. At the same time, the relative wealth, power, and cultural and ideolog-
ical authority of what were previously classed as developing countries, and are
now talked of as emerging powers, particularly China, but also India and others,
have been on the rise. This dual development looks to be pushing the international
system/society into a new, and in some ways unprecedented, post-Western struc-
ture. It seems quite plausible that this structure will contain no superpowers,
several great powers, and many regional powers. As wealth, power, and cultural
and ideological authority increasingly diffuse to a wider circle of states and soci-
eties, it will become impossible for any country to either hold onto (the US) or
acquire (China) the necessary preponderance of wealth and power to be a super-
power. Trump burned the global social capital of the US at a prodigious rate, caring
nothing for the effects of his policies on the alliances, intergovernmental organiza-
tions (IGOs), and trading arrangements that underpinned US leadership. Some of
this damage will be unrecoverable given the uncertainty that now hangs over the
polarized character of US domestic politics. In China, Xi Jinping has been push-
ing the country in a more authoritarian and aggressive direction that scares both
its neighbours and many of the other great and regional powers. This argument is
of course vulnerable to the ambiguity of these categories established above, but it
seems likely that, while the US and China will be primus inter pares, they will not
be in an entirely different class from India, the EU, and possibly Russia, Brazil, and
Japan. They will be great powers in the sense that their influence extends beyond
their own regions, and that they have to be taken into account at the global level,
but the world will not be their region, and therefore neither will be a superpower.
What is emerging will be novel in a number of respects. Increasingly, power,
wealth, and cultural and ideological authority will be wielded by non-Western as
well as Western actors (Buzan and Lawson, 2015: chapter 9; Acharya and Buzan,
2019: chapter 9). As the last superpower wanes and emerging powers rise, what is
unfolding does not look like classical multipolarity. Certainly, there will be sev-
eral centres of wealth, power, and cultural and ideological authority, and thus in a
sense global international society (GIS) will be multipolar. But there will be many
non-state actors in play in this GIS, some of which will wield significant amounts
of wealth, power, and authority. States will probably remain the dominant form of
actor, but will be much more entangled in webs of global governance than is im-
plied in the term multipolarity. Even just thinking about states, the emerging GIS
will still not be multipolar as classically understood because, lacking any super-
powers or any aspiring to be superpowers, it will not feature a realist-type struggle
for domination of the whole system. Although they are all embedded in a highly
interdependent global economy, and a single planetary environment, none wants
to, or can, lead or dominate GIS. The US is losing both the will and the legitimacy
to do so, and neither Europe nor Japan can fill its shoes. The rising great powers
China and India are still developing countries and have neither the capacity, the
will, nor the legitimacy to play the hegemon. They still prioritize their own devel-
opment over their global responsibilities. Indeed, it is an interesting question as to
whether the very idea of hegemonic leadership, which has been closely associated
with Western hegemony for more than two centuries, will be delegitimized in this
emerging system.
Various labels have already been put forward to capture the novelty and com-
plexity of this emergent construction: plurilateralism (Cerny, 1993), heteropolarity
(der Derian, 2003), no one’s world (Kupchan, 2012), multinodal (Womack, 2014),
multiplex (Acharya, 2014), decentred globalism (Buzan, 2011), polymorphic glob-
alism (Katzenstein, 2012), and multi-order world (Flockhart, 2016). Acharya and
Buzan (2019: chapter 9) offer the concept of deep pluralism to capture what is now
unfolding. They define deep pluralism to mean a diffuse distribution of power,
wealth, and cultural and political authority, set within a strongly integrated and
interdependent system in which there is a significant move towards a GIS in
which both states and non-state actors play substantial roles. Non-state actors
range across the spectrum from civil (e.g. Red Cross/Crescent, Médecins Sans
Frontières) to uncivil (e.g. Islamic State), with many in between (e.g. Facebook).
While power asymmetries remain, it describes a world not only without a global
hegemon but in which the very idea of such a role is no longer legitimate. Such a
world might feature different economic and political ideologies and systems, in-
cluding the remnants of the liberal order. This will be a novel system, and not only
because we have got used to living in a system with a high concentration of power
dominated by superpowers. There has never been a system like the one now emerg-
ing in which the density and interdependence of the system is high and rising, but
the distribution of wealth and power is relatively diffuse. Power was diffused dur-
ing pre-modern times, but the density and interdependence of the system at that
time was low.
Deep pluralism describes where the current momentum of GIS is taking us
whether we like it or not. But we also need terms to indicate whether that con-
dition is understood and acted upon in a positive or negative light, and where the
scope for agency and policy lie. Contested pluralism means that there is substantial
resistance to the material and ideational reality of deep pluralism. This might take
various forms: states resisting the roles and standing of non-state actors; former
superpowers (most obviously the US) refusing to give up their special rights and
privileges; great powers refusing to recognize each other’s standing and playing
against each other as rivals or enemies. Consensual pluralism means that the main
players in GIS not only tolerate the material, cultural, ideological, and actor-type
differences of deep pluralism, but also respect and even value them as the foun-
dation for coexistence. Another way of seeing this is that consensual pluralism is
about the preservation and/or cultivation of the political and cultural diversity and
distinctness that are the legacy of human history, to be valued for its own sake in
the same way as biodiversity (Jackson, 2000: 23). It is highly probable that deep
pluralism in either form will see a sharp weakening of the homogenizing liberal
teleology that has been both an implicit and explicit assumption in much West-
ern thinking about the evolution of the global order. This raises the question of
whether GIS will have sufficient cultural and ideological unity to foster deep co-
operation on global challenges, such as environmental protection (Falkner and
Buzan, 2019).
Within this unfolding new structure of deep pluralism the rise of China, In-
dia, and other emerging non-Western powers is creating a growing interest in new
great powers and their roles and responsibilities in international society (Gaskarth,
2015). A lot of the discussion here focuses on the so-called BRICS group of states
(Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). While BRICS has some actor quality
in terms of setting up its own institutions (the BRICS bank), it is otherwise an
odd grouping. China is on the brink of being an emerged rather than an emergent
power. India is on the borderline between being a big regional power and a small
great power, with Brazil further behind on the same track. Russia is not emergent
at all, but rather a fallen and declining superpower. South Africa is clearly only
a regional power. China and India (and perhaps later Brazil and Indonesia) raise
the question of whether countries still classified as ‘developing’ can also be clas-
sified as great powers? Since the nineteenth century, being at or near the leading
edge of industrialization and modernity have been necessary conditions for great
power status (Buzan and Lawson, 2015: 240–270). If this condition is breaking
down, what are the implications for how we understand both the qualifications
for great power status and the rights and responsibilities associated with great
power status? As noted, big developing countries such as China and India quite
rightly give their own development first priority, and understandably argue that
they should not be obliged to burden themselves with global managerial responsi-
bilities. There has been a particular focus on rising China, which is pressured from
without to become a more responsible great power and from within to balance the
domestic political needs of the Chinese Communist Party with the necessity to
engage in a Western-defined global economic order (Jones, 2014). More broadly,
there has been interest in how rising powers gain the ‘legitimate’ great power sta-
tus in ‘recognition games’ (Suzuki, 2008) and some discussions on the legitimacy
of power (Reus-Smit, 2014).
The exercise of GPM responsibility under deep pluralism will be more diffuse
and more complicated than under the relatively concentrated domination of the
US over the last few decades. Ideological differentiations mattered during both the
interwar and Cold War years, and they may well matter again under deep plural-
ism, where there will not only be a divide between authoritarians and democracies,
but also one between the different civilizational values represented by the US,
Europe, Russia, China, India, and the Islamic World. We might anticipate that
under deep pluralism the extent and character of great power cooperation/conflict
generally will depend on whether deep pluralism is more contested or more con-
sensual. Within that, a great deal will depend on how the great powers respond
to the various shared-fate threats, such as climate change and pandemics, that af-
fect them all. Such threats stand outside ideological and cultural framings to a
much greater extent than do questions of global economic management or hu-
man rights. This ideological neutrality opens a path to the possibility of GPM on
a shared-threat functional issue such as climate change, even if deep pluralism, as
seems increasingly likely, unfolds in contested form.
Diffusion of Capabilities
An entirely different complication for great power responsibility and manage-

ment is raised by the diffusion of some capabilities away from great powers and
towards both lesser states and non-state actors. Increasingly, as Cui and Buzan
(2016: 207–210) argue, great power responsibility and global governance now
overlap, and might even be thought of as merging. In specific issue areas, the am-
biguity about what constitutes a ‘great power’ becomes a major problem. Saudi
Arabia might be a ‘great power’ in oil and religion, but in general terms only a re-
gional power. Once we get down to energy, disease control, cybersecurity, climate
change, and suchlike, the criteria for defining not only great powers but also great
power responsibilities may need to be tailored to the specifics of the issue. As we
discuss below, the same applies to the field of global environmental protection.
And as the convergence of great power responsibility and global governance sug-
gests, in some issue-areas special responsibilities are diffusing not only to actors
other than great powers, but to actors other than states.
The diffusion of capability and responsibility away from great powers is a very
complicated issue. Since it has been set out in detail by Bukovansky et al. (2012),
it does not require detailed elaboration here. Great powers have often been ‘great
irresponsibles’, making themselves more part of the problem of world order than
part of the solution. This paralysis at the top has opened up space for more bottom-
up forms of global governance involving lesser powers, IGOs, and non-state actors.
Great power capabilities might well have been decisive in relation to the classical
high politics agenda, but as an ever-wider array of functional, non-military issues
has come onto the security agenda, the capabilities of other kinds of actors have
become more relevant. In these functionally specific issue-areas, even the capa-
bilities of quite small actors might count as ‘great’. The Ebola crisis of 2014 is an
interesting case involving not only great powers but also non-state actors such as
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and drug companies, whose specialized capabil-
ities made them an essential part of the response to the medical emergency, and
IGOs that were important to legitimation and coordination (Cui and Buzan, 2016).
This opens the pathway to a quite radical reinterpretation of special responsibili-
ties, which are becoming more widely diffused to a range of actors able to deploy
special capabilities in relation to specific issue-areas of global order. This develop-
ment does not remove great powers from the equation, but it does open up a much
more diverse and complicated picture of the relationship between capabilities on
the one hand, and special rights and responsibilities on the other.
How, then, do these general considerations about great powers and great power
responsibilities play into the environmental sector?
Environmental Power and Great Powers
As argued in the first part of this chapter, the concept of ‘great powers’ has been
central to IR theorizing about international order, but important ambiguities per-
sist with regard to defining what constitutes power in international relations, and
the criteria for identifying great powers in specific issue-areas. Both these prob-
lems are clearly evident in the field of global environmental politics (GEP). As we
discuss in this section, there are important similarities between GEP and other in-
ternational issue-areas that justify talk of environmental great powers. The effects
of power inequality on outcomes in international environmental negotiations can
be found across a wide range of environmental issues, from climate change to the
regulation of chemicals and marine protection. At the same time, GEP is also char-
acterized by a high degree of diffusion of relevant capabilities, and lesser powers
and non-state actors generally play a more significant role. The general premises
of the great power concept, and great power theory, do not translate to GEP in a
straightforward manner. It is important, therefore, to start with a discussion of the
issue-specific characteristics of power in GEP before we can approach the question
of what counts as a great power in the environmental field.
Environmental Power
The dual material and social understanding of power discussed above is appli-
cable to all international policy fields, including GEP. In a material sense, a
state’s environmental power is based on its control over important ecosystems
or natural resources (e.g. forests, rivers, fossil fuels) or its ability to cause signif-
icant transboundary environmental harm. Furthermore, a state with significant
economic and political might (military strength is generally a less fungible power
resource in GEP) can use such capabilities to influence international bargain-
ing over environmental rules, for example by providing environmental aid or
threatening trade sanctions. Environmental power also has an important social
dimension in that states that command legitimate authority in GEP are able to
influence the identities and interests of other states, thereby shaping outcomes
in international environmental policymaking. Environmental power exists where
states are able to provide intellectual or entrepreneurial leadership that sets inter-
national agendas or shapes bargaining outcomes. We can also find it where states
create social structures that legitimate certain forms of environmentally relevant
behaviour (e.g. regulated vs unregulated forms of pollution), define environmental
roles and responsibilities (e.g. differentiated responsibilities under the UNFCCC),
or create or privilege certain types of meaning that shape relevant social fields of
action (e.g. ‘sustainable development’ and ‘green growth’ discourses).
It is important to recognize that that the exercise of environmental power
can serve different purposes. Some literature restricts the term ‘environmental
power’ to only those actors that use their power to advance global environmen-
tal objectives (e.g. Sotero and Armijo, 2007; Dauvergne and Faria, 2012; Viola
and Franchini, 2014). This is too restrictive a conception, however, as it ignores
ongoing contestation over what counts as environmentally friendly behaviour
(e.g. some environmentalists support pro-nuclear energy policies as they reduce
greenhouse gas emissions, while others oppose them as they create long-term risks
of nuclear accidents and radioactive pollution). It also fails to capture situations in
which states can be said to possess environmental power but use it to weaken,
rather than strengthen, global environmental objectives. ‘Environmental power’,
just like economic or military power, should be understood as a neutral concept.
It reflects a state’s ability to influence processes and outcomes in GEP, and to shape
other states’ behaviour, interests, or identities, irrespective of its underlying mo-
tivation or objective. This means that, broadly speaking, we can distinguish two
principal uses of environmental power: negative and positive. Both uses of environ-
mental power are essential to understanding a state’s overall power and influence
in GEP, and by implication its (potential) great power status.
This distinction between negative and positive uses of power is not a unique
feature of GEP alone. Any form of power gives rise to similarly diverging, and in-
deed conflicting, uses. From the perspective of maintaining international peace
and stability, military power is a predominantly negative form of power when
used in an offensive capacity to pursue a country’s expansionist goals, but can also
serve a positive purpose when used for defensive purposes, to contain or defeat
military aggression, to maintain a balance of power, or to support humanitar-
ian interventions. Economic power similarly gives rise to negative usage where
it allows powerful countries to pursue their own interest by exerting leverage over
weaker countries, but such economic leverage is also at the heart of international
sanctioning mechanisms that seek to uphold international trade rules.
In the environmental field, negative power reflects a country’s control over cer-
tain environmental ‘goods’ and/or its ability to produce environmental ‘bads’ in
the form of environmental degradation. The former is the case where countries
control large shares of natural resources or ecosystems (e.g. forests, lakes, rivers,
biodiverse habitats) that are of global, regional, or just transboundary significance.
In such cases, control over significant environmental goods gives countries the
ability to degrade or destroy internationally significant ecosystems or resources,
or to refuse to cooperate in their international management. The latter is the case
where countries cause a significant share of global environmental degradation (e.g.
emissions of pollutants, consumption of environmental goods) and are therefore
able to undermine international environmental management efforts by refusing
to reduce transboundary environmental harm. In both cases, significant negative
power gives rise to de facto veto power in international environmental affairs as
countries in control of environmental goods/bads can slow down, weaken, or even
block multilateral environmental efforts (Porter and Brown, 1996: 14; Falkner,
2005: 591).
Examples of such situations where one or several countries possess veto power
include ozone layer depletion, where five industrialized countries (USA, Germany,
France, Britain, Japan) dominated the global market for ozone-depleting sub-
stances at the time of the ozone regime negotiations in the mid-1980s; interna-
tional climate politics, where the top 10 emitters are responsible for two-thirds
of global greenhouse gas emissions; international whaling regulation, where a
small number of states (Japan, Norway, Iceland) are responsible for most of the
global whaling catch; or deforestation, where three countries (Brazil, Congo, In-
donesia) control large parts of the world’s remaining tropical rainforests. As these
illustrations show, negative power in GEP is issue-specific, and countries that
possess it in one environmental issue area may not possess it in others. Some
developed or rapidly developing economies with large populations (e.g. United
States, China) tend to have a large ecological footprint across all or most envi-
ronmental issue-areas, largely because they consume a large share of the Earth’s
natural resources and produce a large share of global pollution. Because they pos-
sess negative power across a wide range of issues, they can be considered critical
to the successful management of the global environment. Others (e.g. Norway,
Indonesia), however, will have globally significant negative power only in those
few issue areas where they control significant shares of global environmental
goods/bads.
The positive use of power in GEP rests on a country’s ability to engender
positive change in international environmental politics and promote effective
solutions for global, regional, or transboundary environmental problems. This
constructive use of power is closely related to the concept of international en-

vironmental leadership (Skodvin and Andresen, 2006; Eckersley, 2020), which
is based on the notion that leaders are needed to establish environmental is-
sues on the international agenda, propose cooperative solutions and diffuse
innovative policy ideas, provide technological and economic aid in support of
environmental policies, and push for an international consensus behind spe-
cific regulatory approaches. Such leadership can take many forms, from facil-
itating compromise and coalition-building (entrepreneurial leadership) to the
creation and diffusion of innovative policy solutions (intellectual leadership)
and the use of economic incentives and sanctions to change actors’ behaviour
(structural leadership) (Young, 1991; Tews, 2004; Skodvin and Andresen, 2006).
The environmental leadership literature assumes that such leadership is pro-
vided not only by powerful states but also by other actors, such as less power-
ful countries or even individuals in international organizations acting as norm
entrepreneurs (Young, 1991). In this sense, GEP lends itself to the diffusion
of capabilities and responsibilities away from great powers, and is a signa-
ture sector for the merger of GPM and global governance (Cui and Buzan,
2016).
The literature on the history of GEP has identified several instances in which
powerful states have used such positive power to promote global environmental
solutions. The US played a key role in establishing environmental stewardship
as a fundamental norm in international society at the 1972 Stockholm confer-
ence and beyond (Falkner and Buzan, 2019; Falkner, 2021: chapter 5), and US
pressure was instrumental in getting to international environmental agreements
on issues ranging from the protection of endangered species to ozone layer de-
pletion (DeSombre, 2000). In the 1990s, Japan’s dominant role as a provider of
international environmental aid, especially in Southeast Asia, led to the country
being described as an ‘environmental superpower’ (Dauvergne, 1998: 2). Inter-
national environmental leadership is generally said to have passed from the US
to the EU since the 1990s (Kelemen and Vogel, 2010), and the EU has more re-
cently played a leading role in pushing for higher international environmental
standards and new environmental agreements (Zito, 2005; Vogler and Stephan,
2007; Kelemen, 2010), even though the US continues to a play a leadership role
in certain specific contexts, such as air pollution (Gouldson et al., 2015). More re-
cently, the Obama administration negotiated a bilateral climate agreement with
China in 2014 that signalled America’s renewed support for international climate
action. This bilateral agreement was widely praised as a key game changer in the
Paris Agreement negotiations, as it ensured that the two largest greenhouse gas
(GHG) emitters were committed to working towards the goal of climate change
mitigation.
It is important to note that these two uses of power in GEP are not mutually ex-
clusive. In fact, in many cases positive and negative dimensions of environmental
power coexist or overlap. A large and populous country may cast a long ecological
shadow but may nevertheless play an active international role seeking to advance
environmental protection. Thus, China, the US, and the EU are the three leading
emitters of GHG emissions, but each of them can be said to have taken a leader-
ship role at various points in the recent history of international climate politics. We
also need to consider the issue-specific nature of the use of environmental power.
Countries that lead on one international environmental issue may be laggards on
other issues. Indeed, countries rarely take a consistent stance across the wide range
of environmental problems that can be found on the international agenda. Japan
and Norway, for example, are noted for their international leadership in some
environmental areas (e.g. supporting biodiversity protection in developing coun-
tries) but play a more obstructionist role in other areas (e.g. whaling). More often
than not, some of the most powerful nations on the planet can be found to be both
leaders and laggards in international environmental politics, and some oscillate
repeatedly between negative and positive uses of environmental power (e.g. US
foreign policy shifts from Bush to Obama, and from Trump to Biden). Just as in
other global policy fields, great powers may aspire to be responsible leaders but
often end up acting as the ‘great irresponsibles’ (Bull, 1980).
Great Powers in Global Environmental Politics
What makes a powerful country a ‘great power’ in GEP? In line with the ES’s so-
cial framing, we can stipulate that great power status is a social phenomenon that
depends on other actors according a country recognition as a responsible power.
Great powers, as Bull (1977: 200–202) defined them, are ‘recognised by others to
have, and conceived by their own leaders and peoples to have, certain special rights
and duties.’ How does this notion of great power status manifest itself in the field
of GEP? Should we expect conventional great power status directly to translate
into GEP? Or are there issue-specific characteristics in the environmental field
that need to be taken into account when discussing the role and responsibilities of
great powers?
Building on the above discussion of environmental power, it is fair to conclude
that the conventional great powers are likely to possess both significant negative
and positive environmental power. Their dominant military and economic might
is invariably based on a resource-intensive industrial system that casts a long eco-
logical shadow over the planet, and their political power gives them considerable
diplomatic clout in international negotiations, including on environmental mat-
ters. That said, the usually small group of states that are considered to be great
powers in international society are not the only ones that possess relevant environ-
mental power across the many environmental issue-areas. This accords with the
view of Bukovansky et al. (2012: 73–78) that the domains of special responsibility
are fragmented into issue-areas, each different in its social construction, actors,
sources and types of power, social dynamics, etc. One implication of this is that,
even allowing for ambiguities, the group of environmental great powers is larger
than the group of great powers. Another is that similar ambiguities will attend any
attempt to draw up a definitive list of environmental great powers. A brief discus-
sion of the most likely contenders for the status of great power in GEP reveals the
ambiguity implicit in this categorization.
What Counts as an Environmental Great Power?
Some cases are fairly straightforward. The world’s most powerful nation, the US, is
both a superpower in conventional terms and one of the world’s leading environ-
mental powers. As the largest economy with a high per capita ecological footprint,
the US is both deeply implicated in many global environmental problems and plays
a critical role in most multilateral environmental negotiations. In the early days of
modern environmental politics, it pioneered new forms of environmental regula-
tion, which were widely copied around the world, and promoted the creation and
expansion of the international environmental agenda from the 1970s onwards.
The US continues to lead on environmental issues where it has a strong domestic
policy mandate, though the administrations of George W. Bush (2001–2009) and
Donald Trump (2017–2021) are noted for their assertive anti-regulatory stance.
Over time, the US has thus moved away from its early role as international envi-
ronmental leader and has, more often than not, come to exercise negative power
by rejecting a special responsibility for the global environment (Falkner, 2005).
The EU, initially a laggard on environmental issues in the 1970s and 1980s, has
more recently pushed for international action on a wide range of environmen-
tal issues, most notably climate change (Wurzel and Connelly, 2010). Much like
the US, the EU possesses considerable environmental power with global signif-
icance. Its economy, although more energy efficient and with a lower per capita
ecological footprint than that of the US, is a major source of global environmen-
tal degradation. The EU’s claim to be an environmental leader has been widely
noted, both as a demandeur in international negotiations and a ‘market power’
(Damro, 2015) that has the ability to raise global regulatory standards (Selin and
VanDeveer, 2006), though questions persist about its ‘actorness’ (Vogler, 1999)
and coherence (Barnes, 2010) as a power in international forums.3
3 This question of the EU’s ‘actorness’ is a general one in thinking about great powers. The strict
state-centrism of realists means that they cannot ‘see’ the EU as an actor because it is not a state. If
actorness is taken as an empirical question rather than as a theoretical presupposition, then the EU
clearly has a significant degree of actor quality, and more so in issue-areas such as GEP, than in the
‘high politics’ of the traditional security agenda.
Russia, once considered a superpower alongside the US, but merely an

‘honorary power’ during the 1990s, now falls more into the category of a declining
great power in international affairs but is punching above its weight under Presi-
dent Putin. It is perhaps best thought of as a second-rank great power with mainly
regional power resources but with some global aspirations remaining. Both its mil-
itary and industrial strength have declined sharply since the end of the Cold War,
with post-1991 deindustrialization also leading to a notable reduction in its global
ecological footprint. Still, its considerable draw on natural resources, its substantial
role as a fossil fuel producer, and its inefficient industrial system give it signifi-
cant negative environmental power. What sets Russia apart from the US and EU
is its relative weakness as a positive force in GEP. Having initially rejected the
global environmental agenda as a Western, capitalist issue at the 1972 Stockholm
Conference, the Soviet Union and later Russia has mostly taken a backseat role in
international environmental negotiations, including in the climate negotiations. It
rarely, if ever, aspires to play a positive, leading role in GEP.
Given its large economic size, Japan surely ranks as a leading environmental
power with a considerable ecological footprint. Foreign investment by Japanese
multinationals and the need to import vast amounts of natural resources (energy,
timber) have been noted in the past as the source of the country’s considerable
‘environmental shadow’ (Dauvergne, 1997; Hall, 2009). At the same time, Japan
has at times taken on the role of a global environmental leader, promoting
international cooperation on environmental management issues and exporting
environmental technologies to developing countries (Maddock, 1994; Schreurs,
2004), even though this international role has come under growing domestic strain
as the country’s economic woes have increased (Tiberghien and Schreurs, 2007).
The rise of non-Western powers, most notably China and India, but also Brazil,
South Africa, and Indonesia, has attracted growing attention in international af-
fairs generally as well as in GEP. As mentioned above, questions can be raised
about categorizing developing countries as great powers. However, there can be
little doubt that most rising powers have become formidable environmental pow-
ers, mainly because their combination of rapidly rising economic fortunes and
large populations has led to a dramatic expansion of their ecological footprint.
China is the standout case in this regard. Having grown at around 10% per annum
for the last three decades, the Chinese economy, expected to become the world’s
largest within a few years, has one of the highest consumption rates for many global
resources. It is the world’s biggest importer of oil and largest consumer of coal, alu-
minium, nickel, zinc, copper, iron ore, and lead, among others (Armbrecht, 2015).
China’s overall ecological footprint is said to have surpassed that of the US in the
early 2000s (Global Footprint Network, n.d.), and in 2006 it overtook the US as the
world’s largest emitter of GHGs. Other emerging economies, such as India, Brazil,
and Indonesia, still lag behind China’s dramatic economic growth, but their eco-
logical footprints are expanding rapidly as their large populations are joining the
global middle class and are ramping up consumption of the world’s commodities.
In many global environmental issue-areas, from climate change to air, water, and
marine pollution, emerging economies have joined the leading great powers as
major sources of global environmental degradation.
Many of the larger developing countries also possess significant environmental
power because they control environmental goods that are of vital importance to
the health of the planet. Brazil holds c. one-third of the world’s rainforests and is
the most biodiverse country on the planet, being home to at least 103,870 animal
species and 43,020 plant species. Indonesia, one of the 17 ‘mega-diverse’ countries
with large forested areas, contains 2 of the world’s 25 biodiversity ‘hotspots’ and
ranks second in the world as the home to 12% of the world’s mammals. India,
also a mega-diverse country, harbours an estimated 7–8% of the recorded species
and contains a vast range of globally significant ecosystems and habitats, such as
forests, grasslands, wetlands, deserts, and coastal as well as marine environments
(Convention on Biological Diversity, n.d.).
While emerging powers’ rising economic profile and control over environ-
mentally sensitive ecosystems has given them significant veto power in inter-
national negotiations, they are only slowly beginning to match this with cor-
responding positive power, that is the desire and capability to positively shape
the international environmental agenda and promote global environmental so-
lutions. In the past, emerging powers were viewed primarily as reluctant part-
ners in GEP, at best, and as veto powers exercising negative power over issues
such as deforestation and global warming, at worst. The long-standing fram-
ing of global environmental politics around the North–South divide, with in-
dustrialized countries cast as the main environmental culprits yet also leading
demandeurs for international environmental action, has reinforced a defensive
posture by developing countries and a strategic focus on regulatory differenti-
ation and financial compensation. More recently, some emerging powers have
begun to be more serious about addressing the worst environmental excesses at
home and are also playing a more nuanced and constructive role internation-
ally. Brazil has received widespread international praise for its efforts to tackle
Amazonian deforestation, though these achievements are now threatened by the
environmental policy shifts introduced under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro
(2019– ). China has adopted a more proactive approach in the climate negotia-
tions after having stepped up its efforts to curb rising GHG emissions at home
(Green and Stern, 2017). Furthermore, the creation of the BASIC group in the
UNFCCC negotiations, consisting of Brazil, China, India, and South Africa,
signalled greater willingness among emerging powers with a large emissions pro-
file to accept some regulatory differentiation from the rest of the developing
countries (Hochstetler and Milkoreit, 2014).
Thus, as for great powers generally, only more so, no definitive list of great
powers exists for GEP. The largest and most advanced industrialized countries
(the US, EU) can be considered to be of systemic importance across most, if not
all, areas of global environmental protection. The populous and rapidly growing
economies in the Global South are fast developing a similarly large ecological foot-
print, with China already in a leading position as the world’s largest consumer of
environmental resources. Until recently, their significance as environmental pow-
ers has rested more on their ability to obstruct than to promote environmental
protection, though some (again, China) are beginning to claim an emerging lead-
ership role in GEP. Some other countries that are conventionally considered to
be great powers (e.g. Russia) are mostly noted for their negative environmental
power, while others not normally considered to be great powers are significant en-
vironmental powers in one or a few specific areas (e.g. Malaysia in tropical forests,
Indonesia in tropical forests and coal, Norway in whaling).
Sectoral and Spatial Differences
The question of what counts as a great power in GEP is complicated by two

characteristics of the environmental policy field. For one, global environmental
policymaking is highly fragmented, with hundreds of international environmen-
tal treaties and dozens of international organizations dealing with the wide array of
environmental sectors that make up the international environmental agenda: from
climate change to ozone layer and transboundary air pollution, and from biodiver-
sity protection to deforestation, desertification, toxic waste, and marine pollution,
each environmental issue has its own distinctive problem structure, which in turn
results in a range of different power structures and institutional contexts. Despite
overarching UN summits with universal participation and the United Nations
Environmental Programme’s role as a facilitator of international policymaking, no
central forum exists for dealing with all, or even most, environmental issues that
are of global concern. With environmental power being so fragmented, it is un-
likely that a fixed set of environmental great powers exists that are in a dominant
position across all environmental subfields. The US, EU, and now China, appear
to be major powers across a wide range of environmental issue-areas, while other
countries are powerful only in specific subsets of the international environmen-
tal agenda. We can thus distinguish great powers in GEP according to whether
they possess wide or narrow environmental power, which exists either across a
wide range of sectors or is concentrated in just a small set of sectors. In this sense,
GEP is an extreme case of the diffusion of capabilities and responsibilities that has
marked great powers generally. Probably, any country with wide environmental
power will be a candidate for great power status, but it seems doubtful that the label
‘great power’ should be applied to those with narrow power in just one or two en-
vironmental sectors. They would seem to fall more comfortably into the framing of
Bukovansky et al.’s (2012) argument about the diffusion of special responsibilities.
A further complicating characteristic of GEP is that the issues that make up the
international environmental agenda exist at different scales of international poli-
tics and involve different constellations of countries. Only some, such as climate
change and ozone layer depletion, are truly global political problems that require
a global approach. Others are of a more regional nature, from desertification to
transboundary air pollution and water management, while yet others require only
bilateral or plurilateral cooperation beneath the regional level, such as the man-
agement of rivers and riparian zones. Yet other environmental issues are highly
localized phenomena (e.g. deforestation, whaling) but have regional or even global
implications (e.g. local forests acting as carbon sinks for the global climate; local
whaling leading to global species loss). For this reason, environmental power, both
in its negative and positive use, has distinctive spatial dimensions that affect our
understanding of what counts as a great power in GEP.
As noted above, great power interest and responsibility can exist at different
spatial scales, from global through regional to local. In the environmental sector,
great powers may operate at different levels, from the global down to the regional
or other sub-global levels. Environmental regionalism has always played an impor-
tant role, despite the global policy aspirations of the UN environment summits of
1972, 1992, 2002, and 2012. More recently, regional environmental cooperation
has further gained in political significance as it offers opportunities for regula-
tory harmonization that meet both environmental and trade/investment policy
objectives (Schreurs, 2013). Regionalism also appeals to environmental leaders
as a more congenial forum in which environmental protection policies can be
advanced, especially at a time when many multilateral efforts at the UN level ap-
pear to be deadlocked. We can thus distinguish between countries whose great
power status in GEP is global in nature, while others may only be considered to be
environmental great powers in a regional, or even subregional, context.
When it comes to negative environmental power, the distinction between dif-
ferent scales of great power status is reflected in the spatial dimensions of the
environmental resources that a country controls or of the environmental harm
it can cause. Such spatial categorizations are subject to change over time, however,
depending on how environmental problems are defined and impacts are under-
stood. Deforestation, for example, was primarily seen as a local problem in the
nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, affecting mainly the coun-
try where it was occurring. By the late twentieth century, due to wider recognition
of the importance of tropical rainforests for biodiversity and climate stability, de-
forestation had become a global environmental problem, as is evident from the
repeated but failed efforts to create a global forest regime since the early 1990s
(Humphreys, 2006).
Similarly, positive environmental power comes with distinctive spatial charac-
teristics. The US and the EU both have global policy ambitions in their engagement
with the international environmental agenda and have provided international
leadership on environmental issues that has had a lasting impact on the insti-
tutional and legal structure of GEP. At the same time, the US and EU also play
distinctive regional roles in their respective neighbourhoods. The US has sought
to shape environmental policies of neighbouring countries through regional
initiative such as NAFTA and bilateral agreements with Latin America. The EU
has developed a distinctly regional dimension to its external environmental role,
using environmental conditionality in its negotiations with countries that want to
join the Union (Andanova, 2003; Knill and Tosun, 2009). Of all emerging pow-
ers, China comes closest to playing a systematically global environmental role,
mainly because of its rapidly growing environmental footprint and increasing
global power ambition. China has also started to stake out an emerging (though
widely contested) regional environmental leadership role, particularly in the con-
text of regional investment and trading relationships (e.g. the Belt and Road
Initiative). Armed with its own concept of sustainable development (‘ecological
civilization’—see Goron, 2018), the country is increasingly trying to project an
image, if not a reality, of environmental responsibility in these various regional
partnerships. Other major environmental powers have seen their global policy
ambition reduced in recent years, even if their status as a leading economy ensures
that their environmental footprint remains global in nature. Japan, for example,
was once assumed to have global environmental leadership ambition (Maddock,
1994; Dauvergne, 1998) but is perhaps better thought of as a regional, not global,
environmental power (Graham, 2004), with much of its environmental aid efforts
concentrated on the Asian region, and particularly Southeast Asia.
Towards Great Power Responsibility for the Environment?
This section addresses three themes:
• The relationship between great power status and the management of global
international society;
• The specific nature of great power responsibility for the global environment;
and
• The question of whether to securitize the environment or not.
Great Powers as Managers of International Society
Power inequality is one of the eternal features of international life, and most IR
theories have attributed some form of wider managerial role to those nations
that possess the most power in international relations. Materialist theories of
IR (e.g. realism) assume that great powers are the dominant players by default,
whether or not they actively seek to manage the international system. Great
powers largely determine outcomes in international interactions, with the main
variation being the distribution of power and the number of great powers. In a
unipolar system, individual superpowers can exercise hegemonic power world-
wide, while in a multipolar system groups of great powers may form alliances
in an effort to maintain a rough balance of power. Social theories (e.g. ES, con-
structivism) accept the material reality of power inequality but qualify it with an
important dimension: legitimacy. The role of great powers as managers of inter-
national society is determined not only by the distribution of power but also by
whether they can claim to act with a certain degree of legitimacy. In this view,
great powers may have the material means to shape outcomes by power inequal-
ity, but their managerial role is also subject to social approval by the other, less
powerful, members of international society.
The ES has taken the idea of great power legitimacy furthest and identifies
GPM as one of the five classical primary institutions of international society
identified, the other four being war, diplomacy, international law, and the bal-
ance of power (Bull, 1977). As noted above, in Bull’s formulation, great powers
not only assume themselves but are also recognized by others to have man-
agerial rights and responsibilities for international order. The key to GPM as
an institution of international society is thus that the powers concerned at-
tract legitimacy to support their unequal status as leaders by accepting special
responsibilities as well as claiming special rights (Bull, 1977: 74; Bukovansky
et al., 2012: 26–27). They do this both by displaying good manners and by ef-
ficiently providing public goods (Clark, 2009: 207–220). GPM thus embodies
a quid pro quo in which lesser states legitimize a degree of sovereign inequal-
ity in return for the provision of order that only the great powers have the
capacity, self-interest, and will to provide. A classic example is Britain pro-
viding the charts, the standards, and the rules of the road for maritime nav-
igation during the period in which it had much the biggest world-spanning
navy and merchant marine. The US similarly defined the rules of the road
for the internet. More broadly, this inequality takes the form of great powers
forming a club, or collective hegemony, in which they recognize each other as
equals at a higher level, and enjoy privileged positions in IGOs. In return,
they take responsibility for upholding the core norms of international society
(Simpson, 2004; Suzuki, 2008: 50).
The GPM concept is not without its problems. Various authors have pointed out
that the link between the possession of great power capabilities and acceptance of
global responsibilities is not straightforward, and that the inherently social nature
of the concept of great power responsibility implies a certain degree of ambiguity
when it comes to defining its content.
The first ambiguity in GPM thinking concerns the link between the pos-
session of capabilities on the one hand, and the assignment and acceptance
of special rights and responsibilities on the other. As discussed above, in

the classical formulation of GPM, it was the big differentiation of capabili-
ties amongst states that both motivated and justified the assignment of spe-
cial rights and responsibilities to those in possession of greater capabilities.
Great powers were assumed to have both the self-interest and the capability
to take on managerial responsibilities. Lesser states were assumed to have suf-
ficient interest in the maintenance of international order so that they would
acquiesce to the derogation from sovereign equality that GPM required.
But is this as straightforward as it may seem? Do states always accept the respon-
sibilities that are commensurate with their power?
We know from international history that great powers don’t necessarily accept
the responsibilities that are ascribed to them, nor do they always act accord-
ing to those responsibilities that they have come to accept. Alternatively, a
power might have the capability but not be sufficiently trusted by lesser pow-
ers and/or other great powers to be given special rights and responsibilities.
Powerful states may have the necessary prerequisites to be considered a legiti-
mate great power, but this does not guarantee that they will act in a responsible
manner. Bull (1977: 207) made this point when he referred to great power re-
sponsibility as a concept that ‘is not a description of what great powers actually
do. It is rather a statement of the roles they can, and sometimes do, play that
sustain international order’. One of the enduring themes in the great power
responsibility literature is this inherent tension, and at times open conflict, be-
tween intersubjective understandings of what rights and responsibilities the most
powerful nations have and the way these nations interpret their great power
status. In an ideal scenario, great powers can be expected to adopt an ethic
of responsibility (raison de système) that serves the benefit of the greater col-
lective, the society of states. However, whether great powers’ national interest
(raison d’état) does actually manifest itself as enlightened self-interest remains
an empirical question. Bull’s depiction of the US and the Soviet Union as ‘great
irresponsibles’ is a good example of great powers preferring to pursue their
own disputes and so refusing to take up responsibilities commensurate with
their capabilities. So, while the linkage between capability and responsibility
underpins GPM in principle, in practice it sometimes works and sometimes
doesn’t.
The second ambiguity in the GPM literature concerns the inherently social
nature of the concept of great power responsibility. Simply put, it is far from clear
what the content of great power responsibilities should be, and what processes ex-
ist through which this content is being defined and contested. As Loke (2016: 852)
notes, the scope of responsibility ultimately depends on the normative ambition
of international society, which can change over time. At the lower end of the nor-
mative spectrum, labelled pluralist in ES theory, great powers are expected to act
merely as the guardians of the Westphalian order, guaranteeing the stability and
survival of the society of states. In this perspective, global environmental protec-

tion would most likely not enter the remit of great power responsibility, unless
environmental degradation poses a systemic risk to international society. At the
other, solidarist, end of the spectrum, great powers may take on a more expan-
sive role in realizing certain global public goods that go well beyond mere system
survival. These might include management of the global economy, control of dis-
ease, and environmental stewardship. The range of such enlarged international
responsibilities will ultimately be determined by processes of social negotiation,
involving primarily states as the members of international society but poten-
tially also non-state actors. As international society moves either way along the
pluralist–solidarist spectrum, between a logic of mere coexistence on the plu-
ralist end, to a logic of cooperation on the solidarist one, we would thus expect
great power responsibilities to expand and contract in line with the underlying
normative change.
Bukovansky et al. (2012: 47) suggest that there is an important linkage between
the special responsibilities of great powers on the one hand, and the international
security agenda on the other. Cui and Buzan (2016) develop this argument to show
how the expansion of the international security agenda from its traditional mili-
tary concerns to include a much wider array of non-military, but securitized, issues
(see Buzan and Hansen, 2009: chapter 7) is a key to understanding the expansion
of great power responsibility to a much wider range of issues. As Bukovansky et al.
(2012: 73–78, 250–263) note, the domains of special responsibility are now frag-
mented into issue-areas, each different in its social construction, with different
actors, sources and types of power, and social dynamics.
The critical role that security plays in GPM thinking is evident in Bull’s thinking.
Bull (1977: 200–229) makes clear that the scope and function of classical GPM is
deeply rooted in security, and that therefore, in both theory and practice, GPM
norms can also be sustained by calculation or coercion, as well as shared belief.
The functions defined by the traditional (i.e. military-political) security agenda
are set out by Bull (1977: 207), who argues that the basic role of great powers is to
manage their relations with each other and to ‘impart a degree of central direction
to the affairs of international society as a whole’. This nicely differentiates raison de
système from raison d’état. More specifically he identifies six functions for GPM:
1. To preserve the general balance of power;
2. To avoid or control central crises;
3. To limit or contain central wars;
4. To exploit their local preponderance to maintain regional order;
5. To respect each other’s spheres of influence; and
6. To take joint actions.
These traditional functions do not disappear after 1945, but they are increas-
ingly accompanied by new functions that emerged from the wider and deeper
understanding of security (Buzan, Wæver, and deWilde, 1998; Buzan and Hansen,
2009). As the so-called non-traditional security (NTS) agenda comes into play,
the functions of GPM expand into economic, environmental, health, human, and
identity security. Bukovansky et al. (2012: 47) suggest that the widening of the
security agenda has extended and deepened what is accepted as the special respon-
sibilities of great powers. This is an important insight. It provides both a driving
force and a legitimating framework for tracking how and why the functions of
GPM have changed over time.
Cui and Buzan (2016: 197–198) show how elements of the traditional security
functions of GPM persist even after the post-1945 shift to a postcolonial GIS.
As shown by the ongoing manoeuvres amongst the US, China, Russia, the EU,
and India, the great powers still have to manage their relations with each other.
They have to pursue arms control, as in attempts to prevent the spread of nuclear
weapons. They also, up to a point, take joint action against international terrorism
and piracy. And although more divisive (think of Syria, Libya, North Korea), great
powers still intervene regularly when domestic turmoil in lesser states is thought
to threaten international security.
From the end of the Cold War, the risk of great power war declined very substan-
tially, and during the 1990s, a range of non-military threats occupied the leading
edge of securitization. These often, but not always, came in the form of shared-fate
threats—such as air pollution, financial crises, migration, disease, cybersecurity,
transnational crime, and nuclear pollution—that can and do spill over territorial
borders. Much of this NTS agenda is about a range of functional issues that do
not necessarily, or even usually, link to political violence. These wider logics of
functional, non-military, ‘common security’ (security with) are becoming more
intense, and compete with the traditional, often military, logics of ‘national secu-
rity’ (security against). Some of these shared fates will create sustained pressure
for global management, most obviously the global market, climate change, disease
control, and planetary protection against space rocks. But some will create both
‘security with’ pressures for global cooperation and ‘security against’ opportunities
for weaponization in great power competitions, most obviously in cybersecurity,
migration, the rise of artificial intelligence, and possibly pandemics. Which ten-
dency dominates will interplay strongly with whether GPM expands or contracts
in the emerging world order of deep pluralism.
Cui and Buzan (2016: 198–203, 207–210) go on to argue that the widening
of the international security agenda into these non-traditional functional areas,
has not just extended the scope of GPM, but also pushed it towards merger with
global governance. The global governance literature emphasizes the role of lesser
powers, IGOs, and non-state actors, and tends to see great powers as being more
part of the problem of world order than part of the solution. This literature has
tended to stand back-to-back with the one on GPM, with neither addressing the
increasing overlaps and synergies between them resulting from the expanding
functional scope of GPM. This de facto merger of GMP and global governance
puts onto centre stage the argument of Bukovansky et al. (2012: 73–78, 250–263)
about how special responsibilities have diffused away from great powers to a va-
riety of other actors, the mix differing according to the issue. The wider security
agenda has indeed pushed great power responsibilities into new issue-areas. But
at the same time, it has given special responsibilities to actors other than great
powers. Global environmental protection is one of those issue-areas to which the
diffusion of special responsibilities to both great powers and other actors applies.
Great Power Responsibility for the Global Environment?
As noted above, the link between the international norm of environmental stew-
ardship and traditional notions of great power management is (as yet) relatively
weak. However, this has not prevented the great powers from facing critical
scrutiny in global environmental debates and growing demands to make a big-
ger contribution towards collective environmental management. One reason for
this is, of course, that they are seen as a major part of the problem. By virtue of
their large industrial and military strength, the great powers are bound to have
an oversized environmental footprint and are therefore likely to be implicated in
most global environmental problems. Great powers have also been called upon
to provide additional leadership because of the increasing gridlock in multilat-
eral forums dealing with environmental issues. The G7/8, for example, has been
drawn into debates on climate change on several occasions, especially in the run-
up to important Conferences of the Parties (COPs) of the UNFCCC (Kirton and
Kokotsis, 2016). And the UN Security Council (UNSC) has debated on several
occasions whether and how it can play a more active role in global environmen-
tal politics (Conca et al., 2017). In both cases, demand for great power leadership
and the perceived failings of the existing architecture for global environmental
governance make up two sides of the same coin.
A new source of demand for great power responsibility for environmental pro-
tection has emerged in the context of the debate on socializing emerging powers.
China, in particular, has come under growing international pressure to make a
greater contribution to global environmental protection. Such expectations are
partly the direct consequence of China’s extraordinary economic growth over
the last three decades, which has put increasing strain on the planet. They also
reflect China’s growing regional and global power ambition, which has raised
the question of whether the country will also shoulder greater responsibility in
international affairs more generally. In this respect, taking on an enhanced inter-
national environmental role offers an opportunity for an emerging power such
as China (but also India, Brazil, and others) to signal its intention not only to
rise peacefully but also to accept the duties that come with being a legitimate and
responsible great power.
Although great power responsibility for the global environment remains an
emerging expectation that has not yet been anchored in the institutional archi-
tecture of GEP, various forms of experimentation with an enhanced role for great
powers have surfaced. The failings of environmental multilateralism have encour-
aged some powers to experiment with minilateral cooperation and environmental
clubs, which might allow them both to assert their special position in GEP and also
explore new avenues for enhanced environmental cooperation. Such minilateral
efforts signal growing unease about the weakness of existing international envi-
ronmental processes and institutions, as well as willingness among at least some
great powers to explore alternative arrangements, though they are still far from
a fully fledged engagement of GPM in global environmental protection. Various
international forums, such as the G7/8 and the G20, have been used to create a
political consensus among leading powers behind environmental objectives, most
notably in the context of the climate negotiations (Kim and Chung, 2012). So far,
their contribution has been limited to debating global objectives and passing non-
binding resolutions. At best, G7 or G20 declarations have generated momentum
in the multilateral negotiations under the auspices of the UNFCCC; at worst they
have provided inconsequential opportunities for grandstanding on environmen-
tal issues. Some countries have gone a step further and have proposed to create an
environmental/climate mandate for the UNSC, which would be the most dramatic
step towards a GPM-style formation of a great power club in GEP. On several oc-
casions, the UNSC held debates about whether it should play a formal role in the
fight against climate change, but all such proposals have been rejected and there ap-
pears to be little appetite to expand the institution’s remit in this way (Scott 2015),
though this can change anytime as global environmental problems such as climate
change increase the pressure on the UN to play a more proactive role (Conca et al.,
2017: 17).
One reason why it has proved more difficult to establish formal institutional
mechanisms for engaging GPM for environmental reasons lies in the difficulty to
establish corresponding great power rights and privileges that would go with great
power responsibilities. Great powers usually expect exclusive great power rights
and privileges if they are to take on special responsibilities for maintaining the
international order. The most prominent example of this is the UN security sys-
tem, in which the Permanent Five (USA, Soviet Union, China, France and Britain)
are tasked to protect order and peace in international society, in exchange for
which they were given a permanent seat on the UNSC and a veto over any UNSC
decisions. Apart from this explicit form of legalized collective hegemony, other
more informal clubs have evolved to give great powers certain privileges in carry-
ing out managerial roles, with varying degrees of institutionalization. The Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty established a certain number of countries as recognized

nuclear weapons states; decision-making in the IMF favours leading industrial-
ized countries as voting rights are weighted according to economic importance,
with the US having a de facto veto over important decisions; and various minilat-
eral groupings give leading countries from the North (G7) and from industrialized
and emerging economies (G20) a privileged position in the management of global
economic affairs. As members of a formal or informal club, great powers thus en-
joy privileges within international society that are legitimized by other states in
return for the provision of international order and the protection of core interna-
tional norms (Bull, 1977: 74). No such system of balanced great power rights and
responsibilities has ever come into existence in GEP. International environmen-
tal negotiations continue to emphasize a strong form of multilateralism, which
ensures the broad participation of virtually all countries and consensus as the
default norm in decision-making.
Instead, informal minilateral processes have been used in GEP, either as a com-
plement to multilateral processes or as a substitute when formal multilateralism
proves to be ineffective. Throughout the history of GEP, informal discussions and
pre-negotiations among a small group of environmental powers have been rou-
tinely used to advance international cooperation. This was most clearly the case
in the 1970s and 1980s, when many environmental treaties were negotiated by
only small groups of countries, often not more than 20 or 30. Even as partici-
pation in multilateral environmental agreement negotiations expanded from the
1990s onwards, it has not been uncommon for small groups of powerful states to
pre-negotiate contentious issues in smaller settings before they are adopted multi-
laterally. This has been the case especially in politically contentious areas, such as
climate change, where leading environmental powers have tended to assert their
influence and play a more active role in shaping international outcomes (Brenton,
2013). When a small group of great powers tried to broker a political deal at the end
of the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on climate change, this helped to produce a
breakthrough compromise in the form of the Copenhagen Accord. More recently,
the US and China reached a bilateral agreement on climate change cooperation in
November 2014, thereby paving the way towards the successful negotiation of the
Paris Agreement in 2015.
The experience with the climate negotiations shows both the growing tendency
to rely on informal great power minilateralism and the legitimacy challenges that
such a shift creates. When US President Obama and the leaders of the BASIC
countries agreed the Copenhagen Accord to prevent the 2009 Copenhagen con-
ference from collapsing, the accord was immediately challenged in the final COP
plenary for having been negotiated without the participation or consultation of
other parties. Lack of multilateral legitimacy was the main reason why the ac-
cord was only noted, but not adopted, at the end of the COP (Dimitrov, 2010).
Developing countries have since reiterated their opposition to any reliance on
climate minilateralism, either within or outside the UNFCCC. Interestingly, sur-

veys of elite opinion within the UNFCCC process reinforce the perception that
minilateral clubs carry only limited legitimacy among climate negotiators (Hjerpe
and Nasiritousi, 2015). The question then arises whether this might change
should environmental multilateralism continue to produce diminishing returns
and the urgency of fighting global ecological challenges, such as climate change,
grows.
Securitizing the Environment?
The security dimension, which is central to the classical form of GPM, is of critical
importance in this regard. A formal system of GPM is assumed by most IR theo-
rists to arise out of the concerns for security in international society. This is how
Bull defines the scope and function of GPM, as a function of a narrow concern
with military-political security (Bull, 1977: 200–229). Being a socially determined
norm, GPM is not static, however; it can take on a more expansive and ambitious
agenda in line with the changing international normative agenda. As international
society moves towards a more solidarist logic of international cooperation, we
should expect great power responsibilities to go beyond classical concerns with
military security. In the post-Cold War international order, for example, great
power competition receded and shared-fate issues moved to the top of the inter-
national security agenda (Buzan, Wæver, and deWilde, 1998; Buzan and Hansen,
2009), which raised the possibility of bringing a wider range of global management
issues (economic, health, environmental) into GPM’s purview.
Securitization of global environmental issues thus provides one important logic
for creating special environmental responsibilities as part of an expanded system
of GPM. There are good reasons why global environmental degradation ought
to be thought of as a non-traditional security concern that should motivate great
powers as part of their traditional special responsibilities. The first reason is that
some environmental problems, most notably climate change, pose an existential
threat to individuals and societies. In the case of rising sea levels caused by global
warming, for example, the very survival of low-lying islands and heavily populated
and urbanized coastal areas, including many of the world’s great cities, is at risk.
Second, securitizing the environment can lead to the development of more fo-
cused and urgent policy responses, potentially helping to overcome the pervasive
collective action problems that afflict environmental management. Adopting a se-
curity framing can mobilize extraordinary political responses that go beyond the
slow-moving ordinary political processes so common in environmental politics
(Buzan, Wæver, and deWilde, 1998). On this basis, one would expect great pow-
ers to assume special responsibilities for global environmental protection where
this relates to the core functions of GPM.
As yet, however, despite repeated efforts to establish an environmental secu-

rity agenda, the securitization of GEP remains incomplete and great powers have
not yet developed systematic environmental responsibilities in line with their
other great power responsibilities. Securitizing moves in GEP go back at least to
the late 1980s, when the debate on the link between environment and security
first gained wider academic and political attention (Myers, 1989; Mathews, 1989;
for a counterpoint see Deudney, 1990). Various political and military organiza-
tions have since debated the merits of applying a security lens to environmental
issues (US Department of Defense, NATO, UNSC, OSCE, UN Development Pro-
gramme, EU). The security dimensions of climate change—as a threat multiplier,
source of internal and international conflict, and cause of migration flows—have
attracted the most attention in this context. Securitization of climate change
reached a high point during the first Obama Administration in 2008–2009, with
the White House and its congressional allies making the case for framing the cli-
mate challenge as a security issue. This effort failed, however, both in terms of
gaining public acceptance and initiating policy change (Hayes and Knox-Hayes,
2014). Securitization moves by advocates of environmental protection continue,
both in the US and in other countries, but they have yet to have a lasting impact
on the framing and execution of national or global environmental policy.
There are several reasons for the limited success of past environmental securiti-
zation attempts. For one, it has generally proved easier to securitize specific threats
that originate with human agents (e.g. military power, terrorism, migration, trade
surpluses) than diffuse threats arising from structural causes or from nature (e.g.
climate change, disease, space rocks, the global economy), even if the latter may
threaten more people’s lives and livelihoods. Furthermore, although securitization
would legitimate the application of urgent and extraordinary political measures in
response to environmental threats, it is far from clear whether a national security-
type response would be able to tackle their complex roots. Many environmental
problems require long-term and internationally coordinated changes to energy
systems, industrial processes, consumer behaviour, and societal norms. In con-
trast, securitization tends to encourage short-term, territorially defined, and even
militarized policy responses. Unsurprisingly, many environmentalists have there-
fore resisted securitization as an unhelpful legitimation of state-centric approaches
that would prove to be counterproductive (Deudney, 1990). The two problems
for securitizing the environment identified by Buzan, Wæver, and deWilde (1998:
71–93) also remain in play. The first is that there are two agendas in play in the
securitization process—scientific and political—and these often do not line up.
The second is that climate change as an issue is particularly vulnerable to becom-
ing entangled in the often intense economic polarizations of North–South global
politics.
The weak or incomplete securitization of GEP points to a further reason why
GPM has not been fully mobilized for environmental purposes. Environmental
stewardship, although having been established as a primary institution of global

international society, has not yet assumed systemic importance to international
order and stability (Bernstein, 2020). Environmental threats, such as ozone layer
depletion, climate change, and biodiversity loss, may be of global importance and
pose a long-term threat to the sustainability of global ecosystems, including those
that support human life on the planet. But the long-term and uncertain nature
of many of these planetary threats has meant that failure to tackle them does not
yet place international society and its current order in jeopardy. Even when called
upon to act in the interest of planetary sustainability, great powers have largely re-
jected doing so as part of their broader responsibility for maintaining international
order. This is not to say that environmental concerns may never assume systemic
importance to international society. A rapid acceleration of the global warming
trend and a collapse of vital ecosystems could quickly turn environmental sustain-
ability into a life-or-death matter for international society. Recent mobilizations
around the notion of a ‘climate emergency’ (Davidson et al., 2020) are pointing
in this direction. One of the questions, then, that we explore in this volume is
how close international society has come to accepting that reaching certain eco-
logical tipping points would trigger a wholesale securitization of environmental
protection.
Conclusion
This chapter has set out the theoretical context and analytical framework that the
contributors to this volume have worked with. Our framework builds on a mate-
rial and social understanding of power, and of great powers, and applies this to
the field of environmental politics. As we have shown, some of the ambiguities
that surround discussions of great powers in international politics apply to the en-
vironmental sector too, particularly when it comes to determining a definitive list
of great powers and identifying different sectoral and spatial dimensions. On the
whole, because of their oversized economic presence and ecological footprint, con-
ventional great powers are also environmental great powers. Some countries that
are not in the former category are significant environmental powers in one or two
specific areas, pointing to the general diffusion of capabilities and responsibilities
that characterizes great powers today. However, it seems unlikely that those that
possess narrow but not wide environmental power can count as environmental
great powers. The emerging powers of the Global South pose an interesting chal-
lenge to established great power categorizations. The shift towards a deep pluralist
international system/society involves an expansion of the number of countries
whose influence extends beyond their own regions. China is already well estab-
lished as a geopolitical rival to the US, India is on the edge of the great power
club, and Brazil can claim to be more than a regional power. If anything, their en-
vironmental great power status is even more firmly established, given their large
populations and dramatic economic expansion in recent years. However, just as

in the international security realm, emerging environmental powers are cautious
about taking on additional international responsibilities that would be commen-
surate with their enhanced international status. They, as much as the established
powers, may be facing growing demands to take on great power responsibility for
environmental protection. But a collective GPM approach has yet to emerge, and
this is a key problem for GEP.
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PART II
ENVIRONMENTAL POWERS
3
Great Expectations: The United States and
the Global Environment
Robyn Eckersley
The US occupies a central place in debates about great power responsibility and the
global environment. Indeed, no other great power has been the subject of so many
political expectations and so much scholarly scrutiny. Yet the US’s environmen-
tal aspirations have not always been in alignment with international expectations,
above all under the anti-environmental Trump administration.
Most analyses of US environmental foreign policy and diplomacy have been
organized around the frame of leadership rather than great power responsibility.
These analyses generally converge around an overarching narrative of declin-
ing leadership, despite variation along the way (Buzan and Falkner, Chapter 2,
this volume). Yet there is surprisingly little debate about what exactly constitutes
leadership and how the US’s shifting leadership aspirations relate to shifting inter-
national expectations of the US’s environmental responsibilities as a great power.
This chapter seeks to clarify these conceptual linkages and then revisit the his-
tory of US environmental diplomacy since 1970 through this new conceptual
framework.
Falkner and Buzan (2019: 132) have argued that environmental stewardship has
evolved to the point where it is has become a primary institution of global inter-
national society (GIS), reflected in ‘a vast network of international environmental
regimes and in state-level behavioural and constitutive changes’. However, most of
these regimes provide a set of general environmental responsibilities for all states,
and only a very small subset of regimes and instruments include special environ-
mental responsibilities for certain states, and these fall along a North–South axis
rather than the division between great powers and ‘the rest’ (e.g. Montreal Pro-
tocol; Kyoto Protocol; Paris Agreement; Rio Declaration, Principle 7; Sustainable
Development Goals, Goal 3; Convention on Biological Diversity). Nonetheless, the
US has played a pivotal role in the negotiations of the two most significant regimes
that include special environmental responsibilities for developed countries: the
ozone regime and the climate regime. These cases provide striking contrasts in the
Robyn Eckersley, Great Expectations: The United States and the Global Environment. In: Great Powers, Climate Change, and
Global Environmental Responsibilities. Edited by Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan, Oxford University Press.
52 robyn eckersley
US’s approach, but this chapter argues that they are nonetheless consistent with
the more general patterns that have emerged in the US’s relationship to multilateral
environmental agreements (MEAs). One key pattern is that the US has shown con-
siderable reluctance to lead and/or embrace special environmental responsibilities
if the MEA obligations challenge the US’s relative economic advantage under the
existing international order. Connecting the US’s role as a great power in global
environmental governance with US grand strategy and its role in managing the
(declining) liberal international order is therefore crucial to understanding the
US’s approach to great power management (GPM) in the environmental domain.
The chapter unfolds as follows. Part One conceptualizes and clarifies the rela-
tionship between environmental capabilities and powers, special environmental
responsibilities, and environmental leadership. Part Two re-examines the history
of US environmental diplomacy since 1970 through this framework and critically
assesses the narrative of declining US leadership and the US’s role in negotiating
special environmental responsibilities while managing rising powers. The con-
clusion relates this history to the US’s shifting aspirations as leader of the liberal
international order.
Part One: Conceptual Groundwork
The United States’ Environmental Capabilities
Few would deny the US’s status as a great power by any conventional measure. It
has the greatest military capability in the world with global reach, the largest econ-
omy in terms of nominal GDP (although China has reached number one in terms
of purchasing power parity), significant technological capacity, a large population,
a large territory, high-quality education, advanced research capabilities, and sig-
nificant diplomatic capability. The US is therefore well placed to make a significant
positive contribution to any collective international effort, including to protect the
global environment, should it choose to mobilize its considerable financial, ad-
ministrative, and technological capacity to take domestic action and support and
fund multilateral institutions, assist other states, and thereby strengthen collective
agency in pursuit of collective goals or the protection of global public goods.
Traditionally, ‘environmental capacities’ have not been included in the reper-
toire of great power capabilities, or else they are simply regarded as derivative
of traditional capabilities. In the post-Second World War period, a large ecologi-
cal footprint and, since the 1980s, rapidly growing aggregate emissions are widely
seen as by-products of being a great or emerging power. Indeed, the top aggregate
emitters in the world (China, the US, India, and Russia) are all rising or declining
great powers. While possession of state environmental capacity may be emerging
as a new source of international prestige, a marker of an advanced economy, and a
great expectations 53
necessary basis for good international environmental citizenship, it is not widely

considered a marker of great power status per se.
The OECD has sought to give greater specificity to the notion of ‘environmen-
tal capacity’ by defining it as ‘a society’s ability to identify and solve environmental
problems’ (OECD, 1994, 8). For Jänicke et al. (1997) environmental capacity refers
to the conditions for successful environmental policy, which means that the great-
est environmental aspirations in the world cannot compensate for the lack of these
capacities. These include relevant ecological, scientific, technological, and admin-
istrative knowledge; financial and legal resources; robust environmental laws and
institutions; as well as societal capacity, which includes environmental NGOs and
environmental research and education institutions, advocacy, and community
outreach.
Buzan and Falkner (Chapter 2, this volume) make a normative distinction
between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ uses of environmental power, understood as
a state’s ability to produce global environmental goods or bads. This account
goes beyond environmental capacities to include the management of national
environmental endowments and state purposes. Positive environmental power
would presuppose the possession of an adequate level of state environmental ca-
pacity. It arises when a state uses its capacities and endowments in ways that
contribute to global environmental protection. Negative environmental power,
which may or may not include state environmental capacity, arises in relation
to states that are major contributors to global environmental problems (e.g. due
to their oversized contribution to emissions, transboundary pollution, deforesta-
tion, etc.). The participation of such states is essential to successful collective
action devoted to reducing such problems. This can also give such states a greater
bargaining power in international negotiations and even raise the prospect of
‘environmental blackmail’. However, if the distinction between positive and neg-
ative environmental power is to remain consistent with a social and relational
understanding of power, then it is necessary to distinguish between state ca-
pacities and environmental endowments and how and to what end they are
exercised vis-à-vis international expectations in order to understand whether
capacities and endowments convert into ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ environmental
powers (and to what degree). For example, states that are major contributors to
a global environmental problem may have low state environmental capacity,
and this gives rise to different social expectations of what is a positive or nega-
tive environmental contribution relative to other states with high environmental
capacity.
The US is clearly well endowed with national environmental capacity, as well as
traditional capabilities. Moreover, its oversized ecological and carbon footprint
and significant capacity to generate environmental harm makes its participa-
tion essential to the success of many, if not all, MEAs. The extent to which
these capabilities and endowments are managed in ways that are recognized as
54 robyn eckersley
positive or negative depends on the US’s national and international aspirations

and international expectations.
Special Environmental Responsibilities and the United States
The classic English School (ES) account of great power responsibility rests not only
on the possession of superior military capabilities but also on the mutual recog-
nition by great powers and international society that great powers have special
responsibilities to maintain international stability and peace. In Special Responsi-
bilities: Global Problems and American Power (Bukovansky et. al 2012) (hereafter
Special Responsibilities) we argued that the allocation and discharge of special re-
sponsibilities is a site of constant political struggle in international relations, and
that the politics of conferring, claiming, accepting, and performing special re-
sponsibilities are often not in alignment. Nonetheless, the more the ‘demand’ and
‘supply’ align, the more the distribution of special responsibilities conditions legit-
imate political agency and action in an anarchic order characterized by the formal
legal equality of states and their material inequality.
Special Responsibilities also argued that the allocation of special responsibilities
varies across different policy domains. This differs from traditional ES accounts
of special responsibilities by focusing on a wider range of relevant capabilities
(not just military and economic capabilities), potential recipients (not just great
powers or states), and collective purposes (not just security concerns), while also
focusing more explicitly on the contested ethics of special responsibilities. More-
over, while the more traditional special responsibilities were attached to special
privileges (such as the special responsibility of the nuclear powers to uphold in-
ternational peace, which comes with the right of veto as a permanent member
of the UN Security Council), this is not the case with special environmental re-
sponsibilities, which has made them less attractive to the putative holders of these
responsibilities.
Here we can add one more source of variation for special responsibilities,
namely, the degree to which they challenge the existing international order, in-
cluding the hierarchy of states and the political and economic norms of the order.
Historically, special responsibilities have been restricted to great powers and the
purpose has been to maintain the peace and stability of the existing order, which
entails preserving the status quo. In contrast, special environmental responsi-
bilities seek to promote equitable sustainable development and environmental
justice, which entails a degree of redistribution of capabilities and/or entitlements
in favour of developing countries. In the climate regime, this is reflected in the
principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective
capabilities (hereafter CBDR-RC). Although these responsibilities are conferred
on developed countries, the US has nonetheless been widely singled out politi-
cally by the G77/China and many environmental NGOs as having ‘extra-special
responsibilities’ given its significant environmental capacity, its oversized ecolog-

ical footprint, and especially its historical/cumulative emissions. This offends the
US’s free market philosophy of a ‘level playing field’ and places more onerous du-
ties on the US, relative to other developed countries, to take domestic action and
assist other countries, which puts it at a relative economic disadvantage to rising
powers such as China and India. Throughout the climate negotiations, the US has
worked hard to uphold a more restrictive understanding of CBDR-RC by focusing
on differences in capacity rather than historical responsibility, drawing attention
to where future growth in emissions lies (rising powers, not the US), and gener-
ally encouraging a greater diffusion of responsibility that blurs the North–South
divide. While the US executive (as distinct from the Senate) has more often than
not accepted that developed countries should do more than poorer countries, it
has baulked at the idea that they should also go first.
Special Responsibilities and Environmental Leadership Distinguished
Special Responsibilities did not provide a systematic analysis of the relation-

ship between leadership and special responsibilities. Rather, we simply argued
that they are conceptually distinct but may nonetheless sometimes be conjoined
(Bukovansky et al., 2012: 60–61). But if special responsibilities and leadership both
entail asymmetric roles and responsibilities vis-à-vis larger communities, how
then might they be conceptually distinguished?
This is no easy task given the wide variety of meanings attached to leadership,
but necessary if we are to determine to what extent the US has played an inter-
national leadership role as a great power, or merely as developed state. Here I
distinguish between two different types of leadership that are most relevant to
global environmental governance (Eckersley, 2020). The first is the popular un-
derstanding of environmental leaders as those in the vanguard of a performance
field. This includes national front runners that go first and/or do more in terms
of their environmental ambition, advocacy, policy performance, and/or contri-
butions to multilateral funds. This type of national environmental leadership is
positional, judged in terms of the performance standards of the relevant MEA. It
includes cooperative front runners who are seeking to induce international cooper-
ation by setting a national example irrespective of whether they succeed in attracting
followers. It also includes competitive front runners (such the pioneers in a green
technology race) who seek to win at the expense of others but may nonetheless
sometimes attract followers. However, as Liefferink and Wurzel have argued (2017:
953), pioneers of this kind are not leaders if they do not intend to attract followers.
The second understanding of leadership is substantive rather than positional;
it entails a relationship between leaders and followers, based on asymmetric roles
and responsibilities, in the pursuit of a collective and shared purpose. It may be
conceptualized as
56 robyn eckersley
a process of interaction whereby one or more actors (the leaders) exercise asym-
metric influence in attracting or negotiating the consent or acquiescence of
other parties (the followers), either directly or indirectly, in ways that facili-
tate collective action towards the achievement of a common purpose in a given
community.
(Eckersley, 2020: 1179–1180)
On this account, leadership may be understood as a form of legitimated authority

that is marked off from domination or mere success in bargaining because it serves
to facilitate and/or expand collective agency in the pursuit of collective goals. What
counts as legitimate influence by the leaders and what counts as consent or acqui-
escence by followers depends on the social and institutional context. To establish
leadership in the field of international diplomacy and multilateral negotiations it
is necessary to find evidence of asymmetric influence, the building of support by
others, the successful negotiation of agreement through recognized channels and a
commitment to the collective purpose. This does not necessarily mean that leaders
must be purely altruistic (they may fold their own goals into the collective goals),
but nor can they be purely self-serving; rather, they must be recognized as commit-
ted to the negotiating community’s collective goals (Parker, Karlsson, and Hjerpe,
2015: 449).
It should be clear that this account of leadership is agential, not structural;
that is, it is understood as an artful practice by the political executive of a state
rather than a pre-given attribute of states based on superior capabilities relative
to other states in a system or international society (Eckersley, 2020: 1180). While
the possession of superior capabilities by a state, and environmental capacities in
particular, certainly confers an advantage on their diplomats—and indeed, they
raise expectations of diplomatic leadership—this only translates into leadership
when the negotiating team is seen as genuinely committed to bringing all parties
to an agreement to enable the pursuit of a collective purpose (Parker, Karlsson,
and Hjerpe, 2015).
Leadership also carries responsibilities to act in good faith and answer to the rel-
evant constituency that the leaders have created and/or serve. These are the general
leadership responsibilities. They are not special responsibilities owed to a larger
community that arise by virtue of the possession of relevant capabilities that are
essential to the achievement of the collective goals of that community. General
leadership responsibilities and special responsibilities are therefore conceptually
distinct. However, as we noted in Special Responsibilities, they may be conjoined.
For example, the burden sharing principles of CBDR-RC in the climate regime
require develop countries to ‘take the lead’ in mitigation and also provide finance
and other assistance to developing countries to assist them with mitigation and
adaptation. This provides a clear case where special responsibilities and leadership
are completely conjoined. This type of leadership requires developed countries to
play the role of a cooperative national front runner to facilitate collective action
in ways that do not disadvantage developing countries. But this is not the same as
diplomatic leadership in international negotiations.
There is no necessary connection between cooperative and competitive front-
runnership, special responsibilities, and diplomatic leadership. For example, it
is always risky for a state unilaterally to perform the role of a cooperative en-
vironmental front runner since it may play badly in domestic politics, may fail
to induce emulation by other states, and may not necessarily lead to successful
diplomatic leadership in highly contested environmental negotiations. Perform-
ing the role of a cooperative environmental front runner can nonetheless shore up
diplomatic credibility by demonstrating commitment to a collective purpose, but
there are also other ways of demonstrating commitment, such as providing signif-
icant financial and other supports, and these may suffice in leading other states to
consent to an international agreement. In contrast, competitive front runners in en-
vironmental technology races enjoy first mover advantages. When conjoined with
cooperative front-runnership, it can ease domestic political concerns about the
costs of action, while the diffusion of new technologies can also help to reduce the
general costs of collective action. As we shall see, all three types of leadership came
together for the US in the ozone negotiations, but not the climate negotiations.
Part Two: One Shining Moment
Scholarship on US environmental diplomacy tends to converge around a general

narrative of declining leadership. That is, the US gave birth to a vibrant environ-
mental movement in the 1960s and thereafter became an environmental leader in
the 1970s and 1980s, exporting environmental norms to the rest of the world and
more often than not playing a proactive role, despite a period of significant do-
mestic environmental rollback under the Reagan administration. Since the end of
the Cold War, the story goes, the US has more often than not been a laggard than
a leader (Hopgood, 1998; Soden and Steel, 1999; Paarlberg, 1999; Depledge, 2005;
DeSombre, 2005; Falkner, 2005 and 2007; Sussman, 2008; Busby, 2015; Eckersley,
2018). Efforts to play a more proactive role in the international climate negoti-
ations by the Clinton and Obama administrations have been constrained by a
hostile Senate and an increasingly polarized Congress. The Trump administra-
tion (2016–2020) appeared to vindicate this long-term shift from leader to laggard
by renouncing his predecessor’s international environmental leadership aspira-
tions and embracing the role of active international spoiler. This included taking
steps to formally withdraw from the Paris Agreement (2015) and withholding any
further contribution to the Green Climate Fund. Domestically, President Trump
oversaw a major environmental regulatory rollback. However, the new Biden ad-
ministration returned the US to the Paris Agreement and promised to ‘restore’
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the US’s leadership role in international climate diplomacy (Biden, 2020), but the
administration’s record is yet to be written.
This overarching narrative of decline appears to find support from the empiri-
cal record of US ratifications of MEAs. Of the eighteen MEAs concluded over the
period from 1970 to 1991 (with 1991 marking the disintegration of the USSR),
the US signed fifteen and ratified or acceded to twelve; this stands in contrast to
the period 1992–2016, when seventeen MEAs were concluded and the US signed
twelve but ratified only eight MEAs (Eckersley, 2018). Three of the ratifications in
the 1992–2016 period related to protocols dealing with three different air pollu-
tants under the same Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution.
If these ratifications are counted as one, then the ratification rate drops from 66%
in the period 1970–1991 to 60% in the period 1992–2016. All but three of these
ratifications occurred when the Senate was controlled by Democrats (Eckersley,
2018). The Paris Agreement is an exception since it was ratified under the Pres-
ident’s existing executive powers to regulate CO2 emissions as a pollutant under
the US Clean Air Act.
Clearly, the US has appeared to be much more willing to contribute to collec-
tive efforts to protect the global environment during the Cold War period than
the post-Cold War period. This is consistent with the US’s greater relative com-
mitment to multilateralism with its Western allies during the Cold War than the
post-Cold War period. However, treaty ratification signals willingness to cooper-
ate but is does not suffice as evidence of diplomatic leadership. Before assessing
the evidence of US leadership in environmental diplomacy, a closer examination
of the subject matter of MEAs reveals certain general patterns of enthusiasm and
disinclination that are consistent across both periods, and which provide impor-
tant clues to the US environmental proclivities and more general foreign policy
priorities.
First, the ratification record shows that the US has generally been an enthusiastic
participant in MEAs dealing with biodiversity and habitat protection, especially in
the marine environment. The US is a party to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands
(1971), the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (1972),
London Convention on Ocean Dumping (1972), World Heritage Convention
(1972), Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources
(1980), and the Madrid Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic
Treaty (1991). Moreover, at the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environ-
ment, the US was an enthusiastic supporter of the proposal for a moratorium
on whaling under the International Conventions for the Regulation of Whaling
(1946). The US’s concern for marine mammals is also reflected in US trade policy,
where it has imposed a unilateral ban on the importation of tuna that is caught
with driftnets due to the high incidental kill of dolphins, as well as a unilateral ban
on the importation of shrimp caught with a high incidental kill of sea turtles. Both
of these bans were the subject of a World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute as
unjustified restrictions on trade. Yet, unlike the European Union, the US has not
otherwise been a major green demandeur in the environmental negotiations under
the stalled Doha Development round of negotiations, although it has insisted on
environmental clauses in its negotiation of preferential trade agreements.
However, the US’s enthusiasm for the protection of biodiversity has noticeably
waned when the treaties are not ‘pure and simple’ cases of species or habitat pro-
tection but rather entangled with rights of economic exploitation. This applies to
the two most significant ‘omnibus treaties’ that seek to protect marine and terres-
trial biodiversity: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS
III) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD; 1992). In both cases the US
has not participated because the treaties were argued to be inconsistent with US
commercial interests. The Reagan administration refused to sign UNCLOS III on
the ground that the provision on the mining of deep seabed resources would re-
quire US corporations to share their seabed mining technology with other nations
(Malone, 1983). The US preferred a regime that enabled the private commercial
exploration and development of deep seabed minerals. The Bush senior adminis-
tration welcomed the biodiversity protection provisions of the CBD but rejected
the provisions relating to the sharing of biotechnology and the benefits gained
from developing genetic resources because they were not seen to provide sufficient
protection of the intellectual property rights of the US biotechnology industry
(Downes, 1993; Blomquist, 2002). The US was also critical of the provisions on
finance to developing countries, particularly Article 20(4), which makes the ex-
tent of implementation by developing countries dependent on receiving financial
resources and the transfer of technologies.
A concern to protect the commercial interests of the US biotechnology indus-
try was also central to the US’s role as a leading member of the ‘Miami group’
of countries that opposed the ‘prior informed consent’ restrictions on the trans-
boundary movement of ‘Living Modified Organisms’ (i.e. genetically modified
(GM) organisms) under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (2000), negotiated
under the under the CBD (Falkner, 2001). The US also succeeded in an action
brought under the WTO’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement against
the EU for its moratorium on the importation of GM products pending revision
of the relevant EU directives (Eckersley, 2007). The WTO rules provided a less
demanding standard than the precautionary principle embodied in the Cartagena
Biosafety Protocol, which, as a party to the Protocol, had formed part of the basis of
the EU’s defence before the WTO’s dispute settlement body. The WTO panel ruled
in favour of the US, rejecting the relevance of the Biosafety Protocol in interpreting
WTO rules, as the US was a party of the latter, but not the former.
In the area of pesticides and hazardous pollution/waste management, the US
has also been an outlier largely due to a reluctance to bring its domestic regulations
into line with international standards, some of which could not be clearly known
in advance. These concerns underpin its refusal to ratify the Basel Convention on
60 robyn eckersley
Control of the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste and their Disposal

(1989), the Rotterdam Convention on Pesticides and Industrial Chemicals (1998),
and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (2001).
Turning to climate change, the Byrd–Hagel resolution of the US Senate, issued
in June 1997, six months prior to the final negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol, is
emblematic of this general concern to protect domestic commercial interests. This
resolution declared that the Senate would not ratify the protocol if it did not re-
quire developing countries to undertake commitments in the same time period as
industrialized countries or would result in serious harm to the US economy. This
was the basis of the second Bush administration’s repudiation of the Kyoto Proto-
col in 2001, and it has also formed a plank in the Trump administration’s rejection
of the Paris Agreement.
Looking for United States Leadership
In Part One, it was argued that to establish environmental leadership (in the sub-
stantive rather than positional sense) in international diplomacy and multilateral
negotiations it is necessary to find evidence of asymmetric influence by the leader
in generating the terms of cooperation, building support and negotiating consent
in accordance with recognized multilateral processes, and a commitment by the
leader to the collective environmental purpose.
Looking back over the period from 1970 to 1991, the US’s ozone diplomacy
during the 1980s represents the greatest shining moment of US environmental
leadership, not the early 1970s. To be sure, the US was certainly a national front
runner in the early 1970s, most notably in establishing a national Environmen-
tal Protection Agency (EPA), which many other states more or less copied, along
with the Council for Environmental Quality (CEQ). But as Flippen (2008: 614)
has argued, ‘the Nixon administration witnessed the birth of modern American
environmental diplomacy’, but ‘it was a breech birth’. This was because the admin-
istration used the environment opportunistically as a means to other ends—to win
approval and dampen opposition to the Vietnam War, at home and abroad, and as
an avenue for GPM.
It was no secret that President Nixon cared little for environmental issues, but he
found himself presiding over an environmentally active and bipartisan Congress
and a period of rising public support for environmental initiatives which he prag-
matically recognized would earn him political capital (Soden and Steel, 1999:
347–348). Henry Kissinger, and Russel Train (chair of the CEQ and Nixon’s envi-
ronmental envoy), saw environmental diplomacy as providing a potential avenue
for détente with the Soviet Union, given strong public environmental concern in
the US and serious environmental degradation in the Soviet Union (Flippen, 2008:
626). This resulted in the signing of the US–USSR Agreement on Cooperation in
the Field of Environmental Protection in May 1972, which covered areas such as
air and water pollution, animal conservation, and forestry (Flippen, 2008: 626).
The Nixon administration also seized on the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the
Human Environment as an opportunity to win favour, and it took steps to ensure
the participation of the People’s Republic of China, even though it was not then
officially recognized (Flippen, 2008: 626).
The primary evidence that is usually cited for US international leadership in the
early 1970s is its support for the establishment of the United Nations Environment
Program (UNEP) with a pledge to provide 40% of a $100 million fund to support
the fledgling programme. Yet it is noteworthy that the US also objected to the idea
of additional funding to support developing countries (Hopgood, 1998: 79), which
represented an incipient form of special responsibilities. Moreover, the US’s en-
vironmental reputation was tarnished at Stockholm when the host, Olaf Palme,
prime minister of Sweden, referred to the US’s use of the defoliant Agent Orange
in the Vietnam War as ‘ecocide’ (Flippen, 2008: 631). The US’s strong support for
the resolution recommending a ten-year moratorium on commercial whaling is
also treated as evidence of US leadership, but this resolution subsequently failed
to muster a two-thirds majority in the International Whaling Commission. This
does not constitute leadership because the US failed to attract the necessary fol-
lowship. In all, the Nixon administration had the domestic support to do much
more on the international stage but it lacked the commitment and it was soon
overwhelmed by the Watergate scandal and the energy crisis.
In contrast, the US’s ozone diplomacy stands out as the most successful case of
diplomatic leadership in relation to the most successful MEA in the post-Second
World War period. This was also a case where the US EPA was a clear cooperative
front runner at the domestic level in the regulation of ozone-depleting substances
and where the US chemical industry was a clear competitive front runner in
developing technological substitutes for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These two
developments provided the impetus for the US’s energetic diplomatic leadership,
which succeed in building support for the CFC phase-out while also preserving
the competitive advantage of the US chemical industry. This treaty also pioneered
the use of a multilateral fund to assist developing countries while also affording
them a longer time period in which to conform to the phase-out, which provided
an emergent form of special responsibilities for developed countries. But, unlike
the climate negotiations, these responsibilities were uncontroversial since the vast
bulk of ozone-depleting substances were manufactured by developed countries.
Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA had phased out non-essential CFC aerosols
in 1978, making the US a cooperative front runner in protecting the ozone later.
Although US CFC producers had initially opposed the EPA’s unilateral domestic
phase-out, they changed position once they had devised a technological substitute
for CFCs, making the US industry a competitive front runner in the technologi-
cal race to find alternatives to CFCs. These twin developments provided a strong
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domestic basis for the US executive to build international support for a phase-out,
which would also enable the international ‘export’ or internationalization of its
domestic ozone regulations (DeSombre, 2000: 93–94). As Benedick (1991: 55–67)
notes, the US campaign utilized its embassies around the world to explain the US
negotiating position and build support, beginning with like-minded countries and
then reaching out to non-like-minded countries (Benedick, 1991: 55–67).
It is no small irony that this leadership occurred under a president who was
not known for his environmental sympathies. Indeed, President Reagan presided
over a major rollback in domestic environmental regulation and expenditure.
However, following the discovery of the ‘hole over Antarctica’ the US State
Department, working closely with major CFC producers, such as Dupont and
Allied Chemical, as well as the US EPA, mounted a concerted and successful
diplomatic campaign to build international consensus for a complete phase out
in the production and trade of ozone depleting under the Montreal Protocol
1987 (Benedick, 1991: 55–67; DeSombre, 2000: 93–94). The Reagan administra-
tion’s ozone diplomacy clearly qualifies as international environmental leadership
because it intentionally and actively built an agreement to further a collective goal
(ozone protection).
However, when we turn to the US’s role in the development of the climate
regime, which contains much more substantial and consequential special respon-
sibilities than the ozone regime, we see significant oscillation. Over the period
1992–2020, the US’s involvement has swung from mere cooperation based on
significant concessions (under President Bush senior), to frustrated leadership
(under President Clinton), to defection (under President Bush junior), prag-
matic leadership (under President Obama), spectacular defection (under Presi-
dent Trump), and, finally, a renewed and strengthened commitment to climate
leadership (under President Biden).
The Obama administration’s role in the negotiation of the Paris Agreement,
which entailed the reinterpretation of CBDR-RC as part of a process of GPM,
stands out as a much stronger example of leadership than the Nixon administra-
tion’s role at Stockholm and was much more significant and consequential than
the diplomacy of the Clinton administration at Kyoto.
However, unlike the Reagan administration, this was not a great shining mo-
ment, since the Obama administration faced significant domestic opposition and
intense international disagreement, so its diplomacy was more constrained and
pragmatic. But it clearly qualifies as leadership on the basis of the Obama admin-
istration’s expressed commitment to lead, clear evidence of asymmetric influence
in shaping the mitigation architecture of the Paris Agreement, and success in
building support in ways that were consistent with multilateral practices (unlike
the Copenhagen negotiations). Climate change was a legacy issue for President
Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, and the US provided the largest sin-
gle contribution to the Green Climate Fund. The idea of nationally determined
contributions and a hybrid treaty came from the US (US, 2013: 2), and these
ideas were also central to the US’s bilateral diplomacy with China. This diplomacy
yielded the crucial joint US–China statement in Beijing in November 2014, which
declared both parties’ nationally determined contributions and their commitment
to a successful treaty. Indeed, the formula ‘in light of national circumstances’ in
the joint statement represented a significant rapprochement on the interpretation
of CBDR-RC and found its way into the Paris treaty text. This was followed up
with a second joint statement prior to the Paris meeting. The Obama administra-
tion’s diplomacy was pragmatic in improvising around domestic and international
deadlock by promoting a new agreement that would provide considerable national
flexibility to draw in the major emitters, especially China and India, while also in-
cluding provisions for the deepening of commitment over time. This also required
making concessions on the long-term temperature targets (including 1.5 degrees)
to the High Ambition Coalition to win the support of the vulnerable states at Paris.
However, unlike the ozone negotiations, the US was not a clear cooperative or
competitive national front runner in climate performance (although some sub-
national jurisdictions such as California arguably qualify). Although the Obama
administration’s Clean Power Plan represented a significant step up from all pre-
vious national initiatives, the US’s targets were modest when set against the US’s
environmental capabilities and carbon footprint (historical, aggregate, and per
capita). Moreover, this plan bypassed a deeply polarized Congress and relied on
the president’s existing executive powers to regulate CO2 emissions as a danger-
ous pollutant under the US Clean Air Act. This had the advantage of avoiding the
need for the advice and consent of the Senate, but the strategy also rested on the
hope that a future Senate might find the national flexibility of the Paris Agreement
acceptable (Wirth, 2016).
Finally, an understanding of the US’s climate diplomacy would be incomplete
without a critical examination of US energy policy, which has been central to
both the economic and security dimensions of US grand strategy. In the same
year that the US repudiated the Kyoto Protocol, the Bush–Cheney National Energy
Policy responded to shortages in oil and gas by stepping up domestic and inter-
national supply (rather than reducing domestic demand), by allowing drilling in
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and taking steps to enhance access to over-
seas supplies, including in the Persian Gulf, to keep oil prices low. Despite the
Obama administration’s commitment to action on climate change, it supported
an ‘all of the above’ energy strategy, which put no brakes on the steady climb in
the domestic production of gas and oil enabled by the technological revolution
in hydraulic fracturing. The Trump administration sought to accelerate domes-
tic fossil fuel production, including attempts to revive coal production, which has
been in general decline due to the falling price of gas. According to the US En-
ergy Information Administration, the US overtook Russia as the world’s biggest
producer of gas in 2011, and in 2018 it overtook Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest
64 robyn eckersley
petroleum producer. The increase in production in 2018 was declared to be ‘one of

the largest absolute petroleum and natural gas production increases from a single
country in history’ (EIA, 2019). These developments are deeply inconsistent with
the fundamental objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Cli-
mate Change (UNFCCC, 1992) and the temperature targets and long-term goals
of the Paris Agreement.
MacNeil and Paterson (2020) provide a very different evaluation of the US’s cli-
mate diplomacy, as distinct from national climate policy. They characterize US
climate diplomacy as oscillating between ‘hegemonic multilateralism, imposing
US preferences on the world, and a retreat to isolationist rejectionism’, and they
see this ‘leadership’ versus ‘isolation’ as ‘the flipside of each other: each competing
expressions of US attempts at political dominance’ (5).
I do not take issue with their critical assessment of the inadequacy of US
national climate policy. MacNeil and Paterson are also right to note that US
leadership in the climate negotiations is mostly divorced from national climate
performance. However, their assessment of US climate diplomacy may be chal-
lenged on both conceptual and evidentiary grounds. They make no conceptual
distinction between national front-runnership and diplomatic leadership (and
assume the former must necessarily be part of the latter), or between interna-
tional leadership, hegemony, and domination. At issue here is whether success
by a great power in shaping a regime is always tantamount to domination ir-
respective of whether it is achieved by via bribery, coercion or negotiated con-
sent, and irrespective of the personal commitments of the political executive,
especially the president and secretary of state. If the concept of international
leadership is to have any added value, then it needs to be conceptually distin-
guished from domination and mere success in bargaining (where self-interest
is the only driver). The foregoing account of leadership shows how leader-
ship can be distinguished: it requires not just asymmetric influence but also a
commitment by the political executive to a collective (rather than purely self-
ish) purpose, the building of support by others through established multilat-
eral processes in artful ways that can manage deep-seated disagreement and
provide concessions to ensure the participation of all parties. It should not
be forgotten that the US was not the only party to require national flexibil-
ity (e.g. China, India, Russia, to name only a few) and that the EU could not
win support for legally binding emission reduction obligations. Without the
Obama administration’s committed diplomacy, including its decision to join
the High Ambition Coalition, an agreement would not have been reached.
This account rests on a neo-Gramscian approach to the consent: that which
is minimally needed to acquire political acceptance. (Eckersley, 2020: 1184).
This is not a very high bar, but it excludes resorting to coercion to hold sway be-
cause this is a sure sign of lack of political acceptance and therefore a failure of
leadership.
Unlike neo-Gramscian approaches in IR, classical ES theory has focused on

great power responsibility (rather than leadership) and assumed that GPM is fun-
damentally about security. Buzan and Falkner (Chapter 2 this volume) and Cui
and Buzan (2016) have tracked the growth of the non-traditional security agenda,
including climate change, and suggested that this is creating pressure for a merger
of GPM with global governance. However, the long history of deep disagree-
ment between the US and China in the climate negotiations is less about security
(traditional or otherwise) and more about efforts to protect their economic com-
petitiveness in an increasingly globalized capitalist economy. The brief period of
cooperation between the US and China leading to the Paris endgame reveals the
deep conservatism of GPM, in this case, in preserving rather than transforming the
economic status quo. The rapprochement over CBDR-RC between the world’s two
biggest emitters acknowledged and preserved their respective rights to make their
own national judgments about mitigation ambitions, leaving them unshackled by
any formal obligation to take on a larger burden of emissions reductions. This was
not about security; indeed, both parties have generally resisted efforts to bring
climate change within the purview of the UN Security Council (see Scott, this vol-
ume). In many respects, the Paris Agreement has returned full circle to the pledge
and review model in the UNFCCC, where the parties made a non-binding com-
mitment to reduce their emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. At Rio in 1992, President
Bush senior had made it clear that the US would not commit to the UNFCCC if it
included binding targets and timetables. At Paris, the Obama administration com-
mitted to a binding timetable of emissions reductions and nationally determined
rather than internationally negotiated targets.
Ironically, the US Department of Defence (DoD) and National Intelligence
Council have taken the security implications of climate change more seriously
than Congress. From as early as 1990, but particularly since the early 2000s, the
DoD has examined these implications, including on the US military’s infrastruc-
ture, operations, and missions (Werrell and Femia, 2017). It has also taken steps
to improve its resilience to climate change by increasing energy efficiency and
promoting renewable energy (DoD, 2014; 2015; 2019). At times this has put it
increasingly at odds with Congress and sometimes out of step with the president.
While the Obama administration’s 2015 National Defense Strategy gave promi-
nence to climate change, the Trump administration eliminated any such reference
in the 2018 National Security Strategy.
Conclusion
This chapter has challenged the generic narrative of declining US environmen-

tal diplomatic leadership by parsing MEAs into different issue areas and showing
different patterns in US environmental diplomacy across these areas. Moreover,
66 robyn eckersley
conceptually disentangling national front-runnership (in both its competitive and

cooperative forms) from international diplomatic leadership shows that Stock-
holm may have marked the launch of the US’s attempted diplomatic environ-
mental leadership (Busby, 2015), but it was opportunistic, anaemic, and did not
attract sufficient followers. It therefore marked a low entry point from which to
climb, rather than a high point from which to decline. The high point of US en-
vironmental leadership was, ironically, its ozone diplomacy in the 1980s under
an anti-environmental president. The high point of US climate leadership thus far
is the Paris negotiations, but this was followed by a dramatic reversal under the
Trump administration. However, President Biden has clearly signalled that his ad-
ministration will do more than simply return to and maintain the climate legacy of
President Obama, whom he served as vice-president. As a presidential candidate,
Biden laid down his climate commitments in clear terms:
The United States must lead the world to take on the existential threat we face—
climate change. If we don’t get this right, nothing else will matter. I will make
massive, urgent investments at home that put the United States on track to have
a clean energy economy with net-zero emissions by 2050. Equally important, be-
cause the United States creates only 15 percent of global emissions, I will leverage
our economic and moral authority to push the world to determined action. I will
rejoin the Paris climate agreement on day one of a Biden administration and then
convene a summit of the world’s major carbon emitters, rallying nations to raise
their ambitions and push progress further and faster.
(Biden, 2020: 6)
The GPM dimension in this climate diplomacy is also clear. In relation to China,
Biden’s diplomatic plans include pressuring China to stop financing fossil fuel en-
ergy projects as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. However, consistent with the
golden thread running through US environmental diplomacy, Biden has also sig-
nalled that his administration would pursue ‘strong measures to make sure other
nations can’t undercut the United States economically as we meet our own com-
mitments’ (Biden, 2020: 6). While president-elect, Biden appointed John Kerry
as his special envoy on climate change, and he has assembled a progressive en-
vironmental and economic cabinet to take a ‘whole of government’ approach to
climate change at the domestic level (Friedman, 2020). He has also signalled that
the climate challenge will be prioritized in his economic recovery plans in response
to the pandemic (Tankersley and Friedman, 2020). However, legislating Biden’s
climate agenda is unlikely to be plain sailing given the Democrats’ narrow majority
in the House and bare majority in the Senate.
The conceptual framework on leadership in Part One helps to clarify the con-
ditions that are most conducive to international environmental leadership for
the US: an alignment of cooperative and competitive national front-runnership
with the goals of the international regime. However, such an alignment has
been relatively rare. This is not simply due to the US’s fragmented political sys-
tem of checks and balances, which tends to produce a status quo bias against
environmental regulatory change. We have also seen that a general concern
to protect the competitiveness of US industry, whether the chemical, pharma-
ceutical, biotechnology, or fossil fuel industries, has remained a central thread
running through the US’s history of environmental diplomacy. While it has
been a more emphatic preoccupation of Republican than Democratic presi-
dents, it has remained an enduring preoccupation of the US Senate. Indeed,
it is a singular achievement of the US Senate that it has remained a major
constraining force on the US’s climate diplomacy in general, and international
climate leadership in particular, and therefore a major constraining force on
an expansive interpretation and implementation of special climate responsibil-
ities of developed countries in general. The renewable energy revolution will
chip away at congressional resistance to decarbonization, but it remains to
be seen whether this will occur fast enough to produce a strong, virtuous,
and timely alignment between President Biden’s international climate leadership
aspirations and national climate performance.
Although the US Senate has been reluctant to import environmental norms and
standards from elsewhere, it has supported the export of US standards to the rest
of the world. As Busby puts it, ‘virtually every successful international (environ-
mental) regime has its roots in US domestic law’ (Busby, 2015: 253). This pattern
of ‘environmental exemptionalism’ for the US, which is consistent with the gen-
eral idea of US exceptionalism, signals a clear rejection of the general idea of great
power environmental responsibility.
The US case study suggests that the ES approach to GPM should be linked to not
only the management of international security but also the management of the in-
ternational economic order, particularly between incumbent and rising economic
powers. Special environmental responsibilities that require incumbent powers to
cede economic advantages to rising powers are always going to be challenging.
Moreover, drawing these connections highlights a ‘clash of responsibilities’ for
the US in relation to the global environment and the liberal economic order it
has led since 1945. Global environmental protection and ecologically sustainable
development have never formed part of the US grand strategy.
Bernstein (2020) has argued that great powers have not been willing recipients
of special environmental responsibilities in part because there are no necessary
links between the capabilities that can promote system stability and environ-
mental capabilities and in part because the trend in global environmental gover-
nance has been towards a greater diffusion and decentralization of environmental
responsibility towards a wider range of actors and across all levels of governance.
He sees benefits in the latter development because it enables more diffuse and
distributed leadership, and therefore progress on climate action. Yet, if global
68 robyn eckersley
environmental problems are understood as systemically produced by an expand-

ing global capitalist economy, then the proactive use by ‘systemic players’ of their
economic capabilities is essential if indiscriminate growth under capitalism is ever
to be replaced with an equitable and ecologically sustainable post-growth economy
on a global scale. The Catch-22 problem associated with the increasing diffusion
and decentralization of environmental responsibility is that it has reduced pressure
on great powers like the US to employ their systemic capabilities in the service of
global climate protection and ecologically sustainable development. The US is one
of the few great powers that has the potential to make the single biggest difference
to catalyzing global action in response to irreversible global ecological systemic
problems like climate change where time is of the essence. But this requires the US
to commit to building a green international economic order. Biden may be the first
president to attempt a recalibration of this strategy, but his version of a green new
deal is based on green growth rather than a vision of a post-growth international
economic order.
References
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4
China as a ‘Partial’ Environmental
Great Power
Pichamon Yeophantong and Evelyn Goh
Introduction
How do we recognize an ‘environmental great power’ when we see one? How do

great powers wield ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ power in the contested realm of global
environmental governance, against the background of ever deeper pluralism in
international society? And how should we conceive of the rights and responsibili-
ties of environmental great powers? To answer these core questions posed by this
volume (see Falkner and Buzan, Chapter 1), we would ideally need to share sta-
ble understandings about an essential great power identity and what constitutes
‘great power-hood’. Yet, as the editors and other contributors in this volume note,
no easy agreement exists on these matters in international relations. In the Chi-
nese case, these assumptions run into acute problems, both in terms of China’s
self-ascription and recognition from others.
While China may appear to others to be an obvious environmental great power
due to its capability to cause environmental harm or provide environmental goods,
Chinese views on this subject are less straightforward. We posit that this is because
of two fundamental dualities in the Chinese condition. First, Chinese leaders and
policymakers hold a dualistic self-image of China, both as a developing country
and a great power. In this regard, China is the most prominent of that new gener-
ation of great powers breaking the Western mould of leadership that stipulates
industrialization and modernity as necessary conditions for great power status
(Buzan and Lawson, 2015). In what follows, we show the implications of this dual-
ity for China’s exercise of environmental power. Second, in terms of environmen-
tal degradation, Chinese actors are at once major perpetrators as well as victims.
For instance, China is one of the world’s leading carbon emitters; yet it is also prone
to a wide spectrum of extreme weather events and natural disasters that are exac-
erbated by global climate change. By the same token, China’s huge developmental
achievements have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, but can also generate
enormous local, national, transboundary, and global socio-ecological harm.
Pichamon Yeophantong and Evelyn Goh, China as a ‘Partial’ Environmental Great Power. In: Great Powers, Climate Change,
and Global Environmental Responsibilities. Edited by Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan, Oxford University Press.
72 yeophantong and goh
This ‘identity paradox’ results in China’s chequered—selective, inconsistent,

and non-linear—track record in promoting environmental protection and gov-
ernance. Consider, for example, how China’s world-leading policy commitment
to the renewable energy revolution (IRENA, 2019) has ironically reinforced the
country’s longstanding and controversial preoccupation with hydropower projects
that have significant adverse environmental repercussions (see Yeophantong,
2017; Yeophantong, 2020). More recently, President Xi Jinping’s pledge for China
to become carbon-neutral by 2060 (McGrath, 2020) seems discordant with how
Chinese companies (many state owned) are increasingly building coal-fired power
plants abroad (Inskeep and Westerman, 2020). To deal with this identity para-
dox, we need to pay sustained attention to the variegated ways in which Chinese
policymakers and leaders approach global environmental responsibility and lead-
ership. This chapter asks: how and to what extent does China define and act on its
environmental responsibilities as a great power?
We argue that China is a partial environmental great power. That is, while
China’s ‘negative’ or structural power in the global, regional, and national en-
vironmental realms is stark and clear, its ‘positive’ power or potential to act in
favour of environmental responsibility is less obvious and as yet indeterminate.
Not only does its identity paradox result in some reluctance on Beijing’s part to don
the mantle of great power-hood, but because the Chinese leadership continues to
prioritize the key imperatives of securing regime stability, economic growth, and
its international status, China’s policy behaviour in the environmental domain is
only partly motivated by concerns about environmental protection or sustainabil-
ity. Concerns about political risk, legitimacy, or status and about economic profit,
risk, or losses play very large roles. Thus, the Chinese state and its decision makers
constantly need to balance and mediate between multiple constituencies and in-
terests that impinge on how it adopts and acts on its environmental responsibilities
at home and abroad.
The following analysis unfolds in four parts. The first section sets out how China
qualifies, at present, as a ‘partial’ environmental great power. That China’s policy
behaviour is not purely shaped by environmental concerns is, of course, not a par-
ticularly surprising observation; nor is China unique in this regard. As seen in this
volume’s other chapters, contending interests and policy priorities likewise un-
derlie US, European, and Brazilian environmental policies. The more important
point is how environmental protection, responsibility, and leadership continue to
manifest in China’s foreign and strategic policy agendas in spite of, and alongside,
its other imperatives of regime security, economic growth, and international sta-
tus. The second and third sections present two thematic cases, probing China’s
policy behaviour as an environmental great power across two prominent issue-
areas: global climate change and the so-called ‘greening’ of the Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI) with a focus on renewable energy projects. These two sections
unpack how the contingent interaction of environmental concerns with (geo)
china as a ‘partial’ environmental great power 73
political, economic, and commercial interests shapes the perception and perfor-
mance of China’s environmental great power responsibilities in the global and
regional spheres respectively. The fourth section concludes with the implications
of our findings about China for power and great power responsibility in the global
environmental realm.
Before proceeding further, two caveats are in order. First, our use of the term
‘China’ constitutes a necessary abstraction. China is not a monolithic actor given
the diverse cast of subnational and non-state actors that operate within the envi-
ronmental governance space. Indeed, this applies to the case of China as much
as it does to other great powers—as is evident from the chapters on the EU and
the US in this volume. Second, because there is no single established definition
of environmental great power responsibility at the global level (Bernstein, 2020),
we must expect variations in how states define and act upon their environmental
responsibilities. For this reason, this chapter makes no assumptions or normative
adjudications about whether China is a positive or negative environmental great
power in absolute terms. Instead, we accept that China is akin to a chameleon in
this regard: depending on the context and issue at hand, China’s negative and pos-
itive uses of power that either weaken or strengthen environmental outcomes will
often coexist and intertwine.
Conceptualizing China’s Environmental Power
This section develops upon the definition of environmental great power-hood

used in this volume, assuming that it is informed by three elements: the state’s
(a) identity, i.e. its self-identification and others’ recognition of it as a great power;
(b) capability, i.e. its ability and willingness to affect significantly global envi-
ronmental outcomes; and (c) culpability, i.e. its involvement in causing major
environmental harm. We first investigate the related aspects of China’s capabil-
ity and culpability, before turning to an evaluation of its identity, to account for
why China is best understood as a partial environmental great power.
Capability and Culpability
Capability is the combination of political will and state capacity; we might have
a situation in which an environmental great power’s capability is relatively weak
because the policy rhetoric and decision makers may be willing, but the state’s
monitoring or legislative capacity is limited. Culpability is intimately connected
to capability if we focus on the potential for culpability by negligence, i.e. when a
state does not enforce agreed environmental regulations and thereby causes
ecological harm to others.
In the contemporary era, China’s spectacular economic development interacts

with the sheer size of its population and land mass to endow it with significant
structural and systemic power, in the sense that many of its actions and policy
decisions are ecologically consequential on a transnational scale. By any objective
measure of capability and culpability, China would appear to fit the trappings of
an environmental great power, as understood in this volume. It has control over
a vast amount of natural resources—it is home to four of the world’s 36 biodiver-
sity hotspots that are ‘of vital importance to the health of the global environment’
(Cai et al., 2019). China also has in place a complex (even if still-developing) en-
vironmental governance regime made up of domestic environmental legislation
and multilateral environmental agreements. Yet, China has enormous capacity to
cause transboundary environmental harm: one major and recurrent example be-
ing the problem of ‘yellow dust’, which is the result of serious desertification in
northern China and annually pollutes the air in neighbouring Japan and South
Korea (Park, 2017).
These observations reflect the country’s identity paradox, which not only serves
to underscore the limits of Chinese power but also gives rise to a continuum of
contending realities. A common criticism of China’s environmental performance
centres on how Beijing possesses the resources to effect positive change but lacks
the willpower to do so—this is the charge of culpability-by-incapability or negli-
gence. This critique draws attention to the decentralized nature of China’s environ-
mental governance system, which renders domestic authority over environmental
regulation necessarily diffused. It also helps to spotlight the sizeable challenges
that China faces in enforcing environmental protection across a huge diversity of
issue-areas, which individually and collectively test the authority and capabilities
even of a strong central state. Consider the example of the illegal wildlife trade. The
Chinese government has actively promulgated new laws and established a range of
domestic and transnational mechanisms to strengthen interagency and interstate
coordination to curtail the trade and enforce CITES (the Convention on Inter-
national Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), but these efforts
have borne limited results. That China continues to be the world’s largest con-
sumer market for illicit wildlife and their derivatives, despite this raft of legal and
institutional mechanisms, is testament to the relative weakness of China’s diffused
environmental governance system (Jiao, Yeophantong, and Lee, 2021).
At the same time, the capability of an environmental great power can be limited
by unintended consequences resulting from policy choices in the environmental
space. Even when well intentioned, Chinese policy actions may engender negative
results that were not foreseen by Beijing. A classic instance arose in the mid-2000s,
when directives from the central government to the provinces to decrease the
country’s carbon emissions led some local governments to suddenly shut down
coal power plants, effectively depriving many rural homes of heating in the depths
of winter.
By now, China has a well-publicized record in terms of sheer culpability, in

the sense of knowingly causing ecological harm. One prominent example con-
cerns Chinese-backed hydropower development on the Lancang-Mekong River,
described as Southeast Asia’s ecological and economic ‘lifeblood’ (DeSombre,
2020). Even though Beijing presents these hydropower projects as a green en-
ergy alternative to fossil fuels, the negative social and environmental ramifica-
tions for downstream states and communities have generated much debate and
controversy (Johnson, 2020). To assuage external criticism of its secrecy and
unilateralism, Beijing sought to display ‘responsible leadership’ by establishing
the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) mechanism in 2016 to address the
‘economic, social and environmental challenges faced by the sub-region’ (Ministry
of Foreign Affairs (China), 2016). Even so, China continues to refuse membership
of other multilateral environmental development governance institutions like the
United Nations-affiliated Mekong River Commission, and continues to prioritize
its unilateral water-use rights as the uppermost riparian state (Wong and Siow,
2021). Over the past three decades, China’s actions in this major transboundary
river basin have resulted in a fair amount of straightforward culpability for the
detrimental effects on communities, livelihoods, and economic and ecological sus-
tainability in downstream Southeast Asian states. However, it is important to note
the geographical-political context here which also creates a cascade of culpabil-
ities in the Mekong basin: every riparian state is culpable, through its own dam
building, water diversion, and pollution, for socio-ecological degradation in other
states further downstream (Goh, 2007).
Identity
What are the special responsibilities of an environmental great power? And is

it possible to expect ‘special’ responsibilities from a still-developing country like
China? As Robyn Eckersley observes in her chapter, most environmental regimes
seen in the world today incorporate general responsibilities that apply to all states;
only a few such regimes include ‘special environmental responsibilities for cer-
tain states’, and these differentiations tend to ‘fall along a North-South axis rather
than the division between great powers and the ‘the rest” (Chapter 3, this volume).
Thus, in this chapter we are less interested in debating what China’s special duties
and obligations ought to be, and more focused on how Chinese policymakers con-
ceive of their environmental responsibilities, the ways in which these conceptions
interact with China’s self-ascribed identities, and how these responsibilities are
subsequently enacted.
To ascertain how China understands the notion of ‘special’ responsibilities, it
is important to first look at its identity conceptions. As Buzan and Falkner ob-
serve, great power-hood is predicated not solely on a state’s material capabilities
but also on its recognition by others and on its acceptance of the special duties that
come with this status (Chapter 2, this volume). As such, the idea of ‘great power’
becomes normatively loaded. Particularly in the Chinese political context, it may
conjure the spectre of ‘big power chauvinism’ (daguo shawen zhuyi) that spurred
Maoist China’s deep-seated aversion to being externally perceived as a ‘great
power’ (the Chinese word ‘daguo’ can be translated to connote both ‘big’ or ‘great’
power) or ‘hegemon’ (see New China News Agency, 1966). Despite this historical
reluctance to embrace great power status, however, it appears that Chinese leaders
do currently see the country as an environmentally responsible great power. Sur-
veying the country’s official pronouncements and state-run media, it is striking
how the language of ‘responsible great power’ (fuzeren de daguo) has permeated
Chinese policy rhetoric ever since Robert Zoellick’s 2005 ‘responsible stakeholder’
speech (Yeophantong, 2013). This language of responsibility also features notably
in the country’s environmental policy rhetoric, especially vis-à-vis climate change
(People’s Daily, 2018). And yet, this identity does still sit awkwardly alongside
China’s self-image as a developing country that ought to shoulder ‘special’ or dif-
ferentiated obligations compared to those of developed states. As demonstrated
in the climate change case below, this is evinced by Beijing’s abiding focus on
promoting ‘South–South cooperation’ and ‘protecting’ the rights and interests of
developing countries.
That said, although the Chinese government still cleaves to the country’s ‘Global
South’ affinity, China has undoubtedly emerged as a—if at times reluctant—
powerbroker in wider global and regional forums. Speaking to the managerial
function of great powers, Beijing’s capacity to shape multilateral environmental
negotiations, including the global climate talks, has increased over time in line
with the country’s growing politico-economic clout—a trend that was particularly
pronounced during the Trump administration, which had abandoned any ambi-
tion for US environmental leadership (Hook and Hornby, 2018). Crucially, this
growing global role has also been matched by internal developments. Over the past
decade, Beijing has adopted new ‘vertical’ forms of leadership, giving provincial
and local authorities more responsibility and accountability to the central govern-
ment for a spectrum of environmental issue-areas ranging from air pollution and
afforestation to renewable energy technology and sustainable agriculture (Meng,
Chen, and Yeophantong, 2020). As environmental problems such as ‘dying’ rivers
(e.g. the Yellow River) and ‘cancer villages’ have come to feature prominently
within the domestic policy agenda, Beijing’s commitment to building an ‘ecolog-
ical civilization’ (shengtai wenming) at home can mutually reinforce the country’s
broader commitment to global environmental protection.
In sum, China is best understood as a partial environmental great power.
China’s ‘negative’ or structural power in the global, regional, and national envi-
ronmental realms is clear in terms of culpability and capability, while its ‘positive’
power or potential to act in favour of international environmental responsibility
is less obvious and as yet indeterminate. Chinese ‘leadership’ in certain envi-

ronmental areas is not necessarily viewed as desirable by domestic and external
constituencies, and Chinese leadership also cannot be expected to always yield
‘better’ environmental outcomes given the confluence of collateral effects and un-
intended consequences. Even so, Beijing has come to accept—often gradually and
patchily—the idea that, as the ‘major developing country’, it occupies a unique
position of power, one that does come with certain duties and obligations to pro-
tect the global environment. These ongoing transitions in perception, policy, and
interest generate a selective, inconsistent, and non-linear pattern of engagement
with and leadership in environmental protection and governance. The following
case studies allow us to unpack these trends in more detail.
China as a Global Environmental Power: Climate Change
As the ultimate global, complex problem, the issue of climate change offers nu-
merous opportunities for gathering insights into the global aspect of China’s
environmental power. Accounts of China’s role in climate change and its gover-
nance often begin with figures that capture convincingly its negative structural
power: the fact that it is responsible for approximately 26% of global carbon emis-
sions, continues to be the largest net coal consumer (accounting for 64% of the
global total), and is a major financier of fossil fuel projects globally, with over 70%
of the world’s coal power plants believed to be dependent on Chinese financing
(White, 2020).
There is a flip side to this structural power: should China alter its coal depen-
dency and promotion, it will have a disproportionate positive effect on global emis-
sions. Hence, President Xi’s 2020 pledge for China to achieve carbon-neutrality by
2060 is potentially game-changing at the global level. While it is too early to gauge
how the Chinese leadership will uphold this pledge—at the time of writing, the
14th Five-Year Plan was just released—ongoing shifts in government policy are
important indicators of Beijing’s sense of exigency vis-à-vis climate change threats
and its recognition of the country’s potential to exercise positive environmental
power. Within Chinese policymaking circles, climate change is now viewed as both
a political and security challenge. Beyond its immediate implications for China’s
energy security, there are growing concerns about the consequences of climate
change for national security, and the People’s Liberation Army has reportedly set
up expert commissions and specialized bodies to investigate these urgent prob-
lems (Brzoska, 2012). At the domestic level, the acute problem of air pollution has
already been the subject of policy focus for nearly a decade. A set of comprehensive
plans are being implemented in major Chinese cities, aimed at phasing out the use
of coal stoves and small boilers in the residential sector (from 2020, new regula-
tions required households to convert to natural gas supplies), as well as retrofitting
coal-fired power and sintering plants, along with other carbon-intensive indus-
tries (International Energy Agency, 2020). Although coal continues to be central
to China’s energy supply, with coal consumption having increased during the
Covid-19 pandemic (Reuters, 2021), the pandemic has nonetheless accentuated
the need for China to diversify its energy sources and turn its attention more to
developing the country’s digital economy, as opposed to its heavy industry, in the
long term. This comes at a time when, on the world stage, Beijing has demonstrated
greater ‘climate activism’ by filling the leadership vacuum left by the US under
former president Trump and boosting hopes of an economic coalition forming be-
tween China and the EU in the wake of their ambitious climate pledges (Ambrose,
2020).
Climate change entails multiple and intertwined complex problems at the
global, regional, and national levels. Due to space constraints, this section cannot
examine the details involved in the panoply of China’s domestic and international
climate-related policies and actions. We focus on two areas—China’s changing
agenda at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ne-
gotiations and its green technology transfers to developing countries—in order
to distil how Beijing’s conceptions of the country’s role and responsibility within
a polycentric climate governance space have evolved. While we are interested in
unpacking the ‘global’ aspects of China’s environmental power, it is crucial to
note that Chinese policymakers do not see a unitary global audience; instead they
regard the global realm as fractured into multiple hierarchies and differentiated
constituencies (Clark 2011; see also Goh, 2013). Significantly, the climate change
realm shows that China’s self-identification as a ‘responsible great power’ is less
pronounced than its identification and discourse about being the ‘responsible ma-
jor developing power’. It would seem, for Beijing, the main expression of ‘special
responsibility’ in climate change takes the form of showing leadership among de-
veloping countries and protecting the interests of the Global South in particular.
These two factors help to explain the ways in which geopolitics, security, and sta-
tus considerations intersect with environmental ones in China’s growing exercise
of environmental great power.
Negotiating the Global Climate
Discrepancies have historically existed between China’s domestic and interna-

tional climate strategies. Whereas the country’s domestic climate policy has been
notably ambitious in its efforts to reduce fossil fuel reliance and flatten carbon
emissions, Beijing’s international climate diplomacy has had a more conservative
focus on safeguarding China’s—and other developing countries’—right to develop
under the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ (CBDR) principle. Even so,
China’s participation at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP
21) marked a noticeable shift in Beijing’s projection of a greater degree of climate

leadership. Compared to the mixed reception of China’s performance at COP
15 in Copenhagen six years earlier, where then-president Hu Jintao had pledged
‘impressive’ but not sufficiently ‘concrete’ emission targets, Beijing’s role in the
lead-up to the Paris Agreement was, overall, positively regarded by other parties
(Gao, 2018). China’s commitment to invigorated climate leadership was especially
evident from its climate diplomacy ahead of the conference, which saw China ink-
ing bilateral agreements on climate change and clean energy with a selection of
countries, including India, Germany, and most notably, the US (Ye and Wu, 2015).
Taken together, the US-China Joint Announcement on Climate Change in 2014
and the subsequent US-China Joint Presidential Statement on Climate Change
(2015) served to solidify both countries’ commitment to cutting carbon emissions
and to leading the way for more constructive multilateral negotiations at COP 21.
Beijing’s ability to cooperate with the other most important environmental great
power in terms of climate capability/culpability was a significant breakthrough in
global climate governance and a testament to the potential positive power of both
countries.
Since 2015, the Chinese leadership has advanced its goal of peaking the coun-
try’s carbon emissions before 2030 through a raft of domestic policies and interna-
tional commitments centred on the promotion of green financing, technological
innovation, and interagency cooperation on environmental protection. But, de-
spite this projection of positive environmental power, China’s self-ascription as
a ‘major developing country’ (fazhanzhong de daguo) continued to foment and
accentuate divisions between developed and developing countries. Since 1997,
Beijing has consistently and closely adhered to the CBDR principle and the dis-
tinction between a particular state’s ‘common’ and ‘differentiated’ responsibilities
for mitigating global climate change. Even at the Paris summit, Chinese negotia-
tors (along with their Indian counterparts) insisted that the onus of responsibility
for global emissions reduction and climate finance still rested with developed
countries, which should ‘pay their debts’ (Harvey and Doherty, 2018). Crucially,
most of China’s proposals were accepted by all parties, and the language of CBDR
featured prominently in the text of the Paris Agreement (UN, 2015).
The notion of ‘differentiated’ environmental responsibility mirrors what we
have called China’s identity paradox. The truly global arena of climate change mit-
igation affords China unparalleled opportunities to enact its dualistic identities as
great power and major developing country, and as perpetrator and victim of eco-
logical degradation. As a result, Beijing’s global climate strategy is variegated in
being concomitantly aimed at multiple constituencies: smaller developing coun-
tries, major emerging economies, developed countries, and the other great powers.
Thus far, while Beijing pays attention to each of these constituencies, it has cho-
sen mainly to focus its exercise of environmental power on the first two categories
of developing countries, leveraging China’s identity as major developing country.
The main expression of China’s differentiated or ‘special’ responsibility as a major

developing country has taken the form of leadership within the BASIC (Brazil,
South Africa, India, China) and G77 groupings (see Falkner, 2016), coupled with a
stated commitment to protecting the collective interests of Global South countries
from a ‘conspiracy’ by the developed countries to ‘divide the camp of developing
nations’ and undermine the Kyoto Protocol (Watts, Carrington, and Goldenberg,
2010). In this way, aside from acting as a frame for multilateral climate negoti-
ations, the notion of differentiated responsibility has also served to inform the
selective way in which China has tried to exercise political leadership in climate
change negotiations.
The implications of Beijing’s strict adherence to the CBDR principle speak to
the partial and mixed nature of Chinese environmental power. On the one hand,
through its alignment with the BASIC countries, China has sought not only to
act as the vanguard of the Global South but also to position itself as a bridge
between the developed and developing worlds. While this role conception has
been subject to criticism from developed countries—most vociferously, the US
(Firstpost, 2014)—it has been relatively uncontested by most developing countries.
Despite its lacklustre performance at Copenhagen, China’s insistence on differen-
tiating emission targets on the basis of national circumstances was supported by
other BASIC nations (Jayaram, 2015). In this sense, China has exercised positive
power by harnessing some consensus within the developing country constituen-
cies that was vital for the progress of the global climate negotiations. But on the
other hand, the inward-looking nature of China’s CBDR discourse risks alienat-
ing developed countries and further fragmenting, if not entirely derailing, global
climate talks. Even within the developing world, fractures are growing between
the emerging economies like India and Brazil championing their right to develop,
and small island states that emphasize climate change as an existential threat and
demand mandatory emission reductions for all parties (see Sareer, n.d.). Similar
tensions and limitations are manifest within the climate finance space, to which
this discussion now turns.
Transferring Technology to the Global South
The financing and transfer of green technology are the most obvious examples of
positive environmental power in the climate change arena, in terms of diffusing
innovative policy ideas and providing technological and economic aid in support
of environmental policies. At every COP, Beijing has maintained that the respon-
sibility for climate finance and capacity-building lies primarily with the developed
countries. But apart from acting as a staunch advocate, China has also become
more proactive over time as a provider of green financing and technology transfers
to the developing world—an emerging trend that is congruent with China’s rapid
transformation into the world’s largest market for green finance. While China’s
stated commitment to these issues can be traced back to at least 2007 (Ministry of
Science and Technology (China) et al., 2007), it was arguably from 2015 that the
scale and scope of its commitment expanded significantly.
In that year, as part of China’s broader climate commitments, Beijing an-
nounced the creation of a US$3-billion South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund
(SSCAF) and an additional US$3.1-billion fund to support other developing
countries in climate change mitigation. The latter, popularly referred to as the
‘10-100-1000 Initiative’, commits Beijing to implementing in developing countries
‘ten low-carbon development demonstration projects, one hundred climate miti-
gation and adaptation projects, and climate training programmes for one thousand
representatives from developing countries’ (Ma, 2017). Until now, the initiative’s
shorter-term objectives have reportedly been actioned mainly through equipment
donations and the organization of training modules, whereas the impacts of those
components that require longer-term policy formulation (i.e. the low-carbon de-
velopment demonstration projects) have yet to be implemented fully (Ma, 2017).
According to China’s ‘White Paper on China and the World in the New Era’, by
2018, the country had launched over 200 SSCAF programmes in over 30 indus-
trializing countries in a range of issue-areas, including environmental protection
(State Council Information Office (China), 2019). And notably, in addition to co-
operative initiatives at the interstate level, Chinese government agencies have be-
come more embedded in public-private partnerships, working with philanthropic
foundations and billionaires—foreign and home-grown—such as Bill Gates and
Niu Gensheng to fund, inter alia, clean energy research, conservation, and envi-
ronmental restoration initiatives (Glowezewska, 2018; see also Geewax, 2015).
Some observers, including the vice-minister of China’s National Development
and Reform Commission, posit that ‘China has its own methods’ when it comes
to its South–South cooperation on climate change mitigation (Liu, 2014; Urban,
2018). Whilst reflecting the ‘unique Chinese characteristics’ of China’s ‘responsible
great power’ intentions (see Liu, 2014) that have the positive potential to further
catalyze Chinese overseas financing in this space, there are some noteworthy lim-
itations. Even though there are reportedly more successful examples of local skills
and knowledge-sharing, such as HydroChina’s expertise transfer to local engineers
and university academics during the construction of Ethiopia’s Adama wind farm
(Chen, 2018), questions remain as to the extent to which localized learning and
institutional capacity-building are facilitated by Chinese financiers in different
developing-country contexts (Chen and Landry, 2018).
As explored in greater detail in the BRI case below, China has a varied track
record when it comes to its renewable energy investment abroad, with Chinese-
backed hydropower development in the Global South proving especially problem-
atic. Likewise, in the solar photovoltaic (PV) space, concerns have been raised over
Chinese solar companies’ stronger focus on downstream activities (e.g. project
development, construction work, and operation and maintenance), as opposed
to manufacturing and upstream (e.g. research and development) activities, that

are likely to yield more limited technology transfer outcomes (Jackson, Lewis, and
Zhang, 2021). Such criticisms mirror the widely publicized international concerns
over the extent to which China’s international investments are aimed at short-
term absorption of its excess industrial capability and geopolitical competition,
to the detriment of recipients’ economic and socio-environmental sustainabil-
ity (Brautigam, 2020). The mixed record thus far of China’s performance in the
South–South green technology transfer space reinforces the notion of its ‘partial’
environmental great power identity and capability.
China as a Regional Environmental Power: Greening

the Belt and Road
China’s Belt and Road Initiative, first unveiled in 2013 by President Xi Jinping,
is a multibillion-dollar initiative aimed at enhancing interregional connectivity
and cooperation in more than 150 countries spanning the Eurasian continent and
beyond. This initiative provides a timely and significant arena to explore the re-
gional aspects of China’s environmental power. As the BRI highlights, China is
a great power with a lot of backyard: China’s expansive regional domain encom-
passes Central and South Asia, in addition to East Asia. This ‘westward march’
(Wang, 2011) helps China to extend ‘a more comprehensive embrace of the three
Asian sub-regional security complexes that China connects through its growing
capacities and interests’ (Goh, 2019). Currently involving 65 formally participat-
ing countries, the BRI targets a clear demand for infrastructure funding in both
the developing and developed world that has gone unfulfilled by other donors and
investors. Recent industry estimates expect this gap between projected investment
and the investment needed for ‘adequate global infrastructure’ to widen to US$15
trillion by 2040 (Global Infrastructure Outlook, 2021). Once again, this context
creates a double-edged sword for China to wield. Its infrastructure-heavy BRI
projects can potentially exacerbate its negative power, or culpability for creating
and facilitating ecologically destructive activities, industries, and consumption.
But Chinese actors could also leverage China’s growing ‘connectivity power’ across
this mega-regional domain (Goh and Reilly, 2017) in a positive way to stimulate
international cooperation and set standards for environmental accounting or pro-
tection, and to use its economic and political influence to change other states’
behaviour in favour of environmental protection. Although the BRI has gener-
ated political and economic controversy—including concerns about undesirable
Chinese ‘influence’ and unsustainable debt burdens—an estimated US$200 billion
has already been invested in BRI projects (Lelyveld, 2020). In addition, especially
with the Covid-19 pandemic further amplifying the need for enhanced digital
infrastructure globally, Beijing is positioning itself as a champion of investment
in ‘green and sustainable’ infrastructure (Goh and Cadell, 2019). Indeed, China
has tried to use new initiatives and guidelines to raise the ‘green’ profile of the
BRI and its signature schemes in the energy, transport, and telecommunications
sectors.
The list of China’s efforts to enact positive environmental power this way within
the BRI is long and builds on international norms while creating new national
regulations and guidelines. For instance, the central government spearheaded
green financing initiatives that encourage China’s commercial and policy banks
to finance low-carbon BRI projects. One notable example of this is the Indus-
trial and Commercial Bank of China’s 2019 announcement of a US$2.2-billion
bond to finance green BRI projects. Touted as the first green ‘Belt and Road
Interbank Regular Cooperation’ bond, the funds are earmarked for projects in re-
newable energy and low-carbon transportation, as well as sustainable water and
wastewater management (Albuquerque, 2019). Notably too, China’s ‘green BRI
investment strategy’ expresses commitment not only to advancing ‘green devel-
opment’ but also the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in
poor and vulnerable countries. The strategy documents include, for example, the
2017 Guidance on Promoting Green Belt and Road and the ‘Belt and Road Eco-
logical and Environmental Cooperation Plan’. Both were released in 2017 by the
then-named Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP),1 in collabora-
tion with three other ministries, and are underpinned by the MEP’s ‘Action Plan
on Connecting the Belt and Road by Standards (2018–2020)’ which committed
China to undertaking technical benchmarking and developing new international
environmental standards jointly with BRI partner countries.
More recently, the Green Finance Committees of China and the UK launched
the ‘Green Investment Principles for the Belt and Road’ (GIP) in November 2018,
which tasked investors with observing due diligence and integrating environmen-
tal, social, and governance considerations into their decision-making processes
(Green Finance Leadership Program, 2018). Whilst voluntary in nature, the GIP
adopted the language of established international investment instruments (e.g. the
Equator Principles and the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment), and was
subsequently signed by 27 global financial institutions in 2019, including China’s
leading state-owned commercial and policy banks. Crucially, this came on the
heels of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce’s (MOFCOM) publication of the 2018
Guidelines for Country-by-Country (Region-by-Region) Foreign Investment and Co-
operation, which outlines the social, environmental, and governance conditions of
BRI host countries, as well as their environmental laws, in a bid to improve Chi-
nese overseas investment practices. Together, these developments have given rise
to new cooperative platforms at the global level. A case in point is the International
Coalition for Green Development on the Belt and Road, which was established
1 In March 2018, the MEP underwent institutional transformation and became the Ministry of
Ecology and Environment.
in 2018 by the Chinese government and the UN Environment Programme. The

latter is a coalition with a membership base of 80 institutions drawn from govern-
ment and international and non-governmental organizations, and is mandated to
provide support to countries for climate change adaptation as well as to develop
product standards for environmental protection (Hou, 2018).
These developments signal the potential for China to exercise positive en-
vironmental power in this domain. Yet, they also coexist with the continuing
negative aspects of China’s power as expressed through the BRI. Since 2013,
China has committed over US$50 billion in BRI financing to the construction
of 26.8 GW worth of coal facilities in 152 countries—a volume that still ex-
ceeds that committed to renewable energy projects. Such figures further raise
accusations that Beijing is merely ‘greenwashing’ the BRI (White, 2020). In-
deed, China is still among the world’s largest consumers, producers and im-
porters of coal, and is a net importer of oil and gas (see Green and Stern,
2016). On the African continent, roughly one-third of all of Africa’s coal-fired
power plants built since in the 2000s were constructed and largely funded by
Chinese companies. Moreover, through its policy banks, China continues to
invest in non-renewable energy: for example, a report by Oil Change Interna-
tional (OCI) estimated that 72% of Chinese investments between 2014 and 2016
went into upstream oil and gas projects, followed by coal-fired power (13%)
and large hydropower (10%) projects (OCI, 2018). Yet, the difficulty of deriving
a net positive or negative assessment of China’s environmental power through
the BRI is compounded by the necessary lag time before the socio-ecological
implications of the wide range of relatively recent BRI projects can become
clearer.
Meanwhile, there are other complications arising from how national security
and commercial imperatives interact with environmental considerations in China’s
BRI policies. To unpack these, we delve briefly into Chinese BRI investment in the
renewable energy sector.
Investing in Renewable Energy
Renewable energy has been promoted as a key means to ‘green’ the BRI, and is
an understudied but potentially game-changing area in which China seems to
want to exercise regional (and international) environmental leadership. Although
it would appear, at first blush, that this sector offers an account of China flexing its
positive environmental power, it in fact challenges this straightforward depiction,
especially when one considers the negative collateral effects and unintended con-
sequences that such investment can yield. There are also region-based differences
to note in these effects of China’s environmental power.
While much attention is given to Chinese green investment in geographical ar-

eas that fall within the BRI sphere, Chinese investors have been equally active in
non-BRI countries, with investment also flowing into the renewable energy sector
before the BRI’s launch (Nicholas, 2018). Since the turn of the century, the Chi-
nese government has greatly incentivized investment in renewable energy at home,
prompting a growth in the domestic wind, solar, and hydropower sectors and
consolidating the country’s position as a global leader in clean energy and infras-
tructure (Buckley, Nicholas, and Brown, 2018; Hood, 2017). That said, although
Chinese domestic investment in renewable energy still outpaces its overseas in-
vestment, the latter has grown noticeably since 2013 under the BRI. China’s total
investment stock in solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies grew from
US$8 billion in 2005 to US$103 billion in 2015 (Klein, 2017). China’s total in-
vestment in overseas clean energy projects also exceeded US$44 billion by 2017,
marking a US$12 billion increase from 2016 (IEEFA, 2018). Similarly, Greenpeace
has estimated that Chinese equity investments had resulted in 1,277 MW and 432.5
MW of new solar and wind capacity, respectively, being built in BRI countries
between 2014 and 2018 (Ma, 2020).
There are multiple factors responsible for China’s invigorated focus on overseas
renewable energy development. Importantly, concerns about mitigating Chinese
economic, political, and security risks feature prominently in Chinese motivations
to ‘lead the pack’ in this area, interacting unevenly with ‘pure’ environmental con-
siderations per se. Four decades of rapid GDP growth and heavy investment in
the construction and related industries has considerably depleted China’s own fi-
nite natural resources. Diversification of its energy sources is thus a matter of not
only environmental sustainability but also of strategic necessity as China seeks to
become less reliant on fossil fuels and their geostrategically risky transportation
channels (i.e. the Straits of Malacca). At the same time, its massive domestic en-
vironmental problems—most notably, air pollution—demand a shift away from
fossil fuel reliance. Although the current financial rewards for Chinese firms to
invest overseas in renewables are still limited, the decreasing cost of renewable
technologies (e.g. solar cells and onshore wind turbines), combined with incen-
tives and political support from Beijing, could spur increased investment (Ma,
2020). Geopolitically, aside from the potential reputational gains from investing
more in green energy and related technologies, evidence would suggest that invest-
ment in renewable energy is equally critical to global climate security. According
to one report, if 126 of the BRI’s participating countries fail to cut their emissions,
global temperatures could rise to 2.7°C even with other countries meeting their
targets under the Paris Agreement (see Jun and Zadek, 2019). Especially with the
US refusal to commit to carbon reduction targets under the Trump presidency,
leadership in renewable energy could help China achieve multiple purposes: build
up its reputation as a responsible stakeholder, contribute to global security, and
expand its international dominance of this industry (Caughill, 2018).
Over the past decade, it is estimated that Chinese companies have been involved
in at least 124 projects in the solar and wind industries across 33 countries, indi-
cating the potential for Chinese overseas investment in renewables to peak further
(Tan et al., 2013). Interestingly too, the majority of these 124 investment projects
are located in developed countries (e.g. the US, Germany, Italy, and Spain). Be-
tween 2004 and 2013, for instance, Italy and Spain had attracted 12% of China’s
total investment in Europe’s renewables market, with a particular focus on solar
energy, whereas Portugal and Greece have attracted more Chinese investment in
the wind sector (Pareja-Alcaraz, 2017). Notably, in 2018 China Energy Investment
Corporation—a state-owned enterprise (SOE)—bought a 75% stake in four Greek
wind projects while also indicating an intention to invest more in future energy
projects (Xinhua, 2018).
By comparison, Chinese energy investment in the developing world under-
scores the complexities of greening the BRI: here, Beijing’s decision-making and
what kind of ‘green face’ the BRI shows will often vary across local contexts, de-
pending on the constellation of interests and needs present.2 In Africa, China has
become the continent’s largest development partner in the energy sector, with Chi-
nese private and state-owned enterprises winning tenders to build solar and wind
farms from South Africa to Egypt and Ethiopia. More recently, a reportedly leaked
letter sent from the Chinese embassy in Dhaka to the Bangladesh government
had indicated how ‘the Chinese side’ will ‘no longer consider projects with high
pollution and high energy consumption, such as coal mining, coal-fired power
stations’ (Islam and Hall, 2021). This decision was purportedly made in response
to a shift in Bangladesh’s energy development strategy towards renewable sources
and the country’s current power overcapacity; it also suggests the possibility for
coal investment to be phased out in the BRI more broadly (Han, Han, and Wang,
2021). Yet, despite these instances, Chinese non-hydro renewables investment in
developing countries remains incipient overall, with the majority of energy in-
vestment still destined for coal power and hydropower projects. In Southeast Asia,
China constitutes the largest and, arguably, most active investor in Cambodia’s and
Myanmar’s hydropower industries. In South Asia, the state-owned Three Gorges
Corporation has entered into a joint venture with the Nepal Electricity Author-
ity to build a 750 MW hydropower plant expected to cost at least US$1.6 billion
(Harris, 2017). Three Gorges Corporation, through its South Asian subsidiary, has
also established a growing investment track record in Pakistan’s renewable energy
market, acquiring a portfolio of US$6 billion worth of solar and hydropower plants
(Global Village Space, 2020). Likewise, in Latin America, Chinese state-owned hy-
dropower and electricity generation companies have expanded their presence: a
consortium led by Three Gorges Corporation, for instance, acquired the 456 MW
Chaglla hydropower project in Peru for US$1.4 billion in 2019, and in 2020, State
2 We are grateful to Tom Baxter for this observation.

Power Investment Corporation signed a 30-year concession agreement to operate

the 1.7 GW São Simão hydropower station on the Parnaiba River in Brazil (Shan,
2020; Mandi and Bautzer, 2018). The Global South thus sees a different investment
trend that highlights how, for China, renewable energy is still a supplement, not a
replacement for, overseas investments in hydrocarbon energy.
In the developed world, Chinese investment in renewable energy has generally
been received positively, serving to improve external perceptions of Chinese busi-
nesses and China itself. In Europe, Chinese renewable energy projects in Poland,
the Czech Republic, and Slovakia have largely been welcomed by the respective
governments. Despite some national security concerns being raised over foreign
ownership of strategic infrastructure, these projects have been lauded for their
sustainability and economic benefits (see Turcsanyi, 2017). In the Global South,
however, the reception and overall experience are less positive. This is mainly
due to the different portfolio of renewable energy investments. Key projects in
developing countries spotlight the negative collateral effects of China’s leading
investments in renewables. The reality here is that even renewables can carry sig-
nificant socio-environmental externalities, and there are no better examples of this
than the many Chinese-backed hydropower schemes in the developing world.
The involvement of Chinese SOEs in large hydropower dam construction, es-
pecially in the ecologically fragile regions of Southeast Asia, Latin America, and
Africa, has resulted in a slate of adverse environmental and social repercussions.
These have ranged from ecosystem fragmentation due to the flooding of forest
land (to make way for dam reservoirs) to deforestation, illegal mining, forced re-
location, and livelihoods loss (Yeophantong, 2020). Additionally, hydropower also
produces harmful carbon dioxide and methane emissions: hydroelectric stations
in tropical areas can reportedly produce up to 15 times more greenhouse gas emis-
sions than non-tropical plants, and two to three times more emissions than gas, oil,
or coal-fired power plants (see Barros et al., 2011). Given such collateral damage,
other huge hydropower projects facilitated by Chinese investment give cause for
concern. For example, China Three Gorges’ continued expansion of hydropower
investment in Pakistan, with a combined volume of investment at US$5.7 billion,
is worrying in view of how many of these projects traverse the ecologically and
politically fragile Kashmir region (Timperley, 2018).
By the same token, only in recent years have the environmental and social
impacts of large solar and wind farms come under scrutiny. In various parts
of the developing world concerns are now being raised about the unintended
consequences of large solar and wind farms, which can potentially displace com-
munities and degrade the surrounding environment as a result of the land clearings
(Chandran, 2021). Together, these examples illustrate how China’s efforts to
‘green’ the BRI and provide leadership in the renewable energy sector do not
generate straightforward ‘positive’ environmental power—as Buzan and Falkner
observe in Chapter 2, the positive and negative dimensions of environmental
power often coexist or overlap. It would be worth bearing this general constraint in
mind given the growing expectations, from within and without (see, for example,
Shepherd, 2020), for China to encourage greater capital investment and to con-
tinue exhibiting leadership in sectors like green technology and renewable energy
en route to becoming a full-fledged environmental great power.
Conclusion
This chapter has investigated how Chinese policymakers and leaders define and act
upon China’s environmental responsibilities as a great power. We find that China
is a partial environmental great power: its ‘negative’ or structural power in the in-
ternational environmental realm is stark, but its ‘positive’ power or potential to act
in favour of environmental responsibility is currently selective, inconsistent, and
non-linear. Due to its dualistic identity as developing country and great power,
and as perpetrator and victim of ecological degradation, China’s environmental
policy behaviour is only partly motivated by concerns about the environment; it
also reflects regime stability, economic growth, and international status impera-
tives. With respect to global climate change, we showed that Beijing prioritizes its
self-identification as a ‘responsible major developing power’, and thus the main
expression of its ‘special responsibility’ takes the form of leading and protect-
ing the interests of developing countries. At the regional level, we demonstrated
how China’s significant efforts to ‘green’ the BRI are motivated by the interplay of
economic and political risk mitigation, expectation of commercial gains, and en-
vironmental considerations. Importantly, key instances of China’s ‘positive’ power
in the renewable energy sector are still accompanied by negative power behaviour
and marked by unintended consequences.
These findings about the vital case of one of the world’s two most important
states (in terms of capability and culpability) carry at least two implications for how
we conceive of great power and responsibility in the environmental realm. First, it
highlights the notion of deep pluralism in international society and the important
limits to great power capabilities that continue to constrain solidarist ambitions
in global environmental governance. This condition places limits on what we
might expect the strategic category of ‘great powers’ to be able to achieve on their
own in bringing about the types of socio-economic-political and mindset changes
required to generate rapid and significant action for environmental protection.
Second, however, these limits do not obscure the need to think normatively
about how to facilitate environmental great powers to wield more ‘positive’ forms
of power. China’s unfulfilled potential to wield ‘positive’ environmental power
highlights some key questions for those wanting to address the challenges of
negotiating the rights and responsibilities of environmental great powers. At
the global level, how can China’s differentiated responsibilities towards multiple
constituencies be fostered so as to bring about overall positive outcomes in terms

of environmental governance? How can China’s different assets be leveraged more
effectively to harness developing countries, rapidly emerging economies, and great
powers towards ends that are both economically and ecologically sustainable in the
medium term? At the regional level, how can Chinese actors’ benefits or rights be
assured and fostered in return for increasing the ‘green’ and other positive aspects
of environmental power? Within the BRI, such benefits might be sought across
fungible domains, for example through dominance in technology and production
of key renewable sectors, but also through broader standard-setting authority. Try-
ing to tackle rights and responsibilities in a reciprocal manner may well be the key
to enabling environmental great powers to better incentivize state and other actors
to change their priorities and choices in favour of environmental protection and
sustainability.
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5
The European Union: A Green Great Power?
Katja Biedenkopf, Claire Dupont, and Diarmuid Torney
Introduction
The literature on great powers has a hard time accounting for the European Union
(EU). Indeed, as Buzan and Falkner note in Chapter 2, some scholars in this
tradition struggle to ‘see’ the EU because of its status as something less than a
fully fledged state yet more than a traditional international organization. The EU’s
emergence and evolution can be seen as a manifestation of the ‘deep pluralism’
they identify in world politics, involving the diffusion of power away from states
under conditions of high interdependence. Moreover, the EU has often been ne-
glected by the great powers literature because of its lack of military clout or status
as a security actor. By contrast, a rich tradition of scholarship has analysed the EU’s
contribution to shaping global environmental politics (GEP). Once we move be-
yond the international security arena and beyond a focus on military strength, the
EU can be considered not only an important international actor but perhaps even
a great power. It can draw on multiple sources of power and project its power in
various ways, combining material attributes with political and diplomatic elements
in its global role.
The central argument of this chapter is that the EU is indeed a great power in
GEP, but that it cannot be conceptualized in the same way as traditional great pow-
ers because of the limitations on the sources of power available to the EU. We seek
to contribute a distinctive perspective to this volume by showing how the concepts
of great power and great power responsibility can be extended to incorporate the
EU’s distinctive characteristics and contributions in GEP.
The next section develops our perspective on the concepts of great power and
great power responsibility as they apply to the sui generis case of the EU. We
draw on relevant strands of the literature on the EU, first, to identify the na-
ture and sources of EU power in GEP; second, to outline how the EU projects
its power in practice in GEP; and third, drawing on the insight that great power
status is a social phenomenon, to address the question of recognition of the
EU as a great power in GEP by other actors. In the following sections, we
analyse two case study domains within GEP—climate change and chemicals
Katja Biedenkopf, Claire Dupont, and Diarmuid Torney, The European Union: A Green Great Power?. In: Great Powers,
Climate Change, and Global Environmental Responsibilities. Edited by Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan, Oxford University
Press. © Oxford University Press (2022). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866022.003.0005
96 biedenkopf, dupont, and torney
governance—that illustrate different dimensions of the EU’s role as a poten-

tial great power. In these cases, the EU draws upon and projects its different
sources of power in various ways to influence GEP, showing that it has multi-
ple options available. In climate governance, the EU has shifted its projection of
power from one of moral responsibility and exemplary internal action to one
of coalition and capacity building in external relations, including integrating
climate action with other policies, while maintaining its leadership through in-
ternal policy ambition. In chemicals governance, the EU has matched the power
drawn from historical responsibility with its ability to project economic power
externally, making access to its market contingent on adherence to EU regu-
lations. While also engaging in some coalition and capacity building, this type
of activity is far less pronounced than in the climate case. In both cases, the
EU’s balance of its sources and external projection of power has shifted over
time.
Our central contention is that, despite lacking many of the traditional trappings
of great power status, the EU should indeed be considered a green great power.
However, this status should not be taken for granted: as the EU improves its own
environmental footprint, its responsibility for global environmental issues dimin-
ishes, along with its GEP clout (negative power), meaning that strategic alliances
and capacity building in GEP (positive power) become more important for the EU
to project its power and influence.
The European Union’s Distinctiveness in the Great Power Debate
Scholarship on great powers and great power responsibility has generally failed to
consider seriously the EU as a great power. This omission stems both from an un-
derstanding that great powers draw on material (predominantly military) strength
and from that literature’s focus on states (see Chapter 2 by Buzan and Falkner).
In these respects, the lack of attention to the EU in the great powers literature is
understandable, as it is clearly not a state and not a strong international security
actor. By contrast, GEP scholarship has analysed the EU’s role most often through
a ‘governance’ and ‘leadership’ lens (ibid.). Research in this tradition has investi-
gated how the EU has acted in GEP (Wurzel et al., 2019), what makes the EU an
‘actor’ (Bretherton and Vogler, 2013), how its internal structures or politics play
out in GEP, and what influence it has had on GEP (Oberthür and Groen, 2018),
but without delving too much into the question of its power status. To date, little
work has bridged these communities to study the EU as a green great power. Here,
we investigate the nature and sources of EU power, how the EU projects its power
in GEP, and the extent to which the EU is recognized as a great power.
the european union: a green great power? 97
Nature and Sources of European Union Power
As neither state nor international organization, the EU is sui generis. Significant

effort has been expended seeking to capture the distinctive characteristics of the
EU in international affairs—focusing on whether the EU is an actor in its own right
and how the EU can/has acted. As Buzan and Falkner note in Chapter 2, realists
and many of the great power scholars struggle to ‘see’ the EU as an actor in global
politics because of their state-centric orientation. If we drop this requirement it
is possible to see the EU as an international actor. Bretherton and Vogler have
conceptualized the EU’s international actorness by identifying a number of condi-
tions: autonomy, volition, negotiating capability, and the ability to deploy policy
instruments (Bretherton and Vogler, 2006; Vogler, 2017).
When it comes to GEP, the EU has developed the capacity to act under all four
of these conditions, and it can potentially be seen as a unified actor, though this
can vary depending on the area of environmental policy under focus (Dupont,
2019; van Schaik, 2010). By agreeing on political conclusions on an international
GEP issue at ministerial level in the Council of the European Union and/or at
heads of state and government level in the European Council, the EU can demon-
strate political unity, volition, and autonomy. Unlike common commercial policy,
where the EU has an exclusive competence and a common external policy, mean-
ing it negotiates as one, environmental policy is an area of mixed competence.
Member states retain some rights to negotiate and, in the case of climate change
negotiations, the Council presidency plays a role. Through the adoption of policy
instruments, most frequently involving the European Commission, Council, and
European Parliament, the EU demonstrates its capacity to follow through on polit-
ical commitments. The EU’s international actorness is thus the external projection
of its internal capacities.
Consideration of the sources of the EU’s power allows us to understand better
its nature. While the great powers literature focuses on military strength and se-
curity capacity, the EU sources its power elsewhere. The EU’s economic, political,
and diplomatic clout are the key material sources of its international power. Eco-
nomic power is the focus of research analyzing the EU as a ‘market power’ (Damro,
2012), for example by using access to its market as a means of securing compliance
with environmental norms through setting high standards (Goldthau and Sitter,
2015). This lens emphasizes the EU’s ability to extend its regulatory reach beyond
its borders, owing to its status as a single market of almost 450 million citizens and
consumers. Its economic clout and the attractiveness of its market mean that the
EU can influence international affairs to an extent that goes beyond what would
be expected of a ‘middle power’ (see Chapter 2). Empirical literature on policy
transfer, policy diffusion, and the uptake of EU legal norms in third jurisdictions
has shown that there is merit in such an understanding of the EU (Bradford, 2015;
Kelemen and Vogel, 2010).
The political and diplomatic clout of the EU is more diffuse and less unified. It
is a historical legacy of a number of its larger member states; it is connected to its
‘civilian’ power standing, in opposition to military power (Duchêne, 1973; Orbie,
2006); it is based on the EU’s internal unity and its ability to act (see above); and it is
linked to the EU’s self-assigned role as one of the guardians of a multilateral global
order based on universal values and norms (Manners, 2002). The EU’s power is
also constructed through discourse, speech acts, ideas, and diplomacy (Dupont,
2019; Torney and Davis Cross, 2018). In this context, GEP has emerged over recent
decades as an area of world politics in which the EU has often been able to act in
a more unified manner than in other domains, such as security and defence.
The EU’s distinctive constitutional character provides a further source of its
power in GEP in at least two respects. Environmental protection is written into
the EU’s foundational documents: Article 3(3) of the Treaty on European Union
defines among the objectives of the union that it ‘shall work for sustainable devel-
opment of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability … and
a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment’.
This was not evident from its foundation. Indeed, the EU’s founding treaty
contained no reference to environmental protection at first, but over time envi-
ronmental protection became more and more central to the union’s normative
foundations. Furthermore, the EU is, at its core, an embodiment of multilateral-
ism, placing it in a strong position to contribute to global multilateral approaches
to environmental issues.
The European Union’s Projection of Power in GEP
Theorizing the nature of the EU and the sources of its power leads naturally to
questions about how the EU uses or projects its power in GEP. Here, much of the
GEP literature focuses not on power or the nature of the EU but rather on types
of leadership as well as mechanisms and modes of EU external influence in en-
vironmental governance (Adelle et al., 2018; Lavenex and Schimmelfennig, 2009;
Wurzel et al., 2017). Behind both sets of literature is the assumption that the EU
engages in an intentional projection of power.
The EU wishes to be seen as a leader in GEP. It is an intentional choice to call
itself a ‘leader’ (Oberthür and Roche Kelly, 2008), but the discourse around the EU
as a leader in GEP can only be considered legitimate once the EU adopts internal
policy that matches its discourse. Categorizations of leadership help us to under-
stand better the projection of EU power. We can distinguish between different
leadership types (Liefferink and Wurzel, 2017; Wurzel, et al.,2019). Structural lead-
ership involves the use of structural power such as military or economic means,
but according to most authors only constitutes leadership if mobilized in pursuit
of collective goods. Entrepreneurial leadership involves the use of diplomatic and
negotiating skills to bring about compromises and agreements. Cognitive lead-

ership involves actors defining or redefining ideas and concepts with a view to
achieving improved environmental outcomes. Examples include concepts such
as ecological modernization and low-carbon growth, both of which attempted to
reframe environmental protection as consistent with economic growth. Finally,
exemplary leadership involves setting best environmental practice for other actors
to follow.
What these perspectives largely neglect is the prospect that the EU projects
negative environmental power. As Buzan and Falkner note in Chapter 2, envi-
ronmental power should be thought of as a neutral concept that can take both
positive and negative forms. Moreover, both forms of power can coexist and over-
lap in a given area of GEP. Thus, at the same time as playing a proactive role in
various global environmental negotiations, the EU is one of the most advanced re-
gions of the global economy, a significant consumer of raw materials and producer
of environmental pollution, both within its borders and beyond. In its report,
The European environment—state and outlook 2020, the European Environment
Agency (2020: 6) noted that the EU ‘continues to consume more resources and
contribute more to environmental degradation than many other world regions.
To meet these high consumption levels, Europe depends on resources extracted
or used in other parts of the world, such as water, land, biomass and other ma-
terials. As a result, many of the environmental impacts associated with European
production and consumption occur outside Europe’.
This reveals a paradox of the EU’s power in GEP. To the extent that the EU cleans
up its act, its role as a great power in GEP is likely to reduce as it becomes less
central to solving global environmental challenges such as climate change (see case
study below). Moreover, this paradox is exacerbated by the EU’s declining relative
size as a share of the global economy.
Recognition of the EU as a Great Power
As Buzan and Falkner note in Chapter 2, the English School conceives of great
power status as a social phenomenon. Recognition as a great power is an essen-
tial characteristic. It is also prominent in some of the literature on the EU as an
international actor (Jupille and Caporaso, 1998), and connects to work on follow-
ership in GEP (Torney, 2019). The EU has long been recognized as a significant
and independent player in GEP (Adelle et al., 2018; Liefferink et al., 2009; Wurzel
et al., 2019). It is a party to numerous international environmental agreements
and speaks on behalf of its member states in many circumstances. This is, on the
one hand, recognized by the EU member states in the EU treaties and, on the
other, by other countries who admitted the EU as a party equal to nation states.
While this only demonstrates that the EU is recognized as an actor, the two case
studies in the next sections illustrate that there is some degree of recognition as
a great power. Indeed, GEP has arguably been one of the fields of world poli-
tics in which recognition of the EU as an actor and a great power has been most
notable.
In the following sections we empirically illustrate the role of the EU as a great
power in GEP by examining two cases over time: climate change and chemicals.
We investigate the specific nature and sources of EU power in each case, the EU’s
deployment of this power in these domains of GEP, recognition of the EU as a great
power, and changes over time. The two cases differ in a number of aspects: climate
change is a policy area in which the broad contours are regularly decided at the
highest political level, the European Council. Chemicals is a comparatively more
technical and lower-priority issue. In chemicals, using access to the EU market
by setting requirements pertaining to the chemicals that are imported gives the
EU great leverage in this highly globalized industry sector. The nature of climate
change as a policy problem is more diffuse and complex than chemicals, making
the use of market access to project influence even more complex.
Climate Change
Since the 1990s, and the early years of international climate governance, the EU has
aspired to take on a leading, global role. As Buzan and Falkner note in Chapter 2,
the EU was an environmental laggard in the 1970s. In the climate governance do-
main especially, it has stepped up to engage and push for more ambitious action.
Building on our more general discussion earlier, we outline here the nature and
sources of EU power in global climate politics, the EU’s projection of power in
this domain, and the extent to which the EU is recognized as a great power in
global climate governance, specifying developments in the EU’s role over time.
The EU possesses power in the climate change domain as a result of its historical
responsibility for causing the climate problem. Since the Industrial Revolution, the
European continent has benefited greatly from the fossil-fuel-based economy. The
cost of this economic structure has been a long history of European greenhouse gas
(GHG) emissions released into the atmosphere, affecting the entire planet. Despite
the EU’s significant historical responsibility for climate change, it was slow to take
meaningful action to reduce its GHG emissions, though it has performed better
than other regions of the world (see Table 5.1). Comparative data of global emis-
sions show the EU has always been a member of the top three emitters, along with
the United States and China (see Table 5.1). The size and form of the EU’s economy
Table 5.1 Global GHG emissions of the top six emitters, measured in mega tonnes of
CO2 equivalent (MtCO2 e), with share of world total in brackets, 1990–2016 (latest
year with confirmed data for all countries/regions listed).
Country/Region 1990 2005 2016
China 3600 (10%) 7780 (18%) 12700 (26%)

United States 6510 (19%) 7430 (17%) 6570 (13%)
European Union 4230 (12%) 3930 (9%) 3160 (6%)
India 1150 (3%) 1790 (4%) 2870 (6%)
Russia 3780 (11%) 2510 (6%) 2670 (5%)
Japan 1270 (4%) 1380 (3%) 1310 (3%)
Note: Historical data on the European Union refers to combined historical emissions of the EU
27 member states (without the UK).
Source: PIK data, climatewatchdata.org online database.
means that it derives considerable power in climate governance from its responsi-
bility for causing significant climate harm. This forms the core of the EU’s negative
power.
While the EU’s negative power stemming from its historical responsibility re-
mains valid, its power deriving from its role as a significant global emitter is
declining. As shown in Table 5.1, the EU has reduced its GHG emissions, while
China’s have soared and the United States’ have fluctuated with some growth to
the mid-2000s and a slow decline in emissions since then. In contrast, the EU’s
earlier climate policy to reduce its emissions seems in line with its leadership am-
bitions. In practice, this means that while the EU’s status as a top-three emitter
of GHGs remains, its overall share of global GHG emissions has been declining.
By 2014, the perception of global climate governance was that it was becoming a
two-horse game: if China and the US took no action, what impact could the EU
have on climate change globally? This new geopolitics of climate change may have
played a role in shifting emphasis at the EU level towards its capability as a green
great power on climate change, underlining its positive power (Oberthür, 2016).
Power Projection
The EU’s nature and the sources of its power in global climate governance are
closely linked to the manner in which it projects power, which is shaped by
its capabilities. While the EU has no significant military power, its regulatory,
economic, and diplomatic power are particularly relevant for pushing climate gov-
ernance (Damro, 2012; Goldthau and Sitter, 2015; Majone, 1996). Through its
attractiveness as a market and through its interest in leveraging regulatory mea-
sures to combat climate change, the EU can exert its ability to engender positive
change on climate governance both within and outside the EU in global gover-
nance and in external relations (Dupont, 2019). We can see the effects of the EU’s
positive power in three dimensions: (1) internal EU progress on reducing GHG
emissions; (2) external efforts to advance global climate governance through inter-
national negotiations; and (3) external efforts to engage partners through climate
diplomacy (Adelle et al., 2018; Oberthür and Roche Kelly, 2008; Torney and Davis
Cross, 2018).
First, the EU has succeeded in reducing its GHG emissions since the inter-
national climate negotiations started in earnest in the early 1990s, even while
remaining a top emitter. Table 5.1 shows the absolute values of the EU’s GHG
emissions between 1990 and 2016, while Figure 5.1 shows the EU’s emissions re-
ductions between 1990 and 2018, with 1990 as the base year representing 100%.1
Achieving more than 20% emission reductions in that timeframe is more than
any other jurisdiction has achieved through purposeful policy efforts. Certain
contextual factors help explain the reduction of emissions (including the 2008
financial and economic crises and the 2020 Covid-19 crisis causing a huge dip
in production-related emissions in the EU). Nevertheless, since the 1990s, the
EU has implemented an elaborate policy portfolio aiming to reduce GHG emis-
sions. These include policy measures to increase the share of renewable energy, to
improve energy efficiency, and to develop a carbon emissions trading system cov-
ering large industrial installations (the Emissions Trading System, ETS), among
100%
95%
90%
85%
80%
75%
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
Fig. 5.1 EU 27 member states’ total GHG emissions, 1990–2018, measured as

percentage compared to base year of 1990.
Source: European Environment Agency online GHG emissions data viewer, www.eea.europa.eu.
1 It should be noted that the EU’s GHG emissions calculations follow the UNFCCC: emissions pro-
duced in the territory of the EU are those counted for the EU only. Therefore, consumption-related
emissions for products consumed in the EU, but produced elsewhere in the world, are not captured.
others (Oberthür and Pallemaerts, 2010; Wettestad et al., 2012; Wurzel et al., 2019).
In 2019, the European Commission presented a new vision when it published
the European Green Deal, providing an overarching policy framework to imple-
ment transformational change towards the goal of achieving climate neutrality by
2050, bringing several policy measures and several policy sectors under this single
framework (Dupont et al., 2020; European Commission, 2019).
The EU’s internal policy actions have been framed by its overarching targets.
These in turn have been used by the EU to demonstrate exemplary leadership
in global climate governance. By adopting strong policy targets internally, the
EU sought to bring other actors in line with its level of ambition. Under the Ky-
oto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC), adopted in 1997, the EU agreed to reduce its GHG emissions by 8%
between 2008 and 2012, compared to 1990 levels. In 2007, the European Coun-
cil agreed on a target of reducing GHG emissions by 20% by 2020, and offered to
increase its target to 30% if other jurisdictions made comparable commitments
(European Council, 2007). In 2014, the EU agreed to reduce its emissions by
40% by 2030 (European Council, 2014). And in December 2020, the European
Council agreed to increase this target to a net reduction of GHG emissions by
55% by 2030, compared to 1990 levels (European Council, 2020). The EU’s ex-
perience of adopting targets that are more ambitious than other jurisdictions has
not had the effects the EU desired. No country matched the EU’s offer by adopt-
ing comparable targets in the 2009 climate negotiations in Copenhagen (fifteenth
Conference of the Parties, or COP15), and the EU has had to combine its in-
ternal efforts to decarbonize with more purposeful external efforts in order to
seek to exert positive international power (Dupont et al., 2018). In 2020, some
of these efforts may have started to pay off: South Korea and Japan both adopted
targets to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, and China aims to achieve carbon
neutrality by 2060.
Second, the EU’s capability to advance international negotiations has sig-
nificantly developed over time, requiring more than exemplary leadership. It
moved from being a difficult negotiating partner in the 1990s and 2000s, with
little flexibility and many voices, to a united negotiating partner in the 2010s
able to build coalitions (Groen and Niemann, 2013; van Schaik, 2010). This
evolution came about not least because of the EU’s experience at COP15 in
Copenhagen in 2009, at which it was widely perceived to have played a lim-
ited role. While the EU’s exemplary leadership is important for its credibility
as a global climate actor, this needed to be connected to wider diplomatic
and negotiation capacities: a positive power that the EU learned to deploy
to greater effect in the 2010s (Dupont et al., 2018). By building coalitions
with several developing countries, the EU contributed to ensuring that ne-
gotiations on a new global climate agreement could be launched in Durban
in 2011 (Bäckstrand and Elgström, 2013). The EU’s active diplomatic engage-
ment also helped to form the ‘High Ambition Coalition’ during the climate
negotiations in Paris in 2015. The Paris Agreement itself, adopted at this ne-
gotiation meeting, contains most of the EU’s desired outcomes, though this
was only possible with some compromises on the part of the EU itself,
such as dropping its long-standing demand for legally-binding emission reduction
targets (Dupont et al., 2018).
Third, efforts in climate diplomacy through bilateral relations involve several
strategies, including integrating climate change into (broader) external relations
or negotiations, capacity building, and financing, among others. Through those
means, the EU sources power from its market size and economic strength. Trade
agreements, for example, include references to climate change and environmen-
tal protection (Kettunen, 2018). Partnership agreements with third countries
usually include references to climate policies, and/or to objectives to transition
to a clean energy system (Dupont and Oberthür, 2015). Capacity building ef-
forts by the EU have helped countries to plan, develop, and commit to stronger
climate policy objectives in their national climate plans, that need to be sub-
mitted as part of the Paris Agreement’s obligations (Dupont et al., 2018). These
efforts include technical guidance and expertise, but also financing. The EU
and its member states contribute most to climate finance mechanisms, both at
the multilateral level and bilaterally. Funds move through the UNFCCC, in-
cluding the Green Climate Fund, to which the EU contributes nearly half, and
also through the World Bank and other global funding mechanisms. Bilaterally,
the EU influences the use of assistance funds and has earmarked proportions
of such funds for climate action. All of these efforts can result in altered be-
haviour in partner countries through the EU’s use of its economic power (or
its market power and power as a donor) to create (dis)incentives for certain
types of behaviour, or through its regulatory power and expertise to provide ca-
pacity building assistance that goes beyond financing mechanisms. However,
there are limits to the EU’s exercise of such power, with typically less leverage
vis-à-vis other great powers.
In sum, the EU projects power in global climate governance through various
means. It has had to rely on the deployment of its positive power and capa-
bility far more as the years have passed, and as the EU’s own GHG emissions
have reduced. While this reduction in emissions is a success story for climate
governance, it has resulted in a diminished share of global emissions assigned
to the EU, thereby reducing its negative power. This illustrates the paradox
of EU power in GEP mentioned above, namely that successful decarboniza-
tion of the EU economy strengthens its positive power—by enhancing the EU’s
leadership position on the issue—while at the same time reducing its negative
power and therefore making it less central to solving this global collective action
problem.
Recognition
Having established that the EU possesses both negative and positive power in
global climate governance, we now discuss how or whether the EU is recognized
as a great power. Here we focus on three aspects: (1) the EU’s own recognition of
its responsibility as a great climate power; (2) the recognition of the EU as a legit-
imate climate actor by both global and EU audiences; and (3) the EU’s ability to
gain explicit support globally.
First, the EU has promoted equity and fairness in both internal climate poli-
cymaking and in international climate negotiations. Internally, the EU has dis-
tributed the implementation efforts to achieve its climate policy ambitions among
member states based on considerations of economic development and capacity
(Lacasta et al., 2010). Externally, it aimed to fulfil its own responsibility for cli-
mate change by taking on an exemplary leadership role, but also by emphasizing
an interpretation of global action whereby all parties contribute in a differenti-
ated manner depending on their capacities (Petri and Biedenkopf, 2020). This
came about in a back-and-forth interaction over time with the global climate ne-
gotiations agenda. It supported the distinction embedded in the 1992 UNFCCC
of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, and
pushed for strong developed country action under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Also,
as other parties questioned the EU’s credibility as a leader in the 1990s and early
2000s, it stepped up its game in implementing policies that led to emissions reduc-
tions domestically, thus improving its perceived leadership credibility (Oberthür
and Roche Kelly, 2008). The EU recognized its own responsibility to act and to
help advance the global community towards action.
Second, the EU’s ability to gain the support of multiple audiences as a legiti-
mate climate actor is evidenced through its securitization of climate change (see
also Chapter 2 by Buzan and Falkner, this volume). Especially since the 2000s, EU
statements highlighted the security dimensions of the climate problem and sought
to convince both its internal audience (member states and citizens) to accept EU
climate policy efforts, and its external audiences (global partners) to join it in tak-
ing action on climate change (Dupont, 2019). The collective securitization by the
EU of climate change assisted in moving climate policy firmly into global high-
level politics (ibid.). This legitimized climate action further, with both domestic
and international audiences supporting EU climate action and policies. Further-
more, EU climate policy has also proved a source of learning for other jurisdictions
engaging in climate policy development (Biedenkopf et al., 2017; Kruger et al.,
2007).
Third, the EU has been recognized as an actor in global climate governance, but
may still suffer from a lack of recognition internationally as a climate great power.
In studies on who is perceived as a leader in global climate governance, China and
the US are often cited as more important global powers than the EU (Oberthür,
2016; Parker and Karlsson, 2015). Further, the EU has hardly convinced other ac-
tors to pursue comparably ambitious climate action. Its decades-long efforts at
climate leadership have led to little success in garnering followers so far (Torney,
2019; Wurzel et al., 2019).
Chemicals Regulation
Compared to the climate regime, global chemicals governance is much more

fragmented. There is no single framework convention that brings together the
UN-level efforts. Rather, a set of four independent conventions have successively
been adopted in a piecemeal fashion, still leaving large regulatory gaps. Regional,
national, and even subnational legislation, as well as voluntary initiatives, have
emerged in the effort to fill some of the gaps. The core of global chemicals gov-
ernance consists of the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary
Movements of Hazardous Waste and Their Disposal, the 1998 Rotterdam Con-
vention on the Prior Informed Consent for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and
Pesticides, the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, and
the 2013 Minamata Convention on Mercury (Chasek et al., 2014: 131–151; Selin,
2013: 111–116). Numerous initiatives mushroomed at lower levels of governance,
but the EU is at the forefront with its adoption of a pioneering piece of legisla-
tion in 2006, on which EU member states centre their position for international
negotiations and which has been the source of external power projection.
In industrial chemicals policy, the EU holds issue-specific power as the second-

largest chemicals producer globally, accounting for 14.8% of global sales in 2019.
China contributed 40.6% of global chemicals sales in 2019. The United States
ranked third with 13.8% of 2019 global sales. The EU’s issue-specific power has,
however, been on a steady decline. In 1999, it still accounted for 26.7% of global
chemicals sales, which almost halved over the ensuing two decades, with a pro-
jected decrease to about 10% by 2030, while China’s share is projected to grow to
almost 50% over the same period (Cefic, 2020). The global chemicals market has
thus witnessed tremendous power shifts over the past two decades from Europe
and the US to China. This has had implications for global chemicals governance
and the EU’s power projection.
Being a major player in global chemicals trade brings potential negative effects
on various countries. Some chemicals are hazardous and pose risks to the environ-
ment and human health. Their risks need to be thoroughly identified, chemicals
need to be appropriately labelled, and sufficient protection measures for workers,

consumers, and the environment need to be put in place. If these are not guaran-
teed, negative effects can occur and cause severe damage. Chemicals are contained
in consumer products and used in production processes. Yet, knowledge about
some chemicals’ intrinsic properties and the possible risks that they pose is still
lacking. Regulatory agencies’ risk assessments lag behind industrial growth and
progress (Allanou et al., 2003a, 2003b; Hey, Jacob, and Volkery, 2007: 1863; Selin,
2013: 109–110, 118–119; Williams et al., 2009).
Cases such as the 1987/88 incident in which PCB-containing waste that origi-
nated from Italy leaked from a warehouse in the Nigerian village of Koko illustrate
the responsibility of European countries for environmental and health damage
elsewhere. Two Italian companies stored hazardous waste in containers that were
wrongly labelled as building materials. The leak affected the local community’s
health and contaminated the environment. The Italian government eventually
took responsibility and removed the hazardous waste. The ship Probo Koala is
another example. In 2006, it offloaded 500 tonnes of petrochemical waste in Abid-
jan, Ivory Coast, where a local company dumped the hazardous waste in open-air
waste sites. The hazardous waste originated from cleaning the ship in Amsterdam,
but the owner refused to pay a Dutch company to dispose of it. After a num-
ber of other countries refused the hazardous waste, it ended up in Ivory Coast.
These incidents demonstrate the strong international dimension of chemicals
management and the responsibility for environmental and health damage in other
countries that are geographically distant, which makes chemicals management an
international problem and the EU responsible for contributing to ensure safe use
of chemicals.
Power Projection
The EU’s ability to project power in the domain of global chemicals production,
trade, use, and disposal rests mainly on its (shrinking) market power and its ac-
tive role in international chemicals negotiations. Through its central position in
the global chemicals market, the EU has initiated positive change through inter-
nal legislation that has had noteworthy external effects, mainly through supply
chain links and learning by other governments. Moreover, its ambitious internal
chemicals policy lends the EU credibility in international negotiations. Internal
and foreign EU chemicals policies are thus intrinsically linked.
The EU and its member states were driving forces in the adoption of the in-
ternational chemicals conventions. For example, by adopting the regional-level
Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution among European and
North American countries, they established a model and set a precedent for
the adoption of the Stockholm Convention three years later (Hagen and Walls,
2005: 50).
While they played an active role in shaping the international chemicals con-
ventions, the EU and its member states did not succeed in their efforts to push
for a global framework convention. Those efforts were led by individual member
states rather than the EU as a single actor. Today, the EU is a relatively cohesive
and unified actor in international chemicals negotiations. Yet, in the mid-1990s
when the foundations for global chemicals governance were laid, it was rather the
Netherlands and Belgium that submitted a proposal for a framework convention
to the United Nations Environmental Programme in 1996, and Denmark and the
Netherlands (together with Iceland) that called for a global chemicals convention
in 1999. Faced with opposition from the US and some of its allies, those initia-
tives remained unsuccessful (Krueger and Selin, 2002: 338–339). Although the
efforts to adopt a framework convention failed, they contributed to generating the
momentum that led to the adoption of the Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions.
Overall, the EU considerably shaped the Basel, Rotterdam, Stockholm, and
Minamata conventions, quite consistently pursuing more ambitious positions
compared to most other countries. It did not achieve all of its objectives. As
part of the negotiation process, the EU made concessions but generally achieved
significant parts of its objectives. Yet, since it often did not achieve the level of
ambition to which it aspired, the EU reverted to unilaterally adopting legislation
that went beyond the internationally agreed measures, taking on its responsibility.
For example, in the negotiations of the 1989 Basel Convention, the EU and most
African countries demanded a complete ban of hazardous waste trade between
OECD and non-OECD countries, which was opposed by a US-led coalition. The
ban was not included in the original text but, in 1994, adopted as an amendment
to the convention. Since the amendment was ratified only very slowly—it only
entered into force in 2019—the EU unilaterally adopted a law in 2006 that imple-
mented the Basel Ban (EU Regulation No. 1013/2006). During the negotiations of
the Stockholm Convention, the EU proposed a broader scope than the twelve per-
sistent organic pollutants that originally were included. It pushed for the inclusion
of a process that allows the Conference of the Parties to add new substances based
on the precautionary principle, against the US position that wanted more control
by the parties and evidence of clear risk (Biedenkopf, 2016: 67–71). The EU derives
its substantial influence on shaping international treaties from the large share of
its chemicals market and its, often more ambitious, internal policy.
The EU’s projection of power in global chemicals governance rests consider-
ably on its internal legislation, specifically the 2006 Regulation No. 1907/2006
on the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals
(REACH Regulation). While the EU has regulated industrial chemicals since
1967, when it introduced labelling and classification rules, it took a major leap
forward when adopting the REACH Regulation, which went beyond previous
EU and international chemicals policy in its scope and ambition by addressing

chemicals management in a comprehensive and systematic manner (Biedenkopf,
2015; Biedenkopf and Park, 2012: 783–787; Hansen and Blainey, 2006; Scott,
2009). It introduced the requirement that, for all industrial chemicals placed on
the EU market above the threshold of one metric tonne per producer per year,
data on their intrinsic characteristics and uses must be submitted to the Euro-
pean Chemicals Agency. This aims to address the lack of data and accelerate risk
assessments.
The requirements apply to any actor placing a chemical on the EU market, re-
gardless of their headquarters’ location and where the chemical was produced.
Possible restrictions and other decisions apply to all activities on the EU market,
regardless of the company’s origin. In a highly globalized industry like chemicals,
this lends the EU significant market power. For example, US or Chinese companies
that export chemicals to the EU must comply with registration and other require-
ments. They are obliged to submit toxicity and use data for the chemicals they
export, otherwise they will be denied access to the EU market. Through these pro-
visions, several standards crept into multinational companies’ practices, extending
the EU’s regulatory reach beyond its borders.
Recognition
The EU bears some responsibility for addressing the possible adverse effects of
global chemicals production, trade, use, and disposal, but also has demonstrated
substantial capacity to take on its responsibility. To act, the EU needs to be rec-
ognized by external audiences as a legitimate chemicals actor and gain explicit
support globally. The EU has been recognized as a central actor in international
chemicals negotiations, and the European Commission plays a key role in the
Conferences of the Parties of the various conventions.
Recognition by other countries can also be noted by non-EU countries’ inter-
est in the REACH Regulation as inspiration for their own chemicals policy. One
notable example is South Korea, which adopted its Act on the Registration and
Evaluation of Chemicals in 2013. The similarity of the South Korean law’s name
with the REACH Regulation suggests a certain EU influence. The structure of the
South Korean law resembles that of the REACH structure by introducing provi-
sions on the registration of chemicals, on risk assessments that could be followed
by regulatory measures, and on sharing chemicals data. Some requirements are
even identical. This learning and inspiration process is a strong indication of the
EU being recognized as a legitimate and strong actor in chemicals policy. The EU’s
unilateral imposition of its chemicals regulation on any company that is active on
the EU market initially triggered significant resistance and lobbying to prevent the
REACH Regulation by several countries, including the US. The Bush administra-
tion, influenced by the US chemicals industry, perceived the REACH Regulation
as an illegitimate imposition of requirements on foreign firms. However, during

the Obama administration, the US strengthened its own domestic chemicals law.
Resistance and recognition fluctuate with national politics and political leadership.
The institutionalization of bilateral cooperation through memoranda of under-
standing also supports the observation that non-EU countries recognize the EU as
a hub of chemicals governance and strive to collaborate with it. Despite primarily
being an internal EU policy, Article 120 of the REACH Regulation explicitly refers
to cooperation with non-EU countries and data-sharing with non-EU regulating
agencies. On this basis, regulatory dialogues have been established with countries
such as China and South Korea, and agreements to share non-confidential data
were signed with Australia, Canada, Japan, and the US. Chemicals regulation has
also been included in trade agreements such as the 2010 EU-South Korea Free
Trade Agreement. These activities contribute to boosting the recognition of EU
power in global chemicals governance. Nevertheless, the EU’s capacity to engage
in external outreach is curtailed by the limited funding and human resources avail-
able. The EU has evolved over time into a coherent and active contributor to global
chemicals governance. It has accepted its responsibility to act and has demon-
strated its capacity to act both internally, by adopting the pioneering REACH
Regulation, and externally, by actively engaging in international negotiations and
including chemicals regulation in other foreign policy tools such as free trade
agreements. It is a recognized actor. Given these characteristics, the EU can be
regarded as a great power in chemicals regulation.
Conclusions
Despite its neglect by the great powers literature, the EU should be regarded as a
green great power. Our analysis of two diverse domains of GEP, climate change
and chemicals, shows that the EU possesses significant power, both negative and
positive, and has deployed this power in different ways. Moreover, the EU has
increasingly been recognized as a great power in GEP.
Our discussion of global climate governance highlighted that the EU is a cen-
tral actor. While its role has developed, it has accepted its responsibility for causing
the climate problem and recognized its obligation to act. It has demonstrated its
ability to take action both internally, by adopting a suite of policy measures and
targets, and externally, by adapting its climate diplomacy efforts to respond to new
contexts of turbulent global governance and its own diminishing negative power.
It is a recognized actor and its recognition as a key player in global climate gov-
ernance has increased, although gaps remain in terms of gaining followers. Given
these characteristics, the EU can be regarded as a climate great power, even though
it does not possess usual power sources assigned to nation states. In global chem-
icals governance, although the policy is more fragmented and of lower political
profile, our analysis shows a similar pattern. The EU has increasingly developed
internal regulations and shaped global chemicals governance, building particu-
larly on its negative power of responsibility, along with positive power stemming
from its economic clout. It is also recognized as a great power in this domain.
There are also differences between the cases. Climate change has become a high-
politics issue, which figures much more prominently in the EU’s diplomacy. The
EU projects its power through diplomatic means and on the basis of successive
climate diplomacy action plans, including a strong diplomacy pillar under the Eu-
ropean Green Deal. Much less strategic and high-level diplomacy is dedicated to
the rather low-politics issue of chemicals. The EU’s external power projection re-
lies to a larger extent in this case on the leverage of the internal market and the
EU’s share of global chemcials trade. While there was some initial resistance, the
EU’s role has been recognized externally. Using the leverage of the internal market
has proven more challenging in climate change, which is a more complex issue af-
fecting almost every economic sector and consumer. For example, the EU adopted
a provision that included all flights departing and arriving in Europe in the ETS as
from January 2012. This triggered substantial resistance by major players, includ-
ing the US and China, which threatened to cancel an order of Airbus airplanes. In
response, the EU backed down and only included EU-internal flights in the ETS.
Under the 2019 European Green Deal, the European Commission has proposed
revisiting the idea of a carbon border adjustment mechanism. Using market power
in a high-politics area such as climate change has so far proven challenging for the
EU, but it continues to try to innovate in this area. Expansive diplomacy and out-
reach in preparation for the use of market power to generate external support and
recognition of the legitimacy of the action therefore seems crucial.
However, both cases also highlighted a long-term trend of declining EU nega-
tive power, by virtue of the fact that the EU’s contribution to the issues of climate
change and chemicals management, while historically significant, are declining
and being overtaken by China in particular. This is partly the result of more
successful and earlier action in the EU on climate and chemicals management,
compared to other powers, and demonstrates the paradox of the EU’s role in GEP
generally. Against this backdrop, the EU relies increasingly on its positive power
and its ability to persuade, incentivize, and assist other partners through envi-
ronmental diplomacy tools that may reap new rewards. It has had some success
in making this shift in emphasis, and its future power and influence relies on a
strengthening of its diplomatic efforts in this regard. As the chemicals case il-
lustrates, diplomacy is not yet extensively used across all environmental policy
areas. With the European Green Deal agenda, which also plays a significant role
in the EU’s recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic (Dupont et al., 2020), we may
see renewed attempts to increase the EU’s level of ambition on climate change
and environmental regulation that go hand in hand with the external diplomacy
efforts.
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6
Brazil: A Boundary Case of Environmental
Power
Kathryn Hochstetler
Brazil is one of just a few countries in the world that are both economic pow-
erhouses and mega-diverse, housing a large share of the world’s species, natural
resources, and fresh water in its borders. In the terms used by many scholars
of global environmental governance, this means it is inherently an environmen-
tal power: it has a substantial ‘exploitable power to destroy’ (Downie, 1999: 104;
see also DeSombre, 2000). Yet there is a second possible definition of an envi-
ronmental power, which is that a country might be a positive power, a leader
in contributing to global environmental solutions (Viola and Franchini, 2018;
see Buzan and Falkner, Chapter 2 this volume). This turns attention away from
domestic environmental outcomes to international relations of various kinds.
Brazil’s environmental importance means that it is inevitably central in global en-
vironmental outcomes, and other countries have recognized that repeatedly. The
question is what Brazil itself has made of its power resources in the area over time.
This paper contextualizes Brazil’s choices in a broader discussion of what it
means to be an environmental power and the expectations that generates. En-
vironmental powers with substantial ‘power to destroy’ have usually also been
among the traditional industrialized powers, but the economic rise of emerging
powers like Brazil and the rest of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and
South Africa) have placed a new spotlight on these fast-growing powers that still
have significant development challenges and many poor citizens. What are their
environmental responsibilities and to what extent have they accepted them?
Being ‘a Power’: Emerging and Environmental Powers
What does it mean to say that a country is an ‘emerging power’ in the envi-
ronmental domain or any other? The field of international relations has spent
considerable effort since 2000 trying to answer exactly that question. Just a few
Kathryn Hochstetler, Brazil: A Boundary Case of Environmental Power. In: Great Powers, Climate Change, and Global
Environmental Responsibilities. Edited by Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan, Oxford University Press.
brazil: a boundary case of environmental power 117
of the unsettled questions include identifying which countries are rising pow-
ers, what characteristics make them that, what they are aiming for in their
international relations, and the impact those ambitions will have on global or-
der (e.g., Alexandroff and Cooper, 2010; Hochstetler and Milkoreit, 2015; Hurrell,
2006; Ikenberry, 2011; Mearsheimer, 2014).
Writing about regional hegemony, Peter Katzenstein divided the concept be-
tween what he called ‘strategic action and sheer weight’ (Katzenstein, 2005, 21).
In other words, there are concrete material indicators of what it means to be
an emerging power and possibly also a regional hegemon, a ‘sheer weight’ of
structural influence that most countries simply do not have because of their
smaller size. But hegemony and leadership are also wielded as strategies and re-
flected (or not) in recognized authority and legitimacy. At the WTO, for example,
Brazil and India pursued negotiation strategies through the 2000s that gave them
more direct influence on trade agreement outcomes than China chose to develop
(Hopewell, 2015).
In these general terms, Brazil is an informative boundary case. That is, it is not
so clearly a major power as China and traditional major powers like the US are.
However, it already has claims to be a regional power and is not so clearly not a ma-
jor power as most world countries. Especially when time frames are long, Brazil is
conceivable as a future major power with the rights and responsibilities of that sta-
tus. This changes its stakes in current negotiations about long-lasting institutions,
arrangements, and interests. Brazil’s ambiguous material status also increases the
importance of its strategic action. The ambiguous material foundation of its power
also makes Brazil and other boundary cases more likely to exercise leadership in-
consistently. This is much as Andrés Malamud argues Brazil has in fact done in
its foreign policy: sometimes striking a leadership role and sometimes retreating
(Malamud, 2017).
Beyond these general observations about power, the specific issue matters, with
different issue-areas showing different political structures. These depend in turn
on assets held and their distribution, geographical dimensions, the presence of in-
terest groups, and so on, observations that go back to the classic work of Keohane
and Nye (1989). Many environmental issues, including biodiversity conservation
and climate change, are rivalrous in their structure, meaning that ‘use of the re-
source by one actor diminishes that resource’s value to another actor’ (DeSombre,
2000: 24). Countries that are heavy resource users through, say, deforestation
that reduces biodiversity or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that reduce the to-
tal carbon space, have substantial ‘power to destroy’ or to prevent environmental
protection (Downie, 1999). Biodiversity is also excludable, meaning that access to
biodiversity’s benefits and losses is associated with (national) control over the ter-
ritory where biodiversity is physically located (DeSombre, 2000: 31). These issue
characteristics give Brazil what Katzenstein calls sheer weight, in its substantial
power to destroy, in some of the most important issues on the agenda of global
environmental governance.
118 hochstetler
While the literature on global environmental governance generally acknowl-

edges how greater power to destroy makes certain countries critical partners in
solving environmental problems, it says less about how those solutions might look.
There are at least three ways of thinking about how countries with great power to
destroy might be expected to contribute, which I outline here with special atten-
tion to the expectations for countries that might also be classified as emerging
rather than established powers. The three are not mutually exclusive and are not
intrinsically related either, as they represent rather different forms of engagement
with environmental problems.
First, holding significant environmental power to destroy implies that activities
that are entirely or partially under national control have significant environ-
mental effects that go beyond national boundaries. Contributing to a global
environmental solution could therefore mean designing and implementing na-
tional and local policies that, for example, reduce deforestation, GHG emissions,
or species loss. There is a long tradition in global environmental governance
that expects this from all countries, beginning with the 1972 Stockholm Con-
ference, which encouraged creating national environmental protection agencies
(Frank, Hironaka, and Schofer, 2000). Since its Framework Convention of 1992,
the biodiversity regime has asked countries to develop national biodiversity strate-
gies, now more formally required after the 2010 Nagoya Protocol.1 The climate
regime has explicitly taken on the question of whether only established powers
must take climate action, moving from asking for only nationally appropriate
mitigation actions from developing countries to asking all countries to formally
put forward their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to achieving a
global solution to climate change (Upadhyaya, Fridahl, Linnér, and Román, 2018).
In all these ways, environmental protection regimes have established the ex-
pectation that all countries will tackle their environmental problems at home,
even as there continues to be debate over how to enforce and/or enable that action.
Beyond national action at home, there is a second possible expectation that en-
vironmental powers will contribute constructively to international negotiations.
For instance, Chasek et al (2016: 52) assert that a state may play lead, support-
ing, swing, or veto roles. Much of the discussion about environmental ‘power to
destroy’ focuses here, with environmental powers being seen as veto players in
international negotiations in the areas that they dominate. An intended frame-
work convention on forests died in 1992, for example, when the countries with
substantial expanses of tropical forests, including Brazil, essentially vetoed the
possibility of such an agreement (Humphrey, 2005). In other cases, however, en-
vironmental powers can anchor agreements that say countries will work together
in ways they can support. Such constructive engagement is especially important
if the participation of some environmental powers ensures the participation of
1 Brazil signed the Nagoya Protocol, as well as an update in 2018, but ratified it only in August 2020.
others. In this expectation, the action shifts from national territory to interna-
tional negotiations. A country could conceivably contribute positively to the latter
without actually taking national action; alternatively, it could block international
negotiations while still taking national or subnational action towards a solution.
The BRICS countries have often been said to be more willing to take national ac-
tion than to enshrine that action in formal international commitments, especially
in the climate regime (Hochstetler and Milkoreit, 2015), even as their emerging
power status has led to heavy pressures for international cooperation.
Finally, environmental powers might be expected to go on to bear the additional
costs of achieving global environmental solutions beyond simply the costs of their
own compliance. Such a contribution to providing global public goods is virtually
a defining feature of true global leadership in that it makes it more possible for oth-
ers to also contribute to a solution. In environmental agreements since the ozone
regime of the 1980s, such a role includes paying all or some of the costs of others’
actions, especially those of developing countries. The Kyoto Protocol codified such
an expectation for Annex 1 countries and it is a perennial focus of international
negotiations, not least because developed countries have so often failed to meet
their own promises (Roberts and Weikmans, 2017). Beyond direct payments, this
contribution can also include developing or subsidizing environmental technolo-
gies that can later be more widely used, as European countries did for wind and
solar power (Aklin and Urpelainen, 2018).
Through much of the history of global environmental governance, developed
countries have been the ones who held such environmental power to destroy and
took on—more and less willingly—all of these categories of positive action. The
climate regime’s principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ reflected
that arrangement. Whether and how similar expectations are being fulfilled by
emerging powers is less clear. Their responsibility for climate action has led to
fraught debates, both among them and with other countries. At the time of the
Copenhagen Accord they were more willing to commit to domestic than to inter-
national actions, and its bottom-up nature reflects their concerns (Conrad, 2012;
Hochstetler and Milkoreit, 2015; Hochstetler and Viola, 2012; Vihma, 2011).
There are fewer assessments of the emerging powers in Paris and since, not least
because they seem to be going their own ways rather than working together as they
did in Copenhagen (Tobin, Schmidt, Tosun, and Burns, 2018). In the remainder of
the paper, I examine Brazil’s varying contributions to international environmental
governance through this lens, seeking to classify and account for its positions. My
focus is primarily on the climate regime, although Brazil’s impact there is heavily
refracted through its deforestation policies, which have obvious implications for
biodiversity and related environmental issues as well. Brazil was perhaps the most
willing to globally commit to climate action in the earlier period (Hochstetler and
Viola, 2012), but has been charged with pulling back to less cooperative positions.
Eduardo Viola and Matı́as Franchini even set out their recent book’s aim as ‘to
120 hochstetler
problematize the myth of Brazil’s climate leadership in international environmen-

tal politics’ (Viola and Franchini, 2018: xxii). In contrast, Brazil’s NDC presents the
country as having already achieved ‘one of the largest undertakings by any single
country to date’. Leader or laggard? This paper takes up that question. It examines
Brazil’s environmental leadership at home, in environmental negotiations, and in
support of the environmental action of other developing countries.
Solving Environmental Problems at Home
One possible contribution to resolving global environmental problems is for en-

vironmental powers with substantial power to destroy the environment—because
they are so well endowed with particular resources or have high levels of emissions
and contamination—to take action on their national territory to preserve re-
sources and prevent environmental degradation. Arguably, this is the most crucial
step for environmental conservation in countries of all kinds, with international
agreements facilitating further national action rather than being able to replace it.
As is well known, Brazil includes the largest expanses of tropical forests in the
world, which host remarkable biodiversity and play major roles in regional as well
as global weather and climate patterns.2 While it has not recently grown econom-
ically at the rates of China and India, Brazil is substantially industrialized and
urbanized. Industrial agriculture and mining are also major economic activities
and central to Brazilian exports. An electricity matrix grounded in large-scale
hydropower—with remaining locations largely located in the Amazon region and
significant socio-environmental impacts—mixes awkwardly with both large-scale
production and use of biofuels and the 2007 discovery of large offshore oil fields.
This combination of features makes Brazil an environmental power with signif-
icant power to destroy on essentially the entire agenda of global environmental
politics.
Figure 6.1 shows a snapshot of how all of those features create a particular emis-
sions profile of GHG emissions that is very unusual for an upper-middle-income
country, as it has been heavily concentrated in the land-use and land-use change
and forests (LULUCF) sector (see Figure 6.1). Even more unusually, those emis-
sions were brought down considerably after 2005, leaving it with a more typical
profile for an industrial powerhouse. As discussed below, those achievements have
now levelled off and deforestation is beginning to rise again, with negative conse-
quences for both biodiversity and climate aims. In this section, I discuss Brazil’s
partial gains in controlling deforestation, as well as changes in the energy sector
where emissions have been growing at the fastest rate.
2 See http://www.mma.gov.br/biomas
2,500,000,000
2,000,000,000
1,500,000,000
1,000,000,000
500,000,000
0
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
Agriculture Energy Deforestation, Land-use change
Industry Wastes
Fig. 6.1 Brazilian greenhouse gas emissions (t CO2 eq) by sector, 1990–2019.
Source: http://plataforma.seeg.eco.br/total_emission. See Azevedo et al. (2018) on the
methodology used by this group of 40 NGOs.
As Figure 6.1 demonstrates, Brazil was successful in reducing deforestation

from the very high rates of the early 2000s, especially in its iconic Amazon region.
This drop is an undoubted achievement and the foundation for most of Brazil’s
subsequent claims of climate leadership. Table 6.1 shows that a great many political
and economic forces coincided in the middle of the decade of the 2000s to rein-
force major new governmental policies and oversight. They were of many types,
from private governance initiatives for soy and beef industries through govern-
ment policies to international commodity price and currency movements. Many
of these emerging forces worked to reduce deforestation, although some, like the
Worker’s Party government’s return to building large hydroelectric dams in the
Amazon, increased it. Analyses of the decline in deforestation tend to focus on just
a subset of these factors, but their coincidence in time means that the actual weight
of individual policies, initiatives, and developments will be difficult to disentangle.
In fact, the most significant change may have been the collective impression left
that the national government was now present and paying attention in the region.3
The coincidence of reinforcing policies supports earlier analysis of Brazilian envi-
ronmental policy achievements that argues that they tend to involve exactly such
a complex of mutually supporting developments and networks for effectiveness
(Hochstetler and Keck, 2007).
Figure 6.1 also shows that annual deforestation rates levelled out after 2010 and
have even spiked upwards in subsequent years. Total deforestation rates are still
very high, matching the rates of the early 1990s that marked Brazil as a major
contributor to the global forest and biodiversity crises. This change has been less
3 Interview with João Paulo Capobianco, Executive Secretary of the Ministry of Environment during
the years when deforestation began to be controlled, São Paulo, December 2018.
122 hochstetler
Table 6.1 Review: Claimed causes of the drop in deforestation in Brazil after 2005
Government-based Causes Non-governmental Causes
Plan to Prevent and Control Amazon Amazon Fund, REDD+,

Deforestation (PPCDAM) and generally incentives
from foreign donations
Monitoring and prosecution, fines Soy moratorium
New protected areas Beef moratorium
Payments for ecosystem services Drop in soy profitability
Conditions on credit Intensification of cattle
raising
Road paving stalled PPG-7’s indigenous land
programme
Environmental impact assessment Pressure from civil society
Marina Silva as Minister of Environment Exchange rates
State and municipal level initiatives Droughts
Land titling programme (Terra Legal) [Economic growth]
[Hydroelectric dams] [Commodities boom]
[Program for Growth Acceleration—
PAC]
[Inattention to cerrado ecosystem]
Note: Items in brackets [ ] are seen to contribute to greater deforestation.

Source: Aamodt 2018; Alix-Garcia and Gibbs 2017; Carvalho 2012; Gibbs, et al. 2015; Hochstetler and
Viola 2012; Inoue 2014; Macedo, et al. 2012; Nassar de Oliveira 2015; Schwartzman, Moutinho, and
Hamburg 2012.
studied, although observers point to a new Forest Code in 2012 that reduced for-
est protections and decreased funding for existing programmes (Schwartzman,
Moutinho, and Hamburg, 2012). Other promising initiatives like the effort to
require cattle producers to register and report deforestation have been locally
successful, but provoked ‘leakage’ or deforestation in ways not counted in the
programme (Alix-Garcia and Gibbs, 2017). Years of economic recession, a presi-
dential impeachment in 2016, and deep corruption revealed in ongoing court cases
have drawn attention to other issues and led successive presidents and congresses
to prioritize economic growth over environmental protection. Since 2011, conser-
vative agribusiness representatives have gained ground in the National Congress
and asserted themselves as central in governing coalitions (Hochstetler, 2017). As
a result of these and other factors—again joining and reinforcing each other in
ways difficult to disentangle empirically—Brazil has reduced its contribution to
reducing deforestation with its implications for global climate and biodiversity so-
lutions. In its NDC in Paris, Brazil formally rolled back its ambitions for national
action even further, targeting illegal, but not legal, deforestation rates.
On taking office in January 2019, President Jair Bolsonaro moved to immedi-
ately reorganize the national administration in a way that further weakened tools
for forest protection and de-emphasized climate action. The Ministry of Agri-
culture, with agribusiness leader Tereza Cristina at its top, gained the National
Forest Service (Serviço Florestal Brasileiro) and responsibility for demarcating
indigenous lands. No actor in the national administration had a listed respon-
sibility for climate action in the new administration plan.⁴ The National Forest
Service administers the Rural Environmental Registry (Cadastro Ambiental Ru-
ral), which identifies the areas for permanent preservation on private land, critical
for satellite-based monitoring. The Temer government had already delayed the
final requirement for registration, but this is a further weakening of what had
been a key implementation mechanism for the package of policies controlling
deforestation.
When more specific rules for the Ministry of Environment came a week later, it
had lost the Climate Secretariat created in 2008, although a climate section on the
website indicated that it was still implementing the 2009 climate law.⁵ The admin-
istration’s sceptical view of climate science has given new political and cultural
space for climate deniers that did not exist before.⁶ Bolsonaro and his Minister
of Environment, Ricardo Salles, are also openly critical of NGOs and announced
a 90-day suspension of all contracts and other cooperation with them to allow
for review.⁷ In total, the Ministry of Environment has issued 57 major regulatory
changes, each of which reduces environmental protection (Vale et al., 2021: 2).
The energy sector provides a similarly complex view over time. In electricity,
the clearest progress is in the introduction of wind power to the sector, although
solar power lags (see Figure 6.2) (Hochstetler, 2021). Since 2012, wind power has
competed well in auctions that pit different fuel sources against each other, often
being the cheapest form of electricity offered. It is seasonally complementary to the
hydropower that has historically supplied the single national grid. Hydropower has
come under increasing fire for the deforestation and other socio-environmental
impacts it brings to local communities. Some scientists also charge that it con-
tributes methane to Brazil’s GHG profile, with a few poorly designed projects
even out-emitting fossil fuel plants (Fearnside, 2005), although other scientists
and the Brazilian government defend hydropower as a clean energy source. As
the electricity supplied by hydropower has decreased with droughts—themselves
worsened by climate change (Schwartzman et al., 2012: 341)—and activists block
and delay the plants, electricity planners declared during the Temer government
that Brazil would not build more large hydropower plants.⁸ The alternative for
⁴ MP 870, online at http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2019-2022/2019/Mpv/mpv870.htm.

⁵ Decree 9672, online at http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato2019-2022/2019/decreto/D9672
.htm; http://www.mma.gov.br/institucional.html
⁶ Interview with Andre Nahur, Coordinator Climate Change and Energy, WWF-Brasil, Brasília,
November 2018.
⁷ https://exame.abril.com.br/brasil/ministerio-do-meio-ambiente-suspende-convenios-com-ongs-
por-90-dias/.
⁸ https://oglobo.globo.com/economia/fase-de-grandes-hidreletricas-chega-ao-fim-22245669. The
Bolsonaro government’s intentions on hydropower are unclear.
124 hochstetler
18,000
16,000
14,000
12,000
10,000
Wind
8,000
Solar
6,000
4,000
2,000
0
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
Fig. 6.2 Wind and solar power in Brazil, 2002–2019 (built and contracted
grid-scale supply).
Source: ANEEL
balancing the intermittency of wind and solar power, unfortunately, is natural gas
plants. The 10-year electricity plan for 2018–2027 foresaw an enormous upsurge
in plans for natural gas installations, which will worsen the electricity emissions
profile (Hochstetler, 2021; Ministério de Minas e Energia, 2018: 56).
The more significant and confounding development in the energy sector, how-
ever, was the 2007 discovery of major quantities of deep-sea oil off the Brazilian
coast and under a thick layer of salt. This pre-salt oil has recently made Brazil
an oil producer and exporter on an unprecedented scale and dampened Brazilian
prospects for real decarbonization of the economy (Viglio, Di Giulio, and Ferreira,
2017; Viola and Franchini, 2018). Beyond the emissions of the extraction itself,
the oil and gas supply provide disincentives for weaning Brazil’s heavy transport
sector—another major source of GHG emissions—from fossil fuels.⁹ This is the
most significant new source of GHG emissions in recent years. Oil production
and use had grown to be 57% of all energy and industrial process emissions in
2018 (SEEG, 2018: 2).
The 2009 climate legislation had contained a clause calling for the phase-out
of fossil fuels, but when then-President Lula signed it in 2010—after the Copen-
hagen Conference was over—he followed the advice of the Ministry of Mines and
Energy and vetoed that clause (Aamodt, 2018: 15). Brazil’s Paris NDC was also
notably unambitious in the energy area. Simulations of Brazil’s current energy
plans concluded that existing policies will lead to energy-related CO2 emissions
that are ‘23% lower than the NDC indicative target’ (Lefevre, Wells, and Hourcade,
⁹ Interview with André Ferreira, Instituto de Energia e Meio Ambiente (IEMA), São Paulo, 2018.
Ferreira leads the energy analysis of SEEG.
2018: 5). The simulations also explore a higher-carbon scenario, where Brazil sub-
sidizes and consumes more of its own oil, and a true decarbonization scenario with
a high carbon tax and conclude, interestingly, that neither has much of an aggre-
gate effect on GDP (ibid.: 7). The simulations suggest that Brazil could be much
more ambitious in its national decarbonization plans, although the broader sce-
nario does not save the global climate, as it assumes more oil would be exported
and consumed elsewhere. To go well below 2°C, as the Paris Agreement asks, Brazil
would have to phase out oil production after 2035, which would have negative GDP
effects (ibid: 8).
There is no significant movement to leave the oil in the ground. Among decision
makers, the climate impacts of oil and gas production seem to play at best a small
role in decision-making. A governmental study of the socio-environmental effects
of increasing their product never even mentions the words climate change, and
refers only to the GHGs that may escape at the moment of production (EPE, 2014).
A think tank’s review of fossil fuel subsidies in Brazil found they totalled an aver-
age of R$68.6 billion per year (approximately US$20.65 billion) between 2013 and
2017, not least because of a 2017 decision to exempt the oil and gas extraction
industry from taxes until 2040. This is 1% of GDP, more than twice what Brazil
spends annually on its iconic conditional cash transfer programme, Bolsa Famı́lia
(INESC, 2018). Nonetheless, economic decline and the corruption scandal in the
energy parastatal Petrobras may be having their own weight already even if climate
concerns are not. In 2016, Petrobras cut its planned investments for 2016–2020
three times, falling from R$130 billion to about R$80 billion.1⁰
Contributing to Constructive International Negotiations? Brazil

and the BASIC Countries in Global Climate Negotiations
Global climate negotiations have been centred on the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) of 1992, its 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and
a decade of debates about what to do beyond the Kyoto Protocol. The protocol
codified a two-part division of the world’s countries, with 43 of them (‘Annex 1’)
asked in the protocol to commit to formal emissions reductions on a timetable,
while the remaining (self-identified developing) countries were given no formal
obligations. This arrangement of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ in
its convention language has been the starting point for nearly all the climate ne-
gotiations, but it has been contested just as long. The US has led the opposition,
withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol because it did not ask for reduced emissions
from large, quickly growing emerging economies like China and the other BASIC
countries.
1⁰ http://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-petrobras-plan-idUSKCN0W35F5.
126 hochstetler
After 2000, as the BASIC countries began the economic growth—and

emissions—spurt that gained them new international attention as emerging pow-
ers,11 other countries began to also pressure them for climate action (Hallding
et al., 2013). The BASIC countries emerged as a grouping at the beginning of the
2009 Copenhagen Conference of Parties. In Copenhagen, they were at the centre of
a late huddle with the United States and only a few other countries that jettisoned
long-standing treaty documents at the last minute in favour of a minimal docu-
ment asking countries to voluntarily commit to climate action. BASIC, especially
China, received much of the blame for blocking formal multilateral obligations
(Dimitrov, 2010), and the resulting Copenhagen Accord was not adopted until
the following year.
Yet their individual and collective attitudes towards climate action were more
complex than this simple story suggests. Even before the Copenhagen meeting, all
but South Africa had said they would reduce their emissions, and South Africa
added its pledge during the meeting. The four BASIC countries strongly agree that
the industrialized countries, who have benefited from decades if not centuries
of growth built on carbon emissions, have a historical responsibility for earlier,
more substantial, and externally obligated emissions reductions—and to pay to
help developing countries do so. Since 2009, the coalition has splintered over the
nature and timing of their own commitments, however, with China and India
especially slow to agree that they should commit to climate action (Hochstetler
and Milkoreit, 2015). The BASIC coalition has continued to meet quarterly since
Copenhagen, but has never become the negotiation bloc that many expected. Its
participants stress that it is a forum for strategic coordination, where members
learn about the intentions of the others and cooperate where possible; the G77
remains their negotiation group.12 Their national trajectories are quite different.
Brazil was the most active, early, of the four, as it hosted the 1992 United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development where the UNFCCC was
presented for signature. Its delegation to the 1992 conference took credit for hav-
ing the UNFCCC negotiations proceed under the auspices of the UN General
Assembly, rather than the initial inclination to use the United Nations Environ-
ment Program or the World Meteorological Organization. The latter choice ‘would
have led to a ‘depoliticization’ of the negotiations and a focus on scientific and
technical aspects,’ said the delegation, while it preferred a negotiation setting that
would keep economic issues central for the sake of developing countries (Brazilian
11 Their emerging power status was recognized in 2001 by Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs, who chris-
tened Brazil, Russia, India, and China as the BRICs, a moniker that took hold over the next decade.
South Africa joined in 2010, and the BRICS now meet regularly, even announcing plans to create their
own financial institutions similar to the World Bank and IMF. Because Russia was an Annex 1 country
under the Kyoto Protocol, it does not join the others in climate negotiations, where they are BASIC.
12 Interview with Adriano Santhiago de Oliveira, Director of the Climate Change Department of
the Brazilian Ministry of Environment, Brasília, 3 October 2014; Interview with Official of the South
African Department of Environmental Affairs, Pretoria, 5 May 2014.
Delegation, 1993: 25). As host and a large developing country, Brazil already saw
its role as bridging between North and South and encouraged an outcome ‘with
more teeth,’ as long as only developed countries assumed obligations (ibid.: 26–27;
see also Lisboa, 2002).
Brazil submitted a document that would do just that in the Kyoto Protocol ne-
gotiations, offering language and calculations for specific quantitative targets for
emissions reductions in developed countries.13 Its calculations of the developed
countries’ historical responsibility for global emissions continue to form a starting
point for developing country negotiators, including China. Developed countries
soundly rejected the language and principle, but the arguments eventually be-
came the foundation of the Clean Development Mechanism, a provision of the
Kyoto Protocol that allows developed countries to meet some of their emissions
reduction obligations through funding projects that reduce emissions in develop-
ing countries (Johnson, 2001). This repeated theme of the historical responsibility
of developed countries to take the earliest and most intensive action to address cli-
mate change is at the core of arguments that Brazil is a conservative, unconstructive
actor in climate negotiations (Basso, 2018; Viola and Franchini, 2018: 152ff).
Another thread of Brazilian participation came in negotiations about the more
specific topic of the inclusion of forests in the climate regime, where Brazil again
had exceptional power to destroy. From 1997 to 2005, Brazil really had exer-
cised a veto on including deforestation and forest degradation as components
of mitigation, asserting national sovereignty (Carvalho, 2012: 153). Nonetheless,
Brazil’s many non-governmental participants pushed hard to change the govern-
ment position. An NGO coalition in favour of climate action had been attending
the negotiations since the first UNFCCC was presented for signature in Rio de
Janeiro in 1992. They held a side event in 2003 and pushed hard to redefine Brazil’s
deforestation problem as a climate rather than agricultural issue (Aamodt, 2018).
Also in 2003, the NGOs made a specific proposal to include deforestation in the
negotiations by creating an economic incentive for avoided deforestation, which
eventually became REDD+ (Nassar de Oliveira, 2015: 184). Notwithstanding crit-
icism of actual REDD+ projects by many local communities, the idea had its
origin among ‘Amazonian indigenous peoples, rubber-tappers, and small farmers
who wanted compensation for the conservation they and other local communities
achieved’ (Rodrigues, 2015: 126; see also Nassar de Oliveira, 2015). Working with
transnational allies, Brazilian activists thus worked to build consensus in Brazil
and then internationally to include efforts to protect tropical forests in the climate
regime through REDD+.
In the international negotiations, the Coalition of Rainforest Nations made
a similar proposal not long after, which was countered by a Brazilian proposal
in 2006. The two proposals differed in that the Brazilian government resisted
13 http://unfccc.int/cop4/resource/docs/1997/agbm/misc01a3.htm
128 hochstetler
allowing offsets and market mechanisms for compensating conservation activi-

ties, arguing on grounds of environmental integrity (Carvalho, 2012: 149, 165; see
also Dooley and Gupta, 2017). Brazil continued to hold these positions through
2009, but the proposal of Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica effectively won
(Carvalho, 2012: 154). Since Brazil was influential and didn’t believe in offsets,
it prolonged the discussion but did not outright block consensus internation-
ally, a ‘constructive and more sophisticated conciliating position’ (ibid.: 154–155).
Meanwhile, it pursued its own deforestation control strategies and moved to
set up an Amazon Fund with Norway under the rules it preferred. The Ama-
zon Fund accepts public monies and does not generate tradeable carbon credits
(ibid.: 159).
In a later stage of negotiations from 2012 to 2015 that was specifically about
a post-2020 design for climate commitments, Brazil ranked seventh in terms
of the numbers of statements made by individual countries in the negotia-
tions, making 225 statements (Karlas, 2017: 836). Its most important offering
was a proposal submitted in 2014 in Peru for how NDCs might be differenti-
ated, which again departs from Brazil’s insistence on the historical responsibility
of developed countries. This proposal suggested three levels of action (instead
of the traditional two), through which countries were to progress over time
as they became more developed, keeping developed countries’ responsibilities
first and central. While Brazilian negotiators were very pleased with the level
of engagement with their proposal, the question of how to define the thresh-
olds between the levels showed that three levels of responsibility did not resolve
many more questions than the Kyoto-era division in two had done and it was not
adopted.1⁴
More generally, Brazil’s statements on post-2020 design marked it as only a
lukewarm supporter of legalization of any agreement, with especially guarded
comments on legal obligation. These positions put it well behind its regional
neighbours in the AILAC group and its sometime ally South Africa—both at the
top of support for legalization—but ahead of India, China, and the US in will-
ingness to accept institutional constraints on state autonomy (Karlas, 2017: 836).
This positioning is common: Brazil can appear progressive in its climate po-
sitions in comparison to its BASIC partners (Hochstetler and Viola, 2012),
but other countries in Latin America and Africa are more committed to firm
climate commitments (Edwards and Roberts, 2015).
In this sense, Brazil’s Paris NDC was typical. Brazil stood aside from its BASIC
partners in being the only one of the four to submit a plan for an absolute reduc-
tion in GHGs from a baseline year (Tobin, Schmidt, Tosun, and Burns, 2018: 16),
2005, the year when deforestation began to drop. Organizers of the High Ambi-
tion Coalition for Paris—which already included regional countries like Colombia
1⁴ http://blog.observatoriodoclima.eco.br/?p=2144#sthash.Dom1nv7z.dpbs
and the Caribbean countries—recruited Brazil to join because of its promise of an

economy-wide absolute emissions reduction target. They credited Brazil’s joining
(the day after the US did) as a ‘game changer’, with US lead negotiator Todd Stern
agreeing that Brazil’s entry marked ‘a real sense of dynamism and force in this
thing’. Once Brazil joined, its former partners India and China were left isolated in
pushing against transparency and regular reviews (King, 2015; Volcovici, 2015).
It is worth noting that Brazil has claimed even more credit for diplomatic lead-
ership than this. Andre Correa de Lago, the lead negotiator for Brazil at the Rio+20
conference has argued that its ‘miracle’ of success ‘renewed the faith of people and
governments in the multilateral processes in a way we had not seen in years’.1⁵ In
his view, the simple following of transparent and inclusive discussions that resulted
in a final agreement laid a foundation for doing the same thing a few years later
in Paris—although some observers are much more sceptical of both the process
and the outcomes (e.g., Bernstein, 2013). Similarly, its NDC claims that ‘Brazil’s
mitigation efforts are of a type, scope and scale at least equivalent to the iNDCs
of those developed countries most responsible for climate change. In view of the
above, and based on available tools, it is evident that Brazil’s iNDC, while consis-
tent with its national circumstances and capabilities, is far more ambitious than
what would correspond to Brazil’s marginal relative responsibility for the global
average temperature increase’ (Brazil, 2016: 6). This is one area of continuity with
the Bolsonaro administration, as Minister of Environment Salles has also force-
fully made the argument that Brazil had already done more than its share in climate
action and now deserves credit and remuneration, not criticism (Preissler Iglesias,
Lima, and Douglas, 2019).
Since Paris, however, Brazil has stepped back in its climate role, first quietly
and now with increasing stridency as the Bolsonaro administration rejects a ma-
jor role in international environmental leadership altogether. Bolsonaro’s choice
as foreign minister, Ernesto Aráujo, has denounced multilateralism in his blog and
said Brazil had been weakened by its acceptance of an ‘international order based
on rules.’1⁶ In another posting, he called the environmental cause, and ‘climatism’
in particular, part of the political left’s globalist strategy to achieve total dom-
ination.1⁷ The Temer government, reportedly at the prodding of the incoming
Bolsonaro government, withdrew Brazil’s offer to host the 2019 UN climate talks.
In the final months before his inauguration in January 2019, Bolsonaro followed
then-US president Donald Trump in threatening to leave the Paris Agreement al-
together (Darby, 2018). Brazil did not follow in the end, but the threat shows a
possible dynamic where rejecting the responsibilities of power can be influential
1⁵ https://profilesofparis.com/profiles/, accessed May 2018.

1⁶ https://social-blog.wix.com/querer-grandeza.
1⁷ https://www.metapoliticabrasil.com/blog/sequestrar-e-perverter.
130 hochstetler
in much the same way that the English School expects accepting great power
responsibility to be.
Beyond rhetoric, Bolsonaro’s administrative reorganization of the government
has made significant climate diplomacy leadership less likely, as the Foreign Min-
istry (Itamaraty) lost its climate group. Environmental topics generally went to
the area that works with national sovereignty and citizenship issues (Assuntos
de Soberania Nacional e Cidadania).1⁸ This reflects the government’s post-
inauguration position that Brazil will not withdraw from the Paris Agreement
‘for now’, but will implement it in a way that avoids costs for Brazilian business
and follows national priorities and interests.1⁹ Brazilian agribusiness unexpect-
edly emerged as a critical supporter of remaining within the Paris Agreement as in
their best economic interests, helping to reshape government positions. The exec-
utive director of the Brazilian Association of Agribusiness (Associação Brasileira
de Agronegócio) was widely cited as saying, ‘He who wants to leave the Paris
Agreement has never exported anything.’2⁰
There has been a similar retreat from strident rhetoric on forests and biodi-
versity. Brazil’s implementation of its REDD+ programmes at home and inter-
nationally has continued into 2019 despite the Bolsonaro government’s rhetorical
opposition to much of what the programme involves.21 And while the Bolsonaro
administration has rejected international criticism of its forest policies and ex-
pressed scepticism of the donor-powered Amazon Fund, it is beginning a new
initiative with the USAID which will draw on the private sector for an Amazon
Impact Investment Partnership.
Brazil’s traditional position on climate diplomacy was perhaps best summarized
in a pre-Paris article by three environmental specialists in the Ministry of Foreign
Relations: ‘Brazil and other developing countries are disposed to do their part and
to contribute even more to the global effort to face climate change — but not at the
cost of absolving developed countries of their commitments and responsibilities
to the international community’ (Carvalho, Azeredo, and Lucero, 2015: 32).22 The
Brazilian government and those who see it as a constructive force in international
negotiations have stressed the first part of this statement, while those who are crit-
ical see Brazil as overemphasizing the latter in ways that undermine global climate
progress. There has long been a division between Brazilian actors who emphasize
1⁸ MP 870, online at http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2019-2022/2019/Mpv/mpv870.htm

and Itamaraty Decree 9683, online at http://www.in.gov.br/materia/-/asset_publisher/Kujrw0TZC2Mb
/conte…tamaraty_e_medida_ideologica_e_antipatriotica&utm_term=2019-03-11
1⁹ https://www.valor.com.br/politica/6064021/ministro-diz-que-por-ora-brasil-permanece-no-
acordo-de-paris.
2⁰ https://exame.abril.com.br/economia/quem-quer-sair-do-acordo-de-paris-e-porque-nunca-
exportou-diz-abag/
21 See the funding proposal to the Green Climate Fund, GCF/B.22/10/Add.02.
22 Azeredo was the head of the Brazilian delegation to UN climate negotiations at the time of the
Paris talks.
one side or the other of this position (Vieira, 2013), but the Bolsonaro adminis-
tration seems unique in not only rejecting its premise but also taking institutional
steps to undermine and weaken—and sometimes openly threaten—the actors and
institutions that might want to undertake significant environmental leadership.
Providing Global Public Goods
The most expansive contribution a country might make to global environmental

governance would be to take up the broader costs of providing global public goods
and helping other countries to make their own contributions to solving global
problems. These are roles that have traditionally been reserved for hegemonic and
well-developed powers. It was the ‘developed country Parties’ in Annex II of the
Kyoto Protocol, for example, who were called on to finance the additional costs
of developing countries who took action to implement climate agreements and to
transfer necessary technology to the latter (Article 11).
During the latter years of Lula’s presidency and up to the Paris conference in
2015, Brazil’s presidents made some gestures in the direction of providing global
public goods. The Copenhagen COP in 2009 was a high point of Brazilian inter-
national assertion in the climate realm, with Lula himself an active participant. In
trying to reach an agreement in the final tumultuous days, Lula drew on his history
as a leader of organized labour, startling his own foreign policy establishment by
offering that Brazil could not only pay for its own climate action but also offer some
funds to other developing countries. At the 2012 Rio+20 conference, his successor
and the host of the conference, Dilma Rousseff, offered a $10-million pledge in cli-
mate finance for developing countries, saying, ‘Brazil, as an emerging power, will
do its part’ (Hochstetler and Milkoreit, 2015: 218–219). Brazil’s NDC continues
to promise, for actions at home, that ‘the implementation of Brazil’s iNDC is not
contingent upon international support’ even as it accepts foreign contributions
(Brazil, 2016: 3).
A section of Brazil’s NDC indicates that it will engage in South–South co-
operation initiatives (but not funding) ‘on the basis of solidarity and common
sustainable development priorities’ (ibid: 4). The NDC mentions ‘forest moni-
toring systems; biofuels capacity-building and technology transfer; low carbon
and resilient agriculture; restoration and reforestation activities; management of
protected areas; increased resilience through social inclusion and protection pro-
grammes; capacity building for national communications and other obligations
under the Convention, in particular to Portuguese speaking countries’ (ibid.).
There is clearly a history and an existing institution (the Brazilian Cooperation
Agency, ABC) to support this promise, although the actual trajectory of such
initiatives has been mixed.
132 hochstetler
1,000
800
600
400
200
0
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
New projects Total projects underway
Fig. 6.3 Number of technical cooperation projects and activities.

Source: Brazilian Cooperation Agency (ABC), see http://www.abc.gov.br/
gestao/quantitativoprojetos, accessed 25 September 2017.
Lula greatly expanded Brazil’s development assistance programmes, focusing on

technical assistance where Brazil could pass on policy successes to interested coun-
tries. Figure 6.3 shows that the number of new projects peaked in 2010 with very
few new projects after 2012. The largest number of all projects (19%) were related
to agriculture, and Brazil’s climate-unfriendly industrial agriculture came to dom-
inate those initiatives (Cabral et al., 2016; Scoones et al., 2016; Vaz, 2015). Brazil
has also tried to promote biofuels in southern Africa with technical assistance and
the participation of some national firms. While the policy is billed as one that pro-
vides alternative, environmentally friendly energy sources, the Brazilian biofuels
model is based on large-scale monocultures. Studies have increasingly concluded
that such initiatives are ‘one of the main sources for socio-environmental conflicts
and disputes on the Africa continent’ (Fulquet and Pelfini, 2015: 120) and Brazil
has increasingly withdrawn from promoting them.
Another area where Brazil might contribute to broader climate action is in
the international finance of its National Development Bank (BNDES), as fi-
nance for sustainable, climate-friendly infrastructure is a core requirement for
reducing global emissions. BNDES’ international lending is not nearly as ex-
tensive as China’s, totalling about $14.5 billion between 2003 and 2018 (Sierra
and Hochstetler, 2017).23 In climate terms, it is not as problematic as China’s
lending, which has been a major source of finance for coal-powered power plants
(Gallagher, 2018). BNDES financed only one thermal electricity plant during these
years, although it supported Brazilian firms that built nine hydroelectric plants, 20
roads (which encourage deforestation in forested areas), and extensive oil and gas
23 Compiled from http://www.bndes.gov.br/wps/portal/site/home/transparencia/, accessed March

2017. Regular checks show no new projects since 2016, due less to policy changes than to the Lava
Jato corruption scandal linked to the construction companies involved in many of the projects. All
references to BNDES data are calculated by the author from this source unless otherwise indicated.
pipelines in Argentina and Uruguay. These sorts of projects typically contribute

to environmental degradation, including GHG emissions. In addition, BNDES
also made its largest loans during these years to Petrobras, the state-controlled
oil company (Hochstetler and Montero, 2013). Because these loans were generally
given for Petrobras’s general investment needs, it is not possible to identify spe-
cific projects and whether they were inside or outside Brazil, but Petrobras had
operations in 20 countries.
Beyond its own finance, Brazil is also a partner in the BRICS New Development
Bank, a multilateral bank that currently is lending just to its own members, before
an expected broadening of the list of recipients. This bank has reported its first
financed projects, which present an interesting array of choices. Of 13 projects,
six are for renewable energy projects, mostly wind and solar (one is hydropower).
The NDB tallies 2.2 GW of total electricity to be built, and 4,105,000t of CO2 /year
of emissions avoided. An energy conservation project in China adds more carbon
savings.2⁴ Other projects are primarily water infrastructure and road projects. The
profile of projects is notably more environmentally benign than those of any of
the national development banks of the countries that comprise it. It is also more
benign than that of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, where Brazil is not
a member, which is investing heavily in natural gas and large hydropower as al-
ternatives to coal power plants.2⁵ While incipient, this multilateral South–South
financing may eventually have a major impact on the themes of this paper.
As these examples show, Brazil has made a modest contribution to the global
public good of environmental protection through supporting other developing
countries’ efforts. It has offered technical assistance and pledged small amounts
of financial assistance for climate action, although documentation of the execu-
tion of these promises is sketchy. The Brazilian National Development Bank and
the BRICS New Development Bank have also offered project finance for a number
of infrastructure projects in developing countries, some of which helped to reduce
GHG emissions in the borrowers, although others did not.
Conclusion
Over the last three decades, Brazil has become an increasingly important inter-
national actor, both gaining and withdrawing from new international roles. I
suggest here that this inconsistency may actually be commensurate with its status
of being not quite an emerging power but not wholly not one. Buzan and Falkner
(see Chapter2, this volume) call this status being a regional power, but that term
2⁴ https://www.ndb.int/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/list-of-all-projects-1.pdf, accessed 28 March

2018.
2⁵ https://www.aiib.org/en/projects/approved/index.html, accessed 28 March 2018.
134 hochstetler
captures neither the global scale on which Brazil sometimes plays nor its ambigu-
ous leadership in its geographic region. All of these characteristics are on especially
striking display in the environmental area, where Brazil has the clearest material
basis for claiming to be a major power, even as its strategic aims in the area have
often been well below that level.
In sorting among the evidence presented here, presidential leadership is clearly
one factor in how Brazil plays its roles and the responsibilities it is willing to take
on in the environment area. President Lula (2003–2010) was clearly an excep-
tional president in this regard, with a vision and rhetoric of Brazil as an emerging
power that was not matched by his predecessors or successors (Burges, 2017;
Malamud, 2017). He spoke openly about Brazil’s international ambitions and
joined Brazil to other emerging powers in the BASIC countries rather than its
Latin American neighbours. President Bolsonaro (2019–present) appears to be
staking out the counter-position, rejecting even the environmental responsibilities
Brazil has more or less willingly taken on for a generation—and the multilateral,
rule-governed approach to diplomacy that they rest on.
Looked at another way, Brazil has taken on greater responsibility for improving
environmental outcomes at home than its other possible responsibilities. While
gains in controlling deforestation have stopped and the Bolsonaro government
is weakening the institutional foundations of the gains, there were still impor-
tant achievements in this area. The electricity sector is another area where Brazil’s
GHG emissions remain comparatively quite low, although the increased emissions
from developing and using its oil and gas reserves undermine those achievements.
Brazil’s active leadership in international environmental negotiations has been
spottier and not always constructive, although it can claim an important role in
developing the CDM and REDD+, as well as helping to broker the bottom-up in-
novations of the Copenhagen and Paris climate agreements. Brazil’s contributions
to supporting the environmental efforts of other developing countries have been
modest, although are still more substantial than those of other regional powers.
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7
Politics of Responsibility: India in Global
Climate Governance
Miriam Prys-Hansen
The Politics of Responsibility
The discussion of great power responsibility in global governance has entered the
mainstream of International Relations research (Cui and Buzan, 2016). As the En-
glish School (ES) argues, great powers not only possess more power than others
but also accept special responsibilities for providing common goods for interna-
tional society, and in exchange are given special rights and privileges. Some of
the difficulties (discussed in the introduction to this book) with linking environ-
mental power to managerial responsibility in the field of climate change are, first,
that great power responsibility is associated above all with the response to global
security threats and the ‘provision of security in the global system’ (Buzan and
Falkner, Chapter 2). Whether environmental challenges qualify as such threats is
contested.1 Second, great powers are rewarded for their efforts in providing order
and security with privileges in a quasi-hierarchical international structure, for in-
stance in the UN Security Council. Establishing such privileges is more difficult
in a system such as global climate governance, which has traditionally been struc-
tured by the assumption that the Global North (which includes the conventional
great powers) has already used up these privileges through unlimited greenhouse
gas (GHG) emissions in the past, at least in the view of actors from the Global
South (Buzan and Falkner, Chapter 2 this volume).
What I call here the ‘politics of responsibility’ thus takes note of a process
that has not been discussed extensively in the literature on great power manage-
ment (GPM). As Loke (2016) describes, the scope of responsibility ‘ultimately
depends on the normative ambition of international society’ and can thus change
1 There is much literature on environment and/or climate change as a threat to international security
(see Scott, this volume); however, it is not a mainstream framework yet, even if both environmental
scientists (c.f. Xu and Ramanathan, 2017; Kareiva and Carranza, 2018) and military organizations have
devoted considerable attention to climate change as an existential threat (Dalby, 2015).
Miriam Prys-Hansen, Politics of Responsibility: India in Global Climate Governance. In: Great Powers, Climate Change, and
140 prys-hansen
over time (see also Buzan and Falkner, Chapter 2 this volume). This assumes an
underlying normative consensus about who has the responsibility to do what; how
these responsibilities (for international action) are specifically defined, however, is
for the most part unclear. The actual content of this consensus might also differ
from issue-area to issue-area ‘with different actors, sources and types of power and
social dynamics’ (ibid.: 36) at play. Further, fields such as climate change that are
not fully securitized might require a ‘different logic’ of responsibility-taking that is
less ‘paternalistic’ and more fragmented, calling into question the existing distri-
bution of responsibilities, for instance between ‘North’ and ‘South’. Increasingly,
responsibilities may also emerge at different levels of world order, traditionally
defined as, but not limited to, global, regional, and national levels, involving a dif-
fusion and/or decentralization of power. Indeed, it is unlikely that one great power,
or a small club of great powers, will continue to dominate globally or even univer-
sally (ibid.: 9–20, 25). Instead, new arenas and institutions are constantly being
constructed and reconstructed by actors in attempts to establish new frameworks
of governance that better match their capacities, interests, and identities. The rise
of emerging powers, such as India and China, has added a new dynamic to the
debate about who is considered to ‘have power’ in international society and un-
der what conditions this power is linked to what type of responsibilities (Hurrell
and Sengupta, 2012). Hence, the process of responsibility ascription in different
issue-areas and across different levels is well worth analysing. This fits well with
Buzan’s notion of a world order moving towards deep pluralism, though with the
final destination as yet unclear. In this chapter I thus study the assumption of a
great power role as a social process, with the aim to better understand the con-
ceptualization of responsibility and who is supposed to have it. How actors work
with these changing notions of responsibility and attempts to shape their own and
Others’ responsibilities is the research question at the heart of this chapter.
The empirical part of the chapter centres on the case of India and how it, as a
potential environmental power, creates or at least attempts to create ‘social struc-
tures that legitimate certain forms of environmentally relevant behaviour … define
environmental roles and responsibilities …, or create or privilege certain types of
meaning that shape relevant social fields of action’ (Buzan and Falkner, Chapter 2,
this volume: 24). This makes it useful and necessary to trace the respective shifts
in responsibility attribution in order to understand, for example, important ac-
tors’ willingness or unwillingness to commit to potentially costly climate policies.
Through this lens, we can acquire a better understanding of, for example, multi-
lateral gridlock, but also showcase new opportunities for cooperation and positive
action, based on how different actors frame and localize particular problems and
ascribe responsibility and authority (Juerges and Newig, 2015). Indeed, agents
‘may play a plurality of oftentimes competing roles associated with divergent inter-
est, and that agents may value each of the roles in this set to a different extent in any
given decision-making process’ (Friedman and Starr, 2002: 13). The attribution of
politics of responsibility 141
responsibility to Self and Others in this regard is an important measure for these
prioritizations and problem definitions. Indeed, within the global climate regime,
India, for instance, has played to different identities, including as a ‘developing
country in need of technology transfer’, but also leading actor in South-South co-
operation through significant financial contributions. How this may add up to
a role of an environmental great power is intriguing. The core intention of this
chapter is thus to refine our understanding of the social constructedness of respon-
sibility within the ES approach. As shown in earlier work (Prys-Hansen and Franz,
2015), the notion of responsibility has always been open for reinterpretation and
contestation; it is a highly politicized concept and it is of specific interest what key
actors believe about who has a responsibility to act, with regard to which issue, and
at what particular level or in which arena.
Given my focus on the social construction of responsibility, this paper will not
go into the discussion of who is actually morally or legally responsible for action
in the climate change regime, nor add to existing debates on philosophies of re-
sponsibilities and the related issues of justice and ethics.2 Instead, I shall focus on
attributions of responsibility and how they—as a crucial element of public dis-
course on climate change and how to solve it—are linked to shifts in power and
thereby structure negotiations and policymaking. Using the case of India, I discuss,
first, whether India should be considered a great power within the realm of global
environmental politics and climate change politics. Based on the finding of this
section I, second, elaborate on the expected responsibilities connected to shifts in
the understandings of India’s ‘power’ both from within India itself and in the ‘rest
of the world’. In the conclusion, I reflect on the plausible broader implications of
this research.
Is India an Environmental Great Power?
India is often described as either a regional, emerging, or (partial) global power

and presents a rich tapestry of interactions with both international institutions
and other actors of global international society (Carranza, 2017; Pardesi, 2015;
Prys, 2012). It dominates—to various degrees—its immediate neighbourhood and
has a very strong presence in the Indo-Pacific (Roy-Chaudhury and Sullivan de
Estrada, 2018). Within these regional spaces, it is recognized as great power and
for the most itself accepts its great power role in traditional, security-related GPM.
This neither means that it consistently acts upon its ‘duties’ or always manages
to successfully pursue its interests, specifically in relation to Pakistan and China
2 The philosophical background to responsibility in global environmental governance has been dis-
cussed by, for instance, Kopra (2018) and scholars who investigate who is ‘actually’ responsible within
the climate change regime (Bukanovsky et al., 2012).
142 prys-hansen
(Gordon, 2014; Blarel and Ebert, 2018), yet this is not a necessary condition of
great power status in any case. India further has a complex relationship with
global international society, which remains dominated by established Western
norms and institutions. India’s remarkable transformation in terms of status and
material capabilities in the international realm has allowed it to develop consid-
erable say within international institutions such as the World Trade Organization
(Jaishankar, 2015; Pant, 2015). At the same time, its positioning concerning these
institutions is considerably less ossified than that of established great and mid-
dle powers, which gives it room for changing negotiation coalitions, for example.
Moreover, through the creation of interregional fora such as BRICS, IBSA, and
BASIC (a negotiation coalition limited to the climate regime), India appears to
challenge the status quo within the so-called liberal international order (Stephen
and Zürn, 2019).3 Overall, at this point, for various reasons it nevertheless remains
difficult to speak of India as a conventional great power with special responsi-
bilities across the board of policy fields. First, India has not been recognized to
have nor has it accepted general managerial responsibilities (Buzan and Falkner,
Chapter 2) in issue-areas that affect global peace and security. Second, mainly due
to its relatively low level of economic development, India has not been recognized
as an equal in a real or imagined ‘great power club’. Third, it is not a recognized nu-
clear power, despite possessing nuclear capabilities—and because the other Asian
power, China, continuously vetoes its acceptance into the Nuclear Suppliers Group
(Hindustan Times, 2018)—nor has it, at this point, a reasonable chance to gain a
permanent seat on the UN Security Council (Gaskarth, 2015).
When assessing India’s environmental power, we find that India has an emi-
nent role to play in issue-areas of climate change, biodiversity, forest protection,
air pollution, and others. It is therefore plausible to consider India as a state with at
least wide (rather than narrow, see Buzan and Falkner, Chapter 2) environmental
great power potential. For the issue of climate change, Jaiswal et al. express this
well: ‘If India sneezes on its climate actions, global warming cannot be contained’
(2019: 19). Its size of population and foreseeable economic development means
that if India follows a high-carbon path in its economic development, international
society as a whole will be unable to keep to the 2°C goal established in the Paris
Agreement (Chatzky, 2019). A recent country report on India by the International
Energy Agency (IEA) found that India’s electricity demand could triple by 2040
and that without sufficient improvements in energy efficiency ‘India will need to
add massive amounts of power generation capacity to meet the demand from the 1
billion air-conditioning units the country is expected to have by 2050’ (IEA, 2020).
India is projected to have more than 200 million city dwellers that will need new
3 There is a tendency to speak about emerging powers as if they should have similar interests within
global governance regimes. If we look at this in detail, for instance within climate change, they differ
not only in their types of energy production and consumption but also in terms of their vulnerabilities
and readiness to face climate change (Nelson, 2016: 110).
buildings, streets, and means of transportation. India is already the third-largest

emitter of CO2 (after China and the US) with 2.62 billion tons of carbon dioxide in
2019. This is more than three times as much as in 2005. The need for new energy
infrastructures to address the projected population growth and the continuous
energy poverty among the majority of Indians to date will, even on a low-carbon
development path, lead to a doubling of energy consumption up to the year 2030,
giving India significant negative environmental power.⁴
India’s potential for negative environmental power extends to areas beyond cli-
mate change, for instance biodiversity, water management, and pollution. India is
home to close to 8% of known floral and fauna species and four of the 35 global
biodiversity hotspots.⁵ With the Himalayas, India has sovereignty over parts of one
of the world’s most prominent ecosystems and source of freshwater for large parts
of South Asia. India is thus important and able to exercise veto power in almost
any regional and global environmental regimes.
The actual extent of India’s negative environmental power and its ability to capi-
talize on it, however, needs to be assessed in light of its equally large environmental
vulnerabilities. Vulnerability puts a strict limit on the actual exercise of negative
environmental power, as blocking cooperation or vetoing regional or global initia-
tives to tackle problems will hurt India potentially more than other states. Indeed,
India’s vulnerability to weather-related disasters that may be intensified by climate
change became, once more, visible in 2019. Incidents included widespread flood-
ing in July and August 2019 that took place in 13 states. Incessant rains caused the
death of at least 200 people and displaced about 1 million. Overall, between July
and October 2019, 1,600 deaths occurred in ‘India’s Heaviest Monsoon in 25 years’,
which produced 10% more rain ‘than a 50-year average’ (NDTV, 2019). In South
India, 2019 brought a water crisis, the result of three consecutive years in which the
monsoon failed. Chennai, for example, experienced a 55% rain deficit. The effects
of this lack of water were exacerbated by an extreme heatwave in May and June
with temperatures rising to 50.8°C. Similar heatwaves have become more frequent
over the past 15 years (Sengupta, 2018). It is projected that even under a moderate
mitigation scenario (rather than a business-as-usual projection of GHG emis-
sions), some urban areas of India will become unliveable by 2100 (Chandler, 2017).
Other natural hazards such as cyclones, landslides, wildfires, soil erosion, and
the spread of diseases are adding to India’s environmental vulnerability (GFDRR,
2020; The Hindu, 2018), exacerbated by high population density and intense urban
growth. Thus, in 2018 India was ranked as the country most vulnerable to climate
⁴ Yet, should the needed investments flow into low-carbon solutions that might lower the prices for
solar installations and high-efficient LED technologies (The Guardian, 2017), this may have a positive
effect on the whole world, which shows India’s large potential for positive environmental power as well.
⁵ These numbers are often put in relation to India’s share of the geographical area of the world of
only 2.4% (Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, 2019).
144 prys-hansen
change (HSBC Global Research, 2018). A more immediately pressing issue is ur-
ban air pollution. In 2017, 1.24 million or 12.5% of all deaths in India were related
to air pollution (Balakrishnan et al., 2018). According to the ‘Global Air Quality
Report’, 15 out of 20 of the most polluted cities on earth are in India. Other factors
such as contamination of rivers and the absence of efficient waste management,
for example, lead to a position of India in the Global Environmental Performance
Index at rank 177 of 189.
The key question here, though, is: does vulnerability necessarily thwart envi-
ronmental power? On the one hand, extreme vulnerability should be expected to
make India more dependent on effective global environmental governance, thus
limiting its ability to exercise is negative power potential. However, vulnerability
could also be turned into strength and, hence, positive environmental power. If
India is able, in the future, to showcase how vulnerability could be tackled and
successfully managed, both its material and its symbolic and reputational positive
environmental power will rise. Thus, while currently India’s positive power po-
tential is tentative, the Indian government increasingly portrays itself as one of the
key global leaders in tackling vulnerabilities itself and helping other states of the
Global South to do so. At the global level, India has, for instance, been lauded for
the foundation of the International Solar Alliance:
Over two years ago, PM Narendra Modi drew praise from the world by taking the
lead, with France, in forming an International Solar Alliance of tropical countries
to harness the energy of the sun ….The Indian media treated this as a diplomatic
coup for Modi, and the international media took it as a sign that India … was
taking seriously its responsibility to control greenhouse gas emissions.
(Jha, 2018)
India also benefits in its positive environmental power potential from assessments
that, as one of the few exceptions in the universe of states, its emission projec-
tions for the year 2030 are actually consistent with meeting its Paris pledge on
reducing its emission intensity of its GDP by 33–35% over 2005 levels by 2030
(UNFCCC, 2015; Subramanian, 2019). India has garnered praise for, on the one
hand, increasing energy access throughout the country while at the same time de-
creasing its emission intensities by more than 20% over the past decade. It has
further invested significantly in solar PV power. In 2018, an IEA analysis showed
that ‘India’s investment in solar power was greater than in all fossil fuel sources of
electricity generation together’ (IEA, 2020). This means that, in December 2019,
India had available a total of 84GW of renewable energy capacity when the total
generating capacity was 366GW. Beyond issues related to climate change, India
has, for example, taken on leadership within the field of disaster management both
at home and abroad. With its proactive hydrological policies and programs, such
as the World Bank-financed National Cyclone Risk Reduction Project, India has
been cited as an exemplary case study for disaster risk management (DRM). DRM
initiatives have been reported, for instance, to have led to a 99.6% reduction in
fatalities during Cyclone Hailing compared to a similar storm system 14 years ago
(GFDRR, 2020).
Yet, these achievements are so far insufficient for a clear-cut claim to environ-
mental leadership and, hence, positive environmental power. For instance, India’s
nationally determined contribution (NDC) commitments have been described as
being ‘in reality fairly modest and inconsistent with domestic achievements and
progress’ (Mohan and Wehnert, 2019: 276). Strong reductions in emission inten-
sity already took place between 2005 and 2011, so that arguably India ‘has very
much played it safe about international commitments’. It seems therefore safe to
argue that most of India’s global climate leadership posturing has been a means
of increasing its diplomatic clout rather than providing effective solutions to per-
sistent problems. Domestically, the government has yet to develop a roadmap for
the phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies that would reduce the country’s dependence
on coal. Despite good advances in the renewables energy sector, India has been
(more so than China and any other state) responsible for the increase in the con-
sumption of coal that was registered in 2018 after three years of universal decline
(BP, 2018).⁶ Other national policies have also come under serious scrutiny. For in-
stance, the country has been criticized for prioritizing large development projects
with significant impacts on ecosystems, as is the case with the Char Dam highway
project in the Himalayas (Joshi, 2018). Government entities have been accused
of green-washing reports based on unreliable data, as in the crucial India State of
Forest Report (ISFR) of 2019. The increase of forest cover to create carbon sinks is
one of the central elements of the Indian NDC, yet the registered increase noted
in the 2019 report has been widely questioned in its accuracy by journalists and
scientists (Padma, 2018; Kohli and Menon, 2019).
In sum, we thus can only paint a mixed picture of India’s environmental power.
India has extensive negative environmental power; however, it is likely to be
hesitant to use it because of its equally extensive vulnerabilities. The successful
management of these vulnerabilities, however, bears potential for positive envi-
ronmental power as a frontrunner or even global leader from the Global South.
This positive power is still limited, for instance because the realities of Indian
domestic environmental policies do not always live up to the image of an envi-
ronmentally conscious and caring actor that especially Prime Minister Narendra
Modi tries to project to the world. The trajectory of India’s environmental power
⁶ But, looking at the announcement of two Indian states that they will not build any new coal-fired
power plants, ‘despite widely cited government projections, the future of coal expansion in India might
not be as bright as some assume’(Sarkar, 2019).
146 prys-hansen
status thus continues to be in flux and very much in the eye (and the position) of
the observer. Much depends on India’s attempts to shape the kinds of responsibil-
ities it needs to take on, or not, in line with its growing position and ambitions in
international society, as well as the expectations placed upon India by significant
Others and India’s readiness to respond to them.
India’s Ascription of Responsibility, 2002–2018
In this third part of the chapter, I assess the kinds of responsibilities that India has
ascribed to itself and others over time and within different settings of the global
climate change regime. I use qualitative text analysis, which involves the collection
of a body of texts and the application of a systematic, theory-guided approach to
the analysis of these texts using a category or coding system (Mayring, 2004). My
coding of responsibility ascription builds on the work of Gerhards et al. (2007),
who develop a definition of the ascription of responsibility that consists of several
parts. To count as ascription a statement needs to have a speaker (in my case study,
this is by default a member of the Indian government), an addressee, and a subject
of responsibility. In addition, these ascriptions can be qualified based on whether
they refer to a causal responsibility, i.e. a (historical) blame for a problem, or a re-
sponsibility for action (now or in the future). Further, responsibility ascriptions
can be not only ascribed but also rejected. With the help of the data analysis soft-
ware Atlas.ti, I thus coded for notions of responsibility to action, specific rights to
resources and non-action, concepts of Self and Other, as well as several issue-areas
within climate change as overarching themes to see whether responsibility-talk is
different depending on the particular subject (such as adaptation, science, technol-
ogy, forests, etc.). I add to this claims of justification as well as references to scales
and levels. As I am interested in differentiated usages of, for instance, the con-
cept of responsibility across texts, themes, and time, I analysed co-occurrences.
Co-occurrence analyses are in general most frequently used to assess the context
within which specifics concepts are used. This, for our purposes, is particularly
useful. I combined this analysis with an interpretative approach, in which I look in
more detail at specific statements and relate findings to questions asked above. The
body of analysed texts is made up by 55 speeches, reports, and statements by the
Indian political elite, including the Prime Minister, the Minister of Environment,
and other representatives of the Indian government, addressed to an international
audience, for example, the statements of the Indian Prime Minister to the Confer-
ence of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC). While the domestic level is likely to be important for the emergence
of certain beliefs about responsibility and other important concepts, the relevant
audience is beyond the borders of the Indian nation state, in the form of govern-
ments in both the Global North and Global South. Finally, I also analysed a set
of primary and secondary sources for ascriptions to and expectations of India by
other states, asking what kinds of responsibilities are assigned to India by decision
makers in other governments and important non-state actors and whether they
match Indian propositions.
As a first step, I take note of some of the typical forms in which India attributes
responsibility for action to itself. There seems to be an agreement on the overall
timeline of India’s readiness to take on special responsibilities in the global cli-
mate change regime. While well into the 2000s India has portrayed itself as one of
the great victims of the industrial and economic policies of the developed world,
it is often seen to take a more engaged or open-minded position since 2009, with
its apparent emergence out of the category of developing country (Sengupta, 2012;
Saran and Jones, 2017). Mostly, the shift in the Indian perspective is placed around
the 2009 Conference of Parties in Copenhagen (Saryal, 2018). This moment in time
coincided with both domestic and international developments that may account
for substantive change. First, the BASIC coalition between Brazil, South Africa,
China, and India was founded in November 2009 and contributed significantly
to the particular negotiation dynamic of the Copenhagen COP in the same year.
The foundation of BASIC is often associated with a move away from India’s tradi-
tional strong commitment to working together as a large negotiation block with
the G77+China. The main reason for this was that the four large industrializing
nations were put under significant pressure not only from the developed nations
but also increasingly from lesser-developed states. Yet, as my analysis will show,
the alliance had fewer effects on India’s negotiation stance and ascription and
acceptance of responsibilities than often expected, and a continuity in its nego-
tiation stance prevailed. The second major development that is frequently argued
to account for a more responsive India is placed at the domestic level. Indeed,
roughly around the run-up to Copenhagen, India introduced the Prime Minis-
ter’s Council on Climate Change (in 2007) and launched its National Action Plan
on Climate Change in 2008 (NAPCC) that, most significantly, added the notion
of ‘co-benefits’ to the Indian discussion on mitigation. Co-benefits is a central
argument in the Indian climate change narrative since then that positions devel-
opment and poverty eradication as central goals while treating mitigation as a “by-
product’ of developmental activity and energy security’ (Saryal, 2018: 10; Mohan,
2017: 50).
Yet, there is no agreement in the literature on whether domestic or interna-
tional explanations for this apparent shift prevail. Moreover, the data presented
in this chapter does not give sufficient support to the initial finding of a more
responsive, more responsible India after 2009. First, it is not necessarily con-
vincing that Copenhagen is the exact milestone for an identified turning point
148 prys-hansen
in Indian global climate change policy, as similarly ‘seismic’ shifts, albeit in

different directions, have occurred both at the COPs in Cancun and in Dur-
ban. In Cancun, Indian Minister for the Environment Ramesh announced that
India would be willing, within specified boundaries, to accept an internationally
legally binding agreement, only for India to reverse its stand in Durban when it was
largely caught between the BASIC position, with inclinations towards accepting le-
gal obligations, and India’s more traditional G77 negotiation position, and thus
was rather isolated (Mohan, 2017: 44f., Lahiri, 2010). By the time of the Paris
Agreement in 2015, India was facing international pressure to become more ac-
commodating again, and the resulting agreement created a ‘more dynamic notion
of differentiation’ than India preferred, which India, however, had ‘little choice
but to accept’. Despite public outcry in India on how differentiation was ‘reduced
to sweet little nothings’, India’s substantive concerns were nevertheless addressed
by the ‘sovereignty-preserving’ NDCs that serve as the central means to establish
any state’s individual commitment (Dubash et al., 2018: 411).
When we thus look at India’s ascriptions of responsibility to itself and Others,
the literature makes us expect that we should see some willingness to accept fun-
damental responsibilities as an emergent great power after Copenhagen. However,
this is largely not the case according to the material analysed here. Since the early
2000s, for instance, a first typical form of contextualization of its own responsibil-
ity emerging from our body of texts is the rejection of both causal responsibility
and responsibility for action for itself. India’s principal objective ‘has been to de-
fend the “differentiated” architecture of the climate regime that it had worked to
inscribe within international law, and to ensure that no fresh legal obligations were
placed on it’ (Sengupta 2012: 107). This continues well into the mid to late 2010s,
putting into question India’s readiness to take on responsibility as stated in some of
the literature. Instead, a juxtaposition of a lack of causal and action responsibility,
combined with an acute sense of victimhood is, as will be shown, rather common
(Plagemann et al., 2018). This is an example from 2002:
Friends, India’s contribution — indeed, the contribution of all the developing

countries — to greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere is very lit-
tle, compared to that of the industrialized countries. This will be the case for
several decades to come. Tragically, however, developing countries will bear a
disproportionate burden of the adverse impacts of climate change.
(Indian Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee at COP 8 in 2002(MEA, 2002))
The second recurrent type of self-attribution is the claim of responsibility to de-

velopment and poverty eradication towards primarily its own population, as these
two quotes from 2007 reflect:
As we endeavour to increase our energy consumption to empower our people,

we ensure, through our national policies that the means are sustainable and in-
clude use of market mechanisms and relevant technology along-with promotion
of energy efficiency and conservation.
(Minister of External Affairs Pranab Mukherjee at Meeting of the Asia-Pacific
Partnership for Clean Development and Climate, 2007 (MEA, 2007a))
Energy is the sine qua non of development. We are obliged to explore every op-
tion available to us to produce or procure energy. However, we are profoundly
concerned about environmental degradation and climate change.
(Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on Climate Change, 2007 (MEA, 2007b)
This sentiment also appears in later years when India was already clearly perceived
by many in the international community to no longer fit into the category of a
developing country.
As a developing country, India faces many challenges. Poverty eradication stands

as our foremost priority. We have huge social and developmental constraints and
have to address large unmet energy needs of our vast population. Yet, we are
conscious of our global responsibilities.
(Prakash Javadekar, Minister of State for Environment, at COP 20, 2014
(UNFCCC, 2014a))
And while a focus on sustainable development is an important catchphrase in

most of these statements, the concept of sustainability is mostly treated one-
dimensionally, with a focus on its economic facets. Also, the Indian NDC sub-
mitted in October 2015 clearly positions India as a developing country whose
obligation is, above all, poverty eradication and development (UNFCCC, 2015).
A third type of self-referencing in terms of responsibilities, past and present—
and one that becomes stronger over time—is its description as a good global citizen
with respective global responsibilities. This is much closer to the argument that
India’s willingness to take on responsibility has changed significantly over time.
Yet, while this would require that these kinds of statements are a phenomenon of
recent times, this also appears earlier, as in this statement of 2008, again raising
doubts about a straightforward timeline according to which India has been one
kind of actor (developing, with little responsibility) before 2010 and another kind
(leading, with responsibility) after that.
While India’s carbon emissions will inevitably rise in the short and medium-term
as we pursue accelerated growth, we would ensure that at no time would our per
150 prys-hansen
capita carbon emissions exceed the average of the developed countries’ per capita
emissions.
(Special Envoy of the Prime Minister, Shyam Saran, 2008 (MEA, 2008b))
In a similar vein, there is a frequent appeal to joint responsibilities, in which India

will take its fair share:
Climate Change is everyone’s business and can only be tackled by

mobilizing all our available creative and organizational energies.
(ibid.)
The analysed texts thus show that there is no linear development or graduation
of India from a poor developing nation with a focus on poverty eradication to
an aspiring global power with global responsibilities, but instead that there is a
rather strong continuity in figures of speech and use of identities depending on the
contexts. This fits with the theoretical assumption about the possibility of agents
playing a ‘plurality of often-times competing roles associated with divergent inter-
ests’ in different decision-making processes (Friedman and Starr, 2002: 13). As a
large emitter contemporarily, without great responsibilities historically (Mohan,
2017: 41), India’s position is necessarily one of duality and potential cognitive dis-
sonance even within India depending on whichever identity of the two is more
important at any one time. I argue here that India uses this duality and politicizes
the different facets of its identity and related responsibilities to pursue its interests
(as I will show below, though, other actors can also make use of this duality). This
manifests itself, for instance, in India’s strategic use of different alliances and coali-
tions within the broader framework of international climate negotiations, such as
BASIC and the G77 (Dubash et al., 2018: 410).
To look further into this point, I studied co-occurrences of different sets of codes
that characterize and justify India’s role within the regime. By doing so, I have
found, for example, that India over time uses different sets of identities within
different issue-areas of climate change, clustered above all around two different
themes, often assumed to stand in contradiction: one as ‘victim’, including con-
notations of weakness, lack of capacity, etc., but also one as ‘hero’, highlighting its
advances despite being a victim at the same time. The hero characterization not
only occurs in India’s claims to good global citizenship named above but is also
illustrated by statements as put forth in India’s Intended Nationally Determined
Contribution of 2015.
India, even though not a part of the problem, has been an active and constructive
participant in the search for solutions. Even now, when the per capita emis-
sions of many developed countries vary between 7 to15 metric tonnes, the per
capita emissions in India were only about 1.56 metric tonnes in 2010. This is
because Indians believe in nature-friendly lifestyle and practices rather than its
exploitation.
(UNFCCC, 2015: 2)
On behalf of BASIC, India stated similarly that:
We are concerned that the mitigation effort by developing country Parties is

currently much greater than that by developed countries. As developing coun-
tries we are ready to undertake our enhanced action to address climate change.
Our concern however is that developed countries have not shown sufficient am-
bition, despite their historical responsibility and great access to the means of
implementation.
(UNFCCC, 2014b)
Similarly, in 2019, Indian government officials highlighted that BASIC countries

are ‘implementing ambitious climate actions based on their national circum-
stances’, despite the ‘insufficient and uneven progress of their domestic develop-
ment [and] beyond historical responsibilities’ (PIB, 2019). Besides, more ambi-
tious domestic responsibilities have been acknowledged at times as part of India’s
ambition to project global responsibility:
It is based on the recognition that both in terms of energy security and tackling
climate change, India must achieve a graduated shift from reliance on carbon-
based fossil fuels to non-fossil fuels and from non-renewable to renewable sources
of energy.
(Special Envoy of Prime Minister, Shyam Saran, 2008 (MEA, 2008a))
The juxtaposition of being a vulnerable victim of dire circumstances that are out-
side of its control and responsibility, with the apparent exceptionality of the own
achievements, is an effective negotiation tool, as it can be used strategically to avert
unwanted assignments of responsibilities while maintaining the idea of acting as
a great responsible power or even a ‘hero’ in light of adverse circumstances.
This juxtaposition is further upheld by a continuously strong investment in the
language of the 1992 framework convention. To confirm this in the textual analy-
sis, I have applied a free code ‘Under the Convention’ whenever speakers refer to
some action to be undertaken or some norm to be applied ‘under [the rules of] the
UNFCCC’ or ‘under [the rules of] the Convention’. This is an important formu-
lation as it indicates India’s (and, for that matter, also often China’s (Prys-Hansen
et al., 2019) continued insistence on the very clear distinction between obligations
of Annex I (developed) and non-Annex I (developing) states. In 1992, when
the UNFCCC was negotiated, all then members of the OECD and the so-called
‘Economies in Transition’ were placed in Annex I; the Kyoto Protocol assigned to
152 prys-hansen
these states binding commitments to reduce GHG emissions. There is an almost

100% co-occurrence of the term ‘Under the Convention’ with some form of as-
cription of developed countries’ responsibilities. This is not surprising, as the two
codes describe the same substantive claim by India: i.e. that developed countries
must take the lead on all aspects regarding mitigation of and adaptation to climate
change. One might expect that, with the onset of the Paris Agreement, these refer-
ences might occur less frequently, particularly as India has claimed leadership, for
instance through its apparent successes in installing solar energy capacity and its
founding (with France) of the International Solar Alliance which invests in South–
South cooperation (Shidore and Busby, 2019). Yet, this is not the case. Instead, we
find that the outstanding feature about the ascription of responsibility to devel-
oped countries is how little both the wording and the actual content of ascriptions
have changed over time. Here is a typical quote from the 2005 India country paper
published within the framework of the G8 Gleneagles Summit:
According to these projections, even in 2030 emissions from developed countries

will constitute the larger part of global emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions of
developing countries will indeed rise more rapidly than those of industrialized
countries, but this is imperative to meet the challenges of poverty eradication,
which developing countries face. It is also true that per capita emissions from
developing countries will remain far below the level of industrialized countries
even thirty years from now. Because of this, it is industrialized countries, which
need to undertake greater effort in meeting the international commitments made
by them.
(MEA, 2005)
Compare this to a statement from 2017, which India submitted on behalf of the
Like-Minded Developing Countries:
The extent to which developed countries take the lead in reducing their emissions
and providing support to developing countries, and developing countries con-
centrate on enhancing their efforts, in the context of sustainable development and
poverty eradication, enabled and supported by finance, technology development
and transfer, and capacity building from developed countries.
(UNFCCC, 2017)
So while over time the use of this blame game decreases, in particular in the
run-up to Paris, this seems, in light of the other findings presented here, a change
in strategic rhetoric rather than in substance. This is not to deny that new forms
of self-ascriptions of responsibility also emerge. While any acknowledgement of
Indian action responsibility towards other states is virtually non-existent before
2011, the topic of South–South cooperation, defined here as India as donor to-
wards ‘even poorer’ states such as the small island developing states, becomes a
frequent topic in the speeches and hence a new arena or space that India helped to
created and reinforce. This, however, does not essentially contradict the conclu-
sion that India’s conception of responsibility continues to be deeply embedded into
the notion of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) as developed in
the framework convention of 1992. It continues to reference responsibilities in
a language of North–South politics and the established categories of developing
and developed countries; it thus exposes much more continuity than frequently
assumed in the literature in trying to omit own responsibilities by talking a per
capita approach, combined with a historical approach to responsibility. This quote
is exemplary of this approach:
To accept the U.S. argument is to accept what I call the NPT Approach to Climate
Change — that is, I get to keep what I have because I got here first. You have to
stay where you are because you are a latecomer. This is precisely what has been
done in the nuclear domain.
(MEA, 2008b)
As a last step in the analysis, I looked at whether India makes any particular
statements regarding its responsibilities as a great power within its regional space
of South Asia. While India has been ready to take on responsibilities as ‘net se-
curity provider’, for instance in the domain of maritime security (Plagemann and
Prys-Hansen, 2018; Khurana, 2017), has regularly extended a ‘helping hand’ when
providing developing and disaster relief to its smaller neighbours, and has tripled
its aid to the region since 2010 (Bhogal, 2016), it is noteworthy that there are no
linkages with any form of regional or neighbourly identity or community. Being a
South Asian state, therefore, does not appear to be of relevance to India within the
climate change regime. Despite the multiple tensions among South Asian nations
and the lack of progress in regional integration or cooperation, this is nevertheless
surprising as the regional neighbourhood shares so many of their multiple vul-
nerabilities. Indeed, the limitation of India’s responsibility is frequently justified
by its vulnerabilities and challenges, but this vulnerability is frequently addressed
regarding national and subnational arenas, but only once is this vulnerability put
in an Asian or even South Asian context. This is despite, for example, the im-
minent role of Himalayan glaciers and water politics across South Asia; a long,
common South Asian coastline; extreme weather events that do not stop at bor-
ders; and so forth. Even in these matters of shared fate at the regional level, there
is very little identification with the region’s plight or any linkage to India’s similar
challenges.
The key takeaway from the qualitative text analysis is that India faces a duality in
its own identity and position in the global climate regime. On the one hand, India
154 prys-hansen
continues to take on the role of a developing country with limited historic respon-
sibility; on the other hand, it is currently the third-largest emitter of GHG and
cannot shy away from addressing this in some form of commitments. Yet, while
India as a member of a changing international society had to react to mounting
pressures in the presentation of its ambitions, the beliefs and constructions of re-
sponsibility as a power in the global climate regime have, as the discussion here
shows, remained remarkably constant. My data displays that, while the general
timeline of before and after Copenhagen and before and after Paris accounts for
moderate changes, above all in India’s negotiation rhetoric, the crucial themes and
constructions of its responsibilities as an emerging power and aspiring great power
remain constant.
The Views of Others
In this last part of the chapter, I briefly address whether and if so how Others,
in particular other state actors, have ascribed responsibilities to India. One of the
reasons that this discussion is brief is that it is only recently that specific expecta-
tions and ascriptions of responsibilities have emerged that demand from India that
it take on more concrete, possibly burdensome responsibilities potentially per-
tinent to an environmental great power. Over the years India has instead been
relatively protected from at least public ascriptions of responsibility. An excep-
tion is the (albeit very important) argumentation linked to the US rejection of
the Kyoto Protocol and its resistance to the Bali Road Map in 2007, ‘arguing that
mandatory emissions reductions targets for developed countries alone were unfair
if other major developing nation emitters such as China and India remained un-
burdened’ (Christoff, 2008: 467). Yet, while India is frequently mentioned in the
discussion of the Byrd-Hagel resolution of 1997, the critique was not targeted at
India per se, but at India as one of a group of emerging countries that has been
lumped together with the main target of the resolution, China, that was mainly
at the receiving end of a fundamental critique of the structure and requirements
of the institution regulating mitigation commitments. The US, and along with it a
few other states such as Japan and Canada, has maintained the position that emerg-
ing economies’ emissions need to be included in the global climate regime. Most
other Annex I parties have historically and in the run-up to Paris ‘shared the view
on the need for the transparency of Chinese and Indian climate actions but have
been more flexible on the symmetry of the legal form of international obligations’
(Vihma, 2011: 73).
Direct ascriptions of responsibility emerged only gradually and sparingly.
One that has gained traction among political elites was a report by Greenpeace
India that was published ahead of the COP in Bali in 2007. While mostly targeted
at the domestic debate, the argument received much purchase internationally. The
report argued that the discrepancy of carbon footprints within India between a rel-
atively small wealthy segment of the population and the (then) 823 million poor
was enormous and the average per capita emissions that India’s entire position-
ing with the UNFCCC was built on were therefore misleading, allowing wealthy
elites to ‘hide behind the poor’ (Greenpeace, 2007: 2). India’s focus on equity based
on per capita emission thus was increasingly seen as obstructing the process of cli-
mate negotiations, and ‘among big countries, perhaps only America and Russia are
considered more obdurate’ (The Economist, 2008). How per capita emissions, as
one apparently objective measurement relevant to climate action, are contentiously
interpreted reinforces the argument that responsibilities, both past and present,
can be politicized; which data to use and how to compare and interpret it are also
political choices. This means, for instance, that not only India is using different
identities for different purposes but also that India can be portrayed by relevant
Others either as a developing country leading the G77 (Paolo Yu III, 2012) or as
the ‘fourth-largest emitter of GHGs worldwide’ (Chen, 2012), depending on the
context and the purpose of the particular intervention.
Overall, India, however, has received considerably less attention than China as
an emerging and potentially great (environmental) power. In the US (but also in
EU), unfamiliarity with India (and irritation with some of its negotiation style)
led to an ‘unfortunate … tendency to hyphenate the two countries rather than
distinguish them’ (Levi, 2012: 192). The lack of attention to India in comparison to
China is a continued feature both in US and EU global politics (including climate
negotiations). When dealing with India in particular, the EU has been critical of
India’s stance on equal per capita emissions as it, as said above, masks the ‘presence
of a substantial number of people with high emissions’ (Metz, 2012: 181).
Overall, direct ascriptions of responsibility emerged only gradually and spar-
ingly. With India’s rocketing economic growth, however, some developed (but also
some developing) states expressed dissatisfaction with the classification of India
as a developing nation without any commitments. Thus, with ‘the developmental
success of emerging countries and their substantively improved power-political
position’, expectations by the US (and other established powers), as well as their
‘notions of fairness and legitimacy in climate change politics[,] have been trans-
formed’ (Hurrell and Sengupta, 2012: 465). Increasingly, the BASIC countries
(Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) were treated differently from the G77, and
were, even outside the UNFCCC, for instance, in the G8+5 dialogue on Climate
and Energy in 2008, addressed as carriers of responsibility (Hallding et al., 2013).
Also, parts of the developing world started to demand limits to the emissions of
the emerging powers. From this process India has emerged (unlike Brazil, for
example) as a holder of great promise in the climate change regime. During the
156 prys-hansen
Cancun negotiations in 2013, for example, India helped negotiate important com-
promises on the subject of transparency, even ‘receiving personal thanks from
the COP President’ (Mohan, 2017: 44; Michaelova and Michaelova, 2012).⁷ This
more favourable vision was enhanced with the election of PM Narendra Modi,
who was seen as ‘demonstrating leadership’, in particular in the US (Times of In-
dia, 2016). More recently, India’s initiative of an International Solar Alliance (see
above) was praised, and in October 2018, for instance, Prime Minister Naren-
dra Modi was awarded the ‘Champions of the Earth Award’ by UN Secretary-
General Antonio Guterres for his contribution in the field of environment and
environmental protection. India’s growing role, but also its rhetoric, is thus in-
creasingly taken seriously and India has been called upon by a broad range of
actors, including other developing nations, to live up to its aspirational rhetoric
(Harvey, 2019).
This brief contraposition of mutual expectations has shown that, first, while ex-
ternal expectations on India have increased, this has so far not had many serious
real-world consequences, neither by constructing tangible great power respon-
sibilities nor by forcing ambitious domestic climate politics that might follow
suit from external expectations. I conclude that, despite its economic emergence,
India’s own understanding of its responsibilities has not changed significantly.
While it has experimented with accepting some limited responsibilities in de-
signing NDC targets, such as an unconditional target of 33 to 35% below 2005
emissions intensity of GDP by 2030 and a condition (on financial and technologi-
cal support) of a non-fossil share of power generation of 40% by 2030 (Climate
Action Tracker, 2020), that are, if followed through, actually in line with what
has been assessed as fair and compatible with a 2°C target, considerable un-
certainties remain regarding, for instance, its dependence on coal. This move,
however, is not challenging its long-held position and orientations within a rather
rigid North–South division of responsibilities. It has, instead, used global lead-
ership moves, such as the initiation of the International Solar Alliance to, as
stated above, improve its overall global reputation while not necessarily providing
effective leadership towards a global solution. Thus, despite promising precondi-
tions, India’s move to great power status within environmental politics—as within
other, more traditional policy fields—seems to have been postponed. Yet we can
also see that India does have considerable leverage over its own politics of re-
sponsibility, and in particular its frequent rhetorical positioning as heroic victim
seems to have been successful in limiting burden-sharing but increasing India’s
status.
⁷ This short excursion in no way does justice to the intricacies of both Indian climate change gover-
nance and the complicated negotiation of expectations on India from others. For discussions of India’s
leadership role and its reception, see Mohan (2017).
Conclusion
In this chapter, I discuss the construction of the scope of (great power) responsi-
bilities. I argue that the actual content and reach of responsibilities is a matter of
political contestation. What these responsibilities might contain is thus a matter
of debate and social construction. I hence analyse in detail understandings of re-
sponsibility of the Indian government and juxtaposed them with expectations of
India by the wider world. While India has not been recognized as a member of the
circle of great powers overall, it has pushed for this status within climate politics,
and its audience, at the global level, has been at least somewhat receptive to this
claim. Nevertheless, I conclude that India’s status as an environmental great power
is less than clear. While climate change cannot be resolved without the participa-
tion of emerging powers in general, and India specifically, this does not mean that
these kinds of states seamlessly slip into some kind of great power role, however
defined. For India, the assignment of responsibilities to Others currently prevails
over the acceptance of responsibility for itself, justified by references to a strictly
historical interpretation of CBDR and its own continuing identity as a developing
country. India, at the international level, i.e. within the realm of the UNFCCC,
thus continues to hold on to a rather explicit North vs South/developed vs devel-
oping countries view when it comes to the assigning of responsibility for action to
prevent or at least mitigate dangerous climate change. And, while India has taken
global initiatives, such as the foundation of the International Solar Alliance, for
which it has received much praise, we can only recently see some modest increase
in accepting responsibility beyond its boundaries. This is not supposed to be a
judgement on this position, however. Rather, it helps to contextualize the rising
expectations of India within media and academia—and its reluctance to adhere to
them.
Nevertheless, when we look at the potential for creating new spaces and arenas
within which responsibilities need to be assigned anew, India has taken the initia-
tive. First, it increasingly points at the domestic or even subnational level for which
it has clear responsibilities. This, arguably, is a strategy of defence against the inflic-
tion of wider global responsibilities; and, from its broader climate communication,
it is doubtful that India would accept the focus on domestic commitments at the
expense of global action by other important emitters. This speaks against the im-
mediate assumption of a great power role by India in the realm of climate or even
environmental politics. The second interesting finding is the very clear discon-
nection from its own neighbourhood, the South Asian region (however defined).
While the reality of melting glaciers, vicious droughts, and increased flooding
would suggest that regional solutions might be an important part of the puzzle,
India has shown very little willingness to incorporate its neighbours into its global
climate change discourse. This is despite the fact that India has been acknowledged
158 prys-hansen
as a regional power with special responsibilities in South Asia and has, at least
selectively, also recognized this important role. Where forms of accepting respon-
sibility have emerged is, for instance, in the realm of South–South cooperation. It
is here that we find more typical patterns of great power behaviour by India; and
we should expect these types of engagement to expand over the years to come. That
responsibilities within the same issue-area can differentiate according to arena and
audience is thus something that we need to take away from this chapter. Looked
at it in this more limited sense, India is a power that is very much able to decide
on its fate. While climate finance is an important aspect of India’s climate policy
and dependence on the global climate regime is present in this regard, India has
been able to design its domestic climate policies according to its interests and it has
been able to shape its global engagement in the way that suits itself best. While not
quite matching the characteristics of a ‘true’ great power, this independence will
certainly play an important part in India’s future role not only in climate change
but also in the wider international society.
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8
Great Power Ambitions and National
Interest in Russia’s Climate Change Policy
Alina Averchenkova
This chapter discusses to what extent Russia can be considered as a climate great
power, particularly with regard to its sources of power and engagement in interna-
tional climate change politics. In doing so, the chapter analyses the shifts in Russia’s
position and behaviour over time in this arena and discusses the factors that have
contributed to these changes.
Following Buzan and Falkner (Chapter 2, this volume) I consider two dimen-
sions of power in global environmental politics (GEP): Russia’s potential for acting
as a negative power, based on its control over environmental ‘goods’ and/or its
ability to produce environmental ‘bads’ through degradation of internationally
significant environmental resources (or by contributing to climate change), and
as a positive power, based on its ability to engender positive change in interna-
tional environmental politics. As Hochstetler (Chapter 6, this volume) observes,
the exercise of negative power is best seen in domestic environmental outcomes,
while positive power requires constructive participation in international relations.
This chapter therefore considers both of these aspects in relation to Russia’s climate
change policy.
The English School’s social framing suggests that great power status is not just
assumed by the powers themselves but also requires recognition by others of their
having certain rights and responsibilities for the international order (Buzan and
Falkner, this volume). In line with this consideration, I discuss to what extent the
framing of responsibility and (international) leadership are part of Russia’s stance
on climate change, as well as the perceptions of Russia’s role in the international
climate negotiations by its key negotiating partners and broader climate change
community.
The case of Russia is particularly interesting to consider. Despite its possessing
structural characteristics of a great environmental power and its active reliance on
great power framing in the domestic political debate, Russia has largely failed to
Alina Averchenkova, Great Power Ambitions and National Interest in Russia’s Climate Change Policy. In: Great Powers,
great power ambitions and national interest 165
obtain recognition of its claims of leadership and contribution to global climate

change mitigation efforts from its main negotiating partners. The significant re-
ductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions after the breakup of the Soviet Union
and subsequent economic restructuring did not result in corresponding inter-
national recognition. Furthermore, Russian expectations of receiving significant
benefits from the flexibility mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol came to nothing.
Ever since these early setbacks, Russia has pursued mainly a passive strategy in the
international climate negotiations.
Yet, although heavily dependent on income from oil and gas production and
exports and being set to experience economic losses due to global decarboniza-
tion, Russia has not taken an obstructive route in the international negotiations
and remained a party to the Paris Agreement (unlike the US under the Trump
administration and Brazil). The international expert community criticized Rus-
sia’s levels of effort under the Paris Agreement (and previous accords) as being too
weak since they hardly require additional emission reductions below the current
levels (e.g. Climate Action Tracker, 2020). At the same time, Russia voluntarily be-
came a donor of climate finance, ratified the Paris Agreement in the fall of 2019,
and confirmed its continued political commitment to its objectives.
This chapter explores whether Russia can be considered as a great power in
international environmental politics, focusing specifically on action to address cli-
mate change. It examines the evolution of the Russia’s position in the international
climate change negotiations and its stance towards leadership in this area as well
as its domestic policy and analyses factors that determine these positions. It con-
cludes with a discussion of the role of great power framing in Russia’s stance in the
domestic and international debate on climate change.
Structural Conditions of Environmental Power: Resource

Endowments and Dependencies
Understanding a country’s ecological footprint is central for assessing its poten-

tial for acting as a negative power in GEP (see Buzan and Falkner, Chapter 2, this
volume). As discussed earlier, control over a large share of world’s environmental
resources or ‘goods’ (such as forests, fresh water, or biodiversity stock), or over a
large share of environmental ‘bads’ (such as pollution, forest degradation, or biodi-
versity loss) would give rise to negative power. This section assesses to what extent
Russia possess structural characteristics of environmental power.
The Russian Federation is the largest country in the world. With an area of
17.1 million square kilometres, its territory is more than 60% larger than that
of second-placed Canada (FAO, 2016). Russia’s territory contains about 32% of
the world’s proven natural gas reserves, 10% of its explored coal reserves, and
12% of its oil reserves (Bradshaw and Connolly, 2016). The Russian economy
166 averchenkova
is highly dependent on fossil fuels: in 2019 the country was the world’s third
largest oil producer (after the US and Saudi Arabia) and the second largest pro-
ducer of natural gas (after the US) (EIA, 2019). Oil and natural gas revenues
accounted for 43% of Russia’s federal budget revenues as at February 2020 and
varied between 34–54% over the past decade (Author’s calculations based on
data from the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation, 2020). The Euro-
pean market has been the most important consumer of Russia’s energy exports;
in 2016, more than 60% of crude oil exports and almost 75% natural gas ex-
ports from Russia went to Europe (EIA, 2019). Russia is also a major coal pro-
ducer globally, containing the world’s second largest reserves of recoverable coal
(Martus, 2019) and being the world’s third largest coal exporter after Australia and
Indonesia (IEA, 2020).
Being the world’s fourth largest emitter of GHGs, following China, the US,
and India, Russia is responsible for about 5% of global emissions (IEA, 2020).
In 2018, it emitted 2.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent, not taking into account
sequestration by carbon sinks (30.3% below the level of 1990), with 78.8%
emissions coming from the energy sector (Ministry of Natural Resources and
Ecology of the Russian Federation, 2019; Center for Strategic Research, 2021).
At the same time, Russia is also home to about 20% of the world’s forest
cover (FAO, 2012), which sequesters large amounts of carbon and is rich in
biodiversity. Its territory stores about half of the northern hemisphere’s terres-
trial carbon, predominantly in the permafrost regions (Goodale et al., 2002).
Deforestation and the melting of permafrost in Russia could have considerable
implications for the success of the global efforts to mitigate climate change.
Despite some earlier claims to the contrary, the country is also vulnera-
ble to the impacts of climate change. Warming over Russian territory is on
average happening at significantly higher rates compared to the global aver-
ages. The average annual temperature increase from 1976 to 2018 in Russia
was 0.47°C per decade, two and a half times higher than the global tem-
perature increase in the same period (0.17–0.18°C). Particularly high warm-
ing rates of over 1.0°C per decade have been observed in the polar area
over the past 30 years (Roshydromet, 2019). Impacts of climate change are
already observable in Russia and are projected to increase in the future, in-
cluding heatwaves, widespread forest fires, epidemics, drought, mass flooding,
and food shortages (Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology of the Russian
Federation, 2017).
Being among the largest emitters of GHGs, and a country with large car-
bon sequestration and storage, Russia clearly possesses structural characteristics
of both negative and positive environmental power, as its efforts on reducing
GHG emissions, preserving and enhancing its carbon sinks, and stored carbon
have significant influence on the effectiveness of global efforts to address climate
change.
Contribution to International Cooperation

on Climate Change and Domestic Implementation
Russia’s domestic climate change policy developed slowly, mostly in response to

the emerging international regime and economic developments. Since the end
of the Soviet Union, Russia has moved from a centrally planned towards a more
market-based economy. Economic reforms in the 1990s privatized most indus-
tries, bar the energy and defence-related sectors. Economic restructuring resulted
in a fall of GDP and subsequently in GHG emissions. In 1998 the GDP was 44% be-
low the level of 1989 (Grigoryev, Golyashev and Brilliantova, 2017). The economic
dynamics were influenced by the development of market institutions and external
factors, such as world crises, swings in economic activity by trade partners, and
oil market shocks. Economic recovery started in 1997 but was interrupted by the
oil price crash and financial crisis of 1998. Concurrently, GHG emissions in 1999
were 1,879 Mt of CO2 eq (not considering emissions and sinks through land use,
land use change, and forestry—or LULUCF), which is about 40% below their lev-
els in 1990 of 3,113 Mt of CO2 eq (see Figure 8.1). When accounting for LULUCF,
emissions in 1999 were about 55% below the levels of 1990 (based on UNFCCC,
2020). Russia’s emission trends in the 1990s are in stark contrast with the dynam-
ics in global GHG emissions (see Figure 8.2). Global GHG emissions (including
LULUCF) in 1999 were 8% higher than in 1990.
The above economic and emission trends defined Russia’s starting position in
the emergent international climate change negotiations and its domestic climate
change policy. Domestic climate change policy has lagged behind commitments
taken by Russia in the international sphere. While Russia has engaged in the in-
ternational climate change treaty negotiations and undertook commitments under
the international accords since early 1990s, domestic climate change policy in its
3,500
3,000
2,500
2,000
1,500
1,000
500
0
1990 1993 1996 1999 2002 2005 2008 2011 2014 2017
Total GHG emissions without LULUCF Total GHG emissions with LULUCF
Fig. 8.1 Greenhouse gas emissions in Russia, Mt CO2 eq.

Source: UNFCCC, 2020.
168 averchenkova
60,000
50,000
40,000
30,000
20,000
10,000
0
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
Mt CO2eqv inc. LULUCF Mt CO2eqv excl. LULUCF
Fig. 8.2 Global greenhouse gas emissions, Mt CO2 eq.

Source: Our World in Data and CAIT Climate Data Explorer. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/
total-ghg-emissions, accessed 15 June 2020.
own right started to emerge over a decade later. Below, I outline several key policy
periods (summarized in Table 8.1).
From Global Stewardship Aspirations to ‘Leadership by Chance’
In the early 1990s Russia, as a newly formed actor at the international scene, was
seeking to establish itself as a major cooperative global player, including through
joining international environmental treaties. At the Rio Summit in 1992, Russia
joined all three of the conventions adopted, including the United Nations Frame-
work Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It was included in the Annex I
list alongside developed countries, but with a special status recognizing its ongoing
process of transition to a market economy. Russia was among the first countries
to ratify the Rio Conventions. However, in 1996, under the influence of domestic
climate sceptics in the scientific community, Russia sided with OPEC countries in
opposing quantitative limits on GHG emissions in the negotiations on the Kyoto
Protocol (Moe and Tangen, 1999).
After several international studies demonstrated potential benefits for Russia
from participation in the proposed emission trading mechanisms under the proto-
col (e.g. Averchenkova, Golub, and Strukova, 1997; Golub, Avertchenkov, Berdin,
et al., 1999), Russia finally joined the Umbrella Group in supporting a protocol in
1997, subject to it containing flexibility mechanisms (emission trading and join
implementation). Its emission target under the protocol was set as stabilization at
the levels of 1990 (see Table 8.2), a target that gave ample room for the potential
growth in emissions during economic recovery and promised significant potential
income from emission trading.
Table 8.1 Key periods in Russia’s international and domestic climate change policy
Period International position Domestic developments
Early Global aspirations: Active en- Development of basic environ-

1990s gagement in international mental institutions
environmental cooperation
1995–1996 Scepticism and obstruction: Op- Rise of climate scepticism; domes-
position to quantified emission tic institutional competition for
targets; siding with OPEC at the oversight of climate change
climate negotiations in Geneva
1997–2004 Leadership by chance: Ratification Little domestic implementa-
of the Kyoto Protocol; focus on tion; focus on economic recovery
national benefits through issue and rapid growth in early 2000s;
linkages to WTO entry and ex- Growing criticism of the Kyoto
pected economic benefits from protocol; Formation of the eco-
Kyoto. nomic expert community around
the president
2005–2008 Going with the flow: Passive stance Little implementation and lit-
in international negotiations tle attention to climate agenda
(Putin-2)
2008–2012 Modernization Thaw: Push for the modernization
Synergy between domestic agenda domestically; slight ac-
modernization priorities and in- celeration in the implementation
ternational image; decision to not of climate policy with progress on
join Kyoto-2 energy efficiency policies.
2012– Minimal engagement and polit- De facto undermining of energy
current ical distancing: Further political efficiency and other climate-
distancing from the West; grow- relevant policies largely due to
ing emphasis on national interest, public resources being shifted
sovereignty; explicit recognition to the preparation of the Sochi
of economic risks to Russia from Olympics;
global decarbonization
2019– Focus on accelerating domestic
current decarbonization?
Source: Author.
Between 1997 and 2004 much of the domestic focus in the climate change debate
was on the benefits and costs of ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. With the deci-
sion of the US to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, announced in 2001, Russia
received a de facto veto power over entry into force of the protocol, as its ratifi-
cation was necessary to meet the emission threshold. It suddenly found itself in
the position of exercising leverage, while also occupying a stronger position in the
international negotiations.
Russia was expected to benefit from participation in the Kyoto Protocol: its
GHG emissions were unlikely to come anywhere close to the target level in
170 averchenkova
Table 8.2 Summary of climate change targets committed to internationally by Russia
Emission targets Conditions
Paris 25–30% below 1990 by 2030 Subject to the maximum

agreement accounting for LULUCF
Copenhagen 15–25% below 1990 by 2020 Subject to the maximum ac-
Accord counting for Russia’s LULUCF
Commitments to action by all
major emitters
Kyoto Stabilization at the 1990 levels in Access to the flexibility mecha-
Protocol 20018–2012 nisms (emission trading and joint
1st com- implementation)
mitment
period
Based on the corresponding UNFCCC decisions.
the first commitment period between 2008 and 2012, while participation in the
flexibility mechanisms through the sale of excess emission quotas or additional
emission reductions could deliver significant new investment (according to some
studies up to 4 to 35 billion USD, assuming US participation, e.g. Victor, Na-
kicenovic, and Victor, 2001). Yet a domestic campaign against the ratification
was launched, led by the climate sceptics questioning climate science and some
economic experts claiming that climate action and participation in the inter-
national agreements would be detrimental to Russia’s economic development.
One of the most vocal Kyoto critics was Andrei Illarionov, President Putin’s
chief economic advisor between 2000 and 2005, who argued ratification would
harm Russia’s economy. An investigation by international NGOs showed that
Illarionov’s think tank was supported financially by vested interests, namely by
large multinational fossil fuel companies (e.g. Poberezhskaya, 2016; Corporate
Europe Observatory, 2007). Having the ear of the President, Illarionov is be-
lieved to have influenced Putin’s position and contributed to the delay of the
decision on ratification for several years. Around the same time, a number of
climate sceptics emerged in the scientific community, mostly in the geologi-
cal circles, who questioned the scientific claims about human-caused climate
change.
The decisive role of Russia in the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol gave
it significant political leverage internationally (Tynkkynen, 2010). While Russia
had economic incentives for the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, the primary
factors in the ratification decision were rather international incentives in other
policy areas and concerns over Russia’s international image (Korppoo, Karas,
and Micheal et al., 2006; Henry and McIntosh Sundstrom, 2007). The 2004
negotiations on Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) provide
a case in point. The EU promised to drop its objections to Russia’s joining of

the WTO if Russia ratified the Kyoto Protocol (Andronova, 2008). In a speech
at the EU summit President Putin noted, ‘the fact that the European Union has
met us halfway at the negotiations on membership in the WTO cannot but in-
fluence Moscow’s positive attitude towards ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.
We will accelerate our movement towards ratifying this protocol’ (Paton Walsh,
2004). Overall, in his announcement of the ratification President Putin asserted
the status of Russia as a ‘great power’ while focusing on national interest as the
primary driver for the decision, emphasizing the potential costs and the side
payments that Russia deserves for participating in international climate change
agreements.
Domestically in the early 2000s, the prevalent perception among Russian
civil servants of President Putin being against the Kyoto Protocol’s ratification
and climate policy in general created a major disincentive for starting any new
policy initiatives related to climate change. Yet transnational projects and dif-
fusion of expertise in this period contributed to strengthening the knowledge
of the economic expert community on climate change in Russia and of their
influence on policy. They helped strengthen the position of the Ministry of Eco-
nomics and Trade as a major player in the debate and facilitated a shift of power
to the ministry, which was supportive of participation in the Kyoto Protocol
(Andronova, 2008).
However, ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 2005 did not result in any major
shift in domestic climate change policy. Lack of active engagement in the flexibil-
ity mechanisms in the early years of the first commitment period (2008–2012),
despite the associated economic benefits, was reflective of the low priority of
climate policy implementation in the domestic agenda in Russia. Overall inef-
ficiency of the bureaucracy and administrative hurdles also played a role in the
delay (Andonova and Alexieva, 2012). Delays with developing domestic infras-
tructure necessary to participate in the Kyoto Protocol’s flexibility mechanisms,
such as procedures for project approval, coupled with lower demand for Rus-
sian emission reduction due to the withdrawal of the US from the protocol, led
to the expectations of new investments being largely unfulfilled. Furthermore,
Russia’s entry into the WTO, which was perceived as the main political benefit
from ratification of the protocol through issue linkage, happened only in 2011,
seven years after the initial deal brokered with European leaders. This created a
perception at the top levels of the government that the EU has not kept its end of
the bargain.
Furthermore, the economic recovery that resumed in 1999–2000 was based on
the rapid growth of oil and gas extraction supported by the growth of energy de-
mand in Russia and internationally. By 2007 Russia’s GDP had recovered to 1989
levels, and by the time of the world recession in 2008–2009, the average annual
growth in Russia reached 7–8% (Grigoryev, Golyashev, and Brilliantova, 2017).
172 averchenkova
By 2008 oil and gas exports constituted 68% of Russia’s export revenues (Bergloef,
Plekhanov, and Rousso, 2009). With such a focus on economic growth based
on extractive industries, domestic climate change policy and decarbonization has
received scant political attention.
Focus on Modernization: Alignment of Domestic

and International Priorities
Between the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the climate summit in
Copenhagen in 2009, Russia was generally seen as disengaged from the interna-
tional climate change negotiations (Henry and McIntosh Sundstrom, 2012). The
spike in international attention to climate change around the Copenhagen sum-
mit coincided with a shift in domestic policy towards modernization initiatives
under Medvedev’s presidency (ibid.), much of which was rooted in the economy.
From the second decade of 2000s, the growth in fossil fuel extraction in Russia
slowed down due to the limited potential for increasing production from existing
oil fields and lack of capital for developing new ones, exposing the limitations of
the extensive growth model (Grigoryev, Golyashav, and Brilliantova, 2017).
In 2008 an analysis by the World Bank and partners showed that Russia could
potentially save about 45% of its annual primary energy demand, equivalent to the
primary energy consumption of France at the time (World Bank and IFC, 2008).
Utilizing this potential required addressing low efficiency of power stations, high
losses of heat and electricity in the grid, and gas flaring, as well as energy effi-
ciency improvements in industry and buildings, and increasing fuel efficiency of
cars. While there was low concern over climate change itself, there was political
and economic motivation to focus on modernization, which aligned with climate
change objectives.
Between 2008 and 2012, President Medvedev’s government introduced a num-
ber of policies aiming at improving energy efficiency as part of the modernization
agenda. In June 2008 the president signed a decree declaring a goal of reducing en-
ergy intensity of GDP by 40% by 2020, followed by energy efficiency legislation in
2009. In December 2009, Russia adopted the Climate Change Doctrine by a pres-
idential decree.1 Its strategic objective was ‘to ensure [the] safe and sustainable
development of Russia, including institutional, economic, ecological, social and
demographic development aspects in the context of a changing climate and related
threats’ (Climate Doctrine of the Russian Federation, 2009). The doctrine clarified
the government’s position on climate change, recognizing it as one of the major in-
ternational problems, accepting the contribution of human activity, and outlining
1 Website of the President of Russia, ‘Climate Doctrine of the Russian Federation’, available at: http:/
/kremlin.ru/events/president/news/6365, accessed 13 April 2020.
mitigation, adaptation, and engagement with the international community among

the key policy objectives. .
Internationally, President Medvedev attempted to project himself as a mod-

ern liberal leader by shifting the understanding of the national interest to-
wards the modernization agenda and linking it to the international concerns
over climate change (Henry and McIntosh Sundstrom, 2012). At the Copen-
hagen summit President Medvedev characterized Russia as the world leader
in emission reduction.2 Some domestic media outlets covering the summit
noted that Russia’s participation was key to confirming its status as a lead-
ing power. Yet the actual influence of Russia on the negotiations was minimal
(Henry and McIntosh Sundstrom, 2012). Russia announced a commitment to
reduce GHG emissions by 15–25% below 1990 by 2020, subject to the full
accounting of its LULUCF potential. Effectively this target translates to a 30–
35% emission increase from 2007 levels (Charap and Safonov, 2010), which has
been subject to international critique. In 2011 Russia took the decision to op-
pose the second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, together with
Japan and Canada. At the same time, it reaffirmed its commitment to coop-
eration under the new post-Kyoto framework that was being negotiated, em-
phasizing throughout the importance of action on climate change by all large
emitters.
Minimal Engagement and Political Distancing
After his re-election in 2012, President Putin shifted away from the Medvedev’s
modernization narrative and international cooperation to focus on geopolitical
objectives and sovereignty (Tynkkynen and Tynkkynen, 2018). Greater emphasis
was placed on nationalism and conservative values, while the process of distanc-
ing from the West in Russia’s foreign policy accelerated. Some political observers
argue that this was part of President Putin’s strategy of political survival through
to 2018 and a way to gain legitimacy and popularity through non-economic so-
lutions amidst economic stagnation due to falling oil prices and structural issues
(House of Lords, 2015). At the time of the conflict with Ukraine from 2014, do-
mestic public approval of President Putin increased to one of its highest points
(83–85%), which experts attributed mainly to Russia’s foreign policy. The sanc-
tions introduced in response to the Ukraine crisis led to the rouble sinking to a
record 16-year low against the dollar, which further strengthened the ability of the
government to foment nationalist sentiment (ibid). The conflict with Ukraine and
the subsequent decline in the relationship with the West and with the international
institutions (such as the World Bank, The European Bank for Reconstruction
2 ‘Rossiya budet uchastvovat’ v novom soglashenii po sokrashcheniyu emissii parnikovykh gazov’,

Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 18 December 2009; Speech of Prime-Minister Medvedev at the plenary of the UN
Rio+20 Summit21, 2012
174 averchenkova
and Development, etc.) signalled an overall decline of Russia’s engagement in

global initiatives.
Conversely, Russia is also positioned as a ‘great energy power’ in this period,
able to exert political influence through formulating dependencies via energy in-
frastructure and attractive trade terms relying on fossil fuels (Tynkkynen and
Tynkkynen, 2018). This framing has made it more difficult to argue for an
ambitious stance on climate change policy, as prosperity from hydrocarbon de-
velopment was closely bound up with discourses of nation-building (Bouzarovski
and Bassin, 2011). Ambitious climate policy was increasingly seen as at odds
with national interests, particularly Russia’s national gas programme, run by
Gazprom (Tynkkynen, 2013). It also gave more prominence to the growing
concerns over economic threats from global decarbonization to Russia’s econ-
omy and its status as a major energy power, a concern still highlighted today
(Mitrova et al., 2020). Domestic implementation of the energy efficiency mea-
sures adopted by President Medvedev were driven to the minimum as most of
public resources and administrative muscle were channelled into the preparation
of the Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014 (Anonymous. September 2020. Inter-
views with experts). Energy discussions in this period thus pivoted away from
Medvedev’s economic cost-effectiveness rationale for efficiency improvements,
towards placing priority on the geopolitical traction Russian fossil fuel energy
could create.
Despite the above developments, Russia played a passive but constructive role
during negotiations of the Paris Agreement. Russia joined the agreement with a
target of 25–30% emission reduction below 1990 by 2030, which is a slight progres-
sion from its Copenhagen commitment but falls short of the levels compatible with
the goal of keeping global warming below 2°C (Climate Tracker, 2020). Yet the gov-
ernment was not in a hurry to ratify the agreement. In November 2016 a decree on
‘Designing a package of measures to improve state regulation of greenhouse gases
and preparing for approval of the Paris Agreement’ (Government of the Russian
Federation, 2016) was adopted. This outlined a number of steps, including man-
dating a socio-economic assessment of the consequences of ratification of the Paris
Agreement with a recommendation to the president by early 2019. This signalled a
three-year delay in ratification until at least 2019 and cast some doubt on whether
Russia would go ahead with the ratification.
At the same time, the plan attached to the decree outlined several regulatory
steps and timelines that guided subsequent regulatory developments on climate
change. These steps included: preparation of the national adaptation strategy by
July 2018; preparation of a draft law on regulation of GHG emissions by June 2019;
a presidential decree on 2030 emission targets by December 2019 and preparation
of a plan for the necessary implementation measures by March 2020; and devel-
opment of a low emission development strategy up to 2050 by December 2019.
Importantly, all of these steps have been implemented, and close to the outlined
schedule.
In a move long awaited by climate observers, in 2018 the government intro-

duced draft legislation ‘On state regulation of emissions and the absorption of
greenhouse gases’ that would require companies to report on emissions and intro-
duce emission quotas and charges on large emitters with a cap-and-trade system
by 2025 (Ministry of Economic Development, 2019). However, amidst strong lob-
bying from the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the legislation
was weakened to merely introducing a reporting system for GHG emissions and
five-year audits (Moscow Times, 2019).
In the same period the official narrative on climate change slightly shifted.
Official statements highlighted both risks to the economy from climate change
and from the global economic trends related to the implementation of the Paris
Agreement (Kokorin and Korppoo, 2017). International climate action has been
shown to present significant risks for Russia, mainly due a lower demand for fos-
sil fuel energy and a shift of market power from the suppliers to the consumers
of energy (Makarov, Chen, and Paltsev, 2018). Analysts forecast a reduction in
Russia’s GDP of 0.2–0.3% as a result of the global implementation of the Paris
Agreement and the related changes in the global energy markets that would en-
tail. They also point out greater risks of Russia not participating in the Paris
Agreement, such as the introduction of trade barriers or export duties on ex-
ports by countries without low carbon policies and technological inefficiencies.
Addressing these risks requires changes in the economic model and diversification
of economy (ibid.).
Russia ratified the Paris Agreement in October 2019 ahead of the UN Secretary-
General’s Summit on Climate Change. Partly due to the tensions outlined above,
the decision on ratification did not include any change to the targets communi-
cated in the nationally determined commitments (NDC) to the Paris Agreement
in 2015, which effectively assume no change in the level of emissions by 2025
compared to 2017 levels (Porfiriev and Katsov, 2017).
Positive Contribution to Climate Change Action: Failed

Attempt at Getting Recognition
One of the central pillars of Russia’s engagement in the international climate

change negotiations has been its claim for recognition of the country’s significant
contribution to the global efforts through emission reductions during the transi-
tion period. In the period 1990–2012, due to its economic transformation Russia
achieved the largest absolute reduction in emissions in the world, about 1.8 gi-
gatons (Gt) of CO2 eq (Makarov, Chen, and Paltsev, 2018). Russia has repeatedly
argued that its contribution to global mitigation efforts is far greater compared
to other emerging economies, which were exempt from emission limitation com-
mitments, and that it is the only major emitter apart from the EU that maintained
176 averchenkova
emissions below 1990 levels and had one of the lowest rates of emission increases
after 1998 (compared to China and the US in particular) (Andonova and Alexieva,
2012).
The positive environmental image presented internationally contrasts the poor
effectiveness of domestic climate change policymaking, which may explain the
lukewarm reception of the leadership claims from the international community.3
Targeted domestic efforts to reduce GHG emissions were mainly related to
improving energy efficiency and energy saving. This has led to some positive re-
sults. Energy intensity of industrial production in Russia between 2000 and 2015
fell by 38%, while the increase of GHG emissions was much slower than that of
GDP (10.7% against 71.4% respectively) (Porfiriev and Katsov, 2017). However,
total GHG emissions have grown by about 13% in the period from 2000 to 2017
(not considering carbon sinks through LULUCF) (based on Ministry of Natural
Resources and Ecology of the Russian Federation, 2019). Total GHG emissions in
2017 were about 32% below the level of 1990 when not including LULUCF, and
about 49% below 1990 levels when LULUCF emissions and sinks are accounted
for. Despite additional measures taken since 2012 the level of GHG emissions re-
mains stable, suggesting radical transformation towards decarbonization is not yet
occurring (Porfiriev and Katsov, 2017).
According to Climate Action Tracker (2020), Russia will achieve its Paris Agree-
ment target, which does not require a decrease in GHG emissions from the current
levels. Its current policies are projected to result in emissions of between 2,100
and 2,200 MtCO2 e in 2020 and in 2030 (excluding LULUCF), or 0–2% above 2017
emission levels. This is equivalent to emission reductions of 32–33% in 2020 and
31–33% in 2030 below 1990 levels, which are all well below the Russia’s NDC tar-
gets that allow emissions to grow 16–23% above 2017 levels by 2030 (ibid.). In the
context where reaching the objectives of the Paris Agreement requires a stabiliza-
tion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Russia’s efforts are labelled as ‘critically
insufficient’ by the Climate Action Tracker (2020).
In international climate change negotiations Russian officials have consistently
argued that the country is making a major contribution to the global mitigation
efforts and acts as a leader in reducing emissions, given significant reductions in
GHG emissions below 1990 levels. This is demonstrated, for example, in a speech
by the head of the delegation at the Cancun climate change conference in 2010
(Bedritsky, 2010). Similarly, in its communications to the UNFCCC, the gov-
ernment highlights that Russia has significantly exceeded the levels of emission
reductions that it committed to under the Kyoto Protocol (e.g. Ministry of Natural
Resources and Ecology of the Russian Federation, 2019). Between 1990 and 2010
global emissions have increased by 43% and those by OECD members by 10%.
3 As expressed mainly by the NGOs and international media. Negotiators are usually very careful
about publicly criticizing emission targets and efforts to implement them by other countries.
Russian emissions in 2010 were 34.2% below 1990 levels (or 50.8% considering
carbon sinks). However, if a more recent reference year would be chosen, Russia’s
track record would not look as favourable.
It is fair to say that the international community at large has not recognized this
claim and Russia’s performance, demanding more ambitious action, as evidenced
by numerous statements by NGOs and international media. Much of this demand
was due to strong opposition from many environmental NGOs during the negoti-
ation and implementation of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol in
2008–2012 to the idea of Russia being able to sell some of the accumulated emis-
sion reductions from the early 1990s through emission trading mechanisms. The
term ‘hot air’ was coined and used in this context, accompanied with demands that
any sales of emission quotas from Russia should be tied to investments in further
reductions of emissions, leading to the emergence of the proposal for the so-called
Green Investment Schemes (e.g. Moe et al., 2003).
Much international critique of Russia’s current policies and targets committed
under the Paris Agreement rests on the fact that while its emission targets represent
an absolute reduction below the levels of 1990 comparable with those of the EU
and more ambitious than those of most developed countries, they allow for actual
growth of emissions of between 16–27% compared to the levels of 2017 (Climate
Action Tracker, 2020).
‘Great Power’ Narrative and Russia’s Positioning

in Climate Change Politics
Self-presentation of Russia as a great power guided its conduct internationally for

centuries, which in the environmental domain is based on its natural resources
and ecological potential (Tynkkynen, 2010). A public opinion survey on climate
change in Russia in June 2013 showed that 54% of the respondents knew and
36% had heard about climate change. Over 70% thought climate change should
be addressed at the international level and 45% considered that Russia should
play a leadership role in this process, including unilateral commitments to reduce
emissions, while 36.7% disagreed with such a course of action (President Admin-
istration, 2013). Another survey in 2018, focused specifically on perceptions of
the population on Russia’s role in global affairs, found that 75% of the surveyed
population considered Russia to be a great power and 88% agreed that it should
maintain great power status (Levada Center, 2019, reported by Korppoo, 2020).
Two prevalent paradigms have been identified in Russia since the start of the
transition period in 1990s in terms of how the notion of great power is un-
derstood. Firstly, there is a new model for great power that is based, among
other things, on environmental and nuclear security that emphasize the no-
tion of responsibility and engagement in cooperation with international com-
munity. Secondly, there is a national-patriotic or national interest one that
178 averchenkova
stressed national interests based on the unilateralist realist tradition (Tynkkynen,

2010, based on Crow 1992, and Sakwa 1996) and accepts engagement in in-
ternational affairs solely from the point of view of national self-interest.
This model effectively rejects the notion of responsibility for upholding the multi-
lateral order.
Analysis of the coverage of climate change in the Russian media leading up to the
ratification of the Kyoto Protocol from 2000 to 2004 by Tynkkynen (2010) shows
that the notion of Russia as a great (ecological) power is central to the debate.
The study acknowledges that the views of climate change action either from the
angle of great power responsibility (or duty) or ‘national interest’ were among the
dominant political frames in the Russian media (ibid.). While arguing for differ-
ent policy outcomes vis-à-vis a decision on ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, all
dominant framings pursued in the climate change debate in Russia are of a ‘posi-
tive’ rather than ‘negative’ environmental power as defined by Buzan and Falkner
(Chapter 2, this volume) and discussed above. Russian scholars and politicians
stressed Russia’s ecological potential as a source for environmental solutions (e.g.
the role of its boreal forests in carbon sequestration) rather than its contribution to
the causes of environmental problems (e.g. Mokrousov and Kudeyarov, 1997; Old-
field, Kouzmina, and Dennis, 2003). Part of this narrative was Russia’s positioning
as ‘an environmental donor’. Some scientists explicitly argued that Russia should
be recognized as a ‘great ecological power’ (Klyuev, 2002) and should be com-
pensated for the ecological services it provides to the world in addressing climate
change (Kondratiev, 2003).
The great power narrative based on great environmental power responsibility
emerged in Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It builds on the liberal demo-
cratic ideas dominant in that period (Tynkkynen, 2010). It emphasizes climate
change as a global challenge that requires Russia to exercise its moral duty and
join the rest of the world, acting responsibly by cooperating with others. While
economic benefits are not central to the responsibility frame, often the benefits
of modernization, improved energy efficiency, and qualitative growth are high-
lighted by its proponents. Some of the promoters of this frame included, among
others, Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, former Minister of Environment, Alexander
Bedritskyi, the head of the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology (RosHy-
dromet) and chief climate change negotiator for Russia, and Mikhail Gorbachev
(ibid.).
The national interest frame, on the other hand, implies that Russia should only
join global climate change policy if it meets its national interests and carries signif-
icant political and economic benefits. Interestingly, the frame has led to different
policy recommendations on Russia’s engagement in international climate change
policy, depending on the proponent’s interpretation of what is in Russia’s national
interest in relation to climate change action. The analysis of the media debate on
ratification of the Kyoto Protocol showed that some proponents recognize politi-
cal benefits from Russia positioning itself as a great climate power internationally
(Tynkkynen, 2010). In discussing arguments for ratifying the Kyoto Protocol,

media articles that fall under this framing appeal to the need for Russia to act as
an environmental leader, while some also draw on the concept of ecological donor
(ibid.). However, the national interest frame was also pursued by the opponents
of the ratification, who appeal to the lack of scientific consensus (e.g. the director
of the Global Climate and Ecology Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences,
Yury Izrael), positive impacts from climate change, and negative impacts of the
Kyoto Protocol on the national economy (e.g. the president’s economic advisor,
Andrei Illarionov) (Tynkkynen, 2010).
During the presidencies of Putin, the national-patriotic ideology of self-
interested great power status has strengthened (Anikin, 2002; Tynkkynen, 2010).
Further emphasis on the nationalist narrative in foreign policy since the re-
election of President Putin in 2012 also impacted Russia’s self-positioning as a
great power in global climate politics, focusing primarily on national economic
and security interests. The 2016 foreign policy concept of the Russian Federation
outlined consolidation of Russia’s position as a centre of influence in the world
as its key strategic priority (Korppoo, 2020). A study by Korppoo (2020) on cul-
tural drivers of Russia’s position in international climate diplomacy, based on over
100 interviews with non-climate professionals, finds that Russian participation in
the international climate change negotiations, as perceived by domestic experts,
is largely influenced by concerns unrelated to environment, such as foreign policy
interests and benefit-seeking.
Not surprisingly the influence of normative framings of ‘common respon-
sibility’ and ‘international cooperation’ become increasingly less significant
in Russia’s international statements on climate change compared to the ear-
lier periods. When announcing its decision to ratify the Paris Agreement in
September 2019, Russia emphasized that the agreement and its instruments
should not be used to create barriers for countries’ sustainable socio-economic
development.
A focus on sovereignty and the national interest framing is also reflected in the
latest submission to the UNFCCC in the fourth biennial report on progress with
implementation of the key international agreements on climate change. In this re-
port, while taking account of its actions on climate change, Russia emphasizes its
own will in undertaking initiatives on a voluntary basis (Ministry of Natural Re-
sources and Ecology of the Russian Federation, 2019). It further stated that, while
it recognizes that developed countries should provide financial resources to help
developing countries in addressing climate change, Russia is not obliged to pro-
vide such resources not formally being a donor or so-called Annex II Party to the
UNFCCC. Interestingly, later in the same report Russia recognizes its responsibil-
ity for preserving climate and ensuring sustainable development, and reports on its
active role in implementing the UNFCCC objectives, including through providing
financial assistance as a voluntary donor (ibid.).
180 averchenkova
Recent initiatives by Russia to support developing countries in addressing cli-

mate change include debt write-offs for the least developed countries in Africa
and participation in the ‘debt for development’ initiative; R & D cooperation re-
lated to climate change; and disaster relief. Since 2015 Russia provides funding
for the Russia-UNDP Trust Fund for development, which has a dedicated climate
window that supports mitigation and adaptation projects in developing countries.
In 2018 Russia voluntarily contributed towards funding of the Intergovernmen-
tal Panel on Climate Change and is among the funders of the Green Climate
Fund.
While emphasizing self-interest in determining its international engagement on
climate change, continued engagement in international climate treaties and volun-
tary initiatives on finance would suggest that Russian leadership sees some political
and economic benefits from international engagement on climate change. These
could include advancing political and economic influence with developing coun-
tries and overall strengthening of Russia’s image as a great power. It could also
be that Russia realizes the costs of disengagement in international climate change
cooperation are potentially high (e.g. threat of trade barriers to countries without
climate change policies, the need to be at the table when decisions are being taken
that impact global energy markets to which Russia is sensitive, and the risk of de-
teriorating relationships with other countries, in particular developing nations).
There is a risk, however, that, being driven mainly by concerns other than climate
change, Russia’s climate diplomacy could become increasingly less ambitious in
the future. The overall shift from interpretation of great power as responsibility
towards a more nationalist framing implies rejection of the notion of international
responsibilities and a shift towards a more voluntarist approach. This is similar to
the dynamics at the federal level in the US under the Trump administration and
in a few other countries. The proponents of strong climate action in Russia and in-
ternational negotiating partners should therefore articulate how ambitious climate
action would help Russia pursue its national self-interest.
Conclusions
Possessing key structural characteristics of positive and negative environmental

power, Russia has actively drawn on great power framing in formulation of its cli-
mate change strategy. However, political perceptions of its own interest in relation
to climate change policy have changed over time, influenced by a combination of a
domestic economy highly dependent on fossil fuel extraction and export, promi-
nence of climate sceptics and anti-climate economic lobbyists, and overall internal
and international political dynamics.
Positive use of the global environmental power frame has declined in Russia
over time. Driven by the overall desire to join the international community and to
establish itself as a global leader, including in the environmental domain, in the

early 1990s Russia joined the key global environmental agreements and domes-
tically started to implement environmental reforms. Recognition of international
norms and cooperation, with allusions to great power responsibility, were more
evident in the early 1990s. However, over time the domestic political economy,
coupled with the changing international profile of the country and tensions with
the EU and US, has resulted in Russia taking a less active role in international
climate change politics.
A shift towards resource distribution, extraction, and management in Russia’s
overall approach to environmental policy led to the strengthening of the national
self-interest narrative, while the great ecological and energy power stance becomes
less attractive. Issue linkages in the international and domestic policy around the
ratification of the Kyoto Protocol resulted in a period of perceived alignment be-
tween domestic interests and international leadership. While the earlier periods
of climate change policy were in line with Russia’s strategy of enhancing its as-
pirations as a great power, a large-scale global transformation to a low carbon
society threatens Russia’s status as a great energy power, which to an extent ex-
plains the current strategy of minimal participation in climate change agreements
with conservative targets.
Overall, Russia’s efforts on climate change are not framed in the context of joint
global action and common responsibility, but rather emphasize the country’s own
will, national interests, and voluntary or unilateral decisions. There is a clear ambi-
tion to act as a great power, but it is driven by Russia’s own domestic interests rather
than by global values and explicit aspiration to environmental leadership. This sug-
gests there are competing visions of what great power responsibility means, and
raises questions as to what extent its meaning is shared internationally or defined
unilaterally by individual powers.
While being criticized for its minimal progress in reducing emissions since
the early 2000s, Russia’s GHG emission reductions achieved in the 1990s far ex-
ceed emission reductions achieved by other industrialized countries—a card that
the Russian government has been playing in the international climate change
negotiations to claim leadership, yet with little success. Given its ‘accumulated
achievement’ in terms of emission reductions in the 1990s, Russia’s domestic pol-
icy, while sluggish, could hardly be considered as a conscious exercise of negative
environmental power. The lack of international recognition of Russia’s contri-
bution to the reduction of GHG emissions in the 1990s as an achievement and
demonstration of leadership is a testament to that. An interesting emergent ques-
tion for future analysis is to what extent this lack of recognition from the key
negotiating partners and the international community at large (and hence zero po-
litical benefit received) may have contributed to Russia’s relatively passive position
in the international climate change negotiations.
One of the factors contributing to the confused status of Russia as a potential
great power in international climate change politics is its dual personality, which
182 averchenkova
was used through the 1990s and 2000s. On the one hand, there was a claim for
leadership and great power ambitions; on the other, there were requests for special
treatment under the UNFCCC as an economy in transition. Another interesting
question arises: is the current non-ambitious stance of Russia in relation to climate
change policy due to its lack of interest in taking greater responsibility or is it also,
as least partially, reflective of its current capabilities to deliver deeper and more
rapid decarbonization, in particularly given the strong dependency of its economy
on fossil fuels?
It is unlikely that Russia will radically change its international position in re-
lation to climate change in the absence of significant incentives. Such incentives
could be presented by technological cooperation, however the current economic
sanctions from and challenging political relations with the EU and US limit the
scope for this. Overall, the political situation and economic sanctions limit eco-
nomic incentives for Russia’s active participation in the international climate
change cooperation. Hence, the recent position of passive participation with
conservative targets is likely to continue.
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PART III
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
AND ISSUE-AREAS
9
Great Power Responsibility for Climate
Security in the United Nations Security
Council
Shirley V. Scott
This chapter considers the as yet incomplete securitization of climate change by

the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). The special responsibilities of great
powers stem from the need for security (Bull, 1977: 200–229) and so the broaden-
ing of the security agenda to encompass non-military issues has expanded great
power responsibility (Bukovansky et al., 2012: 47)—including, arguably, to climate
change (see Buzan and Falkner, Chapter 2, this volume). The chapter considers
what the full securitization of climate change would look like at a global level and
how this would relate to great power management (GPM), the current state of play,
and why efforts to establish a formal climate change mandate for the UNSC have
not succeeded as yet.
The United Nations Security Council as a Great Power

Management Security Guarantee
The UNSC is the classic example of GPM as security guarantee. The council was
established with 11 members, of which five are permanent, and the remaining
non-permanent members have two-year terms; the number of non-permanent
members increased to 10 in 1965. The five permanent members were amongst the
victors of the Second World War. Article 24(1) of the Charter of the United Nations
allocates the council ‘primary responsibility for the maintenance of international
peace and security’ and, by Article 25, members of the United Nations agree to
accept and carry out decisions of the council. Decisions of the council trump any
other legal obligations of states, and can take the form of recommendations or be
of a compulsory nature.
Shirley V. Scott, Great Power Responsibility for Climate Security in the United Nations Security Council. In: Great Powers,
190 scott
There is little doubt that the founders of the United Nations conceived of likely
threats to international peace and security primarily in terms of one state in-
vading another (Hathaway and Shapiro, 2017: 213–214). The threshold for the
council to take a decision binding on states does not specifically refer to security
as such but, by Article 39, requires the council to identify a threat to the peace,
breach of the peace, or act of aggression. There was no pretence that the coun-
cil would function in a transparent or democratic fashion; it was established as
the organ of the United Nations that would sit continuously in readiness to or-
ganize a unified response to any state that stepped out of line. The philosophy
underpinning the council is encapsulated in the notion of ‘collective security’,
often characterized as ‘all against one’ (Thakur and Weiss, 2009: 24).
The system of collective security established by the Charter of the United
Nations was a radical experiment as a mechanism by which to prevent war. The
tremendous powers accorded the council were not simply accepted by smaller
and middle powers, which were quite outspoken at San Francisco (Fox, 1946).
The great powers nevertheless had their say as regards incorporation in the Char-
ter of what is colloquially known as the ‘veto’. A decision of the council on any
non-procedural question requires an affirmative vote of nine members, includ-
ing the concurring votes of the permanent members; this has evolved to include
abstentions. The voting procedure was decided on at a meeting of Roosevelt,
Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta in February 1945, but the idea of it necessitating the
concurring vote of all permanent members was highly contentious at San Fran-
cisco. The great powers on 7 June presented a ‘Statement by the Delegations of
the Four Sponsoring Governments on Voting Procedure in the Security Coun-
cil’ (United Nations, 1945: 104–106), which set out the rationale for the veto:
that the permanent members could not be expected to assume the obligation to
act so as to maintain peace and security upon a decision in which they had not
concurred.
The UNSC is a system of great power security management but, in con-
cert with shifting understandings of security, the council has over the decades
broadened its remit. One of its earliest innovations was peacekeeping; operations
have become more complex over the decades. In more recent years the Secu-
rity Council has been increasingly involved in long-term monitoring of crisis
situations, overseeing subsidiary bodies, and providing a forum for council mem-
bers to define and act on common thematic interests (Scott and Ku, 2018: 6).
The council has created new missions and bodies, including international crim-
inal tribunals, monitoring bodies to verify disarmament as required by UNSC
decisions, missions to implement peace agreements, and missions to provide
humanitarian assistance and post-conflict reconstruction. The focus of coun-
cil work has shifted from an emphasis on the inviolability of state borders to
a prioritization of human security that focuses on the inviolability of persons
(Scott and Ku, 2018: 8).
great power responsibility 191
Indeed, the council can be understood as having effectively become the go-to
body in the event of crises necessitating an urgent response that no other insti-
tution is addressing adequately, and in relation to which there is sufficient unity
amongst council members. The council’s responses to AIDS, Ebola, and Covid-
19 afford examples; under normal circumstances the World Health Organization
might have been expected to have oversight over the global response to all epi-
demics. But the council has interpreted its mandate to encompass health issues
where circumstances mean that the threat to human health and security is of
sufficient magnitude and urgency that no other institution can deliver the req-
uisite response and where there has been sufficient consensus to proceed (United
Nations Security Council, 2011a: 1; United Nations Security Council, 2018c: 1).
For example, UN Security Council Resolution 2177 (2014) labelled the Ebola out-
break a threat to international peace and security, and the following day the UN
General Assembly (UNGA) welcomed the intention of the Secretary-General to
establish the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response.
In contrast, although the council called for a general and immediate ceasefire
and requested the Secretary-General to instruct peacekeeping operations to sup-
port host country efforts to support the pandemic, strong differences between the
US and China precluded the possibility of a more decisive Covid-19 response on
the part of the council (Patrick, 2020).
Conceptualizing the Process of Securitization
Understanding the process by which a non-military issue comes to be interpreted

and responded to as a threat to security can be enhanced through the application
of insights on ‘securitization’, as theorized by the Copenhagen School of security
studies. The process of securitization is said to begin with a ‘securitizing move’,
discourse that presents the issue as an existential threat to a referent object (Buzan
et al., 1998: 25). The issue is securitized only if and when the audience accepts it
as such (Buzan et al., 1998: 25), thereby generating ‘endorsement of emergency
measures beyond rules that would otherwise bind’ (Buzan et. al, 1998: 5). By that
point the issue has moved out of ‘ordinary’, ‘democratic’ politics to be treated as
an emergency (Buzan et al., 1998: 23–24). ‘Security’ is thus understood as a ‘self-
referential practice, because it is in this practice that the issue becomes a security
issue — not necessarily because a real existential threat exists but because the issue
is presented as such a threat’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 24).
The process of securitization may remain incomplete. Acceptance of some se-
curity rhetoric but without that leading to emergency measures would constitute
only partial securitization. A trend towards securitization might also be reversed.
Indeed, there has been a normative dimension to the theory, by which Waever
(1998: 69) argued that framing issues in terms of security can, perversely, heighten
the likelihood of armed conflict, ‘because when something is constituted as a
192 scott
security issue this enables more extreme action’. Waever believed that ‘security
should be seen as a negative, as a failure to deal with issues of normal politics’
(Buzan et al., 1998: 19). Waever preferred that a process of increasing securiti-
zation be followed by desecuritization, moving the issue back into the ordinary
public sphere (Buzan et al., 1998: 29).
Securitization theory was developed primarily with a domestic democratic
polity in mind, but has also been applied at an international level. Viewed from a
global perspective, emergency measures instituted at a local or regional level would
constitute only partial securitization. While there is no expectation that securiti-
zation would need to occur sequentially at local, national, regional, and global
levels—there is likely to be some complex interplay between uptake of the issue at
the various levels of governance—it would arguably be necessary for the council
to have acted in order to say that there has been full securitization, simply be-
cause the council is positioned at the apex of the international security institutional
architecture.
Furthermore, given that securitization involves an issue being treated as an
emergency, full securitization would presumably equate not only with the coun-
cil accepting a role in governance of the issue, as it could do while drawing
on its Chapter VI recommendatory powers, but also if and when it identi-
fies climate change as a threat to international peace and security, responding
with its Chapter VII emergency powers. Some authors such as de Wet (2004:
134–148) argue that there are limits in law to what the council deems to meet
the Article 39 threshold for Chapter VII recognition of a threat to the peace,
breach of the peace, or act of aggression, but most international lawyers agree
that in practice the authority is curbed primarily by the political considera-
tion of securing the necessary votes. Having identified a ‘threat to the peace,
breach of the peace, or act of aggression’ (Article 39), the council can dic-
tate any action it chooses, and enforce its decisions even with force if it deems
necessary.
Climate Securitization at Local, National, and Regional Levels
There has been greater acceptance of climate change as a threat to local and
national, as opposed to regional or global, security: about 70 countries explic-
itly state that climate change is a national security concern (American Secu-
rity Project, n.d.). And, of particular relevance to securitization theory, activists
have been urging cities and local municipalities to declare climate ‘emergen-
cies’. In June 2019, New York became the largest city to declare such a measure
(Barnard, 2019).
At a regional level, the EU has been regarded as a norm entrepreneur in
advocating for climate security (Zwolski and Kaunert, 2011: 21), and other re-
gional organizations have also acknowledged the seriousness of the issue. ASEAN
(The Association of Southeast Asian Nations), for example, first identified climate
change as a security risk in 2007 (Krampe et al., 2018: 3). The 2009 ‘Singapore
statement’ recognized the vulnerability of South East Asia to climate change, em-
phasizing its implications for livelihoods and the limitations it imposed on future
development options. ASEAN has promoted climate-resilient agriculture and in
2009 established the ASEAN Disaster Management and Emergency Relief Fund
(Krampe et al., 2018: 5).
Climate security is understood differently in different countries and regions
depending on the specific regional context and vulnerability to climate change
(Krampe et al., 2018: 1). Debate in the US focuses on national security, for example,
while Europeans tend to highlight human security (Diez et al., 2016). One of
the most pressing problems addressed by the Economic Community of West
African States (ECOWAS) is food insecurity. South Asian Association for Re-
gional Cooperation (SAARC) heads of state expressed their deep concern about
regional challenges related to environmental degradation and climate change in
the SAARC Kathmandu Declaration as long ago as 1987 (Krampe et al., 2018: 7).
Concrete steps since have included the establishment of the SAARC Disaster
Management Centre in October 2006 to advise policy and facilitate capacity
building.
In 2012 the Pacific Island Forum Leaders endorsed a Framework for Resilient
Development in the Pacific, ‘the world’s first integrated regional framework to
build resilience to climate change and disasters’ (Pacific Community, 2016).
The framework has three goals: strengthened integrated adaptation and risk
reduction to enhance resilience to climate change and disasters; low-carbon
development; and strengthened disaster preparedness, response, and recov-
ery (Pacific Community et al., 2016: 3). It provides voluntary guidance for
all levels of governance and administration, the private sector, civil society
organizations, Pacific communities and their leaders, and regional organiza-
tions and development partners (Pacific Community et al., 2016: 5). The 2018
Boe Declaration on Regional Security of the Pacific Islands Forum called for
recognizing climate change as the single greatest threat to the livelihoods,
security, and well-being of the peoples of the Pacific (Pacific Islands Forum
Secretariat, n.d.).
The Global Securitization of Climate Change
The 1988 Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, attended by some

300 scientists and policymakers from 48 countries, was subtitled ‘Implications for
Global Security’. The statement noted, inter alia, that ‘unanticipated and unplanned
change may well become the major non-military threat to international security
and the future of the global economy’ (Center for International Environmental
Law, 1990: 519). A further paragraph noted:
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The countries of the industrially developed world are the main source of green-
house gases and therefore bear the main responsibility to the world community
for ensuring that measures are implemented to address the issue posed by cli-
mate change. At the same time, they must see that the developing nations of
the world, whose problems are greatly aggravated by population growth, are as-
sisted and not inhibited in improving their economies and the living conditions
of their citizens. This will necessitate a wide range of measures, including signif-
icant additional energy use in those countries and compensating reductions in
industrialized countries.
(Center for International Environmental Law, 1990: 519)
The sentiment was repeated in the conference recommendations: ‘Clearly, the

industrialized nations have a responsibility to lead the way, both through their
national energy policies and their bilateral and multilateral assistance arrange-
ments’ (Center for International Environmental Law, 1990: 521). The Toronto
conference did not generate a sustained debate on climate change and secu-
rity at the international level, although it did serve as a stepping stone towards
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The preamble to this, the foundational global treaty to address climate change,
made no mention of climate change as a threat to security. Incidentally, nei-
ther did the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC; nor, indeed, did the Paris
Agreement.1
The UK, and a number of think tanks, provided the necessary impetus for more
concerted securitizing efforts. In 2006 the G8 accepted the fundamental links
between energy, security, climate change, and sustainable development (Group
of Eight, 2006), and British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett (2006) empha-
sized the importance of climate security in a major speech in Berlin. Around
this time, a number of non-governmental, governmental, and intergovernmen-
tal bodies released reports examining the security implications of climate change
(Scott, 2008).
The UNSC first considered the issue in 2007. As we have seen, full securitization
of climate change would involve governance of the issue moving outside the mul-
tilateral treaty regime processes to the UNSC or at least of the council constituting
the ‘peak body’, coordinating the work of others and taking action of its own. Full
securitization at an international level would therefore equate to a system of GPM.
If climate change were to remain only partially securitized—for example, by being
widely regarded as a national security threat but not as a threat to international
1 Paragraph 9 of the Paris Agreement does state: ‘Recognizing the fundamental priority of safeguard-
ing food security and ending hunger …’ .
peace and security—then securitization of climate change and GPM of climate

change would not necessarily correspond.
The Securitization of Climate Change by the

United Nations Security Council
The council has responded both formally and informally to the growing acceptance
of the risks posed by climate insecurity. The council has since 2007 held sev-
eral debates on the security implications of climate change, issued a presidential
statement in 2011, and more recently, included references to climate change in res-
olutions of the council (Security Council Report, 2021: 8). There has also been a
number of less formal ‘Arria-formula’ meetings.
The first debate, on the interrelationship of energy, climate, and security, was
led by the UK. A common refrain in the debate was that of climate change as a
‘threat multiplier’ (United Nations Security Council, 2007). The 2011 debate was
chaired by Germany and resulted in a presidential statement expressing concern
‘that possible adverse effects of climate change may, in the long run, aggravate
certain existing threats to international peace and security’. A presidential state-
ment of 30 January 2018 noted that the council ‘recognize[d] the adverse effects
of climate change and ecological changes among other factors on the stability of
West Africa and the Sahel region, including through drought, desertification, land
degradation and food insecurity’ (United Nations Security Council, 2018a: 4).
In addition to these formal council securitizing moves, there has been a se-
quence of informal ‘Arria-formula’ meetings. The first, in 2013, was co-chaired by
the UK and Pakistan and focused on the ‘security dimensions of climate change’.
Spain and Malaysia co-hosted an Arria-formula meeting in 2015 on the subject of
climate change as a threat multiplier for global security. In 2016 Senegal led an-
other, this time on ‘water, peace and security’, and also in that year, Egypt and Spain
convened a UNSC information session on challenges to the Sahel region with a
focus on climate change. Ukraine—with the assistance of Germany—convened
a meeting on ‘Security Implications of Climate Change: Sea Level Rise’ in April
2017; a further Arria-formula meeting on 14 December 2017, entitled ‘Preparing
for the security implications of rising temperatures’, was chaired by Italy and co-
hosted with Sweden, Morocco, the UK, the Netherlands, Peru, Japan, France, the
Maldives, and Germany (Security Council Report, 2019).
On 11 July 2018, at the initiative of Sweden, the Security Council held a
meeting on maintenance of international peace and security, focusing on un-
derstanding and addressing climate-related security risks (United Nations Secu-
rity Council, 2018b: 1). Another debate addressing climate change-related risks
196 scott
to international peace and security was held on 25 January 2019, this time
at the initiative of and chaired by the Dominican Republic (Security Council,
2019: 1). An Arria-formula meeting on 22 April 2020 co-organized by Belgium,
France, the Dominican Republic, Estonia, Germany, Niger, Saint Vincent and the
Grenadines, Tunisia, the UK, and Vietnam addressed what the United Nations
could do to prevent climate-related conflicts and to climate-proof UN in-country
activities. On 23 February 2021 UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson chaired a high-
level open videoconference debate on ‘addressing climate-related security risks
to international peace andsecurity through mitigation and resilience building’
(United Nations Headquarters, Climate and Security—Security Council Debate,
23 February 2021).
The UNGA has also made significant interventions in the ongoing debate
regarding climate security. At the initiative of the Pacific Small Island Devel-
oping States, a debate on climate change and its possible security implications
was held in 2009 and, by UNGA Resolution 63/281 (2009), the Assembly ‘in-
vite[d] the relevant organs of the United Nations, as appropriate and within their
respective mandates, to intensify their efforts in considering and addressing cli-
mate change, including its possible security implications’. The resolution also
requested the Secretary-General to prepare a report on the possible security im-
plications of climate change. The resulting report found that the ‘nature and full
degree of the security implications of climate change are still largely untested’
(UNGA, 2009: 4), although it enumerated threats to human well-being and to eco-
nomic development, threats from uncoordinated coping, threat of loss of territory
and statelessness, and threats to international cooperation in managing shared
resources (UNGA, 2009: 1). Members of the assembly have at certain times, in-
cluding at the beginning of its 2018–2019 session, paid particular attention to
climate change during general debate.
In anticipation of stepping into a non-permanent seat on the council, on
1 August 2018 Germany, together with Nauru, launched the UN Group of Friends
on Climate and Security to raise the profile of the issue and to function as a discus-
sion forum and idea generator (Federal Foreign Office, 2018a). According to Smith
et al. (2019), the formation of this 27-member group illustrates ‘the increasing sup-
port by governments from different parts of the globe and their collaboration to
push the UN system to be more risk-aware’. The group convened its first high-level
meeting of heads of state and foreign ministers on the sidelines of the UNGA in
New York in 2018. The Deputy Secretary-General addressed the group, calling for
more to be done to address the climate change nexus with security (United Nations
Secretary-General, 2018).
In parallel with the creation of the Group of Friends on Climate Security, a
Climate Security Mechanism was established in October 2018 to produce climate-
related security risk assessments and management strategies. The Climate Security
Mechanism is hosted by the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding
Affairs and includes staff from the UN Development Programme and the UN
Environment Programme.
Great Power Responsibility for Climate Change

in the United Nations Security Council
The council could repeatedly accept the phenomenon of climate insecurity

without there being full securitization, if the council did not respond to the
phenomenon, or responded weakly without invoking its Chapter VII powers.
In this respect, Resolution 2408 of 27 March 2018 was ‘historic’ insofar as the
council formally recognized climate change as a destabilizing factor in Somalia
(Derler, 2018) in a substantive paragraph of the resolution and by that resolution
extended the mandate of the UN Assistance Mission in Somalia. The penultimate
paragraph read as follows:
Recalling its Presidential statement S/PRST/2011/15, recognizing the adverse ef-

fects of climate change, ecological changes and natural disasters among other
factors on the stability of Somalia, including through drought, desertification,
land degradation, and food insecurity, and emphasizing the need for adequate
risk assessments and risk management strategies by governments and the United
Nations relating to these factors.
(United Nations Security Council, 2018c: 3)
A prerequisite for full securitization would be recognition by council members,

and the P5 in particular, that climate insecurity falls within Article 24(1) of the
Charter of the United Nations, which accords the council ‘primary responsibility
for the maintenance of international peace and security’. Addressing the council at
its second debate on climate change, the Secretary-General (2011b: 3) referred to
members bearing ‘a unique responsibility to mobilize national and international
action to confront the very real threat of climate change and the specific threats to
international peace and security that derive from it’.
As we have seen, the UK was an early proponent of a climate change role
for the council. France has also been a diplomatic champion of climate se-
curity. At the April 2020 Arria-formula meeting, France called for immediate
action to incorporate climate change impacts into the conflict prevention pol-
icy of the UN. The position of the US has varied. In the Arria-formula meeting
of April 2020, for example, the US representative made no explicit acknowl-
edgement of the phenomenon of climate insecurity, let alone of an explicit role
for the UNSC (Barkin, 2020). The US in 2019 and 2020 resisted proposals to
incorporate climate-security language in council outcomes on Haiti and Iraq
respectively (Security Council Report, 2020: 21). US’ support by the Biden admin-
istration for a council role on climate and security matters is actually a return
198 scott
to its position in 2011, when it presented one of the most cohesive cases yet
made in the council for the council accepting climate security as one of its core
responsibilities:
While we recognize the essential work of the wider United Nations

system and other partners in tackling the broader dimensions of
climate change around the world, we also strongly believe that the
Council has an essential responsibility to address the clear-cut peace
and security implications of a changing climate …
Our goal is clear. The Council needs to be prepared for the full range
of crises that may be deepened or widened by the effects of climate
change. The question is not whether we will be faced with climate-
related threats, but when and how to respond. We need to be much
better prepared to tackle one of the central threats of our age. It is past
time for the Security Council to come into the twenty-first century
and to assume our core responsibilities.
(United Nations Security Council, 2011b: 7)
Russia and China have consistently rejected any notion that the UNSC has
responsibilities in respect of climate security. Despite joining the consensus on
UNGA Resolution 63/281, Russia continued to resist the potential implication that
the threat posed by climate change to international peace and security should be
placed on the agenda of the council (United Nations Security Council, 2011b: 13;
United Nations Security Council, 2018d: 16). China has emphasized that climate
change is ‘fundamentally a sustainable development issue’, to be addressed via the
UNFCCC regime (United Nations Security Council, 2011b: 9), although in offi-
cial domestic discourse China has increasingly recognized the security impact of
climate change (Trombetta, 2019). There is notably no unified position amongst
developing countries on the question of a council role in safeguarding climate se-
curity. Unlike China, small-island developing countries have been key advocates
of the council being proactive on the issue.
The UNFCCC regime has ‘responsibility’ as a central concept; however, it is not
the ‘great powers’ that are accorded responsibility, but rather all parties are invested
with responsibility ‘on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common
but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’. As the ultimate top-
down institution, the council represents the antithesis to the governance approach
taken in the Paris Agreement, by which individual countries develop their own
policy commitments.
What the Council Could Do if Accepting a Great Power

Responsibility for Climate Change
There has been some evolution in the themes canvassed during debate, discussion
moving from a concern primarily with whether the council should tackle the issue
to one regarding what the council could in practice do if it were to act. The shift
was heralded in 2011 when the UN Secretary-General welcomed that the debate
in the council would consider ‘what the council and all Member States can do to
confront the double-barrelled challenge of climate change and international secu-
rity’ (United Nations Security Council, 2011b: 2). In practice, however, the shift
has been much slower and has really only gotten underway in recent years. As with
the initial introduction of the issue to the council, momentum has come primarily
from NGOs, scholars, and activists outside the council.
The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2015 launched the Planetary Se-
curity Initiative (PSI), which aims to, inter alia, ‘enhance political involvement in
climate-security’ and to ‘operate as a permanent platform for international cooper-
ation on planetary security’ (Planetary Security Initiative, n.d.a). The PSI operates
as a consortium of several think tanks: the Clingendael Institute, Adelphi, the
Center for Climate and Security, Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, and the Stock-
holm International Peace Research Institute. Planetary Security Conferences were
held annually from 2016 to 2018. The 2017 Planetary Security Conference gave
rise to the Hague Declaration on Planetary Security (Planetary Security Initiative,
n.d.b).
The preamble to the declaration explains that ‘successfully addressing climate-
related security challenges requires knowledge sharing, partnerships, and getting
out of separate silos. It requires, in short, the emergence of a new community of
practice’ (Planetary Security Initiative, n.d.b). It then sets out six action areas,
the first of which is an institutional home for climate security; ‘either appoint-
ing a special envoy for “climate security”, or establishing a unit within the UN
Secretary-General’s office, or both’ (Planetary Security Initiative, n.d.b). Others
are to enhance coordination on migration, the promotion of urban resilience,
the support of joint risk assessment in Lake Chad, the strengthening of climate
and conflict sensitive development in Mali, and the support of sustainable water
strategies in Iraq.
In December 2017 representatives of the Netherlands presented the Hague
Declaration to the UNSC in a special Arria-formula session on ‘Preparing
for the security implications of rising temperatures’ (Security Council Report,
2019: 14). Also at the meeting, Caitlin Werrell, co-founder and president of
the Center for Climate and Security in Washington, DC, proposed the devel-
opment and adoption of the ‘Responsibility to Prepare Agenda’ with the goal
200 scott
of climate-proofing security institutions at international, regional, and national

levels. The paper proposed that action be guided by six functions: routiniza-
tion, institutionalization, elevation, integration, rapid response, and contingencies
for unintended consequences (Werrell, 2017). Werrell called for an institutional
home for climate and security within the UN, a call repeated by Germany,
Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, the Maldives, and
Belgium (2017).
Although much of the groundwork has been laid for great powers to assume re-
sponsibility for climate security in the UNSC, we do not yet know which of its tools
the council might bring to bear were there to be the full securitization of climate
change. Options drawing on its Chapter VII powers include the establishment of
international criminal tribunals, so-called ‘legislative’ resolutions requiring a cer-
tain action of all states, sanctions, and use of force (Scott and Ku, 2018). This brings
us to the real concern with the prospect of council action: that climate change could
be used as an excuse for intervention motivated by other political motivations—
the same ‘Trojan Horse’ concern that has plagued the Responsibility to Protect
doctrine (Bellamy, 2005).
One of the primary reasons given in the early literature opposing the notion of
environmental security was that it would likely encourage inappropriate military
solutions (Deudney, 1990). It has been argued that the potential militarizing of
the issue as represented by its securitization is exactly what is not required. The
council does, though, take plenty of measures short of Chapter VII decisions, and
indeed, if the referent object is deemed to be the individual rather than the state,
human security is more appropriately protected through measures other than use
of force. As the UNGA clarified in Resolution 66/290 (2012: 2), human security
‘must be implemented with full respect for … the sovereignty of States, territorial
integrity and non-interference in matters that are essentially within the domestic
jurisdiction of States.’
Why Has the Securitization of Climate Change to Date Not Led

to Some Form of Great Power Management by the UNSC?
As evidenced by the discussion so far, the global securitization of climate change is

as yet incomplete and there is no global system of GPM of climate change security
in place. Although there is considerable rhetoric around the security implications
of climate change, were the magnitude of the threat to be fully accepted, the council
would likely have become the peak body on the subject, coordinating the actions
of other institutions and governments, including the UNFCCC and regional se-
curity organizations, and addressing not only adaptation but mitigation, drawing
on its Chapter VII powers to do so (Scott, 2015). This raises the question as to why
the council has not done more to date. There are at least two explanations for the
current state of affairs.
First, at the risk of sounding trite, it is reasonable to ask why we should expect
it to have done more. Given that the council was not established to address envi-
ronmental issues and the UNFCCC was established with this remit, it is perhaps
non-notable that the securitization process at a global level is taking some time.
The as yet unanswered question is whether, if great powers were to assume re-
sponsibility for global climate security, they could or would use that for positive
environmental outcomes. Nevertheless, the number of debates that have been
held, and more recently, explicit reference to climate change in resolutions of the
UNSC, suggest that, in contrast to the impression that the securitization of climate
change reached a high point in 2008–2009 (as per Chapter 2: 42), the pace may
be gathering. It is also true that, instead of incrementally increased involvement,
specific crises may prompt unexpected leaps towards full securitization.
The 2015 Paris Agreement provides for all parties to prepare, communicate, and
maintain successive nationally determined contributions (United Nations Frame-
work Convention on Climate Change, 2019), and a considerable proportion of
states have already made these pledges (UNFCCC Secretariat, n.d.). The United
Nations Environment Programme (2018: xiv) advised in late 2018 that it was still
technically possible to keep global warming below two degrees above preindus-
trial levels, but warned that if ambitions are not increased before 2030, exceeding
the 1.5-degree goal can no longer be avoided. Change may not take place in a
graduated, predictable fashion, but with sudden shifts and tipping points.
These are points at which—unless there has been a complete breakdown of gov-
ernance systems—it would seem almost certain that the council will in future
become involved in some capacity. Despite a rather desultory response to date,
acceptance by the council of a responsibility for climate security has increased
incrementally in tandem with some modest convergence of views regarding the
boundaries around potential action. It is not out of the question that a tipping
point in the physical world or in realization of the magnitude of the challenge
could conceivably produce a situation in which the issue as to whether it would be
legitimate for the council to respond to climate change switches into one in which
the council would lose legitimacy for not addressing the issue (Scott and Ku, 2018).
A second consideration as to why the council has not to date done more to ad-
dress climate change may well be the challenge that, in contrast to the provision
of traditional security by great powers, a great power responsibility to provide cli-
mate security would likely come at its own considerable cost. The responsibility
of the P5 for the maintenance of international peace and security after the Sec-
ond World War derived from their success in bringing the conflict to a close. The
account by Bukovansky et al. (2012: 29–34) of this classic exemplar of GPM does
202 scott
not place much emphasis on recognition by the P5—and by the US and USSR in
particular—of their need to ensure their own security as an essential first step.
And yet it needs to be remembered that, given the horrors of war, the P5 ac-
knowledged a responsibility to do all that they could both to prevent another major
war but also to establish a ‘positive peace’ with, for example, a stable international
economic system and protection of human rights. There was little point in their
assuming this responsibility at the risk of undermining their own status, because
if others were going to rely on them, they arguably had an ethical responsibility to
retain a capability to act. This helps explain the hard line taken by the USSR and
the US in relation to the veto.
Chapter 2 noted the difficulty in finding great power rights and privileges to
balance the burden that special environmental great power responsibilities might
represent. The global response to climate change has always been integrally linked
with international economic competition. Climate change is such that any ar-
rangement for the sharing of costs and benefits associated with responding to it
could be of the order to significantly alter the economic destinies of individual
countries (see Dasgupta, 1994: 131). If and as the great powers find ways by which
to benefit economically through climate action, they are more likely to assume a
decisive lead in doing so, but it is arguably unreasonable or at least unrealistic to
expect them to do so at the risk of losing out to competitors in the international
system.
Most fundamentally, in respect of GPM of climate change, is the question as
to whether really effective action on climate change is even compatible with cap-
italism, given the need of capitalism for ongoing growth and its expanding reach
(Scott, 2007). The mainstream answer, as per the market mechanisms in the Kyoto
Protocol, is that climate mitigation and capitalism are compatible—but notably
the agreement was not successful so far as climate mitigation is concerned. The
Green Climate Fund was established to assist developing countries to lower their
greenhouse gas emissions and undertake adaptation projects. But in 2018 the
US withdrew a $2-billion pledge, while China, which had previously indicated
that it would be a contributor rather than recipient of climate finance for de-
veloping countries, sought $US180 million to fund climate mitigation projects
(Lloyd, 2018: 6).
It is likely that the Security Council will become more concerned with climate
change simply because the problem continues to worsen. And yet an important
insight of securitization theory has been that it is not the ‘objective scientific facts’
that determine whether an issue is a security issue but how it is framed by political
actors. And how an issue is framed by political actors has been interrelated with
research findings. An application of securitization theory to the work of the council
in addressing AIDS suggested that the process went into retreat once there was
widespread questioning of the empirical evidence for the claim that HIV/AIDS
constituted a security threat (McInness and Rushton, 2013: 118–120).
Scholarship on the climate-security nexus therefore has the potential to con-

tribute or detract from further climate securitization and it is pertinent to briefly
consider the state of this scholarship. The links between climate change and secu-
rity have been studied since at least the early 2000s (Busby, 2018: 338). In its Fifth
Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that
‘evidence on the effect of climate change and variability on violence is contested’
(Adger et al., 2014: 758). Scholarship has drawn on quantitative methodologies in
an effort to demonstrate that a relationship between climate change and armed
conflict has not been proven. Although some studies have claimed a tight associa-
tion (Zhang et al., 2007; Hsiang et al., 2013; Gleick, 2014), these have been critiqued
on the basis of methodology and underlying assumptions (Hsiang and Meng, 2014;
Buhaug, 2010, 2015). According to von Uexkull and Buhaug (2021), a research
priority going forwards is the need to identify potential long-term security im-
pacts of climate change, including the compound effects of different hazards and
climate impacts, as well as assessing the risks and benefits that may result from
efforts to address climate change. Based on the experience with HIV/AIDS, fail-
ure to empirically ‘prove’ the climate-security link could be drawn on in efforts to
desecuritize climate change and reduce the prospects of the P5 assuming a great
power responsibility for climate security.
Conclusions
This chapter has posited that the full securitization of climate change at a global
level would equate to a system of GPM. It would necessitate the UNSC accepting
a responsibility for global climate security and drawing on its Chapter VII pow-
ers to fulfil such a responsibility. Despite enthusiasm on the part of certain actors,
including the European Union, small island developing countries, and civil soci-
ety protagonists, there is as yet no unity on the issue amongst the P5; importantly,
the US, China, and Russia are all opposed, and debate regarding the appropri-
ate tools that the council could potentially bring to bear is still quite nascent. The
principal blockage would seem to lie with the prospect that assuming great power
responsibility for the environment would hurt economic interests in a competitive
global capitalist system. Also problematic for many countries, particularly in the
Global South, is the prospect of great powers using climate change as an excuse
for military intervention or other coercive measures motivated by realpolitik.
Nevertheless, if viewed in the timeframe by which great power responsibility for
traditional security evolved as opposed to the time scale within which we must act
to prevent catastrophic warming and to implement effective adaptation measures,
the process does not appear so slow and, indeed, would appear to be gathering
momentum. The challenge for advocates of a great power responsibility for climate
security is to prompt a convergence of the two historical trajectories while there is
still a chance to mitigate the worst effects for human security of global warming.
204 scott
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10
Great Power Responsibility and
International Climate Leadership
Sanna Kopra
The English School (ES) of International Relations has identified great power man-
agement (GPM) as one of the most important primary institutions of international
society (e.g. Bull, 2002 [1977]; Buzan, 2004a, 2004b; Clark, 2011; Cui and Buzan,
2016; Simpson, 2004). By extension, the role of great powers may be similarly
important in international climate politics as well. To date, however, literature ad-
dressing global environmental politics (GEP) has largely ignored the role that a
‘great power club’ (Bull, 2002 [1977]: 194; Wight, 1999 [1946]: 42; Kopra, 2019:
70–73) might play in international climate negotiations. From the perspective of
the ES, such a role would mean that great powers not only use their structural
power to sway international climate treaties to suit their interests, but they are
also willing to legitimate their unequal status by accepting special responsibilities
to sustain the workings of international society (Bull, 2002 [1977]: 196). In con-
trast to the ES, which has only recently become interested in environmental affairs
(e.g. Falkner, 2012; Falkner and Buzan 2019; Jackson, 2000; Kopra, 2018) and the
role of international regimes and treaties (‘secondary institutions’ in ES terminol-
ogy) in the maintenance and development of international order (see Knudsen
and Navari, 2019), a wide range of GEP literature has examined the role of lead-
ership in the making and shaping of international environmental regimes, espe-
cially the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
(see Kopra, 2020). The bulk of these studies focuses on the role of great powers in
institutionalization of environmental regimes, which hints that great power status
may involve a leadership position in international negotiations (cf. Bukovansky
et al., 2012). This raises a question that is not addressed in the literature: what is
the linkage between great power status and leadership?
Since the early 1970s, environmental stewardship has emerged as a pri-
mary institution of international society. It has initiated a deep normative de-
velopment in global international society (GIS) moving from a pluralist tra-
dition towards a solidarist understanding of common goals, shared values,
and international norms in GEP (Falkner, 2012, 2017; Falkner and Buzan,
Sanna Kopra, Great Power Responsibility and International Climate Leadership. In: Great Powers, Climate Change, and
2019). Although non-state actors have played a significant role in this pro-
cess, it is clear that state agency, and especially the agency of great powers,
has been crucial in the process that has ‘morphed world society environ-
mentalism into a primary institution of GIS’ (Falkner and Buzan, 2019: 132).
Despite the increasing securitization of climate change, there is no consen-
sus in international society ‘about the way in which climate change threatens
security or indeed on the issue of whose security it threatens’ (McDonald,
2018: 154). Without such consensus it has been difficult to define special re-
sponsibilities of great powers in the context of climate change, and the UNFCCC
has focused on the distribution of responsibilities among states in general, and
among the developed country parties in particular. Arguably, this does not mean
that we should rule out the possibility that great power status comes with special
responsibilities for climate change.
In this chapter, I develop a concept of great climate power and examine what
sort of special responsibilities great climate powers can be expected to shoulder
in international climate politics. I relate the ES concept of great power responsi-
bility with GEP literature on environmental leadership. Arguably, both strands of
literature can learn from each other: GEP literature provides the ES with empir-
ical findings on the ways in which great power responsibility can be carried out
in international politics, and the ES provides GEP scholars with insights on so-
cial aspects of leadership. Moreover, I contend that great powers have managerial
and leadership responsibilities to tackle climate change, but the ways they can—or
should—carry out those responsibilities varies in time and place, depending on
where international society falls along the pluralism–solidarism spectrum (Buzan
2004a, 2014). Finally, I examine the contribution of great powers to the United
Nations (UN) climate regime, and conclude that none of the conventional great
powers have assumed great power responsibility in international climate politics.
Great Power Climate Responsibility
Because the ES has not offered a clear-cut definition of great power, it is therefore
unclear what qualifies a state as a great power in climate politics. In general, ES
theorists agree that power and responsibility go hand in hand, and that great pow-
ers thus have special responsibilities in international society. According to Hedley
Bull (2002 [1977]: 196),
great powers are powers recognized by others to have, and conceived by their own
leaders and peoples to have, certain special rights and duties. Great powers, for
example, assert the right, and are accorded the right, to play a part in determining
issues that affect the peace and security of the international system as a whole.
210 kopra
They accept the duty, and are thought by others to have the duty, of modifying
their policies in the light of the managerial responsibilities they bear.
As Cui and Buzan (2016) point out, the ES conception of great power responsi-
bility derives from the international security agenda and, in turn, holds that great
powers have a special responsibility to maintain international peace and security.
This special responsibility was formalized with the establishment of the UN Se-
curity Council in 1945, when climate change and other environmental issues had
not yet emerged on the international agenda. In the past three decades, however,
the international security agenda has grown to encompass a range of non-military
affairs. That development has likewise expanded the scope of the potential re-
sponsibilities of great powers, for non-traditional security-related issues have also
become increasingly attached to great power responsibility (Bukovansky et al.,
2012: 47). In the ES framework, great powers can thus be expected to have special
climate responsibilities if climate change becomes securitized.
Although uses of positive and negative power undoubtedly matter when defin-
ing great climate power within the ES framework, they cannot be the only criteria,
for small states can also exert forms of narrow power in specific subsets of interna-
tional environmental politics (see Buzan and Falkner, Chapter 2 of this volume).
For example, small oil-producing states, such as Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, have
large ecological footprints and exercise substantive negative power in producing
massive carbon emissions per capita, while the Amazonian states can exercise
significant environmental power due to their control over the so-called lungs of
the Earth. Finland’s recent decision to strive for carbon neutrality by 2035—15
years earlier than the European Union (EU) as a whole—offers another example
of positive narrow power. Even if Finland’s goal is reached, doing so will have a
limited impact on total emissions at the global level. Clearly, none of those states
can be characterized as great climate powers. From the ES point of view, the key
reason for their disqualification as great climate powers derives from the concep-
tualization of international society; compared to lesser powers’ limited capacity
to induce systemic change in international society, great powers’ exercises of neg-
ative and positive environmental power have a more profound influence on the
workings of international society as a whole. Although great powers may not be
the only powerful actors in GEP, they are likely to be the sole actors with power
wide enough to induce profound systemic changes in the global economy neces-
sary to mitigate climate crisis. In other words, great powers not only have large
ecological footprints but also potentially huge ecological handprints; that is, they
can have a significant positive impact on the environment, should they choose
to do so.
Drawing from Bull (2002 [1977]: 196), I define great power in climate change
according to the following characterization of great climate powers:
Great climate powers are large environmental powers recognized by others

to have, and conceived by their own leaders and peoples to have, a special
responsibility to pursue the common good of international society by preventing
dangerous climate change from happening. They accept the duty, and are thought
by others to have the duty, to stabilize climate system in the light of the managerial
and leadership responsibilities they bear.
As Bull (2002 [1977]: 200–201) stresses, this definition is not a ‘description of what
great powers actually do’ but instead ‘a statement of the roles they can, and some-
times do play that sustain international order’. If great powers indeed play such a
role in international climate politics, then the ways in which they play that role
depends on the normative nature of international society—that is, where interna-
tional society falls along the pluralism–solidarism spectrum (Buzan 2004a, 2014).
Notably, the definition of great climate power differentiates between managerial
and leadership responsibilities of great powers. In this way, I seek to construct
a conceptual bridge between the ES writings on GPM and GEP literature on
leadership in environmental affairs. Traditionally, the ES theorization of GPM
has been based on pluralist logic and has focused on great powers’ responsibil-
ity to prudently manage their relations with each other in specific situations (Bull,
2002 [1977]: 200; Watson, 1982: 201) as well as their responsibility to mediate in-
ternational conflicts and preserve the balance of power in international society
(Watson, 1982: 201). Although GEP literature does not regard great power status
as a precondition for environmental leadership, it arguably offers valuable input
for analysing the ways in which great power climate responsibility may manifest
in a solidarist international society.
Based on my extensive reading of GEP studies on leadership (see Kopra, 2020),
I argue that one of the key shortcomings of the literature is that it does not dis-
tinguish between management and leadership. These terms are not synonymous,
as a wide range of leadership studies demonstrate (e.g. Zaleznik, 1977; Bennis and
Nanus, 1985; Kotter, 1990; Lunenburg, 2011; Rost, 1991). In my literature review,
the distinctive feature is that management is task-oriented and based on authority
and material power, whereas leadership is inspirational and visionary and based
on soft power. From the ES point of view, it is clear that both require the existence
of international society. In the system of states there is not enough of the type of
social interaction that would qualify as management or leadership. What differen-
tiates the two is that management produces order and consistency, and leadership
produces change and movement (Ricketts, 2009: 3). Thus, management focuses
largely on short-term problem-solving: it is a function that is exercised to sus-
tain the status quo and organize international society. Leadership, in contrast, is a
relationship between (great power) leaders and other members of international
society (or followers, as leadership literature stipulates) that strive for a desirable
future and the realization of shared goals, however they are defined. Hence, to
212 kopra
emerge, leadership requires a solidarist move within international society; other-

wise, it is not likely that purposive and cooperative leader-follower relations would
evolve. Management, in contrast, does not require a thick set of shared norms and
values; it can occur in a pluralist international society as well.
Leadership in Global Environmental Politics Literature
As the bulk of GEP leadership studies build on three pioneering publications on

the role of leadership in international negotiations and regime formation by Oran
Young (1991), Arild Underdal (1994), and Raino Malnes (1995), I begin with a
brief review of their classic definitions of leadership. According to Young (1991:
285), leadership refers to the ‘actions of individuals who endeavor to solve or cir-
cumvent the collective action problems that plague the efforts of parties seeking
to reap joint gains in processes of institutional bargaining’. Young (1991: 296)
seems to regard leadership as a synonym of successful institutional bargain-
ing and self-interest as a sufficient driver of such leadership. It is not difficult
to imagine that great powers would collectively play this kind of role in case
the survival of international society was at risk and rules of coexistence had
to be written. Underdal (1994: 178), in contrast, pays more attention to so-
cial and relational dimensions of leadership and defines it as an ‘asymmetrical
relationship of influence in which one actor guides or directs the behavior of
others toward a certain goal over a certain period of time’. From the perspec-
tive of the ES, it is noteworthy that Underdal’s definition highlights intentionality
and expects states to share some kind of ‘platform of shared values, interests,
and beliefs’, while ‘successful leadership builds on and cultivates this platform’
(Underdal 1994: 179). Likewise, Malnes (1995: 94) argues that it is important that a
‘leader bases his or her initiatives on some conception of collective goals, although
it may be a controversial conception, whose sincerity will sometimes be chal-
lenged’. Hence, Underdal’s and Malnes’s definitions of leadership seem to require
some kind of solidarist move within GIS and thus capture the ES perspective of
leadership.
In general, GEP literature on leadership is based on rationalist thinking and
focuses on what kinds of leadership strategies aspiring leaders utilize in GEP
(see Kopra, 2020). Despite their merits, classic leadership strategies are not of
interest to the ES theory, because they tend to focus on material power and re-
duce leadership to successful bargaining in international negotiations. As Robyn
Eckersley (2020: 1182) notes, they fail to recognize the ‘social and relational di-
mension of leadership’, meaning that they do not help us understand the role
of leadership in maintenance and organization of international society. In re-
sponse to this critique, Eckersley (2020: 1179–1180) offers a social definition of
leadership:
Leadership, in general, is defined as a process of interaction whereby one or more

actors (the leaders) exercise asymmetric influence in attracting or negotiating
the consent or acquiescence of other parties (the followers), either directly or
indirectly, in ways that facilitate collective action towards the achievement of a
common purpose in a given community.
While ES theorists have not systemically theorized leadership in international so-

ciety, Eckersley’s definition seems to appropriately capture the ES approach to
leadership.1 Although she does not regard great power status as a precondition
for leadership, her definition does not rule out that possibility and even opens the
door for great power clubs’ collective leadership. Additionally, her definition is
broad enough to capture managerial and leadership roles of great powers both in
pluralist and solidarist forms of international society: in the former, great powers
may exercise asymmetric influence to enable collective action to maintain interna-
tional peace and security (cf. Bull, 2002 [1977]: 196); in the latter, great powers may
attract other members of international society to work towards the achievement
of a common goal of that society. That said, I contend that the division between
management and leadership offers us a more nuanced analytical lens to contem-
plate the ways is which great power responsibility can be exercised in the spectrum
of pluralism–solidarism.
Manifestation of Great Power Climate Responsibility

in International Society
Although pluralist and solidarist wings of the ES generally agree that great powers
have a special responsibility to ensure the realization of the collective goals of inter-
national society, they have different views on what these goals are. Likewise, they
also differ in their views about why and how great powers should shoulder special
responsibilities in international society. From a pluralist perspective, great pow-
ers have managerial responsibility to secure the workings of international society,
whereas solidarist logic highlights their responsibility to lead. Since GIS is never
simply pluralist or solidarist, but both elements are at play, it is also clear that both
management and leadership are necessary to secure the workings of international
society. In other words, leadership is not ‘necessarily better than management or
a replacement for it’, as Kotter (1990: 3) explains, but ‘leadership and manage-
ment are two distinctive and complementary systems of action’. Both have their
‘own function and characteristic activities’, meaning that both ‘are necessary for
success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment’, that is,
1 I am grateful to Robyn Eckersley for sharing her thoughts with me.

214 kopra
international society (ibid.). ‘The real challenge’, therefore, ‘is to combine strong
leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other’ (ibid.: 4).
According to Kotter (1990: 4), management is ‘about coping with complex-
ity’ and ‘brings a degree of order and consistency’ to a society. Management is
largely reactive in nature; it focuses on controlling and problem-solving. As for
environmental responsibility, managers use authority to remedy environmental
harms and execute plans to reduce ecological footprints, for instance. In contrast,
leadership is ‘about coping with change’, and ‘more change always demands more
leadership’, as Kotter (1990: 4) explains. Leadership takes a proactive approach: it
seeks to facilitate cooperation and induce positive change (however this is defined
in time and place). In international climate governance, leaders create visions of
low carbon futures, initiate shared norms and innovative modes of governance,
and attract others to strive towards those common goals. When it comes to great
power responsibility, managerial responsibilities are closely linked to securitiza-
tion: without being securitized, an issue is not perceived as a problem or a risk
to the survival of the state or to the existence of international society. Leadership
responsibilities, in contrast, are linked to internationalization: leadership cannot
take place without political and economic aspiration to construct shared values,
interests, and norms among states. To emerge, great power leadership does not
necessarily require solidarization of the entire GIS but does require a strong form
of internationalism in specific issue areas of global governance.
Pluralist Logic of Coexistence and Great Powers’ Managerial

Responsibility in International Climate Politics
In a pluralist international society, states share only a low degree of common

norms, values, and interests, and international negotiations focus largely on cre-
ating rules for coexistence, if not also managing collective risks and problems
(Buzan, 2004a: 49; cf. Kotter, 1990: 4). Because pluralists regard international order
as the chief value and means to promote the common good of international society,
they emphasize the managerial responsibilities of great powers therein (e.g. Bull,
2002 [1977]; Jackson, 2000). Hence, pluralists expect great powers to act as the
guardians of international order; if that order is at risk, then great powers have a
special responsibility to use their authority to control or solve the problem, even
by using coercive force if necessary. In this context, Young’s notion of leadership
seems to fittingly describe the managerial role of great power.
Climate change poses national security risks for states worldwide and repre-
sents a potential source of international conflict (e.g. Barnett, 2003). For some
states, climate change threatens their very survival. Small island states in the Asia-
Pacific region, for example, will be lost under rising sea levels caused by climate
change. For the time being, however, climate change has not been fully securitized
(see Scott, Chapter 9, this volume). As resource-rich powers tend to have both the
funds and know-how to cope with adverse impacts of climate change (and some
of them may even benefit from global warming), they have not yet perceived cli-
mate change as a global security threat. If climate change begins to undermine
their core interests, however, great powers might choose to take on their manage-
rial role in international society and pursue the prevention of dangerous climate
change. Such a scenario would require securitization of climate change: climate
change being perceived as jeopardizing the status quo in international society. In
that case, great powers could cooperate to solve the climate crisis, or at least control
its adverse impact.
Over the past decades there have been signs of that kind of development.
First, the United States (US) has sought to establish a great climate power club
twice. In 2006, George W. Bush established the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean
Development and Climate, and in 2009, Barack Obama initiated the establishment
of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate. Yet neither of these clubs
managed to carry out the responsibilities of great climate powers in practice. Sec-
ond, the UN Security Council and the Group of Eight (Canada, France, Germany,
Japan, Italy, the United Kingdom, the US, and Russia), which can be identified as
the established great power clubs of our times, have discussed climate change sev-
eral times but failed to define their roles in preventing and solving climate-related
security risks. Thus, great powers’ collective acceptance of special responsibility
for climate change has been only partial and tentative.
It is possible that climate change will be securitized in the future, especially if it
proceeds in a disastrous and abrupt manner that undermines international order
and stability. In that case, the UN Security Council could play a stronger role in
climate governance, or great powers could establish some kind of climate security
council. In a pluralist international society, however, the mandate of such a council
would be limited, and the willingness to contribute to its work would vary amongst
the members of the great power club. Some great powers could use climate change
as an excuse to intervene in other states’ internal politics, and the council’s work on
climate change could be used to serve the national interests of great powers. In such
a scenario, it is not very difficult to imagine the militarization of climate change. If
climate change were securitized but great powers failed to undertake collective ac-
tion, pluralist logic could expect great powers to take unilateral actions to prevent
climate-related conflicts from occurring and to secure the survival of international
order. In the absence of economic incentives and genuine collective agreements
and actions, technology-based solutions, such as carbon capture and storage as
well as geoengineering, would probably be the most feasible unilateral means to
reduce emissions.2 Although the potential for geoengineering is massive, its po-
tential solutions remain technically unreliable, as well as politically and ethically
2 I am grateful to Robert Falkner for pointing out this perspective.

216 kopra
contested, for it remains unclear whether geoengineering would work, what kind
of side effects it might have, how potential side effects would be distributed, how it
could be governed, and so on (e.g. Corry, 2017; Talberg et al., 2018). For pluralism,
however, the legitimacy of great power action is not necessary; great powers can,
and indeed should, undertake unilateral actions and violate international law if the
maintenance of international order requires doing so (see Bull, 2002 [1977]: 138).
Collective great power action against climate change may emerge in a plural-
ist GIS, in a similar manner to the way that the US and Soviet Union were able
to cooperate on arms control to preserve their existence during the Cold War.3
However, the pluralist notion of great power responsibility constitutes a rather
poor basis for conceiving special responsibility in international climate politics.
It is unlikely that it will offer an effective, coordinated, and hurried response to
the climate crisis, nor does it recognize that structural changes in GIS, such as the
transformation of energy and economic systems, are crucial in solving the climate
crisis. Technology-based solutions tend to treat the symptoms, not the underly-
ing cause of climate change. Furthermore, even if securitization of climate change
would motivate states to implement national emissions reduction plans, the plu-
ralist approach is not likely to address the issue that not only climate change but
also climate change mitigation may increase inequity and human insecurity and
even precipitate conflicts in some societies (e.g. Selby and Hoffmann, 2017). Soli-
darist ethics, by contrast, put thick international climate cooperation forward and
remind us that climate change mitigation has to pay attention to the side effects of
those actions—in short, harm to human well-being, ecosystems, and biodiversity.
Solidarist Ambitions and Great Powers’ Leadership Responsibility

in International Climate Politics
Contrary to the state-based approach of pluralism, solidarism ‘ties together state

and non-state actors and draws on cosmopolitan notions of individual rights and
a community of humankind’ (Buzan 2014: 114). In other words, solidarist ethics
do not necessarily refer to a world without states, but put an equal moral weight
to the rights and responsibilities of all states and world society. Cosmopolitan ap-
proaches underline that all people have a right to a stable climate system and a
corresponding responsibility to protect climate, even though the principle of com-
mon but differentiated responsibilities among people should be taken into account
(e.g. Harris, 2010; Caney, 2005). In 2000, cosmopolitan principles of universal
planetary responsibilities were written in the Earth Charter, which declares, ‘It
is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one an-
other, to the greater community of life, and to future generations’ (Earth Charter,
3 I am grateful to Barry Buzan for pointing out this perspective.

preamble). In this way, the charter not only links the environment and human
rights together, but also hints at the ecocentric responsibilities of humankind. In
its first resolution related to climate change, the UN Human Rights Council (2008)
acknowledged ‘climate change poses an immediate and far-reaching threat to peo-
ple and communities around the world and has implications for the full enjoyment
of human rights’.
Over the past two decades, the number of various transnational climate gov-
ernance mechanisms and experiments has risen rapidly and GEP literature has
identified a wide range of non-state actors as potential leaders in international
climate politics: international organizations, non-governmental organizations,
corporations, cities, religious organizations, social movements, politicians, and
even individuals (e.g. Wurzel, Liefferink, and Torney, 2019). In addition, climate
change litigation has expanded steadily around the globe since the 2010s, and hu-
man rights have played an increasingly important role in such cases (Setzer and
Higham, 2021). Although climate activists are rather optimistic about the poten-
tial of climate litigation (Viglione, 2020), it remains to be seen whether it will
turn climate responsibility into a ‘new standard of civilization’, or even put for-
ward a related principle of ‘responsibility to protect climate’ among people. For the
time being, however, it seems that the contemporary transnational environmental
movement is firmly rooted in a state-centric organization of international affairs:
it wants states to enhance the level of ambition of their climate policy (cf. Buzan,
2014: 127). Arguably, the emergence of transnational climate governance does not
mean that state-centric forms of international climate governance have declined,
or would do so in the future. As Falkner (2017: 41) states, ‘international society
and world society are not trapped in some kind of zero-sum logic’; rather, they
can complement and support each other. Acknowledging this, the UNFCCC has
established platforms to coordinate and engage sub- and non-state climate actions.
As a truly cosmopolitan approach to climate change remains more or less a
utopian idea, it is helpful to distinguish between cosmopolitan and state-centric
solidarism (Buzan, 2014: 114–118). In a solidarist international society, states are
the principal actors but they can go beyond the logic of coexistence; they share a
complex set of norms, values, and collective interests, and international justice is
regarded as one of the ultimate goals of international society. In that light, humans
worldwide are recognized as moral referent objects of state responsibility, includ-
ing great power responsibility, even if the state-centric structures of international
society are taken for granted. Given its emphasis on social attributes of power and
responsibility, state-centric solidarism also stresses great powers’ special responsi-
bility to promote human values and international justice, including the promotion
of liberal norms—such as human rights, the rule of law, and good governance—by
providing inspiration and guidance to other states. Arguably, climate change can
be added to that list due to its adverse effects on human well-being around the
world. From a solidarist point of view, such an addition means that great powers
218 kopra
can be expected not only to reduce emissions at home but also to offer leadership
in international negotiations on climate. Notably, leadership requires not a securi-
tization of climate change but an emergence of a thick set of shared values, norms,
and interests among the members of international society—an ideational basis on
which a legitimate leadership builds.
Although secondary institutions serve as the key forums where great powers
(and other actors) can offer leadership, the ES does not reduce leadership to var-
ious rationalist leadership strategies, as GEP literature tends to do. From the ES
vantage point, great powers do not take leadership roles due only to material gains
but also because the realization of common good of international society requires
them to do so. Leadership focuses on motivation and alignment of people and
states. It is about ‘communicating the new direction to those who can create coali-
tions that understand the vision and are committed to its achievement’ (Kotter,
1990: 4). Yet, great powers cannot exercise leadership unilaterally; international
cooperation is necessary. Recall Underdal’s, Malnes’s, and Eckersley’s definitions
of leadership, which underline that leaders need followers and that others cannot
be forced to follow. In the ES framework, this means that members of interna-
tional society more or less voluntarily follow a (great power) leader because it is
perceived to strive for the common good of international society, and because they
find the leader’s values, policies, and actions to be appealing. Thus, a state does not
become a leader by simply declaring itself as a leader, but the legitimacy of leader-
ship is important. If a leader does not promote the collective goals of international
society (or is at least perceived to do so), other members of international society
do not recognize such leadership and will not follow it (e.g. Clark, 2005; Karlsson
et al., 2011; Parker, Karlsson, and Hjerpe, 2015).
Great Powers in the UN Climate Negotiations
As other chapters of this volume demonstrate, great powers have played an im-
portant role, both in positive and negative terms, in the processes in which
international society has negotiated about appropriate and fair definitions, distri-
bution, implementation, and monitoring of climate responsibility in international
society. The UNFCCC, the most important secondary institution related to climate
change, was formulated very quickly, in about two years, which not only indicates
universal concern over and willingness to tackle climate change but also illustrates
that it was not seen as a powerful regime that would somehow limit sovereignty
and national interests of states in general, or those of great powers in particu-
lar. The UNFCCC defines the ‘stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in
the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interfer-
ence with the climate system’ as the ‘ultimate objective’ of international society
(UNFCCC, 1992: Article 2). At the Paris climate conference in 2015, members of
the international society agreed to strive for a carbon-neutral world by 2050. The
Paris Agreement somewhat boldly aims to keep ‘the increase in the global average
temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels’, and encourages ‘efforts
to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels’ (UNFCCC,
2015), which would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change
(IPCC, 2018).
Despite the shared understanding of the necessity to tackle climate change, it
has certainly not been easy to agree on how states should implement emissions
reductions in practice. The UNFCCC does not define special responsibilities or
corresponding rights for great powers, but emphasizes special responsibilities for
developed countries as a group. In 1992, states agreed the common but differ-
entiated responsibilities (CDBR) principle as the cornerstone of the UNFCCC.
Although the US ratified the UNFCCC and hence accepted the CDBR at least in
principle, it has since refused to accept special responsibility in terms of a quanti-
fied emission reduction target. In 1997, the US Senate adopted the Byrd–Hagel
Resolution, which announced that the US would not accept any legally bind-
ing emissions reduction target unless they also applied to developing countries.
In the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, however, other developed countries agreed to re-
duce their overall greenhouse gas emissions on average by five per cent compared
to 1990 levels during the first commitment period (i.e. 2008–2012). As Falkner
(2017: 39) notes, those emission reduction targets were not dictated by domes-
tic priorities but established in a multilaterally negotiated international treaty,
embodying the ‘solidarist ambition behind the climate regime’. In accordance
with the CBDR, the developing country parties, including major emitters such
as China and India, were exempted from binding mitigation targets in the Kyoto
Protocol—a decision that President Bush (2002) found unfair. To facilitate and
monitor emissions reduction, the Kyoto Protocol established reporting and ver-
ification procedures and three market-based mechanisms—clean development
management, emissions trading, and joint implementation—known as the ‘Kyoto
mechanisms’, which can hardly be described as developed countries’ special rights
in international climate politics (Bukovansky et al., 2012: 130).
During the presidency of Barack Obama, the US sought to offer management
and leadership in international climate negotiations (Obama, 2008). In particu-
lar, the Obama administration sought to break climate gridlock by pushing for
a political agreement that would include all major emitters. To facilitate such
a treaty, Obama personally practised climate diplomacy with China and India
(Clémençon, 2016: 6). Despite these efforts, however, a new agreement was not
made at the Copenhagen conference, because the Copenhagen Accord, which was
negotiated in a minilateral setting at the end of the conference, was resisted by sev-
eral developing countries during the final plenary of the conference (see Falkner,
2017: 38). Such resistance implies that climate change was not perceived as a prob-
lem that could be controlled or managed by a great power club but rather a risk to
220 kopra
the common fate of international society. At the 2014 UN Climate Summit, Obama
(2014) explicitly linked climate change and great power responsibility together. On
the one hand, his speech could be viewed as an attempt to assume solidarist great
power responsibility and offer leadership in global efforts to tackle climate change;
on the other hand, the fact that he did not emphasize great power responsibility
when addressing his domestic audiences but focused largely on national economic
benefits of climate policy (Bukovasky et al., 2012: 153) does not signify leadership
but rationalist calculations.
China also began to take a more constructive role in international climate nego-
tiations in the early 2010s. Notably, Special Envoy Zhang Gaoli (2014) declared at
the UN Climate Summit, ‘Responding to climate change is what China needs to do
to achieve sustainable development at home as well as to fulfil its due international
obligation as a responsible major country’. The Sino-American cooperation on cli-
mate (White House, 2009, 2013, 2014, 2015) indeed prepared the ground for the
adoption of a post-Kyoto climate deal. In particular, the two great climate powers
together issued a joint statement in which China pledged to halt the growth of its
CO2 emissions by 2030 (White House, 2014). This action could be viewed as an ef-
fort to carry out managerial great power responsibility despite the overall tensions
between the established and rising great powers. Yet it would be difficult to con-
clude that the US played a leadership role at the Paris climate conference in 2015.
At the insistence of the US, for example, the Paris Agreement states that developed
countries ‘should continue taking the lead by undertaking economy-wide abso-
lute emission reduction targets’ (UNFCCC, 2015, my emphasis), although earlier
drafts had used ‘shall’ instead of ‘should’. Moreover, as the Byrd–Hagel Resolu-
tion prevented the US from accepting legally binding emissions reduction targets,
the Paris Agreement does not contain multilaterally established obligations for
any party. Instead, the parties were asked to submit their nationally determined
contributions to the UNFCCC, reflecting their domestic willingness to reduce
emissions and specifying their preferred measures to implement those reductions.
This change in the regulatory framework signals a ‘reassertion of a pluralist logic of
decentralised coordination that protects national sovereignty’ (Falkner 2017: 39).
Given the central role of the US in reasserting this change, it is probably fair to say
that it exercised veto power at the Paris conference.
A few days after the Paris Agreement entered into force in November 2016, cli-
mate change sceptic Donald J. Trump was elected as US president. In June 2017,
Trump signed an executive order announcing the withdrawal of the US from the
Paris Agreement, a decision that clearly dismissed the common good of interna-
tional society, focusing exclusively on very narrowly defined national interests of
the United States. On his first day as president, however, Joe Biden recommit-
ted the US to the Paris Agreement and his pledges of ambitious climate actions
have raised international hopes about US climate leadership. At the same time,
the world has also begun to hope that China would assume a stronger leadership
role in international climate politics. Although China has made efforts to bring
the bifurcation of developed and developing countries back to the international
negotiation table, despite that division’s abandonment by the Paris Agreement, it
has, to some extent, also seemed to respond quite positively to international lead-
ership expectations (e.g. Xi, 2017). Notably, Xi Jinping (2020) announced at the
UN General Assembly in September 2020 that China’s carbon emissions would
peak before 2030 and the state would strive or carbon neutrality before 2060.
While it can be debated whether the announcement was an act of leadership or
a well-calculated geopolitical move in the absence of US engagement in multilat-
eral climate negotiations, it certainly opened a new chapter in international climate
politics.
For its part, the EU has also sought to take a leadership role by working with
China, Canada, and the High Ambition Coalition (e.g. European Council, 2018;
European Commission, 2018; Government of Canada, 2017). To some extent, the
EU can indeed be seen as a global climate leader, for it not only accepts special
climate responsibility but also calls for the most far-reaching emissions reduction
targets at the global level. Yet one can ask whether the EU is really shouldering
great power climate responsibility or merely fulfilling the requirements posed by
the CBDR principle. So far, the EU has neither succeeded in inducing other par-
ties to enhance their ambitions in international climate politics nor managed to
significantly cut emissions. In addition, it faces numerous internal and external
problems that may disturb the cohesion of member states and constrain the im-
plementation of ambitious climate policies at the national level (see Biedenkopf,
Dupont, and Tierney, Chapter 5 this volume).
Conclusions
No doubt great powers—the US, China, and the EU—have significantly shaped
the ways in which international society has defined and allocated special re-
sponsibilities on climate change. For the time being, however, none of them (or
other potential great climate powers) have formulated climate policies ambitious
enough to limit global average temperature rise to 2°C, much less the goal of
1.5°C. Evidently, no state has assumed great power responsibility in international
climate politics: conventional great powers could merely be described as great
climate irresponsibles (cf. Bull, 1980). Should climate change be securitized in the
coming years, it is possible that great powers would take collective climate actions
to preserve the status quo in international society. Yet securitization of climate
change may not generate global we-feeling and shared understanding of human-
itarian impacts of climate change. In short, as pluralist ethics would not motivate
great powers to save strangers affected by climate change (cf. Wheeler, 2000),
222 kopra
a robust and comprehensive great power response to climate change would

presuppose solidarization in international society.
While the UNFCCC’s strong commitment to a multilateral approach and
consensus-based decision-making was initially viewed as one of its key virtues, it
has turned out to be a very slow and inefficient negotiation process that has failed
to prevent global temperatures from rising. In response, two contradicting trends
seem to be emerging. First, minilateral climate groups have been established to
complement UN climate negotiations, and GEP scholars have begun to consider
the potential benefits (and costs) of ‘climate minilateralism’ (e.g. Eckersley, 2012;
Falkner, 2016). From the perspective of this chapter, a concerted effort by great cli-
mate powers could indeed have great potential to break the gridlock of multilateral
negotiations and solve the climate crisis. To be legitimate in the global era, how-
ever, such action should address the issues of international justice and human se-
curity. From a state-centric solidarist viewpoint, the established great power clubs,
such as the UN Security Council, may not be legitimate forums to deal with climate
change. In the present form, they are not sufficiently representative to be able to
promote genuine international justice. Moreover, the Security Council’s military
and sanction-based tools are not designed to solve non-traditional security issues
and promote human well-being (e.g. Kalliojärvi, 2020: 23–24). A new, more demo-
cratic great climate power club should thus be established. Secondly, the growing
involvement of world society in international climate politics could be seen as a
signal of the emergence of cosmopolitan climate governance, a development that
would reduce the role of great powers in international affairs. Yet there is no guar-
antee that such an alternative would manage to solve the climate crisis. World soci-
ety is not necessarily based on cosmopolitan solidarism but shaped by self-interest
calculations and power struggles among people (see Williams, 2005). Presumably,
both state and non-state efforts are necessary and supplementary to mitigate cli-
mate change. In this light, great powers could offer leadership by facilitating poly-
centric climate governance. Without ambitious great power leadership, indeed, the
profound solidarization of international society is rather difficult to imagine.
Acknowledgement
This research was funded by the Academy of Finland (project no. 315402).
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11
Environmental Great Powers and
Multilateral Environmental Agreements
Susan Park
Introduction
How do great powers engage with global environmental politics? Surprisingly,

there is little research on how the great powers contribute to addressing envi-
ronmental problems, despite the expansion of global environmental governance
(Brenton, 2013; Falkner and Buzan, 2019; Terhalle and Depledge, 2013). Fun-
damental to global environmental governance is the proliferation of over 1,300
Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) (Mitchell et al., 2020). Using the
concept of environmental great powers outlined in the introduction to this vol-
ume, this chapter analyses the activities of China, the European Union (EU), India,
Japan, the Soviet Union/Russia, and the US across several important MEAs. It ar-
gues that these environmental great powers have acted as leaders, laggards, swing
states, and brokers across and within MEAs over time according to their inter-
ests and identities rather than their status.1 However, environmental great powers
have been at the forefront of creating secondary institutions, intergovernmental
organizations (IOs), that enact MEAs on their behalf (Jinnah, 2014). Although fo-
cused on controlling IOs through their design, formal voting, informal influence,
and using the power of the purse (Johnson, 2014), these IOs nonetheless demon-
strate a form of responsibility via delegation. This reinforces the possibility of the
convergence of great power responsibility and global governance in a deep plu-
ralist international society. However, this convergence remains limited because of
the contested nature of deep pluralism, which is highlighted by the disjuncture
between environmental great powers over the provision of technical capacity and
resources in MEAs.
1 Both material interests and ideas shape environmental great powers behaviour within MEAs (see
Schreurs 2004; Stevenson 2011).
Susan Park, Environmental Great Powers and Multilateral Environmental Agreements. In: Great Powers, Climate Change,
and Global Environmental Responsibilities. Edited by Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan, Oxford University Press.
228 park
The chapter first outlines the concept and role of environmental great pow-
ers in creating international environmental law via international environmental
negotiations. The second section then examines the role of the environmen-
tal great powers in MEAs generally and then as leaders, laggards, swing states,
and brokers across seven environmental issues and six MEAs. This demonstrates
three things: first, that the environmental great powers’ interests and identi-
ties shape their behaviour rather than resulting from their status; second, that
the environmental great powers do not individually or collectively view them-
selves as holding special rights and responsibilities towards the environment; and
third, that negotiations among the environmental great powers in climate are
not markedly different compared to other MEA negotiations. The third section
then unpacks how environmental great powers have created secondary institu-
tions to uphold and advance MEAs. While they seek to constrain and control
these institutions, it shows the responsibility of the environmental great pow-
ers to maintain MEA secretariats and IOs like the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP) (Biermann and Siebenhuner, 2009). The chapter then high-
lights fundamental differences between environmental great powers on the pro-
vision of technical capacity and resources through MEAs. This highlights possibly
contradictory trends requiring further research: environmental great power re-
sponsibility is converging with global governance while deep pluralism remains
contested.
Environmental Great Powers and International

Environmental Law
Sovereign states, as equals, have accepted that great powers have special rights and
responsibilities in areas like security and finance that stem from their material ca-
pabilities (Bukanovsky et al., 2012). If done legitimately, other states accept this dif-
ferentiation in exchange for the provision of public goods (Clark, 2009: 207–220).
In global environmental politics, neither the systemic role of great powers nor the
threat of environmental problems as challenges to the international order have
led to the provision of special rights for great powers—or raised expectations for
holding them responsible. As argued throughout, the role of great powers in ad-
dressing environmental problems stems from their interest and capacity for doing
so, and their culpability in creating them. This means that the role of great powers
in environmental problems is less derived from their status than from the moral
and normative argument that great powers should tackle environmental problems
(Bernstein, 2020).
Some postulate that environmental stewardship constitutes a primary institu-
tion (along with great power management, international law, the balance of power,
environmental great powers 229
diplomacy, and war), informing how states behave internationally (Falkner and
Buzan, 2019). This is reflected in in the creation and advancement of environmen-
tal norms, rules, and institutions, including MEAs. MEAs constitute international
law, which upholds the international order because it requires states in inter-
national society to ‘do and refrain from doing certain things.’ It is a primary
institution because it underpins the sovereign state system and provides the means
for co-existence and cooperation. While there is variation in state compliance with
international law, most states follow most international law most of the time (Bull,
1977: Chapter 6).
As argued throughout this chapter, even when they have instigated the cre-
ation of MEAs or pushed for their advancement, the great powers have been less
accepting of holding themselves responsible for the environment either individ-
ually or collectively. Indeed, there are no consequences for the great powers if
they choose to ignore environmental problems, with little impact on the inter-
national order (Bernstein, 2020: 9–10, 19). International environmental treaties
are not backed by strong enforcement mechanisms and arbitration (Falkner and
Buzan, 2019: 143). Rather, MEAs are generally absent sanctions, relying on states’
willingness to comply, backed by non-government organization (NGO) verifica-
tion. However, the flip side is also true: great power leadership and resources in
MEAs are vital for advancing them (Keohane and Victor, 2016: 571), while their
absence or opposition can undermine them (Keleman and Vogel, 2010: 452). An
analysis of how great powers behave across and within MEAs over time is therefore
required.
Precisely because great power responsibility in MEAs rests not on status but on
their willingness, capacity, and culpability, the rest of this chapter uses the con-
cept of environmental great powers detailed in the introduction. The reasoning is
two-fold. First, there remains intellectual fuzziness as to what constitutes a great
power in international relations, with broad constructions of great powers de-
lineated based on material capability and the ability to shape others’ behaviour.
Generally speaking, the following states have been recognized as great powers in
the post-Second World War period: the US, the Soviet Union/Russia, China, Great
Britain, France, and, after 1990, both Japan and Germany (Yamagata et al., 2017;
Volgy et al., 2011). Second, in global environmental politics states can have sig-
nificant sway in relation to the specific environmental issues, such as Norway on
whaling, but not fit the broader great power definition (narrow vs wide environ-
mental power, see Buzan and Falkner, Chapter 2, this volume). In this sense, for
better or worse, a single state may play a decisive role in negotiating an MEA. Yet, a
small number of states with material capability can affect others’ behaviour across
more than one MEA. These I designate as ‘environmental great powers’, with ma-
terial capability and the capacity to influence others in MEA negotiations. Here I
analyse the US, the Soviet Union/Russia, China, Japan, Great Britain, France, and
230 park
Germany.2 The last three—Great Britain, France, and Germany—are examined

here under the rubric of the European Union, where member states work with
and within EU institutions (the European Council, European Commission, and
European Parliament) to come to a common EU position on specific MEAs.3
Given this shared competence, the EU is often viewed as a single actor in global
environmental politics and will be taken as such here.⁴
The next section examines the role of the environmental great powers in cre-
ating, advancing, and obstructing MEAs to document two practices. First, the
actions of the environmental great powers across and within MEAs reveals that
there does not seem to be agreement between them for accepting responsibility
for environmental crises either individually or collectively. Second, environmental
great powers can affect the outcome of more than one MEA. While China, India,
and Russia have material capacity according to their status, they still face very real
problems with implementing international environmental commitments, feeding
into contestation over the provision of technical capacity and resources in MEAs
(discussed further below).
The Environmental Great Powers Across MEAs
This section first notes general trends among the environmental great powers in
MEAs before examining their behaviours as leaders, laggards, swing states, and
brokers in negotiations. Leadership occurs when the state advocates for creating or
strengthening the MEA through a treaty, protocol, or amendment. A laggard seeks
to veto the prospect of an agreement but may ultimately go along with an agree-
ment once the majority have signalled their acceptance. For example, Japan has
agreed to MEAs even when it has not been in its interest (Chasek et al., 2017). Some
states play a swing state role, where they may be undecided as to the costs and ben-
efits of accepting a treaty limiting their behaviour in an environmental issue area.
The swing state may be decisive in garnering an agreement. An example is Russia
ratifying the Kyoto Protocol in 2004, thus bringing it into existence. Whether they
accept the agreement determines whether they are considered a swing state or
laggard. Finally, a broker state seeks to overcome barriers to an agreement by nego-
tiating a settlement between leaders and laggards, such as Japan in negotiating the
Nagoya Protocol for the Convention on Biological Diversity (Chasek et al., 2017).
2 Other rising powers like Brazil were also considered, but an absence of data on their behaviour
across multiple MEAs excluded them from analysis.
3 The European Community (EC) was a forerunner to the European Union (EU) and these are desig-
nated as such in the specific MEAs. When discussing the role of the European collective more generally
over time, the EU is used. The UK withdrew from the EU in 2020 but remains included in this chapter
given the analysis covers the period prior to their exit.
⁴ On the question of which EU institutions have competencies for specific global environmental
problems see Torney (this volume).
Treaties Protocols Amendments

200
180
160
140
Number of agreements
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
80 79
00 99
10 09
20 19
3 0 29
40 39
50 49
55 54
60 59
65 64
7 0 69
75 74
80 79
85 84
90 89
95 94
00 99
05 04
10 09
14 14
6
01
18 –18
19 –18
19 –19
19 –19
19 –19
19 –19
19 –19
19 –19
19 –19
19 –19
19 –19
19 –19
19 –19
19 –19
19 –19
19 –19
20 –19
20 –20
20 –20
20 –20
–2
50
18
Fig. 11.1 Multilateral environmental agreements, 1850–2016. Data from Mitchell

(2002–2019).
Given that many global environmental issues are longstanding, some states have
shifted over the course of the MEA from being a leader to a laggard and vice versa.
Over time, the environmental great powers have contributed to the creation of
a dense field of international environmental law (see Figure 11.1). Despite general
distrust of multilateralism (Rathbun, 2012), the US was a leader in the creation of
MEAs from the 1970s up until the 1990s (Falkner and Buzan, 2019: 146). It has the
most influence over MEAs generally, although the EU also plays a significant role
and both China and India are now rapidly catching up (Chasek at al., 2017: 255;
Kelemen and Vogel, 2010). Prior to 1991, the Soviet Union was a leader, along
with the US, in ratifying MEAs; after its collapse, Russia became a passive adopter
(Yamagata et al., 2017: 502).
When environmental great powers lead, they can establish international en-
vironmental law through the creation of conventions and strengthen them
through protocols and amendments (Bodansky, 2010). The US has signed the
most MEAs of the environmental great powers, followed by Russia, Japan,
the EU, China, and India, but the order changes slightly in terms of the
number of MEAs they have ratified (see Figure 11.2). Environmental great powers
provide leadership through ratifying environmental conventions that is then em-
ulated by weaker powers, as the US and Soviet Union did prior to the end of the
Cold War (Yamagata et al., 2017). The diffusion process in terms of ratification and
232 park
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
China EU India Japan Russia* US
MEAs tacit acceptance (status based on pre-amendment agreement action of entry

into forces)
MEAs signed
MEAs ratified /accession
Fig. 11.2 Great powers’ adoption of multilateral environmental agreements.

Data from Mitchell (2002–2019). Tacit acceptance indicates that the state has
agreed to the conditions of the convention for entry into force at the time of
the agreement without objection or amendment. The graph highlights how
many states choose to skip the signature stage and move straight to ratification,
which binds the state and makes it a party to the convention. Accession allows
a state to join a treaty in one step, without the need for prior signature. Asterisk
indicates that this period covers when Russia was part of the Soviet Union.
implementation is a powerful means of spreading environmental norms through-

out global international society (Falkner and Buzan, 2019). When environmental
great powers oppose an environmental agreement that does not suit their inter-
ests they can be ‘potent’ veto players in weakening multilateral action (Kelemen
and Vogel, 2010; Fehl, 2012: 18–19) or can, in a coalition, stop an agreement
eventuating altogether (discussed below).
While the data in Figure 11.2 demonstrates broader tacit acceptance of the
MEAs by environmental great powers, each state reacts differently to implement-
ing its obligations. For instance, the US is diligent in following through on its
international commitments (Glennon and Stewart, 1998). Russia has tended to be-
come a member of an MEA even when it had no intention of complying with it or
did not have the capacity to meet its obligations (DeSombre, 2015: 149). Japan and
the EU’s compliance with MEAs is mixed: Japan has been slow to change domes-
tic practices to meet its international obligations generally, but is also known to
‘pay lip service to international concerns … then simply fail to implement newly
enacted national laws’ (Feinerman and Fujikura, 1998: 251). Given the EU’s in-
stitutional capacity, it can ratify conventions, but then needs to work with its
member states to meet those commitments (Sbragia and Hildebrand, 1998). China
take its obligations seriously but struggles with meeting its international environ-
mental commitments given its rapid economic growth and decentralized internal
governance (Oksenberg and Economy, 1998: 352–354). As a federated state, India

also has had difficulty ensuring compliance with MEAs because of difficulty col-
lecting information and monitoring implementation (Herring and Barucha, 1998:
396–398, 400).
Environmental Great Powers within MEAs
Before detailing the role of the environmental great powers within MEAs, a
methodological discussion of the choice of environmental issues is first warranted.
The following six MEAs are reviewed: climate, ozone, biodiversity, whaling, chem-
icals, and hazardous waste. These MEAs were chosen to highlight whether en-
vironmental great powers played a role in establishing institutions for issues of
global import (climate, ozone, biodiversity) and the increasing threat from the
use and trade of chemicals. The selection of MEAs also demonstrates how dif-
ferent environmental problems are perceived by the environmental great powers
in terms of their interests, such as biodiversity compared with managing whaling
(see Table 11.1). As an eighth comparator I also include deforestation, which does
not have a specific MEA but where a regime has emerged and cooperation is still
sought. It is important for three reasons: first, because it is of global concern and
is linked to climate and biodiversity; second, it reveals the negative role of envi-
ronmental great powers in preventing an MEA from emerging; and third, forestry
still has formal institutions, unlike other environmental problems such as coral
reef degradation, biofuels policy, and Artic haze (Dimitrov, 2019: 2). Comparing
the practices of the environmental great powers across a range of issue areas and
MEAs sheds light on whether climate negotiations are unique or follow similar
practices to other international environmental agreements.
Climate
Over the period under review, environmental great powers situated themselves
in climate negotiations according to their energy mix. The US was the largest pro-
ducer of coal, oil, and gas (DeSombre, 2015: 148). The US, Russia, India, and China
were inefficient producers of fossil fuels, while Japan and most European states
were dependent on imported energy (Chasek et al., 2017: 165–166). In negoti-
ating for the 1992 UNFCCC, Nordic states were leaders and were opposed by a
veto coalition led by the US and including Japan, Russia, and other major emitters.
However, Japan became a swing state when it rationalized its technocratic capabil-
ity and efficiency with the need for energy security (Chasek et al., 2017: 172–174)
while trying to green its image to address international criticism (Schreurs, 2004).
The EU played a lead role in pushing for binding greenhouse gas (GHG) emission
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Table 11.1 Environmental great powers in select multilateral environmental

agreements
Env Climate Ozone Bio Whaling Chemicals Hazardous Forestry

great diversity Waste
power
China V/L V/S V/S V V V/L V

EU V/L V/L V/B V/L L V/L V/L
India V V/S V/S V V V V
Japan V/S V V/B V V V V
Russia V/S V V V V V L*
US V/L L/V L/V L L/V V L/V
Key: V=Veto state; L=Leader; S=Swing; B=Broker. When indicating a shift from veto to leader or
broker (V/L or V/B) this usually refers to being a laggard early in the agreement but a leader or broker
in the agreement or a subsequent amendment. The * refers to Russia’s more passive support for the
convention than active leadership.
commitments within the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol, which the US opposed
(DeSombre, 2015: 138). The US dealt a near fatal blow to the UNFCCC by refusing
to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but the EU’s efforts in negotiating with Russia
to join the Kyoto Protocol enabled it to come into effect in 2004.
The EU is a self-declared leader on climate change and has worked hard to es-
tablish institutions, create binding targets to reduce GHGs, and legitimize a 2°C
climate commitment (Morseletto et al., 2017). However, its role as lead state was
shaken by internal divisions and an inability to achieve its preferences at the UN-
FCCC COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 (Parker and Karlsson, 2017). Meanwhile,
the US, China, and India continue to play veto roles given their differences over
mandatory GHG emission targets. No agreement among the environmental great
powers meant that no agreement could be reached in Copenhagen in 2009. In
the end, the Copenhagen Accord was a compromise between the now two largest
GHG emitters, the US and China (Chasek et al., 2017: 176; Eckersley, this volume).
In 2014 the US and China made a joint bilateral pledge of their commitment to a
successful agreement in Paris, removing a major obstacle to its success. However,
as Chasek et al. note, the 2015 ‘Paris Agreement is a treaty under international
law, but only certain provisions are legally binding’ (2017: 183). This is because
negotiators wanted to ensure that it did not have to be ratified by the US Congress,
which may have killed it (see Eckersley, this volume). The environmental great
powers remain in separate coalitions in climate negotiations: the EU, the US, and
China-India (Wu and Thill, 2018), which are identifiable by their different de-
velopment and economic interests and projections (Zou and Fu, 2015). In short,
the EU has tended to play the lead role in climate negotiations over time, while
Japan’s and Russia’s actions have helped propel negotiations forward in the past.
The current contestation remains between the US and China over interpretations
of the norm of common but differentiated responsibility. The actions of the envi-
ronmental great powers in climate negotiations indicate that interests and identity,
not great power status, shape states’ behaviour.
Ozone
The US, EC, and Japan were the major players in producing ozone depleting sub-
stances (ODSs). The US was an initial leader on establishing international law on
reducing ODSs as the link between ozone layer destruction chlorofluorocarbons
(CFC) emissions became apparent. It led negotiations for the Vienna Convention
for the Protection of the Ozone Layer in 1985 and the Montreal Protocol on Sub-
stances that Deplete the Ozone Layer in 1987 (Parson, 2003). The EC was an initial
veto player opposing controls on ODS production, backed by Japan and the Soviet
Union (Benedick, 1998). In order to improve East–West cooperation, the Soviet
Union engaged in the negotiations to address a global threat (Zimmerman et al.,
1998: 303). Both China and India had shown no interest in the Montreal Protocol,
which they considered a ‘rich man’s problem’, even though they were beginning
to produce CFCs. However, once it came into effect they soon realized the impact
the regime was having on international markets (Benedick, 1998: 100–101; 189–
190). They demanded recompense in the form of financial and technical assistance,
which was seen as international blackmail because the regime needed all produc-
ers and future producers of ODSs on board (Herring and Barucha, 1998: 409).
China did not accede to the Montreal Protocol until after the London Amend-
ments in 1990, which included provisions for financial and technical assistance
through a multilateral fund, and allowed for a delayed implementation on the
basis of common but differentiated responsibilities (Oksenberg and Economy,
1998: 385; Chasek et al., 2017: 111–125).
In the end, even the most reluctant large producers—the EC, Japan, and the
Soviet Union—agreed to the Montreal Protocol targets to reduce ODSs. The US
enjoyed a first mover strategy on shifting to phase out CFCs but then shifted to be
a laggard as the costs of making deeper cuts for the use of hydrochlorofluorocar-
bons (HCFCs) were realized. Japan bowed to international pressure despite being
a major CFC producer (Schreurs, 2004: 93), but it acted quickly and effectively
to cut CFC production and consumption (Finerman and Fujikura, 1998: 287). By
1992 the US had become a veto player, while the EU had become a ‘partial’ regime
leader seeking to strengthen the ozone regime, although it was hampered by inter-
nal foreign policymaking processes (Oburthur, 1999). It was not until 2007 that the
US would switch again to leader in advocating for an accelerated HCFC phase-out,
which Chasek et al. identify as resulting from its need to signal a credible position
in parallel climate change talks (2017: 121, HCFCs are also GHG). India and China
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shifted from veto to swing states based on being provided further financial assis-
tance for HCFC alternatives. Over time the multilateral fund would assist China,
India, and Russia to substantially reduce ODS use (Parson, 2003: 238). Meanwhile,
China has moved ahead with phasing out HFCs, while India continues to resist
(Stokes et al., 2016). Negotiations over time therefore show how environmental
great powers like the US and EU may shift from leaders to laggards over time ac-
cording to their commercial domestic interests (Falkner, 2008: 74–77), or in the
case of Japan may behave as a swing state based on its interests and identity, rather
than from any obligation they may have from their status.
Biodiversity
The US was an initial advocate for an international species conservation conven-

tion in 1972. However, it became a vocal opponent once equity and development
concerns from developing states, the primary holders of biologically diverse ar-
eas, were tabled for negotiation (McGraw, 2017: 11). For the US, the convention
was not seen as providing sufficient protection of the intellectual property of the
US biotechnology industry (see Eckersley, this volume). This meant the US was
a weak advocate in promoting the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in
negotiations in 1992 (Sell, 1996: 112). China, India, and Mexico were key actors in
seeking to have the convention represent the interests of the Global South (Miller,
1995: 139), in which they had moderate success (Sell, 1996). All the environmen-
tal great powers bar the US are members of the convention, with China, Japan,
and Germany the first of these to ratify it in 1993 (Yamagata et al., 2017: 526). The
EU and Japan have targets to restore ecosystems. Overall, there is an absence of a
lead coalition in the biodiversity regime, although some European states seek to
strengthen it (Chasek et al., 2017: 192, 194, 201). Although the US signed the con-
vention in 1993, it has not been ratified by the US Congress (Chasek et al., 2017:
190, 407).
The US and Russia are not party to the 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety,
compared with China, the EU, India, and Japan. The US was also a main veto
state in opposing the protocol and resisting the push for prior informed con-
sent in the transboundary movement of genetically modified organisms (GMOs;
see Eckersley, this volume). This is because of its large grain exports that do
not separate GMO from non-GMO products. In contrast to the US, the EU
has taken a precautionary approach to biotechnology. Once the EU adopted a
de facto moratorium on genetically modified food in 1998, it swung behind
the large group of developing countries that demanded a precautionary instru-
ment to strengthen importer rights in biosafety (Falkner, 2007). In 2006 the
World Trade Organization dispute settlement mechanism ruled in favour of the
US against the EU, declaring the EU moratorium to be in breach of WTO
rules (Chasek et al., 2017: 195). Brazil became a lead state when it hosted the
third Members of the Parties (MOP3) in 2006, establishing the Curitiba Rules
on the documentation needed for the transportation of live modified organ-
isms. In 2014, the EU played broker in its efforts to negotiate between im-
porters and exporters of live modified organisms in reviewing the protocol’s
effectiveness.
Meanwhile, Japan played a key role in negotiating the Nagoya Protocol Ac-
cess to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising
from their Utilization in 2010 when they were the host (Chasek et al., 2017:
195–198). Entering into force in 2014, members include China, India, the EU,
and Japan. Again, the US and Russia have not ratified the protocol. Negotiations
reveal how weak support for a convention by the environmental great powers
can still usher it in, and how their brokering role matters for strengthening it.
It does not, however, provide sufficient evidence that environmental great pow-
ers see themselves as responsible for addressing biodiversity loss individually or
collectively.
Whaling
The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling was established in

1946 at the behest of the US. It was initially designed to regulate, not prohibit,
whaling. There ‘is no question that American leadership has been pivotal at the
IWC. Not only did the United States initiate the entire regime back in 1946, it was
by far the most powerful influence in creating the environment in which the mora-
torium vote [on whaling] could be taken’ (Stoett, 1997: 136). The Soviet Union was
an initial adopter of the convention, although it often violated it (Vogler, 2000:
53–54). In 1973 the US proposed a moratorium on commercial whaling at the
United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Chasek et al., 2017: 244).
A majority veto coalition led by Japan and the then Soviet Union opposed the
moratorium within the International Whaling Commission (IWC).
The US and other anti-whaling states then recruited states that opposed whaling
to join the IWC; by 1982 it had a majority to enforce a five-year moratorium. Both
India and China joined the IWC in 1981, the latter as the only new whaling state
(Epstein, 2008: 159). Japan, Norway, Peru, and the Soviet Union are veto states that
comprised 75% of whaling and almost all whale product consumption, although
Japan, Norway, and the Soviet Union ended commercial whaling in 1988. How-
ever, Japan, Iceland, and Norway then began to undertake whaling for ‘scientific
purposes’ (Chasek et al., 2017: 245). Although there were attempts by these veto
states to end the moratorium, it continued, and the US among others was able to
establish a Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary as a no-catch area.
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Despite this, Japan and Norway still undertake illegal whaling (Chasek et al.,
2017: 247). The US and the EU continue to dominate the IWC, although the veto
coalition has increased substantially through Japanese vote buying. There has been
a failure to bring whalers and anti-whaling coalitions together and commercial
whaling continues. In 2014 Australia took Japan to the International Court of Jus-
tice (ICJ) to challenge its conception of scientific purposes; the ICJ ruled that there
was no scientific basis for hunting whales in the Antarctic (Denyer and Kashiwagi,
2018). In December 2018 Japan left the IWC, an exit strategy it has not previously
invoked in an MEA where it has a specific interest. Although US actions could here
indicate that it operates according to its status as an environmental great power in
being responsible for whales, the issue has little impact on its interests. The actions
of Japan (and Norway) do, however, underscore that a collective understanding of
whaling as harmful does generally exist, but not among all environmental great
powers.
Chemicals
The US agreed to the 2004 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants

(POPs) as a producer and consumer of toxic chemicals but wanted to ensure it only
covered the initial ‘dirty dozen’ chemicals, and it sought exemptions for specific
chemicals. The US sought to uphold its sovereignty and, while it has strong domes-
tic chemical policies and it financially supports the convention, in the end it the
US has not ratified it (Chasek et al., 2017: 144–150, 404). Again, the US tends not
to support MEAs that challenge its commercial interests (Eckersley, this volume).
This contrasts to the EU’s leadership in seeking to extend the convention to more
chemicals and to strengthen its non-compliance mechanism, and to Russia, which
sought exemptions (Selin, 2010: 124). The US opposes EU efforts, among others,
to bring the toxic regimes closer together, including the Stockholm Convention on
Persistent Organic Pollutants, the Basel Convention on Control of Transboundary
Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, and the Rotterdam Conven-
tion on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals
and Pesticides in International Trade (Allan et al., 2018: 560).
China, India, Japan, and the US favour weak compliance in the Rotterdam Con-
vention, compared with the EU, while Russia and India have opposed the inclusion
of chrysotile asbestos and endosulfan respectively (Selin, 2010: 102, 106). The 1998
CLRTAP POPs Protocol on the use of pesticides and industrial chemicals was
again led by the EU, but Russia and the US, both major players, have not signed.
Meanwhile, the US has enabled the emergence of non-state certification processes
for chemicals outside the conventions (Renkens, 2015). Chemical MEA negotia-
tions again indicate that the environmental great powers are motivated by their
interests rather than status.
Hazardous Waste Trade
All the environmental great powers except the US are party to the 1989 Basel Con-
vention. The US is the largest producer of hazardous waste, and even though only
1% is traded, this is still higher than any other major state (DeSombre, 2015: 143).
The US played a veto role in opposing it based on free trade arguments as well as
concerns over implementation. Basel was pushed through based on African unity
and demand for action, despite opposition from three environmental great pow-
ers: the US, EU, and Japan (Chasek et al., 2017: 127–130, 253). Nevertheless, China
and India signed the convention in 1990, with India ratifying it in 1992. Japan fol-
lowed in 1993. Both China and India have difficulty ensuring that illegal waste does
not enter their territories, while the latter has weak regulatory structures requiring
technical support (Quadri, 2010) and a large informal sector that relies on recy-
cling electronic products. The EU and Russia ratified the convention in 1994, but
the latter has weak domestic regulatory structures in place to manage hazardous
waste (Gosh et al., 2016).
The Basel Action Network argues that a coalition of developing states, China,
and the EU was able to push through an amendment to the Basel Convention
(the Basel Ban) strengthening the convention by restricting the trade of hazardous
waste from OECD to non-OECD states in 1998 (BAN, 2019). China ratified the
Basel Ban Amendment one year later. The US has signed but not ratified it, thus
remaining outside the convention. The Basel Convention reinforces the argument
that environmental great powers’ opposition to an agreement can weaken it, while
highlighting how environmental great powers like the EU can shift from laggards
to leaders over time. It is also an example of how environmental great powers
like the EU and China can work together, as waste exporters and importers, to
strengthen the convention. Once again, the negotiations reinforce that the envi-
ronmental great powers are determining their position based on their interests
rather than their status.
Deforestation
Despite attempts to create a formal treaty, there is no MEA on deforestation.

This is because of the complexity of deforestation and a strong veto coalition that
has changed in members and rationale over time (Chasek et al., 2017: 213). The
International Tropical Timber Agreement, first established in 1983, recognized
the need for conservation while also accepting the need for trade; this was
updated in 1994 and 2006. Attempts to establish a forest convention at the United
Nations Convention on Environment and Development (UNCED) pitted lead
states the US and Canada against developing states who sought to protect their
sovereign rights over their own natural resources, particularly the G77, India, and
240 park
Malaysia. Russia has long supported a forest convention as it struggles to curb the
trade of illegal Russian timber to Japan, Finland, and China (Humphreys, 2006:
43, 89, 145).
The result was a non-binding statement of Forest Principles and the inclusion
of deforestation in Agenda 21. Malaysia and Canada were the original leaders to
create processes on forests within the United Nations, with strong backing for a for-
est convention by the EU. A veto coalition of once supportive states was led by the
US (with the largest timber industry) and backed by Japan, with the latter having
‘never initiated any policy to stem its domestic overconsumption of tropical tim-
ber’ (Finerman and Fujikura, 1998: 278). The vetoers viewed a forestry convention
as potentially interventionist in their industries. Efforts to establish quantifiable
goals for reducing deforestation meant that Brazil, as responsible for the largest
tropical timber forest, also became a critical veto state. As Chasek et al. note, ‘the
veto coalition of industrialised and developing states opposed to negotiating a for-
est treaty doomed the Canadian effort’ (2017: 219, 218–220). This resulted in a
Non-Legally Binding Instrument on All Types of Forests, which was adopted in
2007 and came into effect in 2011. The International Arrangement on Forests (IAF)
covering all the UN’s work on forestry was adopted in 2015 to contribute to the
High-Level Panel on Sustainable Development, the UN’s 2030 Agenda, and the
Sustainable Development Goals (Chasek et al., 2017: 215–223). In short, the envi-
ronmental great powers played a strong veto role according to their interests and
did not demonstrate either individual or collective responsibility for deforestation.
Analysing the Environmental Great Powers across and in MEAs
Negotiations in these MEAs reveal three things. First, environmental great pow-
ers often hew to their specific interests in environmental negations that stem from
their identity and interests rather than their status in global international society.
They can play pivotal roles in shifting from a veto coalition to a leadership one
or vice versa, or they may be a swing state seeking concessions that would enable
them to accede to an international treaty, protocol, or amendment. They may also
play an important brokering role in securing negotiations. Given this, it seems as
though there is no agreement among the environmental great powers as to their
responsibility for the environment. Only in the whaling case is there evidence of
the role of an environmental great power, the US, choosing to advocate for an
environmental issue which has so little impact on its interests. This could stem
from status, but is generally attributed to strong domestic NGO advocacy shaping
its position. Further research on the role of the environmental great powers across
all MEAs is required to further test these arguments and to conclusively determine
the role of status in environmental great powers’ decision-making.
Second, the review also demonstrates that all the environmental great powers
do affect the outcomes of more than one MEA, thus highlighting the utility of
this concept. The US has played a significant role in climate, ozone, biodiversity,
and whaling, with initial leadership in chemicals and deforestation. Japan’s swing
state and brokering roles have been important in climate and biodiversity, while
its veto role in whaling has been central to those negotiations. China and India
have been swing states in ozone, and India on biodiversity. China is now playing
more of a leadership role in negotiating the 2014 bilateral agreement with the US
on climate, and in advocating for the Basel Ban in biodiversity. The EU has been
a strong leader over time across multiple MEAs. Only Russia marginally fits the
category of affecting more than one MEA. While it was able to usher in the Kyoto
Protocol through a side deal with the EU, it has not been an active leader in the
deforestation convention. However, the Soviet Union has taken leadership in the
past, such as the 1971 International Convention on Wetlands of International Im-
portance Especially as Waterfowl Habitats (Matthews 1993). Further analysis will
confirm whether Russia should be considered an environmental great power.
Finally, does the evidence reveal fundamental differences between the MEAs?
For example, are climate negotiations unique? The actions of the environmental
great powers across these environmental issue areas suggests not. While there is
a greater onus on states to tackle the climate emergency, given the magnitude of
the problem, the environmental great powers tend to behave similarly across the
different MEA negotiations. The US has been a proponent of strong MEAs for
ozone and whaling, where restrictions had little impact on its interests, but has
been the laggard in climate change, biodiversity, and hazardous waste. The EU has
played important roles in strengthening MEAs on climate, ozone, and chemicals
while playing a brokering role in biosafety (Rhinard and Kaeding, 2006: 1033).
Yet it has also been a strong veto player in ozone and hazardous waste when its
interests are affected (among others, see Chasek et al., 2017).
Japan is an active participant but generally is not a leader in creating interna-
tional environmental law, and while the Soviet Union played an important role in
adopting MEAs, its interest in international cooperation flagged with the collapse
of the Soviet Union (Yamagata et al., 2017). Japan faced significant international
criticism for its environmental impact in the 1980s in terms of its use of natural
resources (Schreurs, 2004), leading it to agree to MEAs even when it was not in its
interest, including conventions on climate and ozone. It has been a veto player in
climate, hazardous waste, and whaling, but did broker regulating genetic resources
when it hosted negotiations that led to the Nagoya Protocol in the CBD (Chasek
et al., 2017).
China has played a strong role in MEAs through representing the G77 and
seeking provisions for developing countries to be able to meet targets in any in-
ternational regulatory requirements (Miller, 1995). It has done this through, for
example, requesting provisions of financial and technical assistance in the ozone
242 park
and forestry regimes (in the International Tropical Timber Organization). Over
time its role has changed in accordance with its dramatic economic accelera-
tion (Economy, 2010), power status, and ecological footprint, which surpasses any
other G77 member (see Yeophantong and Goh, this volume). This means that its
actions are now having consequential environmental ramifications, requiring it
to play a vital role in the climate negotiations as the second largest GHG emit-
ter (Lewis and Gallagher, 2015). Over the last decade China’s role has evolved
in response to these pressures and growing expectations that it behaves like a
responsible great power.
Environmental Great Powers, Delegating Responsibility,

and Contested Deep Pluralism
This section examines how the environmental great powers create international
organizations to support MEAs while diverging on the need to provide technical
capacity and resources to allow states to meet their international environmental
obligations. This demonstrates responsibility via delegation on the one hand, but
also contestation of deep pluralism in global international society on the other.
First, the environmental great powers are often the primary drivers of creating
MEA secretariats and other intergovernmental organizations like UNEP because
they are not only leaders in specific environmental issue areas, but they have
the resources and the ability to marshal other states to follow (Yamagata et al.,
2017). Environmental great powers play a prominent role in the design of sec-
ondary institutions owing to their capacity for technical and scientific knowledge
of the specific environmental issue. In providing such public goods, environmen-
tal great powers nonetheless ensure their advantage through shaping the design,
formal rules, and informal means for influence, as well as controlling the organi-
zation’s funding. In designing the IO, environmental great powers can delimit the
remit of those institutions through shaping the structure and organization of the
institution. For example, states may create empty institutions that have no regu-
latory policymaking or implementation capacity but provide cover for inaction,
such as the UN Forum on Forests, the Commission on Sustainable Development,
and the Copenhagen Accord (Dimitrov, 2019). They can also determine formal
rules for governing and funding it, which in turn can further facilitate their control
(Johnson, 2014). Formal voting may be consensus driven, by majority, or double
majority, with implications as to whose vote counts (see for example the Global
Environment Facility, Young, 2002). The design of the organization may also al-
low for informal influence, where environmental great powers may shape what is
formally discussed (Stone, 2011). Further research is needed to identify how often
the environmental great powers engage in strategies to collude with the secretariats
to advance their mission (Dijkstra, 2017; Jinnah, 2014: 22) and how they use their
financial contributions to alter the IOs’ operations (which can harm the ability of
an IO to meet its mandate, Graeme, 2015).
The MEA secretariats and UNEP provide an organizational basis for conven-
ing MEAs, arranging convention meetings, compiling data, and facilitating the
transmission of information to members of the parties (Biermann and Sieben-
huner, 2009). They also play a role in disseminating information for non-state
actors. While many recognize that the trend towards greater global environmen-
tal governance has been driven by NGOs in facilitating a world society (Yamagata
et al., 2017; Meyer et al., 1997; Hironaka, 2014), environmental great powers have
propelled the creation of secondary institutions as centripetal forces that can fa-
cilitate action. This is nowhere more evident than US leadership in ushering in
the creation of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC; Johnston, 2014). Without the US, the IPCC would not have existed to pro-
vide information on the state of climate science for negotiators. These secondary
institutions are therefore vital for advancing international environmental law.
MEA secretariats are delegated authority by the parties to the agreement to
work on their behalf. This delegation means that they have some independence
to help members meet their treaty obligations. Both the secretariats and the chairs
of MEA negotiations can facilitate members’ agreement (Depledge, 2007). MEA
secretariats and UNEP have been recognized as holding cognitive and normative
authority (Biermann and Siebenhuner, 2009). IOs more broadly have been dele-
gated tasks to facilitate MEA negotiations through setting international agendas,
for example the roles of the OECD and UNEP in advancing ideas in preparation
for the Basel Convention (Selin, 2010) and the World Meteorological Organisa-
tion (WMO) and UNEP in relation to climate and ozone negotiations (DeSombre,
2015. Bureaucrats can also try to insulate new IOs from member state interfer-
ence, as when, for example, UNEP staff influenced the design of the IPCC to give
it more independence (Johnson, 2014), upon which the design of the Intergovern-
mental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services was subsequently built
(IPBES, Andresen and Rosendal, 2017: 55). Environmental secretariats can also
play an influential role in managing the overlap between MEAs in areas such as
the climate-biodiversity nexus (Jinnah, 2014). Environmental great powers have
delegated responsibility for facilitating environmental action to these secondary
institutions, which reinforces the argument outlined in the introduction to this
volume that there is an increasing convergence between great power responsibility
and global governance.
Second, while environmental great powers have taken on the provision of pub-
lic goods through advancing MEAs and creating secretariats and IOs to support
them, there remains significant disagreement between old and rising powers as to
the provision of technical capacity and resources in MEAs. While the US provided
40% of the initial funding for UNEP, it opposed further funding for developing
states (Eckersley, this volume). The US has been notably resistant to MEAs that
244 park
include commitments to support developing countries such as in climate and bio-

diversity (among others, DeSombre, 2015: 146). Indeed, the creation of the Global
Environment Facility was driven in part by a desire by the US to limit the creation
of multilateral funds for technical and financial assistance as occurred in the ozone
negotiations, despite this being a key component of ensuring its success.
China and India have a history of working together with the G77 (of over 130
developing states) in most MEAs to advance a common collective view of environ-
mental politics that recognizes their disadvantage. The G77 has been a principle
grouping of states operating within the United Nations system: it has advanced a
shared understanding of the needs of the Global South to address environmental
problems, and articulated the need for time and financial and technical assistance
from the Global North to meet MEA obligations (Najam, 2015). The G77 has been
able to gain ‘modest concessions’ when bargaining in climate, ozone, biodiversity,
and hazardous waste (Miller, 1995; Sell, 1996).
Over the last decade the demand for China and India to take greater respon-
sibility at the international level for environmental protection has come in the
form of demands for higher targets in specific MEAs, while India and China have
consistently demanded greater access to technical and financial assistance in or-
der to be able to do so. In climate negotiations, a deal brokered between the US
and China contributed to the creation of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) in 2015
to assist states adaptation and mitigation efforts. While designed to give formal
power to developed and developing states, its initial pilot was under the World
Bank, which developed states control. The GCF has been mired in controversy
over its operations, while the environmental great powers have fallen short of their
financial commitments to it. This indicates divisions over how to meaningfully im-
plement MEAs. It also suggests that there is a contestation of deep pluralist global
international society, with scholars arguing that disagreements in climate nego-
tiation are fundamentally over the value of maintaining the current Westphalian
international order (Terhalle and Depledge, 2013).
Conclusion
This chapter focused on the role of the environmental great powers in using inter-
national law to protect the environment. In reviewing the literature on MEAs, it is
clear that the great powers can be leaders, laggards, swing states, and brokers in dif-
ferent MEAs in accordance with their interests and identities. There is no evidence
that the great powers use international law to demonstrate a shared responsibility
to protect the environment. The environmental great powers behaviour is instead
based on negotiating the costs of mitigating environmental problems. However,
environmental great powers have been at the forefront of creating secondary in-
stitutions to enact MEAs on their behalf. While the environmental great powers
remain focused on how to control IOs even at the expense of addressing envi-
ronmental problems, the delegation of responsibility to secondary institutions is
helping to propel further action for environmental protection. Yet deep pluralism
within global international society remains contested, as indicated by divisions
over the provision of technical capacity and resources through MEAs, and more
light needs to be shed on the design, operation, and implementation of multilateral
funds for developing states.
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12
World on Fire: Coal Politics and Great
Power Responsibility
Stacy D. VanDeveer and Tim Boersma
Coal politics play out from local to global scale, as coal extraction, trade, and con-
sumption dynamics remain very much in flux in the post-Paris Accord era. But
for now, one fact remains: ‘great powers’, as traditionally conceived, extract and
use a lot of coal, and coal powers usually possess great environmental power.
This chapter develops a framework to understand the factors driving coal poli-
tics between and within some of the largest coal-consuming countries and regions
(namely the US, the European Union, and China), all of which rank as global
powers. We focus on these three from a larger pool of major coal consumers,
producers, and traders, because they demonstrate various discrepancies between
political rhetoric related to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction and empir-
ical realities of continued production of, trade in, and consumption of coal, despite
the well-documented fact that the two cannot go hand in hand with existing tech-
nologies. The three cases also help us explore why responsible rhetoric so often
remains unmatched with responsible domestic action and global governance.
Certainly, we do not argue that progress on reducing GHG emissions would
hinge exclusively on efforts to curtail coal use in these two countries and the EU,
or purely on reducing coal use. The list of other countries where production and
consumption of coal presents significant challenges is long. The number of com-
panies profiting via trading, shipping, and financing coal is also substantial. Yet,
if key GHG emitters are to make meaningful progress in terms of emissions re-
ductions, significant action likely must come from countries and regions like the
cases discussed below, which are either major OECD economies with significant
political and economic influence, or—in the case of China—simply much too large
to ignore. For a country like India, compelling reasons like concerns about local
air quality and mining safety might suggest planning for a post-coal era. However,
concerns about providing energy access and jobs to poor and rural populations
might prevail in the short term, notwithstanding the country’s major ongoing
investments in renewable energy.
Stacy D. VanDeveer and Tim Boersma, World on Fire: Coal Politics and Great Power Responsibility. In: Great Powers,
250 vandeveer and boersma
In addition to our three case studies, we include observations and data about the
financing of coal production and consumption. Without financing, such projects
would not come to fruition, and recent trends suggest that access to capital is
increasingly becoming a constraint on developing future coal projects. Market dy-
namics, as well as domestic and international environmental policies, are driving
rapid change in some states, while statist policies aimed at expanding electricity
access and enhancing national energy security shape others. We explore how coal
powers respond to expectations about great power responsibility in international
climate politics.
Broadly speaking, what does the global coal market today look like? Proven
global coal reserves (of all sorts) in 2019 are estimated around 1,069,636 million
tonnes, roughly divided equally between OECD and non-OECD countries. The
largest proven reserves are found in the US (23.3% of total), the Russian Feder-
ation (15.2%), Australia (13.9%), China (13.2%), and India (9.9%). Global coal
production in the OECD countries declined steadily over the last decade at 2.0%
per annum, where non-OECD production grew in the same period by 2.7% per
year. Global coal consumption shows a similar pattern, with OECD consumption
declining by 2.8% per annum over the last decade and non-OECD consump-
tion increasing by 2.2% per year over the same period. Among the countries
where coal consumption declined, two stand out: the US and the United King-
dom. US consumption declined 5.1% per year over the last 10 years, and coal has
recently been surpassed by renewable energy sources. Notwithstanding an antici-
pated short comeback for coal in 2021 related to natural gas price increases during
the pandemic, the terminal decline of coal for power generation in the US seems
irreversible.1 The United Kingdom witnessed a spectacular 14.3% annual decline
over the last decade, effectively eradicating coal as a feedstock for power gener-
ation. Consumption rose steadily in various countries in South and South East
Asia and the MENA region, with double-digit annual growth percentages in, for
instance, Kuwait, Oman, the UAE, Egypt, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, but
in some of these countries coal is a relative novelty (making relative numbers seem
more impressive than absolute coal use). More traditional coal consumers like In-
dia, Indonesia, and Pakistan also saw their coal appetite increase, with 5.5%, 8.0%,
and 9.9% per annum, respectively, though in late 2020 Pakistan’s government sig-
nalled the days of coal consumption growth may be ending.2 Finally, global coal
trade is a market with several price points. The most prominent importers of coal
over the last decade were China, India, Mexico, and various African countries,
1 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46497#:~:text=Forecast%20generation%20
from%20coal%2Dfired,declining%20by%2020%25%20in%202020.&text=EIA%20expects%20about
%2036%25%20of,%25%20from%2020%25%20last%20year, accessed 15 July 2021.
2 https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/12/16/pakistan-signals-coal-power-exit-potential-
model-chinas-belt-road/#:~:text=Pakistan’s%20prime%20minister%20has%20called,more%20power
%20based%20on%20coal%E2%80%9D, accessed 15 July 2021.
world on fire 251
while countries like Mongolia, Russia, Australia, the US, and several African coun-
tries were major exporters of the commodity. Total international trade of coal in
2019 comprised about 35 exajoules in total, of which 58.7% went to China, India,
Japan, and South Korea. Total global consumption of coal in 2019 was about 158
exajoules, of which 51.7% was consumed in China (excluding Hong Kong).3
Global governance arrangements are rarely centred around coal, nor do many
of these global arrangements explicitly address coal at all (see Van de Graaf and
Colgan, 2016). Certainly, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC)/Paris Agreement regime has implications for coal (Boersma
and VanDeveer, 2016a), as does the Minamata Convention (Selin and Selin, 2020)
and the policies related to coal investment enacted by various (multilateral devel-
opment) banks and investors. A host of transnational arrangements designed to
govern aspects of resource management (including governance concerns related
to mining and other extractive industries), have been created over the last 15 years
(Auld, Betsill, and VanDeveer, 2018). Some of these initiatives seek, in part, to
shape coal-related investments, mining, trade, and usage. If we assume that in-
ternational and transnational arrangements at least partially reflect the views and
values—and perhaps the responsible actions—of great powers in the global system,
then we might conclude that coal has rarely been explicitly addressed but some-
times indirectly or implicitly implicated in governance regimes such as UNFCCC
and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Recently we observe
modest changes to this status quo, such as the spate of formal national govern-
ment announcements of phase-out dates for coal burning, and some efforts to
restrict financing of new coal mining and coal-fired power generation projects by
multilateral development banks, state foreign aid agencies, and commercial banks
(which tend to differentiate between steam coal and metallurgical coal). Work
on the concept and practice of ‘energy diplomacy’ dedicates more attention to
coal (Boersma and Johnson, 2018) than international relations scholarship. For
example, in Trump-era rhetoric about US energy diplomacy coal featured promi-
nently, including calls to revive the US domestic coal industry as part of an effort
to seek international ‘energy dominance’. However, most energy experts reacted to
Trump administration promises with significant scepticism (Houser et al., 2017),
which proved warranted.
Below, the chapter outlines and applies a framework to assess great power
responsibility as related to coal. We differentiate between rhetoric and tangible ac-
tion. Rhetoric and political discourse are important tools for signalling responsible
behaviour. They certainly matter in politics, policymaking, and markets. But em-
pirical analysis must also distinguish identifiable, material actions from political
rhetoric and highlight areas where the two are and are not aligned.
3 All data from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2020, 69th edition.
What Might Contemporary Great Power Responsibility

Look Like for Coal?
Given explicitly stated and often contradictory international community goals re-
lated to climate change mitigation, energy poverty alleviation, and sustainable
development (such as those articulated in the UN’s Sustainable Development
Goals), what might a set of ‘responsible’ policy positions and actions look like
for contemporary great powers? Following Buzan and Falkner’s (see Chapter 2,
this volume) conceptualization of the more solidarist end of a great power re-
sponsibility spectrum, this section explores what a ‘responsible’ great power’s
coal-related policy positions might be, given contemporary global challenges
related to environmental health and poverty alleviation.
Certainly, great powers have an interest in maintaining the international system
in which they hold positions of power and wealth. But do the great powers also—
at least sometimes—pursue aspects of great power management, as the English
School imagines it? Among the best illustrations of an institutional manifestation
of public good provision at the global level, as related to energy, is the Interna-
tional Energy Agency (IEA). Originally created as part of a joint OECD response
to the oil crises of the 1970s, it provides massive quantities of publicly available
data, research, and analysis, despite retaining an OECD-states-only membership
(the agency has in recent years developed partnerships—associate memberships—
with various key countries outside its traditional realm, including Brazil, China,
and India). Its more recent cousin, the United Arab Emirates-based International
Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), endeavours to accomplish some of the same
information and analysis functions with a greater focus on renewable energy
sources, but its mandate is more explicitly supportive of a renewable subset of en-
ergy production sectors and technologies with a greater emphasis on ‘support[ing]
countries in their transition to a sustainable energy future.’ IRENA’s membership
has grown rapidly by international organization standards, increasing from 85 in
2011 to 161 in 2019 (with 22 more states in the processes of accession). How-
ever, while the IEA and IRENA provide informational and analytical global public
goods that can carry significant weight in corporate boardrooms, they lack the au-
thority necessary for effective global energy governance. As such, neither comes
close to providing great power management of energy. Where else should we look?
In this chapter, we focus on two broad areas, or clusters, of public goods
repeatedly articulated and endorsed (at least rhetorically) by the international
community for over 25 years: climate change mitigation and the alleviation or
elimination of the worst manifestations of global poverty. Assessing the global
powers’ commitment to all aspects of poverty alleviation is well beyond the scope
of this study. As part of this analysis, we instead characterize great power engage-
ment in sustainable development goal (SDG) implementation and multilateral
efforts to reduce energy poverty. We suggest the following set of two global
world on fire 253
challenges, each with a set of associated policy positions, to serve as an indicator

of great power responsibility related to coal:
Climate Change: In relation to great power responsibility, the nature of climate
change mitigation and adaptation demands attention to both the domestic and
foreign policy activities of each power because mining, transporting, and burning
coal contributes substantial quantities of GHGs and other pollutants into the at-
mosphere. Regarding domestic and global mitigation of major pollutant emissions
driving global climate change, we look for goals, policies, and actions such as the
following:
• Steady and reasonably rapid reduction of coal burning and coal mining,
and enacting and implementing of policies to induce these outcomes in a
reasonable timeframe.
• Funding research and development related to carbon-capture utilization and
storage (CCUS), renewable energy transitions, energy efficiency, and other
cleaner energy technologies.
• Reducing and working to eliminate subsidies and other incentives provided
for the global expansion of coal mining and coal burning—via foreign as-
sistance, trade and industrial policies, and their involvement in multilateral
organizations—away from coal and towards more climate-friendly energy
sources.
• Using power and influence within various international organizations to set
policy and development agendas accordingly.
Poverty Alleviation, Sustainable Development Goals, and Energy Poverty:

Here we focus only on aspects of poverty alleviation closely associated with climate
change and energy poverty public goods. Regarding domestic and global poverty
alleviation goals, policies and actions include the following:
• Prioritization of worker retraining and community reinvestment and revital-

ization for workers and communities negatively impacted by the transition
away from coal (domestically and abroad).
• Support for bilateral and multilateral efforts to reduce energy poverty and
achieve multilaterally agreed universal electricity access goals in ways that
simultaneously advance climate change and poverty alleviation.
Consistent with the UNFCCC’s ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ prin-

ciple, we might expect more responsible great powers who can most afford to lead
the transition to low carbon energy sources to set a more ambitious course to-
wards zero coal burning and coal mining than others. Thus, while the US, the EU,
and China would be expected to assume and manifest such responsibilities, they
might well set different time frames and levels of ambition. In terms of concrete
examples of multilateral engagement in climate change and energy poverty is-

sues, our research prioritizes examining leadership and action related to the SDGs,
IRENA, G20, United Nations Security Council (UNSC), UNFCCC, the ozone
layer regime, and various multilateral development banks, as well as the articu-
lated priorities related to foreign assistance and bilateral development, trade, and
investment policies. In short, we seek to characterize the great powers’ priority
actions and willingness to lead in such international fora. Because great power ac-
cess and influence varies across multilateral fora, the G20 might provide a venue
for more US and EU leadership (Boersma and VanDeveer, 2016b), while the G77
might offer a better venue for relevant Chinese leadership. But the general research
questions remain: Do their rhetoric and actions suggest acceptance of great power
responsibility? How are rhetoric and action aligned? If they are not well aligned,
why might that be?
Assessing Three Contemporary Great Powers’ Responsibility
Together, the US, the EU, and China constitute about $50 trillion in GDP out of
the world total of approximately $80 trillion. Combined, these three powers repre-
sent over 50% of (2018) GHG emissions. For perspective, the 100 lowest emissions
countries collectively contributed 3.5% of total global emissions.⁴ These three pow-
ers tend to make ‘the list’ of contemporary great powers across a host of issues,
given some combination of their economic size and importance for international
political and security cooperation. Only a few years ago, these three were also the
top three coal consumers in the world. With recent declines in US and EU coal con-
sumption, India ranked second in 2019, with China, the US, and the EU ranking
first, third, and fourth respectively.⁵
Given various aspects of economic, security and regional influence, one might
well add others to a broad, more ‘multi-polar’ list—including Japan, India, Russia,
Brazil, Canada, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, and Turkey. The US-EU-China
trio each remain much larger, economically, than these others, and their com-
bined coal consumption is almost two-thirds of the global total. It bears noting,
however, that it is certainly possible that the rhetorical and behavioural accep-
tance of great power responsibilities might vary quite substantially among the
larger group of states—a possibility we return to below when we briefly discuss
Australia, India, Indonesia, and Russia. Also, as is clear below, there is no reason
to assume that wealthy, ‘Northern’ states are necessarily or more likely to accept
global responsibility. Arguably, in fact, Indian leaders have been more accepting
⁴ https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/04/interactive-chart-explains-worlds-top-10-emitters-and-how-
theyve-changed, accessed 15 July 2021.
⁵ https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energy-
economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2019-coal.pdf, accessed 15 July 2021.
world on fire 255
of global responsibilities related to climate change than the Australian state, for
example (see Prys, this volume).
Our empirical task is to assess the three powers’ rhetoric and actions using
the conceptualization of great power responsibility articulated above. As ever, the
EU proves somewhat analytically vexing as a case, being neither a single coun-
try nor an international organization as traditionally understood (see Biedenkopf,
Dupont, and Torney, this volume). Among other contradictions, climate policy
authority is heavily invested in pan-EU institutions, while many other aspects of
energy and finance policymaking remain primarily the purview of member states.
Nevertheless, comparing the US and the EU federalist systems has become increas-
ingly common, and a substantial portion of European energy, climate change, and
globally framed foreign policy and foreign assistance is driven by EU-level deci-
sions and institutions (Selin and VanDeveer 2012, 2015, 2021). Each case begins
with a focus on domestic rhetoric, policies, and actions before turning to each
entity’s more internationally/globally facing statements and behaviours.
United States
The ongoing decline of coal production and consumption in the US has received
substantial popular and scholarly attention in recent years—the New York Times
and The Economist have covered its trends, causes, and varied ramifications quite
extensively, for example. When scholars talk about declining US coal, they mostly
refer to reduced demand for steam coal, used in electricity generation, and not to
metallurgical coal, used in iron and steel production, cement, and some chemicals
(see US IEA, 2019a). Steam coal declined steadily in the US for years due to the
advent of low-cost natural gas (shale gas development was originally supported by
government policy) and government mandates for solar photovoltaic and onshore
wind in the electricity sector (Houser et al., 2017). One result of this electricity
sector transition is that the US is among the few industrialized countries that have
seen a modest reduction in carbon emissions: in the period between 2005 and
2017, carbon emissions in the electricity sector declined by 28% (US EIA, 2018).
Yet assessments of 2018 carbon emissions suggested that emissions rose again, by
3.4%, as a result of booming economic activity and the continuing lack of manda-
tory federal GHG reduction policies.⁶ Fuel switching in the electricity sector was
one factor contributing to declining carbon emissions, but others like the impact of
the ‘great recession’ of 2008/2009, growing investments in renewables, and energy
efficiency policies were also, and are increasingly, important.
Despite political rhetoric about the revival of the domestic coal industry in re-
cent years, US coal’s decline is expected to continue. The market share of the fuel
⁶ https://rhg.com/research/preliminary-us-emissions-estimates-for-2018/, accessed 15 July 2021.

in power generation was 28% in 2018 and was expected to fall to 24% in 2020
(US EIA, 2019c). This decline was exacerbated to an estimated 20% by the impacts
of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a likely coal consumption rebound in 2021.⁷ In
2019 another 4.5 GW of existing coal-fired generation capacity was expected to
retire, after the closure of 13.7 GW of capacity in 2018 (US EIA, 2019b). In 2015
and 2016, then presidential candidate Donald Trump ran on promises of revital-
izing the coal sector. The subsequent Trump administration undertook various
attempts to ‘save’ coal via regulatory intervention. Such efforts often took the form
of reversing (or trying to reverse) a set of climate change and air pollution regula-
tions dating back to the Obama era, and supporting electricity producers, which
throughout the country have overwhelmingly turned their back on thermal coal.
Its first attempt at such support mechanisms was rejected by the federal regulatory
agency (FERC). The Department of Energy (DOE) argued that US grid reliability
was in danger and that security of supply is best safeguarded by having 90 days of
feedstock reserves available next to a power plant, a requirement that only coal and
nuclear plants can realistically meet. Among other things, the FERC ruled that the
DOE failed to present evidence demonstrating that previous or planned generator
retirements were a threat to grid resilience.
The US Energy Information Administration foresees continued trends that keep
the US coal sector under pressure: in all its scenarios, coal’s decline in the do-
mestic electricity sector continues, with expected substantial retirements by 2040
(US EIA, 2019a). With the 2021 start of the Biden administration, we can reason-
ably assume that market forces and potential regulatory interventions are poised
to confirm coal’s US decline. The outlook for US coal exports is also unfavourable.
Despite a modest uptick in coal exports in 2017, the long-term expectation sees
other sources closer to import markets taking market share from US producers.
The modest 2017 increase in metallurgical coal exports used in the steel industry
received media coverage and praise from the administration (US EIA, 2019e). US
exports of steam coal also saw a rebound in 2017, after steep declines between 2012
and 2016 (US EIA 2019d). The main destinations for steam coal were Japan, South
Korea, and India (IEA, 2018b). The Trump administration presented these devel-
opments as evidence that its support for the domestic coal industry was bearing
fruit.⁸ In fact, given fierce competition for market share in the global coal market
and modest demand growth, pressure on US coal producers is likely to continue.
Absent aggressive government intervention, little evidence supports the idea
that market pressures contributing to US coal’s demise can be stemmed. While the
Trump administration declared that it saved the coal industry by selectively citing
⁷ https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/coal/111020-us-2020-coal-
production-expected-to-fall-262-on-year-to-56-year-low-eia, accessed 15 July 2021.
⁸ https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2017/07/secretary-ross-and-secretary-perry-
hail-new-coal-deal-ukraine, accessed 15 July 2021.
world on fire 257
data on the 2020 campaign trail, the demise of the domestic industry notwith-
standing, there is little evidence that the former administration even prepared
proposals aimed at revitalizing depressed coal mining communities. However, in
a rare instance of bipartisanship in Washington, DC, lawmakers in 2018 agreed to
expand and increase existing tax credits for CCUS projects to support the devel-
opment of commercial-scale CCUS projects and potentially assist the coal-fired
power sector.⁹ In 2019, of the 18 large-scale CCUS projects worldwide, eight were
in the United States.1⁰
Rhetorically, President Obama often accepted great power responsibility—and
his administration often tried to act on such rhetoric, particularly in his second
term. His speeches as a candidate and as president, in both domestic and interna-
tional venues, frequently included explicit references to American responsibilities
vis-à-vis climate change and aspects of global poverty alleviation, development,
health, and human rights. In fact, consistent with this volume’s great power re-
sponsibility framework, President Obama and officials in his administration often
framed global responsibilities as shared with other states and societies of means,
often mentioning Chinese and EU partners by name:
Yes, this is hard. But there should be no question that the United States of Amer-
ica is stepping up to the plate. We recognize our role in creating this problem; we
embrace our responsibility to combat it. We will do our part, and we will help de-
veloping nations do theirs. But we can only succeed in combating climate change
if we are joined in this effort by every nation —developed and developing alike.
Nobody gets a pass.11
Domestically, the Obama administration designed an elaborate scheme of per-

formance standards for existing power plants, known as the Clean Power Plan. By
setting stringent emission performance standards, the plan was designed such that
the most polluting power stations (read: those using coal and fuel oil) could not op-
erate in the future. If implemented, the plan was expected to cement trends towards
increased use of renewables and natural gas. President Obama, acknowledging de-
clines of the domestic coal sector, started the Partnerships for Opportunity and
Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) Initiative, aimed at providing
federal support for the most affected communities.12 Obama-era executive branch
initiatives sought to accelerate energy efficiency gains in electricity and transport
⁹ https://www.climatescorecard.org/2018/05/congress-expands-and-increases-section-45q-tax-
credit-for-carbon-capture-and-storage/, accessed 15 July 2021.
1⁰ https://www.energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=DA38A2DF-6B31-4CFF-
91C1-E8D7A052650E, accessed 15 July 2021.
11 https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/23/remarks-president-un-climate-
change-summit, accessed 15 July 2021.
12 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/08/24/fact-sheet-administration-
announces-new-economic-and-workforce, accessed 15 July 2021.
sectors, increase administrative and judicial enforcement of regulatory violations

in the mining and power generation sectors, and advance a host of other small
climate-change related initiatives (Selin and VanDeveer, 2022; Kamieniecki and
Kraft, 2013):
Today, about 40 percent of America’s carbon pollution comes from our power
plants. There are no federal limits to the amount those plants can pump into the
air. None. We limit the amount of toxic chemicals like mercury, and sulfur, and
arsenic in our air and water, but power plants can dump as much carbon pollution
into our atmosphere as they want. It’s not smart, it’s not right, it’s not safe, and I
determined it needs to stop.13
While we lack a counterfactual case, anecdotal evidence suggests that the rise
of natural gas, declining renewables costs, and the decline of coal contributed
to the Obama administration’s push (with other international and domestic ac-
tors) to craft a global agreement on curtailing GHG emissions in Paris in 2015. In
other words, market dynamics created a more favourable environment for polit-
ical action, affording more opportunity to use international and domestic policy
to accelerate transitions away from the most-polluting fuels. Downie (2017) also
notes that influential private sector actors in the power sector became more di-
vided over the fate of US coal, helping to explain some patterns in US domestic
coal politics at the federal level.
The Obama administration also pushed multilateral banks to move out of coal
support and financing, including pressure within the World Bank and as part of
the development of OECD guidelines to stop export credits for the least efficient
power plants in 2015.1⁴ For private banks, decisions to abandon coal investments
are generally related corporate social responsibility, branding, and shareholder
activism. While Obama-era rhetoric may help shape agendas, shareholders are
usually in the driver’s seat in these cases, while advocates are in public relations
departments. In short, if a company’s footprint in coal is modest, stepping out and
announcing it officially can have benefits for branding and employee recruitment
that exceed the small costs. That said, a growing number of financial institutions
and insurance companies have made public announcements to leave coal financ-
ing, and some called others to do so. The Institute for Energy Economics and
Financial Analysis contends that the 100 global financial institutions that have cut
back on coal funding include 40% of the top 40 banks in the world, and at least
13 https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/25/remarks-president-league-
conservation-voters-capital-dinner, accessed 15 July 2021.
1⁴ http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/statement-from-participants-to-the-arrangement-on-officially-
supported-export-credits.htm, accessed 15 July 2021.
world on fire 259
20 globally significant insurers.1⁵ With growing emphasis in the financial sector

to better measure and disclose exposures of organizations to climate risk, we ex-
pect pressure on coal (and other fossil fuels) to continue to grow. However, while
Obama-era policies within multilateral organizations often sought curbs on coal
expansion, public ‘anti-coal’ rhetoric was generally rare, probably constrained by
the perceived domestic political costs of being framed as waging a ‘war on coal.’
In contrast, President Trump often explicitly rejected great power (i.e. ‘Amer-
ican’) responsibility in relation to climate change and aspects of global develop-
ment, health, human rights, and poverty alleviation. He often rejected the notion
that the US has a responsibility to curtail carbon and other GHG emissions, al-
though he did sometimes suggest that China or other international actors should
do more. His administration in fact operated under the premise that climate
change is a hoax, invented by various domestic and international opponents of
the US including scientists, US liberals, or the Chinese government. A wide range
of environmental rules were subject to roll back efforts. Some of the efforts suc-
cessfully reduced Obama era policies, while others remain tied up in legal battles
or were overturned by court rulings (Popovich et al., 2019). The Biden adminis-
tration is poised to push executive branch regulations back the other way, towards
reduced GHG emissions and increased energy efficiency.
Internationally, under the Trump administration the US announced its inten-
tion to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement, and discouraged and refused
to attend climate-related discussions, or to sign climate-change-related statements
in international forums such as the G7.1⁶ Trump administration officials gener-
ally appeared to have no clear policy or negotiating priorities at the 2017, 2018,
and 2019 UNFCCC Conference of the Parties meetings, although they supported
exhibits and side events touting the benefits of coal. On 4 November 2020, the
US formally withdrew from the Paris Agreement, only to have President Biden
announce on his first day in office in January 2021 that the country will rejoin.
After 107 days outside the global agreement, the US officially rejoined on 19
February 2021.
Pricing and the relative cost of resources can make taking and enacting respon-
sibility harder in some areas and easier in others. For President Obama, cheap
natural gas and increasingly competitive renewables offered windows of opportu-
nity. For Trump, it made his ‘pro-coal’ positions difficult to enact. The US, with its
recently unlocked abundance of natural gas, is one of the few countries in the world
with an opportunity to use the resource as a bridge towards a lower carbon econ-
omy. Despite short-term GHG emissions reduction benefits, important questions
1⁵ http://ieefa.org/ieefa-report-every-two-weeks-a-bank-insurer-or-lender-announces-new-coal-
restrictions/, accessed 15 July 2021.
1⁶ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10062018/g7-summit-climate-change-communique-
trump-allies-estranged-germany-france-canada, accessed 15 July 2021.
remain about the long-term compatibility of natural gas with an increasingly

carbon-constrained economy (Boersma, 2016; Bradshaw and Boersma, 2020).
In short, US coal extraction and use continues under severe market pressure,
regardless of continuing political rhetoric to the contrary. The sector’s overall out-
look is bleak, as domestic demand for the resource continues to dwindle, and
international demand is under pressure too, with a growing number of countries
designing policies to curtail coal usage in light of their commitments under the
Paris Agreement. Moreover, communities on the US west coast have so far fought
off project proposals to build new bulk coal export terminals there, deemed nec-
essary to make US coal more competitive in Asian markets.1⁷ This observation
illustrates the limits of the power and effectiveness of political leaders to shape
market forces as they choose. Furthermore, rhetorical acceptance of global re-
sponsibilities related to global climate change and energy poverty seem, at least
currently, to bifurcate along the partisan lines of US domestic politics. For the
time being, this suggests that US international climate change leadership and
willingness to accept and enact great power responsibilities related to coal and
climate change seem likely to remain subject to US electoral outcomes (Selin and
VanDeveer, 2021).
European Union (and Its Member States)
The self-declared global climate leader and front runner continues to have a
rather mixed record when it comes to coal use. Coal consumption has been de-
clining since 2005 (EEA, 2018), and that trend accelerated in 2019 (BP, 2020).
Serious contradictions in climate change and energy policy domains remain in
the EU, as climate policy goals are set at the EU level while many other aspects
of energy policy remain the purview of member states. Substantial differences
within and among EU member states have repeatedly limited the scope of EU-
level ambitions on coal use. Interestingly, there does not seem to be any kind
of simple function explaining domestic coal production and/or mining jobs and
communities. In general, great power responsibility is rhetorically accepted in EU
institutions and among member states, but member states manifest wide discrep-
ancies between that rhetoric and measurable action. In fact, even in rhetorical
terms member state differences may have grown rather than converged in recent
years. These rhetorical shifts are most visible in Poland and the Czech Republic,
even though with the emergence of policy debate about a ‘just transition’ the his-
torically staunch defence of domestic coal interests may slowly wane (Elkind and
Bednarz, 2020). In recent years, EU institutional actors have acknowledged that
1⁷ https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/q2Hx1wZ_dVFAH3Js
9jjsMw2, accessed 15 July 2021.
world on fire 261
coal is a long-term problem that needs addressing, and the European Commis-
sion initiated a process to help coal-dependent regions transition to other fuels.
This includes re-educating workers, reinvesting in coal producing communities,
and so on.
EU coal consumption, by volume, centres mostly around Germany and Poland,
with Germany consuming 71.3 Mtoe and Poland 48.7, together accounting
for over 50% of total EU consumption (BP, 2018: 39). The IEA (2018a) con-
cluded that coal markets showed a ‘tale of two Europes’, with western Europe
chiefly transitioning away from coal, while demand in central and eastern Eu-
rope remains stable. But traditional East–West geographical delineations may
give Germany too much credit. Given German coal consumption, it could be
explicitly treated as a global power in which action has not matched official
rhetoric.
Germany’s energy transition policy, called Energiewende, envisions the si-
multaneous phase-out of nuclear power and most fossil fuels while ramping
up renewable energy sources and energy efficiency. This policy is variously
touted as exceptional global leadership, or heavily criticized as costly and/or
ineffective. Germany is succeeding in ramping up the share of renewables in
its electricity mix (to as much as 46% in 2019)1⁸ far beyond levels deemed
possible by sceptics—and has done so with consistent majority support from
its population. But the country’s carbon emissions struggled to achieve mate-
rial declines over the last decade.1⁹ With the planned 2022 phase out of its
nuclear power plants, the country’s source of baseload carbon-free electricity,
it appears unlikely that Germany will reach its self-imposed carbon emissions
targets in the near term (though it will likely meet its less ambitious EU tar-
gets). German authorities made several attempts to set an end date for coal
burning. Several of those failed, but in 2018 the newly formed government of
Christian-Democrats and Social-Democrats established a commission to inves-
tigate a German coal phase out. In early 2019, this commission announced
its proposals. Starting with the closing of 12.5 GW of coal-fired capacity by
2022, German coal use could be phased out in steps by 2038. Regions most
affected by this decision would be compensated with up to 40 billion Euros
(WSB, 2019). In mid-2020 Germany’s coal phase out plans were finalized in law.
Merkel said that Germany will exit coal step-by-step, but must not move too
hastily.
1⁸ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-power-outputmix/renewable-energys-share-of
-german-power-mix-rose-to-46-last-year-research-group-idUSKBN1Z21K1, accessed 15 July 2021.
1⁹ https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-climate-
targets, accessed 15 July 2021.
Illustrative quote: ‘This would push whole regions into an unacceptable situation,’
Merkel said with reference to coal mining regions Lusatia and North Rhine-
Westphalia. ‘We must not alienate the people permanently.’ She jokingly called
on the audience: ‘You should show solidarity. One day, it will be your turn.’2⁰
Poland is a different story, where support for continued coal extraction and use
is strong among policymakers and publics. Yet Polish public opinion is increas-
ingly critical of poor air quality in cities—among the EU’s most polluted partly
because of continued reliance on coal. The Polish coal sector faces structural chal-
lenges, including being heavily indebted. Polish coal extraction costs are relatively
high—mines are generally deep and old—while global prices have been subdued
due to global oversupply. Productivity in Polish mines is reportedly almost six
times lower than those in the US.21 Poland will probably remain the EU’s last fron-
tier of coal production and consumption, and Polish companies (like those from
Greece), refused to sign the Eurelectric pledge not to build new coal-fired power
stations after 2020.22 The country’s long-term energy strategy envisions continued
coal burning, expanded nuclear energy, and more offshore wind over time. Unlike
the German government, Polish authorities have not pledged to be frontrunners
to combat climate change. In fact, Poland has long been among the least ambitious
EU members when it comes to GHG emissions reductions, consistently question-
ing the need for greater ambition. In the end, Polish leaders agreed to support
the EU Green Deal and its objective to curtail GHG emissions by 55% as soon as
2030.23
Morawiecki also said that the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm,
should be more willing to understand Poland’s stance when it came to energy
dependency and its use of fossil fuels like coal. He said officials should recognize
its history as a satellite state of the Soviet Union where it wasn’t able to develop
modern energy systems.2⁴
Until recently, Greece was fervent lignite user, but in terms of volumes it matters
less than Poland. Moreover, in 2019, and surprising many, the country announced
2⁰ https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/merkel-calls-precise-2050-co2-target-rwe-forecasts-
profit-rise/merkel-germany-must-soon-decide-whether-aim-80-or-95-percent-co2-reduction-2050,
21 https://www.politico.eu/article/poland-duda-szydlo-coal-emissions-pollution-cop21/, accessed
15 July 2021.
22 https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/the-end-of-coal-eu-energy-companies-
pledge-no-new-plants-from-2020/, accessed 15 July 2021.
23 https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/2021-another-decisive-year-for-
europes-climate-ambitions/, accessed 15 July 2021.
2⁴ https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/poland-prime-minister-accuses-the-eu-of-discrimination.
html, accessed 15 July 2021.
world on fire 263
it plans to phase out coal by 2028, being the first Balkan country to do so.2⁵ Several
other Central and Eastern European member states use coal at rates higher than
the EU average for electricity generation, but they have not declared themselves
champions of coal, though Czech investor EPH did agree to buy loss-making lig-
nite mines and associated power plants in Germany from Swedish Vattenfall in
2016.2⁶
Spain has a significant, declining, and heavily subsidized domestic coal indus-
try. In late 2018 Spanish authorities announced a plan to phase out coal mining
and coal consumption in the decade ahead, sending miners into early retirement
or retraining them for other jobs.2⁷ Spain is among the EU member states re-
cently announcing planned phase-outs of coal—as one might expect from states
taking responsibility. Belgium actually realized that ambition in 2016. To date, 11
EU member states—plus one former member—have announced phase-out target
dates. In addition to Spain and Belgium, these include Austria (2025), Denmark
(2030), Finland (2030), France (2021), Ireland (2025), Italy (2025), the Nether-
lands (2030), Portugal (2023), Sweden (2022), and the United Kingdom (2025).
As evidence that the list and target dates are subject to change, Spain and the
Netherlands were not on the list in 2018. In the spring of 2020 both Sweden and
Austria closed their last coal-fired power plant ahead of schedule.2⁸ In addition,
once official dates are announced, these may be subject to continued negotiation.
While some states may extend the coal use timeline, others’ phase-out dates can
be made more ambitious—as in Portugal, Sweden, and Denmark, for example.
This phase-out list, and the fact that it has been growing and growing more am-
bitious over the last three to four years suggest the possible emergence of a new
‘coal phase out norm’ associated with responsible climate change policymaking.
Further evidence for an emergent EU coal phase out norm was on display in late
2019, when the leaders of three more member states announced they would push
their countries towards phase-out dates: Greece (2028), Hungary (2030), and Slo-
vakia (2023). Greek and Hungarian officials made these announcements at the
UNFCCC COP25 in New York.
The UK—a now former member of the EU—has been among the most proactive
regarding policies aimed to reduce coal use, unilaterally installing a carbon price
floor of about £18, offering compensation to the remaining coal users, and thereby
effectively shutting them down. The result is a steady decline in carbon emissions,
making the UK one of the few EU countries to accomplish this in recent years.
2⁵ https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/413274-greece-is-first-balkan-country-to-announce-a-coal-
phase-out-date-the-revolution-has-already-s, accessed 15 July 2021.
2⁶ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vattenfall-germany-lignite-idUSKCN0XF1DV, accessed 15
July 2021.
2⁷ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/26/spain-to-close-most-coal-mines-after-
striking-250m-deal, accessed 15 July 2021.
2⁸ https://reneweconomy.com.au/sweden-exits-coal-two-years-ahead-of-schedule-austria-closes-
last-coal-plant-37319/, accessed 15 July 2021.
On the other hand, the UK offers as many negative lessons as positive ones with
respect to managing the transition of coal miners and coal communities. It is dif-
ficult to understate the impacts of coal’s decline—some would say destruction—in
UK politics over the past 40 years. The UK also illustrates that many non-climate
and non-environmental factors explain coal politics and outcomes over time, even
though climate and environmental factors gained importance in recent years.
As is widely known, the achievement of EU-wide GHG emissions reduction
targets has been heavily dependent on overcompliance by a handful of member
states rather than uniform reduction efforts across all member states (Selin and
VanDeveer, 2015). Certainly, EU officials and institutions (and a number of deeply
engaged member states) have continued their long-standing efforts to advance in-
cremental policy improvements at the global level via the UNFCCC process. In
fact, it is hard to see how the Paris Accord could or would exist without the pre-
ceding years of European commitment to the UNFCCC process specifically, and
to global multilateralism in general.
While the US may be faulted for its attempts to increase coal exports, when it
comes to abdicating coal-related responsibilities, the EU raises more concern re-
lated to coal imports. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one major source of imported coal is
the US. Another is Russia, which is interesting from the perspective of the broader
geopolitical and energy security discourse surrounding Russian natural gas im-
ports to EU member states (Boersma, 2015; Bradshaw and Boersma, 2020). While
European natural gas dependence on Russia produces high levels of concern—and
highly politicized rhetoric—inside the EU, dependence on Russian coal (or oil, or
uranium) is hardly mentioned.
To summarize the EU case, the rhetoric of global great power responsibility
around climate change and energy poverty—and sometimes around coal—is often
explicit, committed, and enthusiastic. However, political and institutional real-
ities and costs at both the EU and member-state levels have complicated goal
setting, policy action, and implementation. Associated environmental policies
like nuclear phase-out decisions in some member states illustrate that not all
impediments to climate change and energy poverty action emerge from propo-
nents of continued coal use. To illustrate the complexity, the German nuclear
phase-out has made ambitious GHG goals much harder to achieve, while Span-
ish policymakers recently announced that they would postpone their country’s
previously announced nuclear power phase-out to enable a more rapid exit out of
coal. Lastly, domestic activists’ and shareholders’ increasingly successful calls for
explicit coal phase-out deadlines and implementation policies provides perhaps
the clearest evidence that normative change directly connected to responsible ac-
tion vis-à-vis coal extraction and consumption may be taking hold in much of
the EU.
world on fire 265
China
Since 2015 global coal consumption has continued its shift to Asia, as the IEA
(2018a) observes the emergence of two worlds: one with coal-fired power gen-
eration, and one without. This development likely makes it harder to reach
global agreement to curtail coal use. As an example, the United Kingdom and
Canada launched the Powering Past Coal Alliance in 2017, which by mid-2020
included 33 countries and dozens of subnational governments and businesses
committed to phasing out coal before 2030. However, coal use in countries
joining this alliance constitutes around 2% of global consumption. In contrast,
after decades of rapid expansion of coal-based electricity generation, China
is the largest coal producer and consumer in the world—burning about half
the coal consumed globally each year. In recent years, however, the Chinese
state has embarked on ambitious policies, plans, and goals to improve air qual-
ity, change its national fuel mix, and accelerate its development, deployment,
and export of low-carbon technologies (Lewis and Gallagher, 2020; Gallagher,
2006, 2014; Economy, 2004; Lewis, 2013; Shapiro, 2012; Helveston and Nahm,
2019; Nahm, 2019). As many analysts have noted, these changes are happening
within a broadly dynamic environmental policy and politics context in China,
at local, regional, and national levels (Hathaway, 2013; Lora-Wainwright, 2017;
Stern, 2013; Nahm, 2019). Such changes also characterize aspects of Chinese
climate and energy policies in the UNFCCC and other global forums, and in
the state’s bilateral relationships with the US and the EU (Lewis and Gallagher,
2020).
Probably the most immediate and direct reasons for these policy turns are dete-
riorating air quality and the rising public health and political impacts of severe air
pollution. For example, some studies estimated life expectancy in China’s north-
eastern provinces was 5.5 years lower as a result of air pollution (Chen et al., 2013).
When air quality problems became so profound that ignoring them was no longer
possible, and with continued economic development the calls for better air qual-
ity became louder, Chinese leaders took action under so-called Blue Skies policies
that prioritize clean air and thus constrain coal use in certain parts of the en-
ergy economy, with global implications. This shift corresponds with a growing
awareness that climate change impacts are already appearing, and likely to be quite
severe, in several regions of the country. Next to positive impacts on health con-
ditions, other benefits of adopting a low carbon strategy that have been cited are
energy security (less dependence on imports of fossil fuels) and industrial and
technological modernization (attractive, for instance, with an eye to job creation)
(Engels, 2018).
In 2016 the Chinese government slashed domestic coal production, in part by

curtailing the workweek for miners from seven to five days.2⁹ Global coal prices,
which had been low for several years, rose as Chinese buyers imported more coal.
Chinese officials began closing old mines and launched an active campaign to re-
duce the share of coal in parts of its energy economy, such as residential heating
and industrial uses. In these sectors an ambitious plan to expand the share of natu-
ral gas was rolled out, leading to double-digit gas demand growth in 2017. The IEA
(2019) notes that the closure of smaller and often inefficient mines should also be
seen as part of an ongoing industrial restructuring process, where more modern
mines, often in the west of the country, are opened instead.
Other parts of the Chinese energy economy may be more difficult to change.
The IEA (2018a) notes that coal’s fate chiefly depends on China’s electricity sector,
as one out of every four tons of coal consumed worldwide is used to generate elec-
tricity in China. Even though final investment decisions for new coal-fired power
generation capacity in China have slowed, the country has more than 1,000 GW
of capacity installed, most of it recently commissioned and comparatively effi-
cient (IEA, 2019). Moreover, there are plans to electrify additional parts of the
country’s energy economy, like transportation, which would increase electricity
demand—potentially increasing demand for coal. In 2017, after three years of
declining coal consumption, China saw consumption rise by 10 million tons to
3,664 million tons (or 48% of global consumption) as demand for coal in elec-
tricity generation rose. This has more than offset the losses in residential and
industrial heating, where large volumes of coal consumption were displaced by
natural gas. In sum, Chinese policymakers are demonstrably grappling with air
pollution challenges and attempting to cut the use of the most polluting fuels
in some sectors. Broadly speaking, this has resulted in a stabilization of China’s
coal consumption in the 2011–2019 period (BP, 2020: 47), not an identifiable
decline.
More work is needed to assess the net impacts of these domestic policies. Under
the state’s high profile ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI), China exports labour, capi-
tal, and equipment to developing countries, including by developing and financing
local coal mining projects and new coal-fired power plants.3⁰ While the BRI is
touted as ‘green’ by national leaders, available data paint a more mixed picture. Of
the 399 GW of coal-fired electricity generation capacity under development out-
side of China, over one quarter has committed or offered funding from Chinese
financial institutions or corporations. Despite signals from the Chinese govern-
ment that it will restrict coal lending, some analysts increasingly see Chinese banks
2⁹ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal/china-cuts-working-hours-for-coal-miners-in-
bid-to-tackle-supply-glut-idUSKCN0XF1I9, accessed 15 July 2021.
3⁰ See https://www.bu.edu/gdp/files/2018/11/GDP-and-WRI-BRI-MovingtheGreenbelt.pdf,
world on fire 267
as lenders of last resort.31 In 2019 investment in coal supply (mining and transport
infrastructure) globally is estimated at $80 billion—half the investment peak in
201232—of which China accounts for more than half (IEA, 2019).
Given its scale, China will continue to be the world’s largest consumer and
producer of coal for the foreseeable future. The magnitude of its demand gives
Chinese authorities significant international political and economic leverage, as
evidenced by the escalating dispute with Australia, and the announced ban on Chi-
nese coal imports from that country. Ambitious Chinese domestic policy goals
may be difficult to implement and achieve, however. Though one might assume
that authoritarian regimes have consistent top-down implementation of climate
and environmental rules, Engels (2018) contends that internal contestation, frag-
mentation, and non-participation often make for a more complicated execution
process. Some Chinese policymakers have expressed understandable concern
about the impacts of decarbonization on the country’s coal producing regions.33
Interestingly, such concerns echo those heard in the US and the EU, with reference
to domestic and international climate change policies. Given its growing economic
and political importance in global politics, international investment patterns, and
many multilateral organizations, the importance of coal-related Chinese domestic
and foreign policies will also be present for decades.
Certainly, however, Chinese responsibility-taking rhetoric has changed sub-
stantially with regard to global climate change over the last decade—as evidenced
by its official statements and pledges at the 2015 Paris UNFCCC summit and sub-
sequent COPs. China now includes global responsibility rhetoric explicitly related
to climate change action. What has not changed in Chinese foreign policy is the
rhetoric associated with China’s commitment to solidarity with and responsibility
for the Global South (Najam 2020). In other words, while Chinese foreign policy
pronouncements have become more accepting of its global responsibility to slow
and then begin to reduce its national GHG emissions, its rhetoric is often quite
explicit about OECD responsibilities vis-à-vis the Global South. Also, the Chinese
state’s actions in third countries, for instance under the BRI, are the topic of ongo-
ing scrutiny and debate related to their GHG footprint and financial sustainability.
This raises interesting questions about the ways in which great powers interpret
or frame their responsibilities differently—and/or in comparative terms—around
a similar set of issues. Also worth noting is that BRI investments are becom-
ing more controversial and contested in receiving countries, as evidenced by
31 http://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/China-at-a-Crossroads_January-2019.pdf,
32 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/world/australia/china-coal-climate-change.
html#:~:text=China%20has%20now%20officially%20blocked,stranded%20huge%20ships%
20at%20sea, accessed 15 July 2021.
33 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-china-coal/china-coal-fired-power-capacity
-still-rising-bucking-global-trend-study-idUSKBN1XU07Y, accessed 15 July 2021.
recent announcements in Pakistan and the Philippines about not allowing new
investments in coal-fired electricity plants.3⁴
Comparator Cases, Briefly
As briefly summarized in Table 12.1, other major producers, consumers, exporters,

and importers of coal do not manifest substantial responsibility-taking in either
rhetoric or action. All four generally seek to maximize either export revenue
and/or expanding domestic production and consumption. Of the four—Australia,
India, Indonesia, and Russia—perhaps India has (recently) shown the greatest
willingness to rethink pro-coal economic development and energy poverty allevi-
ation strategies, as evidenced by growing engagement in the UNFCCC process and
increasing willingness to take on commitments to curb GHG emissions growth.
Whither Responsibility? What We Say, What We Do,

What It Costs
From the above analysis, we draw conclusions about great power responsibility
related to coal and climate change along three lines: (1) rhetorical acceptance of
responsibility, (2) politics and material actions to enact or implement responsibil-
ity, and (3) the relative and perceived costs of responsible rhetoric and action. In
all three areas, we see some general patterns across the three great power ‘cases,’
with some identifiable variance among the cases.
In terms of rhetorical acceptance of responsibility, EU rhetoric that explic-
itly accepts global climate-related—and more recently explicitly coal-related—
responsibility is both longest lasting and most consistent over time among the
three cases. It is important to acknowledge that, in politics and policymaking,
rhetoric matters and accepting responsibility rhetorically might well be a precon-
dition for more substantive and material policymaking and implementation. But it
also seems clear that rhetoric is no substitute for authoritative, adequately funded,
implemented, and enforced policymaking.
While there remains contestation about the nature and extent of responsibilities
among and within a few EU member states, few examples of wholesale rejection of
global responsibilities exist even from the minority of states expressing the most
scepticism about the pace or costs of EU climate and energy goals and policy
instruments. In official EU documents and statements, Europe’s responsibilities
to lead on climate have been oft repeated and reasonably consistent for most of
3⁴ https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/philippines-announces-moratorium-on-
new-coalfired-power.html#:~:text=On%2027%20October%2C%20the%20Philippines,
both%20environmental%20and%20reliability%20purposes, accessed 15 July 21.
Table 12.1 Coal trends and responsibility in Australia, India, Indonesia, and Russia
Country Coal Production and Consumption Great Power Responsibility?
Australia
• Coal production rose an average of 2.9 percent • Australian government continues to argue that revenues from coal
per annum over the last decade. exports (US$70 billion per year) are too important to Australia
• Modest and declining domestic consumption. and to importing countries to curb, citing need to alleviate energy
• Substantial exports, close to 30 percent of total poverty to answer for exports.
global coal export volumes • While the government also stresses meeting its very modest domestic
targets for GHG emissions reductions, such claims are questionable
given the gutting of its carbon pricing scheme and the absence of
climate change leadership.
India
• Indian coal production rose an average of 3.0% • Rhetorically and in policy actions, India has prioritized energy
per annum over the last decade. poverty alleviation and the responsibility of countries in the Global
• Domestic consumption rose in that same period North to make substantial GHG emissions cuts.
by 5.5% per annum, making India a major coal • Domestic coal long touted as an important energy source to fuel
importer as well. demand for energy
• Approximately half of the globe’s 850 million • Government announced in 2020 open bidding for potential coal
people with no access to energy live in India. projects, hoping to cut imports and become self-sufficient.
• Government has also made very substantial renewable energy com-
mitments and progress within the UNFCCC process and in 2019 was
just 2% short of meeting its pledged commitment for 2030 of hav-
ing 40% non-fossil fuel electricity capacity installed, which includes
renewables, large hydro and nuclear.
• India emerging as a global leader in renewable energy and
government plans put country on track to be compatible with 2°C.
Continued
Table 12.1 Continued
Country Coal Production and Consumption Great Power Responsibility?
Indonesia
• Indonesia more than doubled its coal produc- • Indonesian officials prioritize energy poverty alleviation and
tion over the last decade, with an average annual development.
growth rate of 8.8%. • Indonesia’s 2030 NDC target has been rated ‘highly insufficient’,
• Domestic consumption rose by 8.0% per annum although that outlook would improve if planned coal projects fail
since 2008. to materialize and are instead be replaced with low carbon energy
• Like Australia, Indonesia accounted for about sources.
30% of global coal exports in 2018 (much of it
exported to India)
Russia
• Domestic consumption has slowly declined since • Russia has nurtured its coal sector and exports, for decades. Govern-
2008, with an average of 1.5% per annum. ment goals continue to be explicitly in favour of continued expansion
• Russia has expanded coal production by an production and exports.
average 4.0% per year over the last ten years, in- • The Russian Federation’s decision to formally ratify the Paris Agree-
creasing exports to China, India, and Vietnam, ment was more symbolic than substantive, and its strategy to achieve
among others. GHG emissions reductions is generally regarded as weak and
insufficient.
Climatetracker.org proved helpful for assessing the state of these countries climate policies and commitments.
world on fire 271
the last three decades. Official statements regarding China’s global responsibili-
ties vis-à-vis climate change have changed quite substantially, in some ways, over
the last 30 years. Chinese rhetoric shifts rather dramatically over the last 10 to
15 years, from fairly explicit rejection of global climate and coal-related responsi-
bilities to clear and reasonably consistent rhetorical acceptance. This acceptance
usually includes an important caveat, arguing that the Global North must act first
and faster, because of its greater historical responsibility (and often higher per
capita emissions). Lastly, it perhaps comes as little surprise that US rhetoric is both
the most inconsistent since the 1990s and most explicitly responsibility-rejecting
in the post-Paris Accord era under the Trump administration. Official presidential
administration rhetoric is consistently responsibility-accepting during the Clinton
and Obama eras, considerably more mixed and contradictory during the George
W. Bush administration, and most explicitly responsibility-rejecting during the
Trump administration’s ‘American First,’ ‘energy dominance’, and ‘pro-coal’ dis-
courses. The Biden administration has returned responsibility-accepting rhetoric
to the White House. While beyond the scope of this paper, however, the ex-
tensive climate change policymaking within some US states—including several
announced state-level coal phase-out dates—suggest that some areas of the feder-
alist country are more inclined towards responsibility acceptance and action than
their national government (Selin and VanDeveer, 2021).
Regarding implementing and enacting responsibility, all three great power cases
yield rather mixed records—at best—with not terribly impressive or consistent
results over the last 20 years. While the EU and several of its member states re-
main climate change policy and clean energy leaders, compared to most states,
coal and climate change policy goals remain decidedly modest compared to both
EU rhetoric and contemporary understandings of the climate threat. Furthermore,
despite self-declared climate and clean air leadership, the EU does not have a coal
phase-out goal, though European private and public financing organizations are
discouraging coal-related investments inside and outside the EU. Given mem-
ber state divisions on coal issues, explicit ‘anti-coal’ policies like a pan-European
phase-out deadline seem unlikely in the near term. By 2020 over half of the
member states had announced coal phase-out dates. While some announced coal
phase-outs are largely symbolic, like France’s, Germany’s recent policy processes
are moving Europe’s largest coal consumer into the phase out camp. While Ger-
many’s rhetorical ambitions on climate and energy policy are constrained by both
its anti-nuclear policies and the continuing if waning influence of regionalized
coal interests, a coal phase out looks likely in the next 15 years. Poland’s increas-
ing scepticism and hostility to EU energy and air pollution policies, meanwhile,
are rooted explicitly in a desire to continue domestic coal mining and use. While
one might expect a coming EU clash between those wants to put global respon-
sibility into more concerted and aggressive actions to mitigate GHG emissions
and end coal burning, and those determined to delay such actions indefinitely,
it also seems possible that wealthier member states could agree to compensate less
wealthy ones for some costs associated with reductions in GHG emissions and coal
consumption.
The US case sees extremely modest and weak domestic, national policy devel-
opment and the Trump administration’s overt support for more coal extraction,
exports, and consumption. The extreme variance among US states on climate pol-
icy development and emissions trajectories illustrates the high level of contention
in US politics around climate and energy politics. So too does the increased climate
change activism in US politics in recent years. Emissions reductions in the electric-
ity sector were substantially realized by the coal-to-gas switch, as a consequence
cheap gas, growth in renewables driven in part by their falling price points—all
a function of a combination of policy supports increasing price competitiveness.
These developments helped raise ambition levels under the Obama administra-
tion, but are also equally used by the oil and gas sector as arguments to produce
more oil and gas. The Biden administration brings the loftiest national climate
change policy ambitions ever in a US government, but actions remain much harder
than words. In the China case, one also sees a high level of domestic and interna-
tional inconsistency of action and modest domestic accomplishments. While shifts
on climate and energy policy goals are clear rhetorically and in some areas of do-
mestic policy, foreign policies and investments push in the opposite direction on
coal and GHG emissions. As in the US and the EU, domestic politics and interests
are clearer policy drivers for domestic and international action than are foreign
policy rhetoric and goals.
Finally, as related to the costs of responsibility, in all three cases we see ev-
idence that rhetorical acceptance of responsibility—and more clearly enacting
responsibility—is closely associated with the costs (and perceived costs) of actions
needed to enact responsibility. As replacements for coal-fired electricity—natural
gas, solar, and wind—have come down in price compared to coal, we see both
stronger anti-coal rhetoric and (some) stronger goals and enacted policies regard-
ing coal, emissions from coal burning, and replacements for coal use. For example,
the growing list of US states and EU member states willing to publicly declare coal
phase-out deadlines corresponds to the rapid drop in prices for the alternatives
over the last two to four years. These drops in costs are often used as justifications
for the announced deadlines, in fact. And examples like the French and the Ore-
gon coal phase-outs are pretty ‘cheap signals,’ given the extremely low levels of coal
remaining in their grids. Conversely, where the perceived economic and political
costs of coal phase out remain high, declared and enacted anti-coal policies of-
ten fall well short of rhetoric (e.g. Germany, parts of Central and Eastern Europe,
and some coal-mining and coal-using US states). We see only a few modest exam-
ples of greater willingness to take on political or economic sacrifices, for example
Spain’s announced coal phase out, accompanied by an extension of nuclear power’s
phase-out in the country.
world on fire 273
For the three global or great powers, we find quite modest coal-explicit goals.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find short-term political gains often crowding out
longer-term leadership. We also find a number of discourses based more on fan-
tasy or symbolism than on facts, especially when it comes to protecting coal jobs at
all cost in the US, or Poland, for example. More ‘realistic’ narratives that favour the
protection of coal in the short and medium term (Germany), and industry promo-
tion abroad (US, China, Japan) remain common. One is not left overly impressed
with the actions of nominally responsible great powers—at least to date, though
progress is observed in some European states. On the more positive side, modest
attempts at global public goods provision around political institutions related to
the IEA, the UNFCCC, and the Minamata Convention (Selin and Selin, 2020) are
identifiable. But the impacts of these institutions remain modest in comparison to
other aspects of coal-related domestic and foreign policies of the great powers.
In many middle-income higher-growth developing countries, the ‘good’ news
is that air quality concerns continue to drive policy efforts, but are likely driven
more by domestic politics than by globally framed great power responsibility. Also
the UNFCCC/Paris Agreement (and the science upon which the politics partially
rests) may be signalling that the future is carbon-constrained. Chinese efforts to
reduce coal use for residential and industrial heating in parts of the country are
the best and most recent example, and their shift has very meaningful and tan-
gible results (in the form of ‘more blue-sky days’). Arguments about the need to
alleviate energy poverty with coal appear to be commonly invoked by exporters,
including the US, Australia, and Russia—as well as by comparatively poorer coal-
consuming countries such as India and Indonesia. While energy poverty concerns
are understandable among the latter countries, they appear less sincere and more
irresponsible among the former. Furthermore, none of the coal exporters appear to
have made serious attempts either to reduce the global externalities of their exports
or to dramatically reduce their domestic consumption to compensate for their ex-
ports. Our analysis also shows that, of the major Asian economies considered in
this chapter, only India can credibly claim that it is pursuing an all-of-the-above
energy strategy to help lift hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty. While
concerns about the major role that coal plays in that effort are understandable, it
is important to note that the country has also emerged as a global leader in re-
newable energy and is amongst the very few countries in the world where policies
and emissions reduction targets are roughly in line with a 2°C world. Countries
like Indonesia and China cannot now make similar claims and are still betting
big on coal, while countries like Australia and Russia show few signs of serious
commitment to reducing GHG emissions at home or abroad.
Few analysts seem to believe that coal has a bright long-term future, as investors
shy away, regulations becoming more stringent, and research and development
investments in carbon capture and storage technologies remain extremely mod-
est. Strong acceptance of great power responsibility would necessitate more rapid
declines in coal production, trade, and consumption—probably in conjunction

with assistance and support transitions to cleaner sources of power. Because en-
ergy demand growth is heavily concentrated in developing countries, such policies
and initiatives will be critical to avoid more long-term lock-in of carbon-intensive
infrastructure. Nevertheless, contemporary coal politics and responsibility sug-
gest that things do not look good for the UNFCCC and international community’s
two-degree target.
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PA RT IV
CONCLUSIONS
13
Great Powers, Climate Change, and Global
Responsibilities: A Concluding Assessment
Climate change is one of the central global challenges of the twenty-first century.
To prevent the devastating consequences for human societies that runaway global
warming would cause, international society needs to act decisively to bring green-
house gas (GHG) emissions down to ‘net zero’ as soon as possible. In some sense,
this is a global problem that requires internationally coordinated action by many
actors, within the multilateral framework of the UN climate regime. Keeping fu-
ture global warming below 2°C, the internationally agreed temperature target of
the 2015 Paris Agreement, can only be achieved if all nations work together to set
the global economy on a path towards decarbonization. In other words, if we are
to solve the climate conundrum, international society needs an ‘all hands on deck’
approach.
Viewed from another angle, however, climate change also involves profound in-
ternational inequalities in terms of the responsibility for causing the problem and
the ability to find an effective solution. As the contributions to this volume have
demonstrated, a small number of mostly economically advanced, populous, and
powerful countries have been the driving force behind man-made global warm-
ing. They also control most of the economic and technological capabilities that will
be critical to enabling the global net zero transition. In the past, most of this cli-
mate responsibility and capability was concentrated in the hands of a few, mostly
Western, industrialized countries (US, Japan, Germany, France, UK, Russia). More
recently, globalization and the dispersion of industrial technology have also turned
a handful of emerging economies (China, India, Brazil) into significant climate
powers, in the sense of both current responsibilities for large GHG emissions and
growing capabilities to contribute towards the net zero goal. Taken together, these
powers’ future decisions and actions will largely determine whether the world can
avert a climate catastrophe. Climate change is a truly global crisis in terms of its
consequences, but in terms of its mitigation, a small number of major climate
powers hold the fate of the planet in their hands.
The sharp contrast between the universal ecological threat and the concen-
tration of climate-related responsibilities and capabilities in a small group of
Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan, Great Powers, Climate Change, and Global Responsibilities: A Concluding Assessment.
In: Great Powers, Climate Change, and Global Environmental Responsibilities. Edited by Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan,
Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press (2022). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866022.003.0013
environmental powers raises important questions for International Relations (IR)

scholars and analysts of climate politics. The contributions to this volume have
sought to address these:
• How should we think of notions of power and power asymmetry in the field
of global environmental politics?
• What countries count as great powers in the environmental field?
• What responsibilities come with the status of an environmental great power?
Furthermore, what role does international power asymmetry play in the
international politics of climate change? Have the countries that are most
responsible for causing man-made global warming also accepted special
responsibilities for addressing the global climate problem? And to what ex-
tent has the inequality of power and climate responsibility translated into a
corresponding system of great power responsibility and management?
The contributors to this volume have examined the specific role played by the
world’s leading climate powers—the US, China, European Union, Brazil, India,
and Russia. They have explored the (incomplete) securitization of climate change
in the context of the UN Security Council (UNSC) and the relationship between
notions of great power responsibility and leadership. And they have explored the
role of great powers in other environmental regimes as well as in the area of global
coal politics. It would go beyond the scope of this concluding chapter to sum up
all the main findings of the 11 individual contributions. Instead, we seek to bring
together some of the main insights that this volume has generated on three central
questions:
1. What makes countries environmental powers, and indeed environmental

great powers, and to what extent have these countries provided international
leadership for global environmental cooperation?
2. Have the main environmental powers accepted special responsibilities for
climate change that are commensurate with their powerful position in global
environmental politics (GEP)?
3. To what extent has climate change been securitized at the international level,
and thus become a concern for great power management (GPM), and the
maintenance of international order and stability in international society?
Environmental Great Powers
Do some countries count as environmental great powers, and have these coun-
tries provided international leadership for global environmental and climate
cooperation?
great powers, climate change, and global responsibilities 281
GEP, much like other global issue-areas, is characterized by profound

international power inequalities. Power in GEP is a function of the impact,
both positive and negative, that countries have on global environmental quality
and their capacity to act for or against the interest of global environmental
protection. In Chapter 2, we distinguished between negative and positive uses of
environmental power in international relations: the former refers to a country’s
control over a significant share of global ecosystems or resources and their ability
to produce environmental harm, while the latter signifies a country’s ability to
advance global environmental protection or promote international environmen-
tal cooperation. Environmental power is a neutral concept, though the balance
between negative and positive uses of environmental power determines how a
specific country’s environmental power and conduct is viewed by other members
of international society.
The contributors to this volume examined the leading group of environmental
great powers, both conventional and emerging, and the power they possess
in the environmental field. The contributions revealed just how significant
these countries’ contribution has been to global environmental degradation. Be-
cause of the large size of their population and economy, some countries can
count as systemically important in GEP across a wide range of environmental
sectors. This is the case with the US, a global power with a histori-
cally oversized ecological footprint, and China, an emerging global power
with rapidly growing pollution levels and a hunger for natural resources
(see chapters by Eckersley and by Yeophantong and Goh). Other major powers
may not compare with the US and China’s global ecological footprint but control
vital large-scale ecosystems of regional and global significance (e.g. Brazil’s Ama-
zonian rainforest and biodiversity hotspots in India; see chapters by Hochstetler
and by Prys-Hansen). Taken together, a small number of major powers exert
a dominant influence on the global use of natural resources and transbound-
ary pollution levels. For example, when it comes to the global supply of coal,
one of the most potent sources of GHG emissions, just five countries con-
trol over three quarters of currently proven reserves (see chapter by VanDe-
veer and Boersma). Ten countries alone cause over two-thirds of the current
GHG emissions. Undoubtedly, the ability to imperil the future of the planet is
heavily concentrated in the hands of a small number of major environmental
powers.
When it comes to the positive use of environmental power and the
capacity to promote global environmental solutions, we also find that some coun-
tries matter more than others. Indeed, on many global issues, only a small number
of countries have the ability to provide leadership across a wide range of envi-
ronmental issues. As Park notes in Chapter 11, environmental great powers have
been at the forefront of creating multilateral environmental agreements, yet none
of them have provided consistent international leadership, whether individually
or collectively. Instead, individual powers have alternated between being leaders

and laggards, or swing states and brokers, in international negotiations. Other
contributors also demonstrate that many environmental great powers’ record
on international leadership is patchy at best. The US is widely considered to
have been a pivotal actor in creating the international environmental agenda
in the 1970s and 1980s but has more recently retreated from international en-
vironmental leadership, especially in the climate regime. Eckersley (Chapter 3)
moderates this widespread perception of a decline in US leadership, pointing to
important continuities in US foreign environmental policy: successive US ad-
ministrations have consistently prioritized economic competitiveness over global
environmental protection, while the US Senate has been steadfast in its refusal to
accept an expansive interpretation of developed countries’ special environmen-
tal responsibility. Biedenkopf, Dupont, and Torney (Chapter 5) argue that the
EU has emerged as an important environmental great power and has achieved
some international recognition for its positive role in international forums. Ironi-
cally, however, the EU’s environmental success in reducing its global ecological
footprint has also diminished its negative environmental power, thereby un-
dercutting its influence in international environmental negotiations. Russia, a
country with vast natural resources, has only reluctantly embraced its global
environmental responsibilities. Having failed to gain international recognition
for the reduction in GHG emissions that came with its economic breakdown
in the 1990s, Russia has subsequently taken a more passive role in the climate
regime and prioritized national economic over global environmental priorities
(see chapter by Averchenkova).
Emerging powers in the Global South have only recently faced growing
demands to take on greater environmental responsibilities. This is especially so in
the climate regime, where their rapidly rising GHG emissions have propelled them
into a more prominent and powerful position. By forming the BASIC negotiat-
ing group at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, China, India, and Brazil
(together with South Africa) signalled their preparedness as major emitters to con-
sider taking on greater responsibilities. Yet, in one way or another, all three have
continued to defend their developing country status within the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) regime that affords them
greater flexibility in meeting the global mitigation challenge (see chapters by
Hochstetler and by Prys-Hansen). China has arguably moved furthest in accepting
some special climate responsibilities, particularly in the context of its self-portrayal
as a responsible great power. However, given its continued defence of North-South
differentiation in climate politics, while it is definitely an environmental great
power, as Yeophantong and Goh argue (Chapter 4), China can only be considered
a partially responsible one.
Great Powers and Special Environmental Responsibilities
Have the main environmental great powers accepted special responsibilities for
climate change that are commensurate with their prominent position in GEP? The
expectation that great powers should take on special responsibilities for managing
peace and security in international society is well established in international rela-
tions. After the Second World War, the Allied powers created a new international
security order in which the five permanent powers (P5) of the UNSC were tasked
with maintaining international order and stability. The Bretton Woods system also
established a special responsibility for leading economies to maintain interna-
tional monetary stability through the IMF and support post-war reconstruction
and later economic development through the World Bank. In both cases, great
powers took on special responsibilities for international security and economic
management in exchange for a privileged position in these international insti-
tutions. The P5 were given a veto right over any decision by the UNSC, thereby
protecting their own and their allies’ special interests, and the IMF and World
Bank both operate on the basis of weighted decision-making that reflects mem-
ber states’ economic size and financial contributions. Traditional GPM has thus
relied on a system of special rights and responsibilities that are closely linked
in order to both incentivize great powers and legitimate institutionalized power
inequality.
As the contributions to this volume have shown, no such system of intercon-
nected great power rights and responsibilities ever came into existence for climate
change. The major environmental powers have accepted the need for them to carry
a higher climate mitigation burden, but this responsibility applies collectively to
all industrialized countries, and not just the small group of major emitters. In line
with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), which
is at the heart of the 1992 Rio Declaration, the UNFCCC regime adopted the
same North-South division in allocating global responsibilities that can be found
in most other international environmental regimes (see chapter by Park). Accord-
ing to the CBDR norm, developed economies are expected to be the first to reduce
GHG emissions and to help developing countries with their own climate change
mitigation and adaptation challenge.
Given that a small number of major emitters have played an oversized role in
causing the global climate problem, it is at least conceivable for a GPM approach
to be constructed in which these climate powers accept special responsibilities
for managing the climate threat. However, the usual incentives for taking on
such managerial responsibility—a set of special rights and privileges to balance
special responsibilities—are difficult to construct in the climate area. For one, gain-
ing a privileged position or even a veto right in international decision-making
would be poor compensation for taking on a special climate mitigation burden.
Furthermore, creating a great power club at the heart of the international climate
regime would face significant legitimacy concerns. Developing countries, the main
victims of rising temperatures, have been highly critical of the lack of climate ac-
tion among leading emitters and have routinely rejected any move towards a more
minilateral management approach in the UNFCCC.
As the contributions to this volume have also demonstrated, the main climate
powers have never managed to develop a common understanding of their shared
special responsibilities. Of all major emitters in the Global North, the EU has been
most sympathetic towards the idea of taking on an additional mitigation bur-
den and supporting developing countries financially (see chapter by Biedenkopf,
Dupont, and Torney). The US has faced repeated calls to accept ‘extra-special
responsibilities’ due to its particularly large historical emissions, but has been
more resistant to an expansive interpretation of the CBDR norm. Various US ad-
ministrations were also at the forefront of arguing that the future emissions of
emerging economies ought to be given greater weight in allocating the mitigation
burden (see chapter by Eckersley). Russia tried to claim international environmen-
tal leadership, and thus cement its claim to great power status, by playing up the
early reductions in GHG emissions that accompanied the implosion of the Soviet
Union. However, this line did not gain much traction internationally, and Russia’s
growing reliance on fossil fuel exports and national economic interests eventually
came to dominate its approach to climate mitigation, leading to a more passive
role in the UNFCCC (see chapter by Averchenkova).
In the Global South, most climate powers have sought to defend their status as
developing countries within the climate regime against greater pressure to take on
special responsibilities in line with their rising emissions profile. India has been
most resistant to accepting greater climate responsibility for itself (see chapter by
Prys-Hansen). By contrast, China, which became the world’s leading emitter in
2006 and has sought to project a responsible great power image, has signalled
greater willingness to take on special climate responsibilities, particularly in the
context of US-Chinese great power relations. However, it has struggled to recon-
cile its dual self-image as a developing country and as a great power (see chapter by
Yeophantong and Goh). Brazil has also displayed some aspiration to take a climate
leadership role, particularly in the run-up to the Paris Agreement, but has since
retreated from a proactive position that would connect its emerging power status
with commensurate positive environmental action (see chapter by Hochstetler).
It is thus clear that the leading GHG emitters have failed to develop a com-
mon position on their special international duties as environmental great powers.
Faced with a situation that offers special responsibilities but few compensating spe-
cial rights and privileges, a GPM approach to climate change has proved elusive.
If anything, the Paris Agreement’s shift towards voluntary and nationally deter-
mined mitigation contributions signals great powers’ refusal to take on any formal
managerial role for the global climate. Their insistence on maximum flexibility in
delivering their emission pledges shows their determination to prioritize national

sovereignty over global planetary responsibility.
At the same time, however, the discourse of great power responsibility for the
global climate has not gone away, in fact it has resurfaced not least in the con-
text of emerging powers’ rise to economic and environmental prominence. As the
contributions to this volume show, China, India, and Brazil have at various points
had to confront international expectations that they make a greater contribution
to international mitigation efforts in line with their rising ecological footprint. This
has introduced a certain degree of uncertainty into the existing distribution of spe-
cial climate responsibilities, beginning to call into question the UNFCCC’s strict
division of responsibilities along North-South lines. As the global power balance
in GEP has shifted, the attribution of special responsibilities and their recognition
by the powers concerned is thus becoming more fluid. This is most clearly the case
in China. In response to growing external expectations for climate leadership, the
country has repeatedly included climate change in its responsible power discourse
and even claimed to be offering international climate leadership at a time when
the US temporarily withdrew from the Paris Agreement under President Trump.
However, the Chinese leadership has been careful not to dilute the North-South
division of responsibilities too much. In India and Brazil, where great power as-
piration and climate responsibility have also entered national discourses, national
elites have similarly defended their developing country status to avoid a further
weakening of the CBDR norm. There is not much difference in the irresponsible
behaviour of the environmental great powers, whether they are traditional great
powers or emerging ones. Thus, even though a formalized system of GPM re-
mains out of reach, great power responsibility very much remains on the agenda
of international climate politics.
Securitizing Climate Change
Despite growing calls for the major climate powers to take on greater respon-
sibility for the global environment, the gap between their historical culpability
and acceptance of special responsibilities has hardly narrowed. Great powers do
not see climate change as a systemic threat to international order, not least be-
cause climate change has not been fully securitized (see chapters by Scott and by
Kopra). To be sure, climate securitization moves have been underway at least since
the late 1980s, involving an expanding number of political and military organiza-
tions, including in some of the leading climate powers. Such securitization efforts
have engaged both national security and human security framings, with the for-
mer identifying global warming as a source of international conflict and the latter
focusing on its deleterious effects on the livelihoods of communities and individ-
uals. Some notable progress has been made in this debate, as a large majority of
countries now include climate change as part of their national security planning.
However, none of the existing securitization moves have produced the kind of
political response that would trigger emergency responses to avert further global
warming, be it at national or international level. Since, as we argued in Chapter 2,
securitization is the key to engaging and legitimizing GPM, this failure could prove
critical. So far, successful securitization has been effectively blocked by the di-
vided interests affecting most environmental great powers, whether as developing
countries, or as big fossil fuel users and/or exporters. The perception of threat
from climate change has not yet risen far enough to outweigh these conflicting
interests.
This is not to suggest that the situation could not change in future years. As
Scott notes in her contribution (Chapter 9), the UNSC has debated the security
implications of climate change with increasing frequency. The first such debate
happened in 2007, and the UNSC has considered climate change again in 2011,
2018, 2019, and 2021. Small island developing countries, whose very survival is
at risk from rising sea levels, have been particularly keen to push this agenda. At
least some of the major climate powers have endorsed such moves to engage the
UNSC in international climate action, most notably the European Union. The US
has been more lukewarm, oscillating between outright opposition under President
Trump to renewed engagement with the climate security agenda under President
Biden. Other climate powers, however, have been consistent in their opposition to
linking climate change and security at the UN. Both Russia and China are resisting
any move to give the UNSC a formal role in this area, preferring to deal with it
through the multilateral framework of the UNFCCC. The great powers are clearly
not in agreement on the question of whether and how to securitize climate change
within the UN system, though the door to a more meaningful role for the UNSC
has been opened.
If securitization is indeed the route towards engaging GPM in the international
response to climate change (see chapters by Kopra and by Scott), then could a
further deterioration of current warming trends lead international society down
this path? While the parties to the Paris Agreement have agreed to keep global
warming to below 2°C by the end of the century, existing mitigation efforts are
woefully inadequate for achieving this target. Current GHG emission trends would
most likely lead to global warming scenarios of between +3°C to +4°C by 2100,
which would accelerate a number of worrying environmental changes and push
the planet towards dangerous ecological tipping points. Rising sea levels, more ex-
treme weather events, and the destruction of major ecosystems (e.g., rainforests,
coral reefs, permafrost regions) would threaten urban and industrial infrastruc-
tures, disrupt energy and transport systems, and lead to a reduction in agricultural
yields in many parts of the world. The resulting threats to the livelihoods of hun-
dreds of millions of people could cause mass migration and the destabilization of
already fragile states, with dangerous consequences for regional and international
security. It is thus conceivable for climate change to grow not only to a point where
individual states are threatened with political disintegration or even extinction, but
also into a collective existential threat to human civilization, and possibly to hu-
mankind itself. The question is when and how such a shared perception of threat
would become common to international society as a whole.
For now, this level of catastrophic climate change is only a scenario for the fu-
ture. The warning signs are there, but global international society has been slow
to respond to the accelerating global warming trend. As the contributions to this
volume have shown, the main culprits behind the climate crisis—the environmen-
tal great powers that have contributed the most to manmade global warming—are
still acting mainly as ‘great irresponsibles’. Their efforts to reduce GHG emissions
are still well below the level that is required to avert runaway global warming. As
the climate crisis escalates, however, the pressure on them to act more responsibly,
in the interest of global planetary health and the stability of international society,
is bound to grow. That way of thinking suggests that the problem needs to get
worse before there is any hope of fixing it. Perhaps rising sea levels might conve-
niently cause simultaneous major coastal flooding to the vulnerable parts of the
US, China, Russia, the EU, India, and Brazil. Aside from its ethical difficulties as a
recommendation, this strategy has the flaw that climate change is prone to tipping
points, after which reversals become either vastly more difficult and expensive, or
impossible.
Given the obstacles to bringing GPM into action in time, three closely inter-
linked issues need to be addressed urgently:
First, domestic politics within the leading environmental great powers need
to erode the influence of those interests and understandings that continue
both to support carbon-fuelled modernity and to prevent more rapid decar-
bonization. The domestic balance of power is already beginning to shift, away
from those that want to preserve existing high-carbon assets and towards
those that would benefit from the net zero transition and greater climate pro-
tection. This is no easy task, but there are at least growing signs that green
industrial strategies and low carbon technologies are beginning to take root
in several of the environmental great powers discussed in this book.
Second, there needs to be a further move away from the rigid North-South
framing of international responsibilities in GEP, with all of its postcolonial
baggage. Global justice claims and support for climate mitigation and adap-
tation in poorer countries will not lose their relevance, but to accelerate the
global net zero transition we need to move towards a set of priorities framed
around the idea that we are all in the same boat, and that it is taking on
water—literally in the case of low-lying islands, river deltas, and coasts. The
closer the world gets to global-warming-induced tipping points, the more ur-
gent it is for global international society to face a shared threat collectively.
There is a huge political opportunity here for China, India, and other leading
powers from the Global South to take a lead in turning this framing around.
They need to speak up for a forward-looking planetary perspective, rather
than for the backward-looking postcolonial one they are currently defend-
ing, which, despite its valid normative claims, is increasingly ill suited, and
indeed dangerous, as a way of pursuing global climate change politics in the
current crisis. Taking this initiative would stake their claim to status, and
rights, as leading environmental great powers. That said, if this reframing of
global collective responsibilities is to succeed, the established powers of the
Global North have to make good on past promises that have so far only par-
tially been met. A bargain along these lines would perhaps facilitate greater
coordination amongst the diverse group of environmental great powers.
Third, serious thought needs to be given to how to get all environmental great
powers to take on a greater share of global environmental responsibilities.
Given the deep pluralist social structure of global international society now
unfolding around us, as discussed in Chapter 2, such cooperation might seem
a utopian hope. But deep pluralism does not preclude specific functional co-
operation even amongst powers that might otherwise see themselves as rivals.
The US and the USSR, who were not just rivals but enemies, demonstrated
that even in the depths of the Cold War when they managed to pursue sig-
nificant arms control agreements together. The present problem is not deep
pluralism itself, but the fact that, partly because of the North-South fram-
ing, GEP is all about responsibilities and not at all about rights. That makes
an unattractive package for environmental great powers, among other things
exacerbating the problems of turning around domestic politics. Traditional
GPM worked by giving both great powers and the rest of international society
a reasonable deal: taking on management burdens in exchange for privileged
political positions. It does not always work well, but it does offer a deal in
which both sides can potentially benefit. It looks to be a necessary, if cer-
tainly not a sufficient, condition for generating great power engagement in
global management. That principle is embedded very clearly in the P5 group
in the UNSC, which is slowly being drawn into addressing climate change.
However, reform of the UNSC looks impossible for all the usual reasons. An
alternative approach would be to create a minilateral forum with a specific
remit to address climate change—a G6 of the environmental great powers
discussed in this book, or a G10 of the top emitters. Such a group would
give a form of great power status and rights to those now lacking them in
the UNSC (India, Brazil, the EU), and like the UNSC might contain addi-
tional rotating members to ensure global representation. For this to work,
however, the environmental great powers would need to develop a stronger
sense of environmental raison de système, an ethic of collective responsibility
for planetary health. There would be no point in empowering a group of envi-

ronmental great powers that remained irresponsible. But without the element
of GPM being activated, it seems unlikely that the transnational and global
governance forces currently in play will be strong enough by themselves to
generate changes that are both big enough and quick enough to pre-empt the
looming crisis of climate change.
As should be clear from the argument in this book, climate change cannot be
adequately addressed without strengthening the special responsibilities of the few
major environmental powers that hold the future of the planet in their hands. How
to overcome the obstacles to that should thus be a major priority of GEP going
forward.
Index
Abidjan 107 Belt and Road Interbank Regular Cooperation

Acharya, Amitav 20 bond 83
Action Plan on Connecting the Belt and Road by Green Investment Principles for the Belt and
Standards (2018–2020) 83 Road 83
Afghanistan 15 Guidance on Promoting Green Belt and Road
Agenda 21, 240 (2017) 83
air pollution 77–78, 144, 265–266 International Coalition for Green
allied powers 283 Development on the Belt and Road 84
Amazonian states 210 Benedick, Richard 62
Antarctica 238 Bernstein, Steven 67
Aráujo, Ernesto 129 Biden, Joe 220
Arctic haze 233 biodiversity 21, 30, 117, 120, 233, 236
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge 63 hotspots 74, 143
biofuels 132
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
(AIIB) 133 biosafety 241
Boe Declaration on Regional Security of the
Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development
Pacific Islands Forum 193
and Climate 215
Bolsonaro, Jair 30, 122, 129–130, 134
Association of Southeast Asian Nations
Brazil 19, 21, 25, 29–30, 43, 80, 237, 254, 280,
(ASEAN) 193
284–285, 287–288
ASEAN Disaster Management and
Amazon 121
Emergency Relief Fund 193
Amazon Fund with Norway 128
Singapore Statement 193
Amazon Impact Investment Partnership 130
Australia 17, 238, 250–251, 254–255, 267, 273
Association of Agribusiness 130
Austria 263
economic powerhouse 116
Forest Code (2012) 122
Bahrain 210 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 120–121,
Bali climate conference (COP13) (2007) 154 124, 133–134
Bali Road Map 154 Ministry of Environment 123
Bangladesh 250 Ministry of Mines and Energy 124
Barnett, Michael 15 National Development Bank
Basel Action Network 239 (BNDES) 132–133
Basel Convention on the Control of Trans- National Forest Service (Serviço Florestal
boundary Movements of Hazardous Waste Brasileiro) 123
and Their Disposal (1989) 59–60, 106, 108, nationally determined contributions
238–239, 241 (NDCs) 131
BASIC (Brazil, India, South Africa and Rural Environmental Registry (Cadastro
China) 6, 30, 80, 125–126, 128, 134, 142, Ambiental Rural) 123
147, 150–151, 155, 282 Bretherton, Charlotte 97
Beckett, Margaret 196 Bretton Woods system 283
Bedritskyi, Alexander 178 Brexit 19
Belgium 263 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 66, 82–85, 88–89, Africa) 18, 21, 116, 119, 142
266–267 BRICS New Development Bank 133
Belt and Road Ecological and Environmental Britain, see United Kingdom
Cooperation Plan 83 Buhaug, H. 203
index 291
Bukovansky, Mlada 22 litigation 217

Bull, Hedley 16, 27, 210 minilateralism 222
burden sharing 56 mitigation 252
Bush, George W. 28, 215 negotiations 127
Buzan, Barry 18, 20, 22, 51, 210 responsibility 217
sceptics 170
Canada 17, 221, 240, 254, 265 security 85, 193
Cancun climate conference (COP16) security challenge 77
(2010) 148, 156, 176 systemic importance to international
carbon-capture utilization and storage society 5–6
(CCUS) 253, 257 tipping points 287
carbon-free electricity 261 vulnerability 166
carbon neutrality 210, 219, 221 weather-related disasters 143
Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (2000) 59, 236 CLRTAP POPs Protocol (1998) 238
Center for Climate and Security 197 coal 72, 145, 156, 165–166, 281
chemicals 233, 238 burning 271
market 107 consumption 260–261, 265–266
China 17, 19–22, 26–27, 29, 43, 55, 63, 65, global market 249–250
125–126, 129, 140, 154–155, 191, 198, investments 251
202–203, 219–221, 227, 229–234, 236–239, phase out 261, 263
241–242, 244, 249–251, 259, 265–267, politics 249
271–273, 280–282, 284–285, 287–288 powers 249
dualistic self-image 71 Coalition of Rainforest Nations 127
economic coalition with the European Cold War 57, 231, 288
Union 78 collective security 190
energy investment in the developed common but differentiated responsibilities
world 86–87 (CBDR) 78–80, 153, 219, 221, 235, 283–285
environmental responsibilities as a great common but differentiated responsibilities and
power 88 respective capabilities (CBDR-RC) 54–55
investment in renewable energy 81, 85 Congo 25
major developing country 77, 79 Congress of Europe 15
Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) 83 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 59
Ministry of Environmental Protection Convention on International Trade in Endan-
(MEP) 83 gered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora
National Development and Reform (CITES) 58, 74
Commission 81 Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air
national security 84 Pollution (CLRTAP) 58, 107
partial environmental great power 72, 76, 88 Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic
People’s Liberation Army 77 Marine Living Resources (1980) 58
public-private partnerships 81 Copenhagen Accord 219, 234, 242
responsible great power 81 Copenhagen climate conference (COP15)
responsible major developing power 88 (2009) 79, 103, 119, 126, 131, 134, 147,
chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) 61, 235 172–173, 234, 282
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) 127 Copenhagen School of security studies 191
Climate Action Tracker 176 Correa de Lago, Andre 129
climate change 41, 63, 117, 127, 139–142, 165, Covid-19 pandemic 78, 82, 191
192, 195, 202–203, 209, 217, 219–222, 233, Cristina, Tereza 123
253, 279, 283–287, 289 Cui, Shunji 22, 210
adverse impacts 148 Curitiba Rules 237
climate emergency declarations 192 Czech Republic 260
climate securitization, see securitization
Climate Security Mechanism 196 Danilov-Danilyan, Viktor 178
diplomacy 130 decentred globalism 20
finance 157 deep-sea oil 124
292 index
deforestation 25, 117–123, 127, 134 European Community, see European Union
Denmark 263 (EU)
developing countries 29–30 European Union (EU) 19, 26–28, 42, 59, 64,
disaster risk management (DRM) 145 171, 181–182, 192, 203, 210, 221, 227, 230,
Dominican Republic 196 232–233, 235–241, 249, 253, 255, 260,
Durban climate conference (COP17) (2011) 263–265, 267–268, 271–272, 280, 282, 284,
5, 7, 119, 126, 131, 134, 147–148, 286–288
172–173, 282 actor in global climate governance 105
Duval, Raymond 15 advancing international negotiations 103
capacity building efforts 104
Earth Charter 216 climate diplomacy 102, 104
Ebola 23, 191 climate policymaking 105
ecological civilization 76 coal consumption 261
ecological footprint 25, 29, 210, 214, 281 environmental policy as an area of mixed
ecological shadow 27 competence 97
ecological stress 3–5 environmental protection 98
Economic Community of West African States European Chemicals Agency 109
(ECOWAS) 193 European Commission 109, 111
economies in transition 151, 182 European Environment Agency 99
The Economist 5 European Green Deal 103, 111, 262
Egypt 195, 250 followership in global environmental
emerging powers 4–11, 116–117, 140 politics 99
Energiewende 261 green demandeur 59
energy global climate governance 102
diplomacy 251 international actor 97
dominance 271 international climate negotiations 105
poverty 253, 264 leader in global environmental politics 98
Engels, Anita 267 market power 97
English School (ES) of International moratorium on the importation of GMOs 59
Relations 15, 54, 208–210, 213, multiple global audiences 105
218, 252 negative environmental power 99
environmental capacity 52–53 negative power in global climate
environmental degradation 25 governance 101, 104
environmental great powers 3–6, 227, 232–233, positive power in global climate
240–242 governance 101, 104
environmental leadership 3–5, 55, 145 Regulation No. 1013/2006 108
agential versus structural 56 Regulation No. 1907/2006 on the Registration,
cooperative versus competitive 57 Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction
front runner 55, 57, 60–61, 63–64, 66 of Chemicals (REACH Regulation) 106,
legitimate authority 56 108–110
substantive versus positional 55 shaping global environmental politics 95
environmental power 23, 24, 116 single market 97, 109
emerging 43 Treaty on European Union 98
environmental great power 3–6 EU-South Korea Free Trade Agreement
negative power 14, 24–25, 72, 116–120, 127, (2010) 110
164–166, 180–181, 281 Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
positive power 14, 24–25, 72–73, 84, 87, 164, (EITI) 251
166, 180, 281
positive versus negative 53 Facebook 20
environmental responsibility 116 Falkner, Robert 51, 219
differentiated 79–80 Finland 210, 263
Equator Principles 83 Flippen, Brooks 60
Europe 22 food insecurity 193
index 293
Framework for Resilient Development in the great powers 16–18, 22, 24, 43, 76, 118, 190, 252
Pacific 193 in global environmental politics 43, 95–96,
France 197, 229, 263, 271 110, 165
Franchini, Matı́as 119 great irresponsibles 22, 27, 221
freshwater 143 great power status 164–165, 177
great power triangle 17
G6 of environmental powers 288 honorary great power 17
G7 259 in International Relations 14–15
G8 193, 215 responsibility 14, 22, 41
G8 Gleneagles Summit 152 responsibility for environmental
G8+5 dialogue on Climate and Energy 155 protection 41, 44
G10 of leading emitters 288 special responsibilities 208
G20 253–254 Greece 263
G77 54, 126, 147, 150, 155, 239, 241–242, 244, Green Climate Fund (GCF) 62, 104, 130, 180,
254 202, 244
Gates, Bill 81 Green Finance Leadership Program (2018) 83
Gazprom 174 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 26–27, 29–30,
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) 236 100–102, 154, 202, 220, 233–234, 242, 249,
Germany 79, 195–196, 229, 236, 261, 264, 271, 257, 259, 262, 264, 267–268, 271–273, 279,
273 281–284, 286–287
Global Air Quality Report 144 Green Investment Schemes 177
global chemicals governance 96, 106, 110 Greenpeace 85, 154
global climate governance 96, 100–101, 110 Guterres, Antonio 156
cosmopolitan 222
polycentric 222 Hague Declaration on Planetary Security 199
transnational 217 Haiti 197
global collective responsibilities 288 hazardous waste 107, 233, 239
global environmental governance 55, 116, trade 239
119, 131 health damage 107
Global Environmental Performance Index 144 heteropolarity 20
global environmental politics 22–30, 42, 164, High Ambition Coalition 64, 221
208, 210–211, 228, 280–281, 283, 288 Himalayas 143, 145, 153
global environmental solutions 116, 118–119 HIV/AIDS 191, 202–203
global governance 22 Holsti, Kalevi J. 15
Global Infrastructure Outlook 2021 82 human security 222
global international society (GIS) 19–21, 208, Hungary 263
217, 240, 287 hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) 235
Global North 139, 147, 244, 271, 284, 288 HCFC alternatives 236
global poverty 252 hydropower 123
global public goods 119, 131
global socio-ecological harm 71 IBSA 142
Global South 43, 76, 78, 80, 87, 139, 144–145, Iceland 237
147, 203, 236, 244, 267, 282, 284, 288 Illarionov, Andrei 170, 179
Gorbachev, Mikhail 178 Independent Association of Latin America and
great climate power 209–210 the Caribbean (AILAC) 128
great power management (GPM) 6, 15–16, India 19–22, 29–30, 43, 55, 79, 117, 129, 166,
19, 22, 26, 37, 41, 44, 60, 62, 65–67, 139, 219, 227, 230–239, 241, 244, 249–251, 254,
141, 189, 194, 202–203, 208, 212, 280, 283, 256, 280, 285, 287–288
285–288 Char Dam highway project 145
great power responsibility 14, 22, 41, 95, 178, environmental great power 142, 154, 156
181, 193, 197, 203, 209–210, 213, 220, 249 external expectations 156
climate responsibility 209, 221 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 143–144,
and internationalization 214 155
versus leadership 65 high-carbon economic development 142
294 index
India (Continued) Ivory Coast 107

Intended Nationally Determined Izrael, Yury 179
Contributions (INDC) (2015) 150
National Action Plan on Climate Change in Japan 17, 19, 26, 29, 227, 230, 233, 235–241, 251,
2008 (NAPCC) 147 254, 256, 273, 279
nationally determined contribution Javadekar, Prakash 149
(NDC) 145, 156 Johnson, Boris 196
negative environmental power 143, 145 just transition 260
positive environmental power potential 144
Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Katzenstein, Peter 117
Change 147 Kissinger, Henry 60
State of Forest Report (ISFR) 145 Kopra, Sanna 211
Indonesia 21, 25, 29, 254, 268, 273 Kotter, John 213–214
Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Kuwait 210, 250
Analysis 258 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations
intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) 19, 227 Framework Convention on Climate
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 5, 60, 63, 80, 103,
Change 180, 203 105, 119, 125, 127, 131, 151, 154, 165,
International Arrangement on Forests (IAF) 240 168–173, 176–179, 181, 194, 202, 219, 230,
international chemicals negotiations 108 234, 241
international climate change negotiations 175, post-Kyoto climate regime 173, 220
181, 208, 218, 222
International Convention for the Regulation of
Lake Chad 199
Whaling 58, 237
Lancang-Mekong River 75
International Convention on Wetlands of
Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC)
International Importance Especially as
mechanism 75
Waterfowl Habitats (1971) 241
United Nations-affiliated Mekong River
international community 177
Commission 75
International Court of Justice (ICJ) 238
land-use and land-use change and forests
International Energy Agency (IEA) 78, 142, 144,
(LULUCF) sector 120
252, 261, 265–267, 273
leadership 26, 64, 76–77, 208, 210–214,
international environmental agenda 6
217–218, 281
international environmental agree-
ambiguous leadership 134
ments, see multilateral environmental
agreements (MEAs) asymmetric influence 213
international environmental law 228, 241 climate diplomacy 130
international justice 222 cognitive leadership 99
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 283 different leadership styles 98
international order 6, 12, 54 diplomatic 129
International Relations (IR) 280 entrepreneurial 26, 98
International Renewable Energy Agency environmental leadership 120
(IRENA) 252–253 exemplary leadership 99, 103
international society 4, 41, 210, 221 intellectual 26
problem-solving capacity 5 see also global leadership in international society 213
international society (GIS) linkage with great power status 208
International Solar Alliance 144, 152, 156–157 presidential leadership 134
International Tropical Timber Organization 242 structural 26, 98
International Whaling Commission (IWC) vacuum 78
61, 237 Liefferink, Duncan 55
Iraq 197, 199 like-minded developing countries 152
Ireland 263 London Convention on Ocean Dumping
Islamic State 20 (1972) 58
Islamic World 22 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio 124,
Italy 263 131–132, 134
index 295
MacNeil, Robert 64 Norway 17, 25, 27, 229, 237

Madrid Protocol on Environmental Protection nuclear power, phase-out 264
to the Antarctic Treaty (1991) 58 Nuclear Suppliers Group 141–142
Major Economies Forum on Energy and
Climate 215 Obama, Barack 215, 219–220
Malamud, Andrés 117 oil 120, 125
Malaysia 195, 239–240 reserves 165–166
Mali 199 oil and gas sector 272
Malnes, Raino 212 Oman 250
maritime security 153 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) 20, 23 Development (OECD) 53, 151, 249–250,
Medvedev, Dmitry 172–174 252, 267
mega-diversity 116 Organization for Security and Co-operation in
MENA region 250 Europe (OSCE) 42
Merkel, Angela 261 ozone depleting substances (ODSs) 25, 235
Mexico 236, 250 ozone layer 233–235
Miami Group 59
Minamata Convention on Mercury (2001) 108, Pacific Island Forum Leaders 193
251, 273 Pacific Small Island Developing States 196
minilateralism 5, 222 Pakistan 195, 250
Modi, Narendra 144–145, 156 Palme, Olaf 61
Mongolia 251 Paris Agreement (2015) 5, 26, 57–58, 62–65,
Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete 104, 109, 125, 129–130, 134, 148, 152, 165,
the Ozone Layer 62, 235 174–175, 177, 179, 193, 198, 201, 204,
London Amendments (1990) 235 219–221, 251, 260, 264, 273, 279, 284
Mukherjee, Pranab 149 post-Paris Accord era 249, 271
multilateral development banks 251 Paris climate conference (COP21) (2015) 78
multilateral environmental agreements Paterson, Mathew 64
(MEAs) 227–233, 238, 240–241, peacekeeping 190–191
244–245, 281 Peru 237
multilateralism 5, 98, 222, 231 Petrobras 125, 133
multi-order world 20 Planetary Security Initiative (PSI) 199
pluralism 213
Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources consensual pluralism 21–22
and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of contested pluralism 20
Benefits Arising from their Utilization deep 18–20, 22, 43, 140, 227, 245, 288
(2010) 118, 230, 237 plurilateralism 20
natural gas 124, 165–166 Poland 260–262, 271, 273
natural hazards 143 polarity theory 17–18
Nauru 196 polymorphic globalism 20
neo-Gramscian approaches 64–65 Portugal 263
Netherlands 263 post-Cold War international order 18, 41
Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs 199 post-Western international structure 19
net-zero emissions 5 poverty alleviation 253
New York 192 power 16
Nigeria 107 capabilities 16
Niu, Gensheng 81 inequality 3–4
non-governmental organization (NGO) 54 middle power 18
Non-Legally Binding Instrument on All Types of negative power 27, 210
Forests 240 positive power 27, 30, 210
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 42 regional power 18, 22
North–South 30, 42 super power 17–20
North-South differentiation 282, 288 Powering Past Coal Alliance 265
North-South division 283, 285 Power Investment Corporation 87
296 index
primary institutions 51, 209 Ministry of Economics and Trade 171

public opinion on climate change 177 national interest 174, 177–181
Putin, Vladimir 29, 170–173, 179 political survival 173
Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014 174
Qatar 210
Sahel region 195
Ramesh, Jairam 148 Salles, Ricardo 123, 129
REACH Regulation, see European Union, Reg- San Francisco 190
ulation No. 1907/2006 on the Registration, Saran, Shyam 150–151
Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction Saudi Arabia 22, 63
of Chemicals (REACH Regulation) sea level rise 195
Reagan, Ronald 62 secondary institutions 208, 227
Red Cross/Crescent 20 Second World War 189, 283
REDD+ 127, 130, 134 securitization 191–192, 214, 221, 285–286
regional power 133 emergency measures 192
regulatory risk assessments 107 securitization of climate change 42, 189,
renewable energy 72, 84 192–193
responsibility 141 securitization theory 192, 202
ascription of responsibility 146, 148 special environmental responsibilities 283
and coal 268 security 41, 191
common but differentiated responsibilities 54 security agenda 189
costs of responsibility 272 Senegal 195
demand and supply 54 Sino-American cooperation on climate 220
global responsibilities 157 Slovakia 263
great power responsibility 139 small-island developing countries 198
historical 55 solar energy 87, 124, 144
North-South 55 solidarism 213, 216–217
rhetorical acceptance of responsibility 272 cosmopolitan 217, 222
special privileges 54 state-centric 217, 222
special responsibility 54–57, 61–62, 67–68 special environmental responsibilities 75, 283
special versus general 51, 56 special responsibilities on climate change 78,
Ricketts, Kristina 211 221
Rotterdam Convention on Pesticides and small oil-producing states 210
Industrial Chemicals (1998) 60 Somalia 197
Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed South Africa 126, 128
Consent for Certain Hazardous Chemicals South Asia 143, 153, 157–158
and Pesticides (1998) 106, 108 South Asian Association for Regional
Rousseff, Dilma 131 Cooperation (SAARC) 193
Russia 19, 22, 29, 198, 227, 229–234, 236–241, Disaster Management Centre 193
250–251, 254, 264, 268, 273, 280, 282, 287 Kathmandu Declaration 193
Climate Doctrine (2009) 172 Southeast Asia 26, 75, 193
economic restructuring 167 South Korea 251, 254, 256
economic stagnation 173 Act on the Registration and Evaluation of
energy efficiency legislation 172 Chemicals (2013) 109
environmental donor 178 South–South cooperation 131, 133, 141,
Federal Service for Hydrometeorology 178 143, 152
Federation Programme for Sustainable South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund
Development 180 (SSCAF) 81
Global Climate and Ecology Institute 179 South–South green technology transfer space 82
great (ecological) power 178 Soviet Union 15, 17, 19, 29, 60, 165, 167,
great energy power 174, 181 202, 216, 229, 231, 235, 237, 241, 288 see
great power status 177, 179 also Russia
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 165–168, Spain 195, 263–264
173–176, 181 special responsibilities 24, 208
index 297
Special Responsibilities: Global Problems and 182, 194, 198, 200–201, 209, 217–220, 222,
American Power 54 233–234, 251, 253–254, 264–265, 268,
Sri Lanka 250 273–274, 282–286
Stern, Todd 129 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) 126,
Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic 191, 221, 195, 197, 202, 221
Pollutants (2001) 106, 108 United Nations Human Rights Council 217
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 83, 240, United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency
252–253 Response 191
Sweden 17, 195, 263 United Nations Principles for Responsible
Investment 83
Three Gorges Corporation 86–87 United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment
Toronto Conference on the Changing and Development (1992) 283
Atmosphere 193–194 United Nations Rio+20 conference (2012) 131
Train, Russell 60 United Nations Secretary General’s Summit on
transboundary environmental harm 24–25 Climate Change 175
Treaty of Vienna (1815) 15–16 United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 5,
tropical forests 25, 30, 120 42, 65, 139, 141–142, 144, 189, 197–198,
Trump, Donald 19, 28, 129, 220, 285 200–203, 215, 222, 253, 280, 283,
Turkey 254 286–288
‘Arria-formula’ meetings 195–197
Ukraine 173 binding decisions 190
Umbrella Group 168 P5 197, 202–203
Underdal, Arild 212 procedure 190
United Arab Emirates (UAE) 250 United States 15, 19–20, 22, 25–28, 42–43,
United Kingdom 19, 193, 195, 229, 250, 263–265 79–80, 125, 171, 181–182, 191, 193, 197,
United Nations 240 202–203, 216, 220–221, 229, 231–239,
High-Level Panel on Sustainable 249–251, 253, 255, 257–258, 260, 265, 267,
Development 240 272–273, 279–282, 284, 286–288
2030 Agenda 240 Agency for International Development
United Nations Assistance Mission in (USAID) 130
Somalia 197 Biden administration 57, 66–68, 197, 256,
United Nations Charter 189–190, 197 259, 271–272
United Nations climate regime 208 biotechnology 59, 67
United Nations Climate Summit (2014) 220 Bush (George W.) administration 109, 271
United Nations Commission on Sustainable Bush–Cheney National Energy Policy, 63
Development 242 Byrd–Hagel Resolution (US Congress) 154,
United Nations Conference on Environment and 219–220
Development (1992) 126, 239 Clean Air Act 58, 61
United Nations Conference on the Human Clean Power Plan 63, 257
Environment (Stockholm, 1972) 26, 29, 58, Clinton administration 62, 271
118, 237 climate diplomacy 64
United Nations Convention on the Law of the climate leadership 220
Sea (UNCLOS III) 59 climate negotiations 55
United Nations Department of Political and commercial interest 59–60
Peacebuilding Affairs 196–197 Congress 57, 60, 63, 65, 67–68, 234
United Nations Development Programme declining leadership 57–58
42, 197 Department of Defence (DOD) 42, 65
United Nations Environment Programme Department of Energy (DOE) 256
(UNEP) 61, 84, 108, 197, 228, 242–243 energy diplomacy 251
United Nations Forum on Forests 242 Energy Information Administration
United Nations Framework Convention on (EIA) 63, 256
Climate Change (UNFCCC) 5, 24, 30, energy policy 63
64–65, 78, 105, 118, 125–127, 144, 146, environmental foreign policy 51, 57–58
149, 151–152, 154–155, 157, 168, 176, 179, environmental leadership 58, 61–62
298 index
United States (Continued) veto power 25

Environmental Protection Agency Vienna Convention for the Protection of the
(EPA) 60–62, 65, 68 Ozone Layer 235
Federal Regulatory Agency (FERC) 256 Vietnam 15, 250
free market philosophy 55 Viola, Eduardo 119
great power 52 Vogler, John 97, 106
hazardous pollution/waste management 59 Von Uexkull, N. 203
leadership 282 vulnerability 143, 151, 153
leadership versus isolation 64 climate change 143–144
multilateral environmental agreements environmental 144–145
(MEAs) 52, 55, 58–59 vulnerable victim 151
National Intelligence Council 65
National Security Strategy (2018) 65 Wæver, Ole 18, 191
Nixon administration 60–62, 69 Waltz, Kenneth 16–17
Watson, Adam 16
Obama administration 26, 57, 62–66, 109,
Werrell, Caitlin 199–200
257–259, 271–272
West Africa 195
ozone diplomacy 60–61
Westphalian international order 244
Partnerships for Opportunity and Work-
whaling 61, 233, 237–238
force and Economic Revitalization
anti-whaling coalitions 237
(POWER) 257
wind power 87, 123–124
ratification of MEAs 58
World Bank 172, 258, 283
Reagan administration 57, 59, 62
National Cyclone Risk Reduction Project 145
rhetoric 271
World Health Organization (WHO) 191
Senate 55, 57, 60, 67, 282 World Heritage Convention (1972) 58
trade policy 58 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 5, 58, 116,
Trump administration 57, 60, 63, 180, 251, 141, 170–171, 236
256, 259, 271–272 Doha Development Round 59
US and China disagreement 64–65 Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS)
US-China Joint Announcement on Climate Agreement 59
Change 2014 79 Wurzel, Rudiger K. W. 55
US-China Joint Presidential Statement on
Climate Change (2015) 79 Xi Jinping 19, 79, 82, 221
White House 271 Yalta Meeting (1945) 190
Vajpayee, A. B. 148 Young, Oran R. 212

veto 190
veto players 232, 240 Zoellick, Robert 76

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Great Powers, Climate Change, and Global

List of Tables and Figures ix

PART I . IN T RODU C TION

PA RT II . E NVI RON M E N TAL POW ER S

PA RT I II . INTE R NAT IONA L I N STI TU T ION S AND

PA RT IV. C ONC LU SION S

5.1. Global GHG emissions of the top six emitters 101

5.1. EU 27 member states’ total GHG emissions, 1990–2018, measured as

ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations

IBSA India, Brazil, South Africa

SSCAF South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund

Alina Averchenkova is a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute

Robyn Eckersley is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in the Discipline of Political

Robert Falkner is Associate Professor of International Relations and Research Director of

Kathryn Hochstetler is Professor of International Development and Head of Department

Susan Park is Professor of Global Governance in the Department of Government and

Miriam Prys-Hansen is a Lead Research Fellow and Head of Research Programme 4:

Ciplet, Roberts, and Khan, 2015). However, questions of power asymmetry in

Great Powers and the Global Climate Challenge

possess significant technological and environmental capacities, as well as diplo-

Overview of the Book

conditions under which individual countries can count as environmental great

Thanks to its unique quality as an international actor and considerable market

Roberts, J. Timmons, and Parks, Bradley C. (2007). A Climate of Injustice: Global

Great Powers in Global International Society

Great Powers: Two Approaches

definition of international society, which establishes the key distinction between

a group of states (or, more generally, a group of independent political com-

The second definition is Bull’s (1977: 200–202) societal understanding of a great

in issue areas such as global environment, development, and health (Bukovansky

An entirely different complication for great power responsibility and manage-

Environmental Power and Great Powers

constructive use of power is closely related to the concept of international en-

Great Powers in Global Environmental Politics

What Counts as an Environmental Great Power?

Russia, once considered a superpower alongside the US, but merely an

Sectoral and Spatial Differences

The question of what counts as a great power in GEP is complicated by two

Towards Great Power Responsibility for the Environment?

This section addresses three themes:

Great Powers as Managers of International Society

of special rights and responsibilities on the other. As discussed above, in

survival of the society of states. In this perspective, global environmental protec-

Great Power Responsibility for the Global Environment?

Non-Proliferation Treaty established a certain number of countries as recognized

climate minilateralism, either within or outside the UNFCCC. Interestingly, sur-

Securitizing the Environment?

As yet, however, despite repeated efforts to establish an environmental secu-

stewardship, although having been established as a primary institution of global

populations and dramatic economic expansion in recent years. However, just as

Part One: Conceptual Groundwork

The United States’ Environmental Capabilities

necessary basis for good international environmental citizenship, it is not widely

positive or negative depends on the US’s national and international aspirations

Special Environmental Responsibilities and the United States

responsibilities’ given its significant environmental capacity, its oversized ecolog-

Special Responsibilities and Environmental Leadership Distinguished

Special Responsibilities did not provide a systematic analysis of the relation-

On this account, leadership may be understood as a form of legitimated authority

Part Two: One Shining Moment

Scholarship on US environmental diplomacy tends to converge around a general

Control of the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste and their Disposal

Looking for United States Leadership