Citation: Sengupta, Sandeep, ‘Defending “Differentiation”: India’s Foreign Policy on Climate Change from

Rio to Copenhagen’, in Kanti Bajpai and Harsh V. Pant, eds., India’s Foreign Policy and National Security,
Vol.1, Oxford University Press, New Delhi/Oxford (forthcoming).

Defending ‘Differentiation’: India’s Foreign Policy on

Climate Change from Rio to Copenhagen1
Sandeep Sengupta
Merton College, Oxford
sandeep.sengupta@politics.ox.ac.uk

1.0 Introduction

India has been a key player in climate change negotiations ever since the emergence of the
topic in the international arena in the late 1980s. This is not only because it is one of the
largest emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in aggregate terms – projected to be the
third-largest in the world by 2015 – but also because it has historically been one of the
most important representatives of the developing world on this issue.2 In other words,
India’s voice in global climate negotiations matters because neither can the problem of
climate change be practically solved without its participation, nor can any solution be
considered globally legitimate without its consent. It is therefore crucial for those who
wish to bring India on board, and to better engage with it in the future, to understand
where India’s own thinking on climate change is coming from, and what are the key
factors that drive its foreign and domestic policies on this issue.

In this paper, I attempt to provide an initial insight into this subject through a broad
examination of India’s foreign policy behaviour on climate change over the last 20 years. I
begin, first, by looking at the origins of India’s views on climate change and how they
influenced the conceptualisation of its national interest on this topic. I then show how
India, using arguments of legitimacy and through successful alliance-building, played a
key role in the construction of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC) at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, ensuring that its architecture was
best aligned with its interests. The next few sections of the paper then describe, in turn,
how India engaged internationally at key junctures of the climate negotiations from Berlin
(1995) and Kyoto (1997) through to Bali (2007) and Copenhagen (2009). Each of these
episodes illustrates how India continually, and successfully, resisted any weakening of the
core concept of ‘differentiation’ that it had helped to hardwire into the UNFCCC.
However, in my final section, I conclude that events in India leading up to and after
Copenhagen suggest that even while defending ‘differentiation’ abroad, India is now
poised to take serious action to tackle climate change at home.

1
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies
Association (ISA) in New Orleans, USA, 17-20 February 2010.
2
IEA, World Energy Outlook: China and India Insights (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2007).

1
2.0 Origins of India’s thinking on climate change

India’s engagement in international climate negotiations has deep roots. The origins of
much of its thinking and policies on climate change predate the topic’s emergence on the
global agenda and are, in fact, linked to the country’s much older views on environment
and development in general. These can be traced back to the 1972 UN Conference on the
Human Environment at Stockholm, where India, on behalf of the entire developing world,
challenged the then emerging Western discourse that excessive industrialisation,
overpopulation and economic growth were responsible for causing the world’s growing
environmental problems.3

India’s Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, made a forceful and eloquent speech at Stockholm,
where she argued that, as far as the developing world was concerned, it was more and not
less development that was needed to ensure human welfare and protect the environment,
and that the ‘environment could not be improved in conditions of poverty’.4 Referring to
the past behaviour of the developed world, she asked what right it had to ‘speak to those
who live in villages and in slums about keeping the oceans, the rivers and the air clean’,
when they themselves had ‘reached their present affluence by their domination over other
races and countries, the exploitation of their own masses and their own natural resources’.5

Raising also the question of equity in the international environmental discourse, for
perhaps the first time, she asked:

Will the growing awareness of ‘one earth’ and ‘one environment’ guide us to the concept of ‘one
humanity’? Will there be a more equitable sharing of environmental costs and greater
international interest in the accelerated progress of the less developed world?6

Furthermore, she suggested that the Northern concern with overpopulation was a very
narrow way of looking at the problem, and that it was at least as important to bear in mind
the over-consumptive lifestyles that were being led in the West.

As one of the only two heads of government participating in the conference, Indira
Gandhi’s words had a major impact in elevating the concerns of the developing world at
Stockholm. As Maurice Strong, the Secretary General of the Stockholm Conference later
recollected, her speech not only set the tone and direction of the conference itself, but also
left a lasting legacy in terms of re-framing the entire discourse on this subject:

[T]hanks to her leadership, never more could the environment issue be considered only in the
narrow context of the pollution problems of the rich. It could only be considered as inextricably

3
There was a spate of publications and essays around the late 1960s/ early 1970s that focused on this theme.
For an overview of the emergence of the modern environmental movement, see David Reid, Sustainable
Development: An Introductory Guide (London: Earthscan Publications, 1995) or Avijit Gupta and Mukul G.
Asher, Environment and the Developing World: Principles, Policies and Management (Chichester: John
Wiley & Sons, 1998).
4
Indira Gandhi, ‘Man and Environment’, Address to the Plenary Session of the United Nations Conference
on the Human Environment, Stockholm, 14 June 1972, in MoEF, Indira Gandhi on Environment and
Forests: Selected Speeches, Messages and Letters (New Delhi: Ministry of Environment and Forests/
Government of India, 2009), 18-25.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid., emphasis mine.

2
 linked with the development needs and aspirations of developing countries and the imperatives for
new dimensions of co-operation and equity in north-south relationships.7

Within India, Indira Gandhi’s speech gained widespread recognition as well. It was
consistent with the domestic post-Independence consensus that poverty alleviation through
industrial development and economic growth had to be the first priority of government.8
The ‘right to development’, which was implicit throughout her speech, also held a
particularly strong normative appeal for developing countries like India, which had only
recently emerged from colonialism and still felt a deep sense of aggrievement at the
injustices that had been meted out to them under that period.9 Furthermore, her speech
emphasised national sovereignty and solidarity with the Third World, which were both
key pillars of India’s ‘non-aligned’ foreign policy after independence. Finally, the crucial
fact that while being pro-poor her speech was not anti-environment meant that it could
claim a very high degree of legitimacy, as well as a force of logic and persuasive merit,
that could not be easily refuted.

Indeed, Indira Gandhi’s reputation as someone who genuinely cared for the environment –
exemplified through the various domestic measures that she undertook to protect it
throughout the 1970s and early 1980s – generated considerable support and credibility for
her international stand among both domestic and international environmentalists.10 Aided
further by her long stay in office, her Stockholm speech subsequently resulted in the
establishment of an orthodoxy in the country’s foreign environmental policy thinking.11 As
a variety of global environmental issues, including climate change, began to loom on the
horizon, successive Indian governments and negotiators would hark back to the tenets that
Indira Gandhi had laid out at Stockholm to determine the country’s national position i.e.
the prioritisation of development over environment; the safeguarding of sovereignty; a
concern for equity; and solidarity with the Third World.

3.0 India’s role in the construction of the UNFCCC

The issue of climate change formally emerged on the intergovernmental agenda for the
first time in 1988, when the UN General Assembly (UNGA) recognised it as a ‘common
concern of mankind’ and endorsed the setting up of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) to examine its scientific basis in greater depth.12 In 1989, the
UNGA also passed a resolution urging member states to urgently prepare a ‘framework
convention’ to address this global problem.13 Several important discussions and
negotiations were held on this issue during this period, which finally culminated in the

7
Maurice F. Strong, ‘Hunger, Poverty, Population and Environment’, Hunger Project Millennium Lecture,
Chennai, 7 April 1999.
8
See Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 183-85.
9
For example, India saw its share of world income fall from 22.6 percent to 3.8 percent in two centuries of
British rule. See Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Development
Centre/ OECD, 2001).
10
See, for example, Mahesh Rangarajan, ‘Striving for a Balance: Nature, Power, Science and India’s Indira
Gandhi, 1917-1984’, Conservation & Society, Vol. 7, Issue 4 (2009), 299-312.
11
Mukund Govind Rajan, Global Environmental Politics: India and the North-South Politics of Global
Environmental Issues (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 25.
12
United Nations, General Assembly Resolution 43/53, 6 December 1988.
13
United Nations, General Assembly Resolution 44/207, 22 December 1989.

3
adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at
the Earth Summit in Rio in June 1992, which established the basic political, normative and
legal architecture to address this issue.

India played a key role in determining both the content and form of the UNFCCC and,
indeed, also the overall terms under which these early negotiations were held. Apart from
the foreign environmental policy orthodoxy that had been derived from Indira Gandhi’s
Stockholm speech, India’s engagement at these negotiations was also strongly influenced
by its experiences in the Montreal Protocol negotiations on ozone layer protection that had
also been conducted around the same time. At Montreal, it had faced substantial pressure
from developed countries to accede to a treaty that it had played little role in designing,
and where it had been forced to fight a ‘rearguard action’ to secure its interests.14 India felt
that it had been disadvantaged by entering the ozone negotiations relatively late in the
process, and was determined not to repeat the same mistake on climate change.15 This can
be seen, for example, through the active efforts that it made to get elected to the Bureau of
the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC), the body that had been authorised by
the UN General Assembly to conduct the convention negotiations.16

In terms of how India conceptualised its national interest on this issue, it had become clear
to the Indian government very early on itself that ‘[b]ecause of the nature of global
warming, a convention to combat the phenomenon could have wide-ranging economic
implications’.17 As GHGs were released from the consumption of coal – India’s dominant
energy source – and other fossil fuels; from transportation and industry; and from land use
activities associated with agriculture, forestry and animal husbandry, there was hardly a
sector that would not be affected by efforts to curb emissions. Hence, a climate
convention, to Indian eyes, was not merely an environmental treaty, but rather one that
constituted a ‘major multilateral economic agreement’, and where ‘[t]he sharing of costs
and benefits implied in the convention could significantly alter the economic destinies of
individual countries’.18 Given that poverty alleviation, industrialisation, economic
development and regaining what it considered to be its rightful position in the world, were
India’s foremost national priorities post-Independence – and it did not want anything to
get in their way – it concentrated its efforts from the very beginning to countering Western
voices that had started to call for ‘common efforts’ to solve this global problem.19

India’s official position on climate change was thus: (1) that the primary responsibility for
reducing GHG emissions rested with the developed countries since they were the ones
responsible for producing the bulk of the emissions; (2) that the emissions of developing
countries were still very low and would need to grow to meet their development and
poverty reduction needs, and hence no GHG reduction targets could be affixed for them;
and (3) that any convention on climate change would have to provide for technology

14
For a detailed overview of India’s experience in the Ozone negotiations, see Rajan, Global Environmental
Politics, chapters 4 and 5.
15
Tony Brenton, The Greening of Machiavelli: The Evolution of International Environmental Politics
(London: Royal Institute of International Affairs/ Earthscan, 1994), 181.
16
Rajan, Global Environmental Politics, 111.
17
Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, ‘The Climate Change Negotiations’, in Irving M. Mintzer and J. Amber
Leonard, eds., Negotiating Climate Change: The Inside Story of the Rio Convention (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 131.
18
Ibid., emphasis mine.
19
G-7, Paris Communiqué by the Group of Seven, 16 July 1989, paragraphs 38, 40 and 45.

4
transfer and funds for developing countries to help them address this challenge.20 The
importance that India accorded to ensuring equity was also clearly evident at this stage
itself, with its Prime Minister, V. P. Singh, noting that ‘[d]eveloping countries should
certainly participate in any effort which protects and sustains the health of this planet, but
such efforts must be pursued with a sense of equity and fairness’.21 India systematically
articulated these views for the first time at the Conference of Select Developing Countries
on Global Environmental Issues in New Delhi in April 1990, which it organised to
develop a common Southern position on this issue.22 Indeed, rallying the support of the
global South for its positions on climate change, and closely coordinating especially with
China on this issue, was to become a standard operating practice of India’s foreign policy
behaviour throughout the entire duration of the climate negotiations.23

At the official convention negotiations, India went on to further elaborate what it meant by
equity. Drawing, in part, on a report published by the Centre for Science and Environment
(CSE), a New Delhi-based environmental NGO, India noted that the problem of global
warming had been ‘caused not by emissions of greenhouse gases as such but by excessive
levels of per capita emissions’.24 It further pointed out that:

An equitable solution can only be found on the basis of significant reductions in levels of per
capita emissions of developed countries, so that over a period of years these converge with rising
per capita emissions in developing countries.25

The CSE report had earlier shown that if national emissions were calculated on per capita
terms, then India’s contribution to the problem was miniscule compared to that of the
West, especially if cumulative historical emissions were also taken into account. The CSE
had justified such a calculation in per capita terms on the moral premise that all human
beings were equal and had an ‘equal entitlement’ to the Earth’s atmosphere.26 Convinced
by the logic and normative legitimacy of this argument, Indian negotiators incorporated it
into the country’s official negotiating position. Over time, both the argument as well as the
principle of ‘per capita convergence’ became central features of India’s position on this
issue.

20
MoEF, ‘Greenhouse Effect and Climate Change: Issues for the Developing Countries’, in Proceedings of
the Conference of Select Developing Countries on Global Environmental Issues (New Delhi: Ministry of
Environment and Forests/Government of India, 1990).
21
Cited in Rajan, Global Environmental Politics, 81.
22
Ibid. The 18 developing countries participating at the conference, the first of its kind in the developing
world, included Argentina, Brazil, China, Cuba, Egypt, Guyana, Kenya, Republic of Korea, Malaysia,
Malta, Pakistan, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe.
23
The fact that India valued its collaboration with China, in particular, on climate change could be seen at
this early stage itself as it took the opportunity to propose regular consultations on the subject with it at the
New Delhi Conference, Ibid.
24
Statement by the Leader of the Indian Delegation at the Second Session of the Intergovernmental
Negotiating Committee (INC), Geneva, 19 June 1991, cited in Dasgupta, ‘The Climate Change
Negotiations’, 133, emphasis in original.
25
Ibid, emphasis added.
26
See Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental
Colonialism (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1991). This elaboration of India’s position,
and CSE’s report itself, were, in fact, a direct response to an influential UN-backed report published by the
World Resources Institute (WRI), a US-based NGO, in 1990, which had claimed that global GHG emissions
were much more evenly distributed worldwide than had been previously understood, and that ‘both
developed and developing countries’ shared ‘major responsibility’ for causing climate change. See World
Resources Institute (WRI), World Resources, 1990-91 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 13.

5
On the whole, therefore, India’s position during the convention negotiations was as
follows: (1) that it could have ‘no legal responsibility’ for addressing climate change; (2)
that any voluntary mitigation measures that it took would have to be consistent with its
national development plans and priorities; (3) the ‘full incremental costs involved’ for the
same would need to be provided through ‘new and additional financial resources’ from the
developed world; and (4) that the latter would also need to provide developing countries
with ‘assured access to technology on preferential terms’.27 India further noted that any
mechanism to transfer financial and technological resources to developing countries would
need to be ‘democratically administered by the Parties to the Convention, rather than
through institutions where donors have disproportionate influence’.28 And, finally,
together with China, it strongly opposed the voluntaristic ‘pledge and review’ proposal,
which had been introduced at this point as an alternative to the more rigorous ‘targets and
timetables’ approach, for not only attempting to take the pressure off the North but also for
trying to impose legal obligations on developing countries through the back door.29 Indian
negotiators particularly feared that ‘pledge and review’ could evolve into an intrusive
mechanism whereby the North would be able to interfere in the domestic policies of the
South, especially in key sectors such as energy and industry.30

India’s success in the UNFCCC negotiations can be gauged from the fact that the
Convention text that was finally adopted at the Rio Summit recognised that ‘the largest
share of historical and current global emissions of greenhouse gases has originated in
developed countries’ and that they ‘should take the lead in combating climate change and
the adverse effects thereof’.31 Specifically, the Convention called on developed countries
to aim to return their GHG emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000.32 It also recognised
the South’s ‘differentiated responsibility’ vis-à-vis the North and that the future emissions
of developing countries were bound to grow.33 On finance, the Convention required
developed countries to provide developing countries with ‘new and additional financial
resources’ to meet not only the ‘agreed full incremental costs’ of implementing climate
mitigation and adaptation measures, including for technology transfer, but also the ‘agreed
full costs’ of preparing their national communications and other reporting requirements.34

Crucially, on India’s insistence, the UNFCCC also confined its review function to
conducting individual reviews of only the developed country commitments, while
assessing the commitments and communications of developing countries in ‘aggregated’
terms.35 The Convention also agreed that the Global Environment Facility (GEF) would

27
Statement by the Leader of the Indian Delegation at the Second Session of the Intergovernmental
Negotiating Committee (INC), Geneva, 19 June 1991, cited in Dasgupta, ‘The Climate Change
Negotiations’, 133.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid., 136-7.
30
Rajan, Global Environmental Politics, 124-5.
31
UNFCCC, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1992, Preamble and Article 3.1.
32
Ibid., Article 4.2 (a) and (b).
33
Ibid. Article 3.1 of the UNFCCC explicitly noted that countries should protect the climate system ‘on the
basis of equity’ and in accordance with their ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective
capabilities’ (CBDRRC), which became the core foundational norm of the treaty. For more about the
CBDRRC principle, see Lavanya Rajamani, Differential Treatment in International Environmental Law
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
34
UNFCCC,1992, Article 4.3.
35
Ibid., Article 10.2.

6
administer the financial mechanism of the UNFCCC, but only on an ‘interim’ basis until it
was ‘appropriately restructured’.36 Most importantly, from the Indian point of view, the
UNFCCC explicitly recognised that ‘economic and social development and poverty
eradication are the first and overriding priorities of the developing country Parties’, and
that the extent to which developing countries would be able to effectively implement their
commitments under the Convention would depend on the extent to which developed
countries fulfilled their own commitments with regard to finance and technology
transfer.37

India’s overall assessment of the UNFCCC at the end of negotiations was that ‘the
outcome was entirely satisfactory’ from its point of view.38 It noted that its negotiators,
working closely with their counterparts in G-77 and China, had ‘ensured that the
obligations imposed [on India] are minimal and, furthermore, that in all areas there is
“differentiation” between developed and developing countries’.39

4.0 Defending the status quo at Berlin and Kyoto

India’s foreign policy behaviour on climate change from this point onwards, right up to
Copenhagen, can be characterised as one that constantly defended the status quo of what
had been agreed upon, and inscribed as part of international law, in the UNFCCC. The
primary focus of Indian negotiators was to preserve the concept of ‘differentiation’
between the developed and developing worlds, and to make sure that no fresh legal
obligations or commitments were placed upon developing countries like itself. This can be
seen in the repeated battles that were fought on this issue – first in Berlin in 1995, then in
Kyoto in 1997, then in Bali in 2007, and finally in Copenhagen in 2009 – where the North,
particularly the United States and other members of the JUSCANZ group, continually
pressed the larger developing countries to take on emission reduction commitments as
well.40

Thus in the lead up to the first ‘Conference of the Parties’ to the UNFCCC (CoP-1) in
Berlin in 1995, when the need to ‘review the adequacy’ of the UNFCCC commitments
came up for discussion for the first time after Rio, Germany proposed the development of
a ‘protocol’ to the Convention, which – in addition to requiring more stringent emission
reduction targets from Annex I (developed country) Parties – also called for ‘commitments
to limit the rise in emissions in the case of certain more advanced developing countries’.41

36
Ibid., Article 21.
37
Ibid., Article 4.7.
38
Cited in Rajan, Global Environmental Politics, 152.
39
Ibid., 151.
40
The JUSCANZ group, which first emerged at CoP-1 in Berlin, typically included Japan, United States,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The decade between Kyoto (1997) and Bali (2007) was punctuated by
other important meetings as well, including at the Hague (2000), Bonn and Marrakech (2001), and Montreal
(2005), but these dealt mostly with operationalising the Kyoto Protocol and are not covered here due to
limited space.
41
INC, ‘Letter dated 22 September 1994 from the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature
Conservation and Nuclear Safety of Germany to the Executive Secretary of the interim secretariat,
transmitting proposals for further elements of a protocol to the Convention’, Matters relating to
commitments. Review of the adequacy of commitments in Article 4, paras. 2 (a) and (b), Note by the interim
secretariat. Addendum in A/AC.237/L.23/Add.1, Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, 27 September
1994, emphasis mine.

7
Not only was the German proposal endorsed by the EU, but countries like Australia and
the US – which were otherwise opposed to the idea of a protocol with specific ‘targets and
timetables’ – also joined Germany in explicitly calling on the ‘more advanced’ developing
countries to take on additional commitments.42 The US, for example, insisted that action
by Annex I Parties alone was not enough to accomplish the objective of the UNFCCC. It
argued that climate change was a ‘global problem’ that needed ‘broad international
participation’, and that this ‘broadening’ could only be achieved through ‘further
differentiating’ or by establishing ‘new categories’ among the Parties.43

India, unsurprisingly, took strong objection to such proposals. At CoP-1 in Berlin, its then
Environment Minister, Kamal Nath, described this attempt to divide the developing world
into separate categories as ‘insidious’, and reasserted that that ‘developing countries have
no – or negative – responsibility for causing climate change’.44 Similarly, China also noted
that it would not accept the creation of new categories of countries, and that Annex I
Parties should not transfer the responsibility for tackling climate change to the developing
world.45 Brazil, likewise, also argued that the ‘right to development’ of developing
countries could not be compromised, and that trying to enrol developing countries in such
a hasty manner would be unacceptable to it.46 Both Algeria and Philippines, on behalf of
the G-77 and China group, also successively urged countries not to venture beyond the
original mandate of the Convention, noting that any attempt to reassign responsibilities to
the South would be akin to ‘transferring the burden to the victims rather than the
perpetrators of climate change’.47

Given the emerging deadlock between North and South on this issue, India now played a
major role in brokering a deal at Berlin, albeit in a manner that was to its own advantage.48
In a draft paper (dubbed the ‘green paper’), it proposed a set of basic principles to guide
the future negotiations on the question of ‘adequacy of commitments’.49 Until now, India
had remained mostly silent on this issue, only demanding that developed countries fulfil
their existing commitments under the UNFCCC. However, encouraged by a network of
environmental organisations, and specifically the CSE, which had been participating at
CoP-1, the Indian ‘green paper’ now supported an earlier proposal that had been
introduced by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), which had demanded that
Annex I Parties adopt specific, time-bound, legally-binding commitments through a

42
For the Australian and EU viewpoints, see Papers No. 1 and 4 respectively in INC, Matters relating to
commitments. Review of the adequacy of commitments in Article 4, para. 2 (a) and (b). Comments from
Parties or other member States. Note by the interim secretariat in A/AC.237/Misc.43, Intergovernmental
Negotiating Committee, 7 December 1994.
43
For a compilation of US views on the adequacy of commitments from INC-9 to INC-11, see UNFCCC,
Matters relating to commitments. Review of the adequacy of Article 4, paragraph 2 (A) and (B). Comments
from Parties and other member States. Note by the interim secretariat in FCCC/CP/1995/Misc.1, 9 March
1995, 75-92.
44
ENB Vol. 12, No. 20, 7 April 1995. See also Anil Agarwal, Sunita Narain and Anju Sharma, eds. Green
Politics: Global Environmental Negotiations 1 (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1999), 46
and Susanne Jakobsen, ‘India’s Position on Climate Change from Rio to Kyoto: A Policy Analysis’, CDR
Working Paper 98.11, Centre for Development Research, Copenhagen (1998), 11.
45
ENB Vol. 12, No. 21, 10 April 1995.
46
ENB Vol. 12, No. 14, 30 March 1995.
47
ENB Vol. 12, No. 4, 9 February 1995.
48
See Matthew Paterson, Global Warming and Global Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), 70.
49
ENB Vol. 12, No. 21, 10 April, 1995.

8
‘protocol’ to reduce their emissions beyond the year 2000.50 India also insisted that
industrialized countries needed to reduce their GHG emissions so that developing
countries could have the necessary atmospheric ‘space’ to grow.51 In the face of
opposition from fellow G-77 members belonging to the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC), who were against the entire idea of a protocol, given their
heavy economic dependence on fossil fuels, India then convened a ‘Green Group’ of 72
like-minded developing states (which included AOSIS but excluded OPEC) to build a
workable Southern coalition on this subject.52 India’s own red-line, of course, was that in
exchange for supporting the development of a strong protocol for the post-2000 period,
and preventing OPEC from blocking progress on it, no additional commitments could be
asked of developing countries. In other words, Germany and the EU would need to choose
between whether they wanted a strong protocol or whether they wanted to insist on
additional commitments for the ‘more advanced developing countries’.

Faced with intense lobbying from environmental groups, who were generally sympathetic
to the Southern position, and had rallied behind India on this issue, the German
environment minister, Angela Merkel, subsequently agreed to withdraw the original
German proposal and clarified that developing country commitments would no longer be
on the EU’s agenda for the protocol negotiations.53 Intense negotiations were then held
between the EU and the Green Group, on the one hand (who were now both for a strong
protocol but without developing country commitments), and the JUSCANZ group, on the
other (who were against a strong protocol but for developing country commitments). The
final outcome of these negotiations resulted in the ‘Berlin Mandate’, which was formally
adopted by the Parties at the end of CoP-1.

The Berlin Mandate concluded that Article 4.2 (a) and (b) of the UNFCCC – which had
called on Annex I Parties to stabilise their GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2000 – was
inadequate, and called for countries to begin a ‘process’ that would aim for Annex I
Parties to set ‘quantified limitation and reduction objectives’ within ‘specified time-
frames’, including through the ‘adoption of a protocol or another legal instrument’ by
CoP-3, which was scheduled to be held in Kyoto in 1997.54 Most importantly, from
India’s point of view, the decision explicitly noted that the process would ‘not introduce
any new commitments’ for non-Annex I Parties, but rather would ‘continue to advance’
the implementation of their existing commitments under the Convention.55

In other words, India successfully managed to defend the ‘differentiated’ architecture that
it had originally helped to construct in the UNFCCC negotiations, and made sure that the
‘terms and scope’ of future talks recognised the same as well. Following the formal
adoption of the Berlin Mandate at CoP-1, India’s representative acknowledged the key
role that alliance-building had played in furthering its interests on this issue. Noting that

50
However, unlike the AOSIS proposal, which had called for a protocol prescribing a 20% cut in emissions
for Annex I Parties below 1990 levels by 2005, the Indian ‘green paper’ did not suggest any particular figure
or date.
51
Sebastian Oberthür and Hermann E. Ott, The Kyoto Protocol: International Climate Policy for the 21st
Century (Berlin: Springer, 1999), 46 and Agarwal et al., Green Politics, 45.
52
Paterson, Global Warming and Global Politics, 70.
53
See Agarwal et al., Green Politics, 45.
54
UNFCCC, Berlin Mandate, Decision 1/CP.1 in FCCC/1995/7/Add.1, 6 June 1995. See also Oberthür and
Ott, The Kyoto Protocol, 47.
55
Ibid.

9
‘the “green paper” was a rare example of cooperation between government representatives
and non-governmental organizations’, he expressed his satisfaction that the decision had
‘achieved the goal of providing a mandate for a process that would lead to a strengthening
of the commitments of Annex I Parties and would not seek to introduce any new
commitments for developing country Parties’.56

However, notwithstanding the Berlin Mandate, the JUSCANZ countries, and the US in
particular, continued to demand that developing countries take on additional commitments
in the lead up to CoP-3 as well. The US Senate, for example, passed the Byrd-Hagel
Resolution, 95-0 in July 1997, which refused to ratify any climate treaty that mandated
new emission reduction commitments for developed countries, unless it did so for
developing countries too, arguing that an exemption for developing countries would be
inconsistent with the need for ‘global action’ on climate change, and that any agreement
that permitted so would be ‘environmentally flawed’ and result in ‘serious harm’ to the US
economy.57 Just prior to Kyoto, US President Bill Clinton also made it clear that that the
United States would ‘not assume binding obligations unless key developing countries
meaningfully participate in this effort’ as well.58

India did not seem to engage as actively in the negotiations leading up to Kyoto as it had
done in the lead up to Berlin. It generally seemed content to express its views through the
common G-77 and China position. Perhaps having played a key role in defining the terms
of the Berlin Mandate, it did not feel a need to make any additional substantive
interventions at this stage. On the question of additional developing country commitments,
however, there was one moment, during the Commonwealth Heads of Government
Meeting (CHOGM) in Edinburgh in October 1997, when there seemed to be somewhat of
a shift in India’s position on this issue. This was when the Indian Prime Minister, Inder
Kumar Gujral, seemingly endorsed a communiqué which noted that ‘after Kyoto, all
countries will need to play their part by pursuing policies that would result in significant
reductions of greenhouse gas emissions if we are to solve a global problem that affects us
all’.59 However, facing strong internal criticism from both the CSE and his own
Environment Minister, Saifuddin Soz, this was quickly clarified.60 Saifuddin Soz,
subsequently, made it clear to the visiting British Deputy Prime Minister and Environment
Secretary, John Prescott, who had come to New Delhi in November 1997 to lobby support
for a common Commonwealth position ahead of Kyoto, that ‘India is not ready to make
any commitment on cutting back GHG emissions’.61

However, at Kyoto itself, India played a far more assertive role. It vigorously resisted the
idea of ‘voluntary commitments’ for developing countries – an option that had been

56
UNFCCC, Report of the Conference of the Parties on its first session, held at Berlin from 28 March to 7
April 1995. Part one: Proceedings in FCCC/CP/1995/7, 24 May 1995, paragraph 55.
57
United States Senate, Byrd-Hagel Resolution, 105th Congress, S. RES. 98, 25 July 1997.
58
Bill Clinton, ‘Remarks by the President on Global Climate Change’, National Geographic Society,
Washington D.C., 22 October 1997, reprinted in Environment Policy and Law, Vol. 27, No. 6 (1997), 503-4,
emphasis mine.
59
CHOGM, ‘Edinburgh Commonwealth Economic Declaration (Promoting Shared Prosperity)’,
Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, 25 October 1997 in Richard Green, ed., The Commonwealth
Yearbook 2006 (London: The Commonwealth Secretariat, 2006), 503, emphasis mine.
60
Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, ‘Open Letter of Protest addressed to the Indian Prime Minister I. K.
Gujral’, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi, 6 November 1997.
61
Cited in Agarwal et al., Green Politics, 55.

10
included in the final negotiating draft of the protocol, and which was being pushed by
several developed countries.62 New Zealand, for example, had even submitted a specific
proposal that called on developing countries to make formal commitments to limit their
emissions starting from 2010 onwards, which the Japanese President of CoP-3 had
allowed to be tabled.63 Irked by this blatant violation of the Berlin Mandate, India’s
Environment Minister reiterated India’s traditional stand on this issue, noting that:

We expect the conference to cast aside any proposal seeking to disturb the present balance of
equities in the convention. India categorically rejects ideas suggesting any new commitments for
developing countries. Any idea that seeks further to deprive us of our equitable entitlement to
grow can never be allowed to take root.64

Similar protests were made by other developing countries, including China and Brazil as
well.65 The compromise that was ultimately agreed upon at Kyoto, in the final hours of
negotiations, was that in exchange for dropping the option of ‘voluntary commitments’,
many of the ‘flexible mechanisms’ that the US had been pushing for – such as ‘emissions
trading’, ‘joint implementation’ and the ‘clean development mechanism (CDM)’ – would
be allowed to be included in, what finally then became, the Kyoto Protocol.66

5.0 India’s engagement from Kyoto to Bali

Under the Kyoto Protocol, developed countries agreed to reduce their collective GHG
emissions by 5% below 1990 levels over the first commitment period of 2008-12.67 The
various CoPs that followed focused mostly on developing the modalities and rules for
operationalising this treaty. India played an active role in this process, particularly in
framing the rules and principles governing the use of the flexible mechanisms, especially
the CDM, in which it had now begun to sense an opportunity to gain foreign investment
and clean technology from the West. It also hosted CoP-8 in New Delhi in October 2002,
where, following the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) and the release
of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, it succeeding in gaining greater recognition for
the issue of climate vulnerability and ‘adaptation’ on the international agenda, which had
focused almost exclusively on ‘mitigation’ until then.68

Meanwhile, the US and other developed countries continued to raise the question of

62
The day-to-day negotiations and bargaining that took place among the various countries and coalitions at
Kyoto during CoP-3 have been described in detail by a number of scholars and commentators. See, for
example, Michael Grubb, Christiaan Vrolijk and Duncan Brack, The Kyoto Protocol: A Guide and
Assessment (London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs/ Earthscan, 1999), 61-114; Oberthür and
Ott, The Kyoto Protocol, 79-91; and Agarwal et al., Green Politics, 56-67.
63
Agarwal et al., Green Politics, 58.
64
Cited in Ibid., 59.
65
Ibid., 72.
66
Under ‘emissions trading’, developed countries are permitted to buy and sell excess emission allowances
from each other to help meet their assigned Kyoto targets. Under ‘joint implementation’ they are allowed to
invest in emission reduction projects in other developed countries, including those located in the ex-Soviet
bloc with economies-in-transition, and gain credits in exchange to help meet their Kyoto targets. Under the
‘clean development mechanism’, they are allowed to do the same, but this time by investing in emission
reduction projects in the developing world. For more details, see: http://unfccc.int/.
67
UNFCCC, Kyoto Protocol, 1997, Article 3.1.
68
UNFCCC, Delhi Ministerial Declaration on Climate Change and Sustainable Development, Decision
1/CP.8 in FCCC/CP/2002/7/Add.1, 28 March 2003.

11
developing country participation in the post-Kyoto negotiations as well. Their persistence
bore its first fruit at CoP-4 in Buenos Aires in 1998, when they succeeded in getting
Argentina to sign up to the concept of ‘voluntary commitments’.69 But these efforts gained
even greater impetus when the US Administration transitioned from Bill Clinton to
George W. Bush in early 2001. In June 2001, President Bush severely weakened the future
prospects of the Kyoto Protocol by categorically rejecting it as a ‘fatally flawed’
agreement, and making it clear in his explanation that the absence of mitigation
commitments for key developing countries like China and India made the treaty
unratifiable for America.70 Although, with Russian ratification (obtained in exchange for
the EU’s support for its entry into the WTO), the Kyoto Protocol subsequently managed to
enter into force at CoP-11 in Montreal in 2005, its inability to make a substantial
contribution towards actually resolving the problem of climate change focused attention
on the need to improve the existing international framework on this issue.

The formal ‘entry into force’ of the Kyoto Protocol in 2005 had already triggered off a
process under the treaty to initiate discussions on the post-2012 ‘second commitment
period’ emission reduction targets of developed countries that had signed and ratified the
Protocol (the KP-track).71 However, to supplement this, an additional ‘dialogue’ process
was also launched at Montreal to encourage ‘long-term cooperative action’ on climate
change under the UNFCCC (the LCA-track), which could discuss the future commitments
of those countries that had refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, or had no emission
reduction obligations under it.72 Following two years of discussions – and the release of
IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, which noted the threat of climate change to be
‘unequivocal’ – countries finally decided at CoP-13 in Bali in December 2007 that a
formal comprehensive process of negotiation would be launched to enable the ‘full,
effective and sustained implementation’ of the UNFCCC ‘now, up to and beyond 2012’,
and that an ‘agreed outcome’ on the same would be reached by CoP-15 at Copenhagen in
2009.73 This was the Bali Action Plan, the terms of which India, again – as will be shown
below – played a key role in shaping.

In the period leading up to Bali, India had come under increased and sustained pressure
from the developed world, including via the global media, to do more to demonstrate its
commitment in combating climate change. Several influential reports, including the UK
Government’s Stern Review, the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2007 and the UNDP’s
Human Development Report 2007/08, had focused attention on the rising emissions
trajectories of India and China in particular. The G-8 Summit hosted by Germany in
Heiligendamm in June 2007 had also made climate change a key focus of the meeting, and
invited the leaders of the five largest emerging economies (China, India, Brazil, South
Africa and Mexico) to participate in it.

69
Agarwal et al., Green Politics, 51. For the Argentine decision to accept ‘voluntary commitments’, see
Daniel Bouille and Osvaldo Girardin, ‘Learning from the Argentine Voluntary Commitment’, in Kevin A.
Baumert, ed., Building on the Kyoto Protocol: Options for Protecting the Climate (Washington D.C.: World
Resources Institute, 2002).
70
White House, President Bush Discusses Global Climate Change, Office of the Press Secretary, 11 June
2001.
71
UNFCCC, Kyoto Protocol, Article 3.9.
72
UNFCCC, Dialogue on long-term cooperative action to address climate change by enhancing
implementation of the Convention, Decision 1/CP.11 in FCCC/CP/2005/5/Add.1, 30 March 2006.
73
UNFCCC, Bali Action Plan, Decision 1/ CP.13 in FCCC/CP/2007/6/Add.1, 14 March 2008.

12
Faced with the insinuation that it was not acting responsibly, or doing enough, on climate
change, India took the opportunity at Heiligendamm to both clarify and defend the
legitimacy of its position on this issue. At the G-8+5 meeting of national leaders, its Prime
Minister, Manmohan Singh, reiterated that India’s GHG emissions were ‘among the
lowest in per-capita terms’ and that, even if considered in aggregate terms, it would
account for ‘only around 4% of the world’s emissions’.74 He also emphasized that India
‘recognise[d] wholeheartedly’ its ‘responsibilities as a developing country’ and wished to
engage ‘constructively and productively’ with the international community, and that it
would ‘add [its] weight to global efforts to preserve and protect the environment’.75

However, stressing that the ‘process of burden sharing must be fair’ and should ‘not
perpetuate poverty among the developing countries’, Singh noted that the time was ‘not
ripe for developing countries to take quantitative targets as these would be counter-
productive on their development processes’.76 Nevertheless, to indicate India’s sincerity
on this issue, he went on to make a unilateral and voluntary pledge that ‘India’s per-capita
GHG emissions are not going to exceed those of developed countries even while pursuing
policies of development and economic growth’.77 This was the first time in the entire
history of the climate negotiations that India had made such an offer to accept a curb on its
future potential emissions. But a careful reading of this delicately-worded commitment
showed that the offer, while significant, was, in fact, a challenge to the developed world to
reduce its own per capita emissions first, given the vast gap that existed between the per
capita emissions of the developed world and that of India. The Prime Minister’s promise
was also essentially consistent with the country’s long-held principle of ‘per-capita
convergence’. Thus, as far as India’s international legal position was concerned, nothing
much had changed.

Consequently, the main concerns for India as it entered the CoP-13 negotiations in Bali at
the end of 2007 were much the same as before – how to avoid any additional legally-
binding commitments; how to preserve the ‘differentiation’ that had been inscribed within
the UNFCCC; and how to ensure that its national sovereignty was adequately protected?
Its main goal therefore was to ensure that the terms and scope of the future negotiations
that the Bali Action Plan (BAP) would lay out were entirely consistent with the provisions
of the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol, and did not undermine them in any significant
manner.

Hence, during the negotiations on the operational section of the BAP, which dealt with
‘[e]nhanced national/international action on mitigation’, India, together with other
developing countries, insisted that a clear-cut ‘differentiation’, or ‘firewall’, be maintained
between what developed and developing countries would each be required to do in the
future. Consequently, paragraph 1(b)(i) of the BAP called for ‘[m]easurable, reportable
and verifiable nationally appropriate mitigation commitments or actions, including
quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives, by all developed country Parties,
while ensuring the comparability of efforts among them’; while paragraph 1(b)(ii) called
for ‘[n]ationally appropriate mitigation actions by developing country Parties in the

74
Manmohan Singh, ‘PM’s Intervention on Climate Change at the Heiligendamm Meeting of G-8 plus 5’, 8
June 2007.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid., emphasis mine.
77
Ibid., emphasis mine.

13
context of sustainable development, supported and enabled by technology, financing and
capacity-building, in a measurable, reportable and verifiable manner’.78

The specific wording of these paragraphs was important to India because it meant, on the
one hand, that developed countries participating under the LCA-track, which had refused
to ratify the Kyoto Protocol (i.e. United States and Australia) would need to deliver
nationally appropriate ‘mitigation commitments’ by CoP-15 that were ‘comparable’ to the
economy-wide, second-commitment period, emission reduction targets of the developed
countries that were participating under the KP-track, in the post-2012 period. On the other
hand, developing countries would only need to deliver discrete, stand-alone, nationally
appropriate ‘mitigation actions’ which were enabled and supported by ‘technology,
financing and capacity-building’.79 Moreover, the differential placement of the
‘[m]easurable, reportable and verifiable’ (MRV) clause for developed and developing
countries in paras 1(b)(i) and (ii) respectively – again, done largely on India’s insistence –
meant that for developing countries, MRV would apply as much for ‘technology,
financing and capacity-building’ as it did for the ‘mitigation actions’ that they supported
and enabled.80 Equally, it implied that international MRV would not be applicable for any
unsupported mitigation actions. In other words, India would not allow any external
scrutiny of the domestic mitigation measures that it undertook using its own resources,
thereby ensuring the safeguarding of its sovereignty.

6.0 India’s climate change policy in the lead up to Copenhagen

The two-year period between Bali and Copenhagen was a period of intense activity on
climate change in India, as it was in other countries around the world. In June 2007, Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh constituted a Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change
(PMCCC) to evolve a coordinated multi-stakeholder response to climate change issues at
the national level, and to monitor key policy decisions, including the formulation of
climate assessment, mitigation and adaptation plans.81 In April 2008, he appointed the
country’s former Foreign Secretary, Shyam Saran, as his Special Envoy on Climate
Change to help coordinate the country’s international negotiations on this issue. Shortly
thereafter, in June 2008, India also published a National Action Plan on Climate Change
(NAPCC), which identified and outlined a number of measures that the government
intended to take through ‘Eight National Missions’ to promote ‘development objectives
while also yielding co-benefits for addressing climate change effectively’.82

At least three of the eight missions in the NAPCC – on Water, Himalayan Ecosystems and
Agriculture – were identified and prioritized almost purely based on the recognition that
these were sectors in India that were highly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate
change, and upon which the survival and livelihoods of millions of Indians depended.
However, most of the other missions – on Solar Energy, Energy Efficiency, Sustainable
78
UNFCCC, Bali Action Plan, emphasis mine.
79
MoEF, Climate Change Negotiations: India’s submissions to the UNFCCC (New Delhi: Ministry of
Environment and Forests/Government of India, 2009).
80
Ibid.
81
PMO, Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change, Prime Minister’s Office, Government of India, New
Delhi, 6 June 2007.
82
PMCCC, National Action Plan on Climate Change, Government of India, New Delhi, 30 June 2008,
emphasis mine.

14
Habitat and Greening India – had a clear focus on mitigation benefits. Indeed, India had,
over the previous several years, already undertaken a number of domestic initiatives to
promote renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean transportation, and forest conservation
and expansion.83 The motivations for these had not been to address climate change per se,
but more to enhance energy security and economic efficiency, and to gain local
environmental and health benefits. But these were, nevertheless, all climate-friendly
actions and directly helped to curb the growth of the country’s GHG emissions. Now, in
the lead up to Copenhagen, all of these hitherto separate national discourses and
imperatives – on energy security, economic efficiency, local environment, health, and
climate vulnerability – came together to form a unifying narrative in the country’s
NAPCC. The NAPCC signalled, at least to some extent, the government’s seriousness to
actively promote at the domestic-level, at least those climate mitigation and adaptation
actions that had clear development ‘co-benefits’.

Internationally, however, India’s position on climate change remained largely unchanged.

It was only in the final six months prior to Copenhagen that a significant internal churning
and debate began to take place within the country on what India’s external strategy for
CoP-15 ought to be, and if any revision was needed to its existing position. The first signs
of change in India’s international position on climate change were seen in July 2009, when
at a meeting of the Major Economies Forum (MEF) held alongside the G-8 Summit in
L’Aquila, Italy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed the MEF Leaders Declaration on
Energy and Climate. The declaration specifically recognised that the rise in global
temperatures ‘ought not to exceed 2 degrees C’, and that the MEF countries would work
together to identify a ‘global goal’ to reduce ‘global emissions by 2050’.84 While only a
political declaration, and not legally binding, India’s signing on to this ‘2 degree C’ limit
nevertheless indicated its willingness, for the first time, to concede, in theory at least, an
implicit cap on its future emissions, even though this was left ambiguous and unstated.85
Another significant change that now took place was the appointment of a new
Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, as the head of India’s climate negotiating team.
On handing the charge of the environment ministry over to him, Manmohan Singh, who
had been responsible for the portfolio until then, advised the new minister that India had
‘not caused the problem of global warming’ but instructed him to ‘try and make sure that
India is part of the solution’, and to be ‘constructive [and] proactive’ in the process.86

Subsequently, India’s new Environment Minister actively attempted to introduce a certain

amount of flexibility in India’s international negotiating position, in part to address the
perception, within some quarters, that it was being too rigid and intransigent.87 In a letter
to Members of Parliament in October 2009, the Minister noted that India was highly
vulnerable to climate change given the high dependence of its economy on rainfall, its
glacier-fed river systems, and its vast and populous peninsular coastline. He argued that it
could now be in India’s interests to move beyond its traditional ‘per capita convergence’
position, and adopt a more aggressive ‘per-capita plus’ approach, whereby specific

83
Some of these have been documented in the NAPCC; see Ibid.
84
MEF, Declaration of the Leaders of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, 9 July 2009,
L’Aquila, Italy.
85
R. Ramachandran, ‘Climate Change and the Indian stand’, The Hindu, 28 July 2009.
86
Lok Sabha, Transcript of the Minister’s Response in the Lok Sabha, Parliament of India, New Delhi, 3
December 2009, 228-47.
87
See, for example, Jim Yardley, ‘New Script for India on Climate Change’, New York Times, 3 October
2009.

15
‘performance targets’ could be assigned to key economic sectors like power, industry and
transportation through domestic legislation or executive action to help reduce their
emissions, and which would lead to ‘nationally accountable mitigation outcomes’.88 More
controversially, and contrary to India’s official negotiating position on this issue at that
time, he also appeared to suggest that India would not have any objection to IMF/WTO-
style reviews of its domestically-funded voluntary mitigation actions.89 But it was later
clarified in a press statement that India would agree to international MRV of only those
mitigation actions that were enabled and supported by international finance and
technology, i.e. what had already been agreed to in the Bali Action Plan.90

These new ideas provoked a great deal of public discussion and domestic debate in the
country, including within the government, which saw strong dissenting views and
reservations being expressed by senior members of India’s official climate negotiating
team itself about the unilateral nature of these offers.91 It also led to India’s foreign policy
on climate change being extensively debated in Parliament on at least three separate
occasions. The clearest articulation of India’s views en route to Copenhagen was seen in
the final parliamentary debate that was held on this topic in the first week of December
2009, just before the start of CoP-15. Participating in the debate, the Environment Minister
made it clear that while India would go to Copenhagen with a ‘positive frame of mind’
and prepared to be ‘flexible’, there were nevertheless some ‘non-negotiables’ that it would
not compromise on.92 These were: (1) that India would not accept any ‘legally binding
emission reduction cut’; (2) that it would not accept any agreement which stipulated a
‘peaking year’ for the country (something that developed countries had started
demanding); and (3) that it would not allow ‘unsupported actions to be subject to the same
type of scrutiny that the supported actions are subject to’.93 However, the Minister noted
that while the first two non-negotiables were rigidly set in ‘two complete, dark, bright, red
lines’, and there was no question of compromising on them, India could be somewhat
flexible on the third, if sufficient concessions were forthcoming from the West, and if its
partners in the newly-formed BASIC alliance – China, Brazil and South Africa – also
agreed on them.

That India had been closely coordinating its external strategy for CoP-15 with these other
BASIC countries in the lead up to Copenhagen had been evident for sometime. In fact,
China and India had even signed their first-ever formal partnership agreement to
strengthen bilateral cooperation on climate change in October 2009.94 But this
coordination became further clear, when following shortly after the Chinese
announcement of a voluntary cut in its national emissions intensity, India’s Environment
Minister too announced in Parliament that India would also voluntarily reduce the
88
Jairam Ramesh, Letter to Members of Parliament, 6 October 2009 and Padmaparna Ghosh, ‘I want to
position India as a proactive player: Jairam Ramesh’, Mint, 29 September 2009. See also MoEF,
‘Intervention made by Environment Minister at the pre-CoP-15 meeting at Copenhagen’, Ministry of
Environment and Forests, Government of India, 16 November 2009.
89
See, for example, Nitin Sethi, ‘India ready for global scrutiny on emissions’, Times of India, 28 September
2009.
90
MoEF, Press Statement, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, 20 October 2009.
91
See, for example, TNN, ‘Jairam persuades negotiators to join climate talks’, Times of India, 7 December
2009.
92
Lok Sabha, Transcript of the Minister’s Response.
93
Ibid.
94
Governments of China and India, India-China Partnership on Combating Climate Change, New Delhi, 21
October 2009.

16
emissions intensity of its GDP by 20-25% by 2020 compared to its 2005 level through
domestic mitigation actions.95 This reflected a clear shift in India’s position from what it
had held during the Kyoto negotiations when it had abjured any notion of ‘voluntary
commitments’, and from the Prime Minister’s 2007 statement at Heiligendamm itself. But
now the Minister justified this shift to Parliament, noting that India was ‘the most
vulnerable country in the world’ to climate change and that taking proactive domestic
measures to meet this target would not only be in India’s own best interests, but would
strengthen its hands internationally in future climate negotiations as well.96

At Copenhagen itself, the BASIC countries coordinated extremely closely with each other
on both the KP and LCA track negotiations. However, when it became clear that no
‘agreed outcome’ was being reached, and that the sole objective of the developed world,
especially the US, was to do away with the Kyoto Protocol altogether, and, specifically,
the core concept of ‘differentiation’ that it embodied, and which had been embedded in
both the UNFCCC and the Bali Action Plan; the BASIC group pushed for, and succeeded,
in getting the mandate of the KP and LCA negotiations extended to CoP-16. On the
controversial ‘Copenhagen Accord’, which was negotiated between the US and the
BASIC group in the final hours of the conference, at the heads-of-government level,
India’s main objective was to ensure that none of the ‘non-negotiables’ that it had declared
to Parliament were compromised.

In a statement subsequently delivered to Parliament on the outcome of CoP-15 on his

return from Copenhagen, India’s Environment Minister highlighted the following key
points in this regard.97 He noted that under the Copenhagen Accord, the goal of limiting
temperature rise to 20C was set to be achieved only on the ‘basis of equity and in the
context of sustainable development’.98 Further, that while the concept of ‘peaking’ had
been included in the Accord, no ‘peaking year’ itself had been prescribed, and that it had
been explicitly recognised that the time frame for peaking ‘would be longer in developing
countries’ and would keep in mind that ‘social and economic development and poverty
eradication are the first and overriding priorities of developing countries’.99 He also
acknowledged that a reference to a ‘global goal of 50% emissions reduction by 2050’ had
been resisted by India because it had felt that such a target would have resulted in an
implicit binding commitment for developing countries, who did not have any such legal
obligations under the UNFCCC.100 And, that while ‘international consultations and
analysis’ of domestically-MRV’ed unsupported mitigation actions had been permitted, the
Copenhagen Accord had noted that these would be done ‘under clearly defined guidelines
that will ensure that national sovereignty is respected’.101 The Minister further also
clarified that as the Copenhagen Accord was only ‘taken note of’ and not ‘adopted’ by

95
Lok Sabha, Transcript of the Minister’s Response (in Hindi); thereafter confirmed formally in a Letter
from the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India to the Executive Secretary of the
UNFCCC dated 30 January 2010; see also Li Xianzhi, ed., ‘China announces targets on carbon emission
cuts’, Xinhua, 26 November 2009.
96
Lok Sabha, Transcript of the Minister’s Response, 229.
97
Jairam Ramesh, Suo Moto Statement of Shri Jairam Ramesh, Minister of State (Independent Charge)
Environment and Forests in Rajya Sabha, 22 December 2009. For the full text of the Copenhagen Accord,
see UNFCCC, Copenhagen Accord, Decision 2/CP.15 in FCCC/CP/2009/11/Add.1, 30 March 2010.
98
Ramesh, Suo Moto Statement, 3.
99
Ibid.
100
Ibid., 4.
101
Ibid.

17
CoP-15, its contents were not legally binding, and nor did they constitute a mandate for a
new negotiating process under the UNFCCC.102

Separately, it could also be clearly seen in the Copenhagen Accord that while it called on
Annex I Parties to submit their ‘quantified economy-wide emissions targets for 2020’ to
the Secretariat by 31 January 2010, non-Annex I Parties were only required to submit their
‘mitigation actions’ by that date.103 In other words, even though some countries had tried
their utmost to blur the difference between the developed and developing worlds at
Copenhagen, the concept of ‘differentiation’ nevertheless persisted.

7.0 Conclusion

The six months that led up to CoP-15 were momentous in India’s two decade-long foreign
policy trajectory on climate change. Although, as this paper has shown, defending
‘differentiation’ has continued to remain an immutable constant in India’s foreign policy
thinking and engagement on this issue, there is nevertheless change evident in the air.

The growing recognition of its high vulnerability to climate change; its energy security
imperatives; its desire to be seen as a responsible member of the international community;
and the potential to economically benefit from emerging opportunities in clean technology
to transition to a new, more energy efficient and secure, form of development – now all
seem to be encouraging the development of more serious climate-friendly policies and
actions at the domestic-level by the government in India. Following Copenhagen, for
instance, the country’s Planning Commission constituted and tasked an Expert Group to
prepare a strategy for a ‘low-carbon economy’ for India that could be integrated into its
Twelfth Five-Year Plan process over the 2012-17 period.104 Several state governments
also launched or announced their intention to develop state-level action plans to combat
climate change. A raft of other measures, including a clean energy cess on coal, tradable
energy saving certificates, and scientific assessments of the medium-term impacts of
climate change have also been embarked upon.105

At the international level too, India has engaged actively in the post CoP-15 period to find
solutions to the deadlock between North and South, including by submitting detailed
proposals to operationalise the concepts of ‘equity’, ‘international consultations and
analysis’ and the proposed ‘technology mechanism’. Despite the outwardly manifested
allegiance towards maintaining a ‘differentiated’ international regime on climate change,
India’s political leaders currently in charge of climate policymaking have also begun to
show an increased willingness to consider taking a more flexible stance on this issue.
However, given the underlying material conditions of India’s situation – its still relatively
low aggregate contribution of 4-5% of global GHGs; its even more negligible per capita
emissions; its unacceptably high levels of poverty; and its largely underdeveloped national
infrastructure – it seems unrealistic, even undesirable, for India’s core ‘non-negotiables’ to

102
Ibid., 3.
103
UNFCCC, Copenhagen Accord, 8-9.
104
Planning Commission, ‘Office Memorandum constituting Expert Group on strategy for a Low Carbon
Economy’, Government of India, New Delhi, 7 January 2010.
105
See MoEF, ‘India taking action on Climate Change: Post-Copenhagen Domestic Actions’, Ministry of
Environment and Forests, Government of India, 30 June 2010.

18
change anytime soon.

Nevertheless, if creatively and strategically managed, these twin forces of change and
continuity need not be inconsistent, or in conflict, with each other. Given the lack of
serious meaningful action on the part of the developed world to address climate change,
and their reluctance to respect existing international law on this issue to date, defending
the logic of ‘differentiation’ abroad, while acting positively at home seems to offer a
sensible overall strategy for India to follow. However, as the world changes, and India’s
interests change together with it, the trade-offs, and costs and benefits of this approach to
the country will need to be continually assessed.

19