The long negotiation : strategies and variables in the climate change negotiations

Abstract

International negotiations matter in world politics. Questions of international security, trade and the environment cannot be addressed if states do not engage in international negotiations. Many international negotiations, indeed many of the most significant in the post-war era, have been prolonged stretching for years and sometimes decades. This has certainly been true for the international climate negotiations, which represent one of the best examples of the phenomenon. Yet despite seeking to address some of the most critical problems facing the globe, prolonged international negotiations are not well understood.

Although international negotiations have been an important area of study in the social sciences and much research has focussed on explaining how and why states cooperate, remarkably almost none of this work has considered these questions for prolonged international negotiations. For example, extensive work has been done on the role of state and non-state actors in international negotiations, on the influence of domestic pressures and domestic political institutions, on the role of transnational activities of state and non-state actors and on the impact of international regimes. Yet very little work has been undertaken on how these factors vary over time in protracted negotiations.

This thesis takes on this challenge by focussing on variations in state behaviour over time and the affect these have on the negotiated outcome. Specifically, it asks: what factors lead a state to change its negotiating position and the type of agreement it is willing to sign? And, how and why are these decisions made? What is theoretically distinct about these questions is that they are asked in the context of prolonged international negotiations. Accordingly, this thesis examines the behaviour of the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) across three agreements during the ""Kyoto phase"" of the climate negotiations, which commenced in 1995 and took a decade to conclude before the Kyoto Protocol entered into force in 2005. Drawing on three theoretical perspectives - the two-level intergovernmental approach, the transnational approach and the international regime approach - the analysis shows that variations in state behaviour affect the outcome of international negotiations.

While each theoretical approach has merit, the two-level intergovernmental perspective provides the most convincing explanation of the behaviour of the US and the EU in the international climate negotiations. More importantly however, this thesis argues that existing theoretical perspectives do not sufficiently capture the temporal dimension of long negotiations. Once this is taken into account it becomes clear that state preferences are fluid not fixed. As a result, a series of internal and external factors distinctive to prolonged international negotiations are identified to explain why the negotiating positions and the type of agreement the US and the EU were prepared to sign changed.

Building on these variables, this thesis argues that state behaviour in prolonged international negotiations can be usefully conceived of as an immature or mature game, where strategic opportunities arise for networked actors to constructively influence state behaviour. Eight strategies are suggested that traditionally weak actors can employ to steer prolonged international negotiations toward their preferred outcome. -- provided by Candidate. Show more