- Title
- Exclusive minilateralism: an emerging discourse within international climate change governance?
- Creator
- McGee, Jeffrey Scott
- Relation
- 2010 Berlin Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change. Papers of the Participants of the 2010 Berlin Conference (Berlin, Germany 8-9 October, 2010)
- Relation
- http://www.berlinconference.org/2010/paper/
- Publisher
- Free University
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2010
- Description
- Over the past five years there have been a series of significant international climate change agreements involving elite state actors only. The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP), APEC Sydney Leaders Declaration of 2007 and US Major Economies Meetings (MEM) of 2007-08 all display a shift towards a model of international climate change governance determined by a small group of economically powerful states, to the exclusion of less powerful states and civil society. The recent UNFCCC COP 15 meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark ultimately produced a very modest outcome negotiated largely by a small group of key countries. The result from Copenhagen has strengthened calls for international climate governance to be pared down to a smaller decision making forum of ‘key’ countries only. This paper argues the above developments embody a discourse of ‘exclusive minilateralism’ that represents a significant discursive challenge to the multilateral discourse that has been the basis of international climate change governance since the inception of United Nations climate regime in 1992. The exclusive minilateral discourse contests the established intersubjective meaning of the process of international climate governance by promoting more opaque state-based negotiations and power-based outcomes that will allegedly provide greater effectiveness in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. A continued strengthening of the exclusive minilateralist discourse will provide a significant challenge to the cosmopolitan democratic design of the UNFCCC and also to the deliberative potential of wider notions of discursive democracy in international climate change governance.
- Subject
- climate change; democracy; governance; minilateralism; Copenhagen Accord
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/935291
- Identifier
- uon:12026
- Language
- eng
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