Search

At the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, it was decided that by 2020, donors should rally up not less than US$100 billion per year for climate change adaptation and mitigation in developing countries. How much each donor should contribute to that annual target remains an open question, however. Dividing that ‘burden’ in equal parts would be rather unfair. Some countries are bigger and/or richer, but more importantly,some carry more responsibility for climate change than others in terms of their share in greenhouse gas emissions.

Im Dezember 2015 wurde in Paris ein neues Klimaabkommen verabschiedet. Im Wesentlichen gelang es, die länger als 20 Jahre währende strikte Trennung zwischen entwickelten (Annex I) und Entwicklungsländern (non-Annex I) aufzubrechen. Gleichzeitig fand in Paris ein Paradigmenwechsel statt: von den im Stil des Kyoto-Protokolls von oben verordneten verbindlichen, absoluten Emissionsreduktionszielen hin zu einem eher von unten nach oben ausgerichteten System unterschiedlicher freiwilliger Zusagen. Eine entscheidende Komponente des Abkommens, zu der jedoch viele Fragen offen bleiben, ist die Klimafinanzierung. Im Global Governance Spotlight 3 016 erörtern Dr. Paula Castro und Dr. Carola Betzold die Fortschritte des Pariser Gipfels im Hinblick auf die Klimafinanzierung - wenn es denn solche gegeben hat. Dabei befassen sie sich mit drei zentralen Themen: mit dem Gesamtvolumen der Klimafinanzierung, ihren Quellen und ihrer Verteilung. Darüber hinaus geben Sie Empfehlungen, wie die Verpflichtungen zur Klimafinanzierung glaubwürdig erfüllt werden können.

In the run-up to Paris, individual countries and multilateral banks made new promises to provide millions of dollars for adaptation (and mitigation) action in developing countries, with a view to reaching the usd 100 billion target announced in Copenhagen and confirmed in Paris. But where are all these funds going to? To what extent do they reach the poorest and most vulnerable, those most in need of support? The focus of this paper is on bilateral aid for adaptation to climate change. Using oecd data on adaptation aid, we examine how donors allocate this aid|and to what extent they indeed prioritise those `particularly' vulnerable to climate change. To understand donor behaviour, we build on the large literature on aid allocation in general, and on adaptation aid in particular. Yet, as opposed to traditional dyadic analyses, we conceptualise aid allocation as a network, in which the provision of adaptation aid is a network tie. This network approach, we argue, is better able to capture interactions between donors, for the allocation decisions of others likely in uence a donor's allocation decision. Donors on the one hand coordinate their allocation, but on the other hand also compete for political and economic influence through the provision of aid, including aid for adaptation. In order to capture these coordination dynamics in addition to the dyadic relationships between donors and recipients we employ Temporal Exponential Random Graph Models. Our analysis indicates that donors consider recipient need and recipient merit when deciding on how to allocate adaptation aid: more vulnerable and more democratic countries are more likely to receive adapation aid. More importantly, however, donors consider their own economic and political interests: trading partners and former colonies are much more likely to receive adaptation aid. Finally, we also found evidence for donor coordination: countries that already receive adaptation aid from other countries are less likely to form additional ties, that is, they are less likely to also receive adaptation aid from additional donors.

Although previous work largely suggests that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) might have a positive impact on international environmental negotiations to the extent that states in turn are more likely to agree on stronger environmental commitments, the empirical evidence is unclear. In order to address this shortcoming, this article firstly employs a spatial bargaining model, which demonstrates that NGOs primarily help states facilitating information problems in negotiations. The authors then analyze quantitative data on international environmental regimes and find evidence that NGOs do indeed positively influence environmental treaty negotiations. More specifically, the stronger the engagement of those civil-society actors and the more NGOs are effectively involved during negotiations, the higher the degree of regime members’ commitment, i.e., their depth of cooperation afterwards. Finally, the theory on those variables implies that the impact of NGO pressure on state commitment levels should vary conditional on the number of NGOs involved. The paper finds evidence for this interaction, although the results go against conventional wisdom.

n.a.

Small island states were able to obtain some remarkable achievements in the climate change negotiations by building a cohesive coalition, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). The cohesion of the Alliance, however, has been affected by changes in the UNFCCC process. The multiplication of issues on the climate agenda and the increasing number of negotiation groups may help or hinder compromise and finding common ground. To track how AOSIS has fared in the climate change regime, this paper compares the activities and positions of AOSIS as a group, and of individual AOSIS members over three distinct periods in the climate change regime: its early phase from 1995 to 2000; an implementation phase from 2001 to 2005; and the more recent period from 2006 to 2011. Over time, group activity has declined in relative terms, with some issues such as forestry receiving particular attention from individual AOSIS members. Despite controversies in some areas, AOSIS has remained a tighly coordinated and cohesive alliance that continues to be a key player in global climate policy.