Revisiting "Leadership" in Global Climate Governance: China's Normative Engagement with the CBDRs Principle.

This paper studies how China has established and exercised leadership by creating and operationalising the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" (CBDRs) in United Nations climate negotiations—from the embryo of this principle in the Stockholm Declaration to its operationalisation in the Paris Agreement. Building on the updated scholarship on climate leadership, this paper proposes a four criteria test to ascertain the existence of a leadership relationship. It comprises (1) a wilful leader; (2) consensual followers; (3) a commonly shared goal shaped mainly by the leader and accepted by the followers; and (4) a process of leadership-building triggered through use of any one of the following four modes of leadership: ideational, directional, instrumental, or structural. In light of the leadership criteria, this paper focuses on how China has operationalised these various leadership modes towards realising the evolving collective goals of its developing followers. In doing so, the paper provides empirical evidence of the significance of each of the four leadership modes in underpinning China's leadership in the climate regime. This paper finds that while ideational leadership was prominent in creating the CBDRs principle, instrumental leadership, with the support of occasional usages of directional and structural leadership, has also been vital to China in tackling the internal divisions of developing countries and in overcoming the limitations of such countries' normative power in the post-Kyoto era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]