可持续发展外交中的主要新兴大国外文文献英文

Major emerging powers in sustainable development diplomacy Assessing their leadership potential Mihaela Papa a Nancy W Gleason b aHarvard Law School 23 Everett Street G26 Cambridge MA 02138 USA bPolitical Science Department Tufts University Packard Hall Medford MA 02155 USA 1 Introduction The rise of major emerging powers attracts a lot of attention among theorists and practitioners in the fi eld of international affairs Brazil Russia India and China BRIC countries are the new engines of growth in 2040 the BRIC countries together are projected to have a larger GDP than the Group of Six France Germany Italy Japan UK and US Nayyar 2010 They are likely to shape the nature of the world economy through their growing populations and incomes and by extension the world s prospects for sustainable development The major emerging powers also increasingly act together and undertake political initiatives to reform global governance Despite their growing importance the question of their role in sustainable development diplomacy has been largely overlooked Can they emerge as a new coalition or negotiation bloc in this fi eld traditionally organized around the North South divide If so do they have the potential to exercise leadership and address the stalled performance of the sustainable development agenda This article aims to answer these questions by examining major emerging powers joint political initiatives in the sustainable development realm Following a brief overview of the evolution and the current state of sustainable development diplomacy it presents a theoretical framework which conceptualizes emerging powers leadership potential in sustainable development diplo macy While the emerging powers have not yet created a distinctive bloc or an offi cial coalition focused solely on global sustainable development policy making they have been engaged in more broadly focused coalitions with sustainable development goals BRICS Brazil Russia India China and since 2011 South Africa and coalitions with a narrower mandate climate change but central to sustainable development BASIC Brazil South Africa India China This article conducts an initial empirical assessment of emerging powers coalitional behavior in order to examine their capacity to act jointly and exert leadership which is a step toward attaining the actual leadership role in the future Kanie 2003 This study provides new insights into the ongoing academic debate on the impact of rising powers on global policy making Some scholars argue that emerging powers are already exerting infl uence on other stakeholders in the system and that their rise will lead to a tectonic shift in the balance of global power and dramatic changes in world politics Jaffrelot 2009 Alexandroff and Cooper 2010 Mahbubani 2008 Narlikar 2010 Other scholars doubt these powers capacity to challenge the current world order or emerge as coalitions willing to bear the costs of leadership and invest in improving global public policy outcomes Global Environmental Change 22 2012 915 924 A R T I C L E I N F O Article history Received 20 February 2012 Received in revised form 16 May 2012 Accepted 15 June 2012 Available online 11 July 2012 Keywords Sustainable development Diplomacy BRICS BASIC Emerging powers Leadership Coalitions A B S T R A C T It is often argued that the growth of major emerging powers such as China India Russia and Brazil will have a transformative effect on the world economy and politics but the implications of their rise on sustainable development diplomacy have remained understudied Do these new powers have the potential to exercise leadership and address the stalled performance on the sustainable development agenda Drawing on theories of leadership in multiparty negotiations and the empirical study of two major emerging powers coalitions BRICS Brazil Russia India China South Africa and BASIC Brazil South Africa India China this article assesses their leadership potential in sustainable development diplomacy It fi nds that emerging powers are already engaging in policy coordination in the sustainable development realm have begun to use their infl uence to create incentives for other actors in the system and have been conducting skillful diplomacy to develop their coalitions and forge consensus in global policy making However exerting actual global leadership would require building a stronger policy agenda One area with particular potential for emerging powers to exert leadership is the clean energy arena of sustainable development diplomacy 2012 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved Corresponding author E mail addresses mpapa law harvard edu M Papa Nancy Gleason tufts edu N W Gleason Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Global Environmental Change jo ur n al h o mep ag e www elsevier co m loc ate g lo envc h a 0959 3780 see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved http dx doi org 10 1016 j gloenvcha 2012 06 003 Cohen et al 2010 Roberts 2010 Armijo 2007 Glosny 2010 Analyzing sustainable development diplomacy contributes to these debates because the rise of emerging powers directly challenges the political dynamics between the North or industri alized countries and the South or developing countries which established the expectations of leadership and the distribution of responsibilities for managing global environmental problems Kjelle n 2007 Susskind 1994 While the South long perceived itself as disempowered by the international system its revisionist struggle to ensure that sustainable development becomes the dominant paradigm for global policy making has been successful and emerging powers fi nd the paradigm s prioritization of Northern responsibilities for action benefi cial However emerging powers rise and greater capabilities raise the question of their own responsibilities which are now negotiated in the context of the US free riding on key sustainable development issues like climate change Analyzing whether emerging powers have leadership potential in this context sheds new light on their positioning as stakeholders or challengers of the global order and on their relationship with the North and the South Furthermore the investigation of coalitional leadership and the comparison of emerging powers use of two different coalitions advance the study of emerging powers as an analytical category While several studies on emerging powers in the climate regime have been recently published scholars have not yet conceptualized their coalitional leadership potential in sustainable development diplomacy Hochstetler and Viola 2011 Po yry 2010 Norden 2011 The current environmental crisis and lack of sustainable development leadership represent an opportunity for emerging powers to reconsider the established policy trajectories Under a business as usual scenario even with modest UN projections for population growth consumption and climate change by 2030 humanity will need the capacity of two Earths to absorb its CO2 waste and keep up with natural resource consumption WWF 2010 p 9 The BRIC markets themselves now consume 27 percent of the world s primary energy 17 percent of its oil 19 percent of its gas demand and around half of global coal demand Synergyst 2008 and they will have an environmental impact measured in terms of ecological footprint as big as the OECD countries by approximately 2017 WWF 2010 When these countries act together under BRICS BRIC with South Africa they account for nearly 30 percent of the world s land area 42 percent of the global population and make up 18 percent of the world GDP and 15 percent of the world total trade volume Yan 2011 Due to the weight of emerging powers environmental impact and their willingness to act jointly to reform global governance analyzing their leadership potential is crucial for assessing the opportunities for improving responses to global environmental change in the long term This study fi nds that emerging powers are already engaging in policy coordination in the sustainable development realm have begun to use their infl uence to create incentives for other actors in the system and have been conducting skillful diplomacy to develop their coalitions and forge consensus in global policy making However their actual leadership would require strengthening their policy agenda both in terms of deepening cooperation on the basis of common interests and identifying and promoting more specifi c joint goals Based on emerging powers coalitional interests a possible avenue for these countries to advance the implementation of the global sustainable development agenda would be to integrate it more closely with clean energy As the next section will further elaborate another sustainable development diplomacy milestone the UN Conference on Sustainable Develop ment Rio 20 Summit is an opportunity to rethink emerging powers cooperation in this realm 2 Sustainable development diplomacy the need for emerging powers leadership Sustainable development diplomacy is a process of global policy making with the aim to produce a guiding framework for a range of policy instruments fi nancing mechanisms organizations rules procedures negotiations and norms that regulate the processes of sustainable development It is a dynamic negotiation process with a macro level strategic perspective on an evolving architecture of sustainable development which is conducted to enable the whole population to enjoy well being whilst conserving the ecosystems and natural resources The challenge of such a process is to achieve a common global perspective on various problems of sustainable development set global agendas endorse principles of common action and then turn that consensus into a committed and steady process of change at the global national and local level The UN plays a critical role in sustainable development diplomacy as a platform for extensive multiparty negotiations in which nearly 200 states numerous civil society representatives and international organizations meet to plan the future trajectory of sustainable development The 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development UNCED held in Rio de Janeiro Brazil is the central event in sustainable development diplomacy It launched the global sustainable development agenda by bridging the interests of the North to engage in global regulatory efforts to protect the environment as envisioned at the 1972 Stockholm Convention on the Human Environment with the interests of the South to prioritize development Acknowledging that the environment development and society are intrinsically interconnected the North and the South agreed at UNCED that they had a common responsibility to protect the environment that environmental action should not jeopardize development priorities and that the North would provide additional fi nancing to help developing countries achieve sustainable development This agreement was embedded in the statement of sustainable development principles and operationalized through a comprehensive plan of action on the global sustainable development agenda Agenda 21 Agenda 21 is a 400 page document that seeks to entrench the language and practice of sustainable development into national policies business operations and public discourse and comprises actions to be taken at global national and local levels across 115 programmatic areas United Nations 1992 It was adopted by more than 178 governments which also set up the Commission on Sustainable Development CSD to ensure effective follow up monitoring and implementation of UNCED and its many agree ments After UNCED the sustainable development agenda faced major implementation challenges Northern promises for fi nancial aid in UNCED failed to materialize While aid for environmental protection has indeed risen environmentally damaging aid has far outpaced it Hicks et al 2008 The hope that the North would both drive and subsidize global action faded as a disinterested US faced domestic opposition to environmental action from industry organized labor and weak scientifi c and political consensus on key issues such as climate change Paarlberg 1999 Andresen 2007 The EU on the other hand has been eager to lead However its lack of internal coherence has been a barrier to global action and its powers of persuasion especially in its dealings with the US have been weak Vogler and Stephen 2007 Keleman 2010 Over time the South has grown more interested in the environmental dimension of the sustainable development agenda many coun tries have confronted increasing environmental degradation and became aware of their vulnerability to some of the issues previously perceived as part the Northern agenda such as atmospheric pollution Najam 2005 While the South has had a M Papa N W Gleason Global Environmental Change 22 2012 915 924916 common interest in pressuring the North to accept responsibility for environmental degradation tensions within this large and diverse bloc of over 130 countries generally represented by the G 77 China made it diffi cult to pursue proactive diplomacy At the 2002 UN World Summit on Sustainable Development it was clear that countries were unsuccessful in designing their cooperation in a way that would produce gains and generate incentives for implementing Agenda 21 Any ambitious global commitments with strict targets and uniform measurements of progress were politically unrealistic Instead the 2002 Summit encouraged the creation of voluntary multi stakeholder partner ships to act as implementation mechanisms such as the 100 Renewable Energy Islands partnership which joined the Danish Forum for Renewable Energy Islands the Japanese Institute for Strategic Energy Planning Dutch Arrakis the US Climate Institute and the South Pacifi c Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji The number of such partnerships has grown to almost 400 but a systemic contribution to sustainable development governance from these partnerships has been inadequate and the governance crisis has persisted Biermann et al 2007 Adger and Jordan 2009 The 2012 Rio 20 Summit is the latest opportunity to renew political commitment to sustainable development and address slow progress on internationally agreed sustainable development goals Individual states may have an important role in the evolution of sustainable development diplomacy but due to the complexity of dealing with multiple parties multiple issues and numerous procedural rules a major leadership function of a multilateral process is to create and sustain a suffi ciently strong coalition in favor of propositions that move the negotiation forward or bring it to a successful end Sjostedt 1999 p 242 In other words understand ing whether or not emerging powers can mobilize action on the sustainable development agenda to any signifi cant degree requires the examination of the strength of their coalitional behavior and their coalitional leadership A coalition pertains to any group of individuals here emerging powers deliberately constructed independent of the formal organization structure consisting of mutually perceived membership issue oriented focusing on a goal or goals external to the coalition and requiring concerted member action Lewicki et al 1999 p 317 In order to understand whether emerging powers can exert coalitional leadership we turn to the key elements of leadership in complex negotiations 3 Explaining the leadership potential of emerging powers theoretical insights International relations scholarship in the fi eld of international negotiations and in the context of diplomacy which is the institutional framework within which negotiations take place has a rich literature on leadership While there is a general consensus that leadership is a critical factor determining the success or failure of international negotiations that dominate efforts to form institutional arrangements there are various approaches to deciding what should be measured under the leadership concept or what the key elements of leadership are Young 1991 Jo nsson 2002 Hasenclever et al 1997 Underdal 1994 Karlsson et al 2011 The most commonly used typologies for leadership in large scale negotiations generally consider structural or power related aspects of leadership aspects related to the leaders vision that is disseminated and the leaders ability to effectively negotiate with other parties in complex multiparty settings While a detailed analysis of leadership theories is beyond the scope of this paper this study draws on several typologies used to identify the core elements of leadership for analytical purposes Grubb and Gupta 2000 Young 1991 Underdal 1994 and Malnes 1995 It disaggregates the concept of leadership into policy based structural and instrumental leadership and explores the major emerging powers coalitional behavior within this context These elements are not mutually exclusive and may intersect in practice but they provide a useful starting point for the initial assessment of emerging powers overall leadership potential in the sustainable development realm The fi rst element of leadership is policy based leadership it refers to the ability to frame problems promote particular policy solutions and implement them Grubb and Gupta 2000 Malnes 1995 Young 1991 It combines intellectual aspects of leadership providing vision and goals with directional aspects of leadership unilaterally setting an example and demonstrating that goals are achievable The foundation of this leadership model is in the existence of ideas on substantive solutions to policy problems which diffuse as leaders pave the way in implementing them Strong policies infl uence the perceptions of other countries as to what is feasible and desirable Policy based leadership in the context of coalitional behavior refers to the ability of coalition members emerging powers to design a joint policy agenda and implement it Emerging powers policy based leadership potential is high if the examined coalitions can identify a