National Contributions in a Global Agreement

After two weeks of intense negotiations at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21) in December 2015 in Paris - the 196 Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreed on the COP Decisions and Paris Agreement. The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, described the Paris Agreement as a ‘monumental triumph for people and our planet1’. The Paris agreement is a return to the ‘pledge and review’ approach of the early days of global climate policy – middle ground between national pledges for climate action within a global architecture of review and collaboration. For the last twenty years, international climate change policy has been focused on the search for a centrally negotiated multilateral climate treaty with all countries as signatories. Yet since its inception, adapting the top-down multilateral treaty model to the challenge of climate change has been a Sisyphean task. The new approach has broken a deadlock and created a sense of optimism – but trust and legitimacy in the regime still needs to be built to ensure performance. The devil is the detail – right balance between top-down measures and bottom-up flexibility are needed for specific challenges related to ensuring equity, mobilizing finance, driving technological change and ensuring climate resilient development. In this paper we enroll theoretical insights from the work of Elinor Ostrom on polycentric governance, to see how a durable, hybrid climate regime could emerge out of the Paris Agreement and facilitate equitable and ambitious climate outcomes. The paper is divided into four sections: we first examine the road to Paris –the lessons from the last thirty years of climate policy for the future regime; next we review theory – what are the theoretical insights from the work of Elinor Ostrom on polycentric governance; we examine how the ‘hybrid’ architecture of the new regime might play out in dealing with specific issues: setting ambition, ensuring differentiation, legal form, mitigation and adaptation; and lastly weanalyze the way forward – building trust and legitimacy and encouraging the ‘ground swell’ of actors

Uncertain knowledge : cultures, institutions and resilience: adapting to climate change in the Tonle Sap Lake of Cambodia

This thesis provides a sociological account of the relationship between scientific knowledge of the impacts of climate change and its use in the formulation of actions and policies for adaptation. Focusing on the Tonle Sap Lake, the research investigates interlinked institutional and epistemic processes by which knowledge for planning adaptation to climate change 'flows' from global sites of knowledge production to local sites of knowledge consumption in Cambodia. Transnational expert institutions act as knowledge brokers and '(re)localize' global climate change by downscaling global data to local scales, interpreting scientific data for policy use, and instructing national institutions on how to use the knowledge. The processes of localization do not merely produce impact data but in a social and semiotic sense achieve local climate change. Cambodian institutions, however, 'ignore' knowledge that is deconstructive of their institutional commitments and accompanying epistemologies. I use Cultural Theory to analyse how four different policy stories on adaptation are framed by varying nature-myths, spatial and temporal commitments and socially maintained ignorance, characteristic of different social solidarities. A complex terrain of agreements, disagreements and mutual rejections on adaptation policies, linked to control and access over fisheries resources, emerges in the national discourse. However, hierarchical perspectives achieve epistemic sovereignty and become hegemonic. I argue that resilience to climatic changes that are yet to occur and hard to characterize will be realized from the ability of institutions to switch between strategies characteristic of different social solidarities. The knowledge basis for strategy switching, however, needs to be situated and contextualized, and requires a qualitative understanding of how people currently live around the Lake, rather than be a 'downscaled' global scientific representation of climatic change. I draw upon and hope to contribute to a growing body of literature that takes anthropological insights from the study of "primitive religions" in the work of Mary Douglas and applies it to modern social-scientific problems.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Technological innovation and the future of work: a view from the South

Fil: Albrieu, Ramiro. CEDES. Centro de Estudio de Estado y Sociedad, Área de Economía. Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento (CIPPEC); ArgentinaFil: Aneja, Urvashi. Tandem Research; IndiaFil: Chetty, Krish. Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC); SudáfricaFil: Mathur, Vikrom. Tandem Research; IndiaFil: Rapetti, Martín. CEDES. Centro de Estudio de Estado y Sociedad, Área de Economía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento (CIPPEC); ArgentinaFil: Uhlig, Antje. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ); AlemaniaA global narrative about technological change and the future of work is emerging. It states that technological innovation will be pervasive across the world, and the impacts on labor markets will be deep but largely transitory. Will the future of work look the same everywhere? On the one hand, evidence points to developing countries lagging behind in terms of technological diffusion and the re-skilling of their current and future workers. This could exacerbate development gaps with respect to advanced countries as has happened in previous technological "revolutions". On the other, structural factors that are country-specific -such as demographics, factor endowments, gender gaps- may cause new technologies to have different impacts on labor markets. We believe that the menu of policy options that the G20 is developing should ideally start with country-specific diagnoses taking into account these structural factors. However, given that this may be unreachable in the short run, we recommend to start monitoring the trends in technological adoption and skills development in each G20 country. For this, more and better data is needed

Anticipatory governance of solar geoengineering: conflicting visions of the future and their links to governance proposals

This article identifies diverse rationales to call for anticipatory governance of solar geoengineering, in light of a climate crisis. In focusing on governance rationales, we step back from proliferating debates in the literature on ‘how, when, whom, and where’ to govern, to address the important prior question of why govern solar geoengineering in the first place: to restrict or enable its further consideration? We link these opposing rationales to contrasting underlying visions of a future impacted by climate change. These visions see the future as either more or less threatening, depending upon whether it includes the possible future use of solar geoengineering. Our analysis links these contrasting visions and governance rationales to existing governance proposals in the literature. In doing so, we illustrate why some proposals differ so significantly, while also showing that similar-sounding proposals may emanate from quite distinct rationales and thus advance different ends, depending upon how they are designed in practice

Anticipatory governance of solar geoengineering: conflicting visions of the future and their links to governance proposals

This article identifies diverse rationales to call for anticipatory governance of solar geoengineering, in light of a climate crisis. In focusing on governance rationales, we step back from proliferating debates in the literature on ‘how, when, whom, and where’ to govern, to address the important prior question of why govern solar geoengineering in the first place: to restrict or enable its further consideration? We link these opposing rationales to contrasting underlying visions of a future impacted by climate change. These visions see the future as either more or less threatening, depending upon whether it includes the possible future use of solar geoengineering. Our analysis links these contrasting visions and governance rationales to existing governance proposals in the literature. In doing so, we illustratewhy some proposals differ so significantly, while also showing that similar-sounding proposals may emanate from quite distinct rationales and thus advance different ends, depending upon how they are designed in practice.</p

Vulnerability of humans and the environment: challenges and opportunities

60 page(s