Negotiating Challenges And Climate Change Analysis

Finally, many countries, make reaching a comprehensive international climate change agreement difficult by taking on defensive attitudes rather than constructive ones regarding the degree of responsibility they have in global warming in comparison to other states. This, is a determining factor in how much they believe they should need to make changes and contribute to reducing their emissions. In her article: “Negotiating challenges and climate change”, Joyeeta Gupta uses negotiation theory to provide insight into the bargaining strategies used by states during climate talks which affect the agreement construction process. It serves as a useful way of understanding the outcome of strategies used by developed and developing countries. On one …show more content…
The issue of legally binding treaties: who should be included in them and in what way is one of them. As we saw with legal theory, though difficult to put in place, binding agreements are an effective way of getting countries to make changes in favour of the environment. Relying on voluntary contributions and non-legally binding promises however will not go a long way in reducing climate change. We noted with China that developing countries are emitting an increasing amount. For reasons of fairness, this needs to be taken into account during negotiations. In turn, we would certainly see a more willing attitude towards binding contracts stemming from developed countries. The problem of conflicting interests and motives was another obstacle we looked into alongside the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We noted that the threat of climate change is not credible enough to deter actors from free-riding. Extensive cooperation is necessary in order to reduce climate change. A solution was proposed: legally binding treaties seeing as they would reinforce the credible threat. However, the difficulties of convincing actors to adopt such a treaty as we saw in the beginning is a substantial task. Lastly, we analysed the debate between developed industrialised countries and developing countries regarding the issue of responsibility in climate change. It was made clear that, developed countries have contributed massively to climate change while developing countries fell behind. However, now that they are catching up, they are also big contributors to climate change. By refusing to accept their responsibility and constantly referring to developed countries’ past, developing nations make achieving a climate agreement harder than it needs to be. We analysed this behaviour with negotiation theory in the Paris climate talks and noted it was possible to predict the outcome of