1. Can Governments Successfully Collaborate on Climate Change?

Nicholas Goedeking: Can governments successfully collaborate on climate change? This is a central question that remains to be answered, and it's the question we'll address today in this episode of the new podcast from the German Institute of Development and Sustainability, or IDOS for short. Now, there's both good and bad news on international climate collaboration. The good news is that the basic architecture that was built in the 1990s to enable collaboration still largely stands. Most governments still meet at least twice per year to negotiate what needs to happen, by when and by whom. And that matters. The bad news is that climate change is accelerating. This is also a pretty clear finding from the latest climate science. And collaboration within the existing multilateral system remains slow at best. So how should we make sense of this current moment in international climate politics? Why is cooperation proving to be so difficult, and what could make it more effective? My guest today is Dr. Steffen Bauer. Steffen is a veteran climate expert at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability. He has studied international climate governance for over 20 years, and he brings a wealth of insights and expertise to this conversation. We'll talk about both the strengths and limits of the current governance system and how it could be improved. We also look ahead at the next major climate change conference, COP 31, which will be taking place in Türkiye this November. My name is Dr. Nicholas Goedeking. I'll be your host for this episode. Thank you so much for joining us for the IDOS Perspectives podcast. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Nicholas Goedeking: Welcome to the show.

Steffen Bauer: Well, thanks for having me.

Nicholas Goedeking: I imagine that much of the conversation we'll have today is going to be about why cooperation on climate change isn't working, or isn't working effectively enough. But to start, I'd like to flip the question on its head. Why could international cooperation on climate change work? What would successful collaboration actually look like?

Steffen Bauer: My point is often: What leads to cooperation in the first place? If you look back on any policy issue or interaction between societies, between individuals, it's often conflict that is the root cause for cooperation. Some would even argue that without conflict there is no need for cooperation. I wouldn't go that far, but conflict is what it's all about. And there are numerous conflicts around dealing with environmental change, and with climate change in particular. So recognizing those conflicts and finding ways to deal with them is, in a sense, the precondition for cooperation. That applies to states in the international realm, where governments negotiate solutions and find ways to cooperate with each other, to deal with the conflicts they have around identifying common interests or how to maximize their own benefits. So that's essentially what it's about.

Nicholas Goedeking: Maybe taking a step back: When we're talking about international climate cooperation, what are we talking about? Is this basically government officials coming together in a room? Give us a primer on what multilateral climate governance is.

Steffen Bauer: How much time do you have? Well, governments coming together in a room is an essential part of it. In a sense, the annual climate conferences hosted by the UN are the visible part of it that makes the news. It goes back more than 30 years by now. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted in 1992, as you will know, and it very much structures the cooperation. I think my answer would be that for much of the past decades, cooperation more or less equaled negotiation: What are the conflicts? What are the joint interests? How can we deal with them? How can we institutionalize solutions? So it was always negotiating as a specific form of cooperation. By now we have reached a phase where cooperation should revolve much more around implementing what has been negotiated and agreed. And that is a different kind of challenge. It also falls under international cooperation. But in a sense, it's easier for governments to meet and negotiate something, to bring the diplomats together and put their heads together over texts and the right wording. Then eventually there's some agreement, everybody ratifies it, complies with it and translates it into national legislation, etc. But this is not what we need to really effectively address climate change. We need to implement things. And again, a lot of conflicts will then surface: If we implement it this way, is it beneficial for us or does it bring disadvantages? It has this kind of cost, this kind of political impact. I have to consider my voter base. I have to consider my economy. That's what makes it complicated. But that is the challenge now: to shift gears from just negotiating over normative concerns to practical implementation.

Nicholas Goedeking: Some argue that what we need is more and cleaner technology, right? My sense is that the political economy of clean technology has shifted quite dramatically over the last decade. The cost of clean technology has declined. Solar and wind energy, batteries and electric vehicles have all become much more cost competitive. But I wonder if that is helping or hindering cooperation. On the one hand, more cost-competitive clean technology is making climate action cheaper in a way. But on the other hand, might it actually make cooperation more difficult by intensifying economic competition? Who gets to reap the benefits of producing EVs, for example? Where do you stand in that debate?

Steffen Bauer: I would definitely say that the technological advancements, especially the shift towards electricity, are a big part of the solution. The rise of renewable energies around the world is very helpful in many ways. Yet my point is always that the technologies in and of themselves are not the solution to the challenges we are facing in climate change and climate politics. It's essentially political. And while clean technologies, as you call them, are helpful, they also generate new conflicts of interest. If we listen to our own domestic politicians on the daily news, it's very often about competitiveness. That makes sense. It speaks to your electorate, to your population. It speaks to your industries and your economy. But if we're addressing climate change or loss of biodiversity or any other global challenge, it is a global challenge. There is a common global interest. So if everybody is looking out for their own competitiveness, there is a tension with what we want to achieve. Competitiveness too often plays out in a relative gains game, where you want to maximize your advantage, naturally to the detriment of others. In theory, you could say: If everybody is improving their competitiveness, be it on clean technologies or anything else, a race to the top should follow from that. But the empirical reality is much more complex. We have zero-sum games and relative gains competitions. So the challenges are essentially political. And therefore technologies alone will never give us a silver bullet. That is my firm conviction.

Nicholas Goedeking: I imagine that some listeners might be thinking to themselves: Hasn't cooperation on climate change always been difficult or slow? This is not the first time that the United States has withdrawn from an international climate agreement. In 2001, the Bush administration rejected the Kyoto Protocol. So are we just witnessing the persistence of weak cooperation in this current moment? Or is there actually a qualitative difference in the degree to which governments are cooperating on this topic, or not?

Steffen Bauer: I would say that to some extent both are true, and they're not mutually exclusive. It's almost dialectic how we have seen progress in international cooperation and, at the same time, a deterioration of what it can achieve. To some extent, the success of climate negotiations, the advances made in the past 20 or 30 years, have also led to a very complex institutional architecture. It has evolved in a piecemeal fashion. Nobody ever had a master plan of what the climate governance architecture should ideally look like. You make some progress in negotiations, you establish an institution or a fund, and then other layers are piled on top of it, making it ever more complex and cumbersome. That is one explanation of why it is perceived as so inefficient currently. The other aspect is that in the recent past, the political environment in which this all happens has become more challenging. Climate has never been the only issue on the international agenda. It's always competing with other issues for attention. If you look at the past 10 to 20 years alone, we had a global financial crisis, we had a Covid pandemic, and climate has always been pushed aside. Now at least a large share of decision makers seem to realize that climate is more pressing and more urgent, because of ever more catastrophes and impacts. But still, there are security concerns. There is a revival of geopolitical tensions. And again, this is pushing climate policy into the background, when in fact it needs to be prioritized much more strongly. So I wouldn't identify it as a deterioration of climate governance as such, but it is impacting it in many ways. And that is a problem.

Nicholas Goedeking: If you had to break it down, what do you think are the main reasons why international climate cooperation has proven to be so difficult?

Steffen Bauer: Well, that is linking very strongly to economic questions.

Nicholas Goedeking: I've only attended one climate change conference, the one here in Bonn a couple of months ago. My sense was that there were these blocks of interests negotiating with one another. One was the G77, another was, loosely, the high-income Western countries. Help me understand: How would you describe these groups, and what is at the core of what they're disagreeing on?

Steffen Bauer: That's a good observation. There are numerous groups and negotiation blocks. Some of them are overlapping. You have more progressive ones and more defensive ones. Very often it's about finance. It's also about technologies. Technology transfer and trade are becoming increasingly important, which again links to the issues of competitiveness I mentioned earlier. For instance, from a European perspective, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism that the EU has now applied to protect its own industries in alignment with climate policy standards and regulations is a big bone of contention in the international negotiation rooms. CBAM, as it's called, is plausible for the European Union. But it is also plausible for many developing countries to argue: This is a protectionist measure that works to our detriment. At the very least, the money you make from these border adjustment measures should flow back to us through international climate finance, so that we can also implement the measures you expect us to. So that is one of the bigger issues. It's very controversial, and it's certainly not the only one. Speaking about the blocks you mentioned, it is more complex. There are many groupings, alliances and blocks. But what is visible throughout the history of international climate politics, and in my opinion has become more pronounced again in recent years, is what many would refer to as a North-South divide. The North being the rich, established Western industrialized countries that built their economic wealth by exploiting fossil resources and burning fossil fuels. And a larger part of the world in the so-called Global South. I am fully aware that's a very contested term. The so-called developing countries have contributed comparatively little to global heating, yet suffer the brunt of it much more severely than we do in the so-called North. That North-South divide really structures international processes, not only in regard to climate policy, but it's particularly pronounced there.

Nicholas Goedeking: Just to clarify for those who might not know these terms: What do we mean by the Global North and the Global South? Is this basically high income versus low income? And why is it controversial?

Steffen Bauer: In the language of the United Nations, it's not even North and South. It would be developed countries and developing countries. But that is also controversial, for obvious reasons. Or, as you said, high income versus low income. That could also apply. But the crux is that the empirical reality is not as binary or dichotomous as this divide suggests, whereas the way the debates are structured in the negotiation rooms caters to this dichotomy. And that's one of the main structural problems I see. North and South have become convenient shortcuts to express this. But depending on who you ask, you will get very divergent definitions and a lot of disagreement about what the Global South contains and what represents the Global North.

Nicholas Goedeking: One of the arguments I came across in preparing for our conversation was that there's been an erosion of trust between countries loosely labeled as the Global North and the Global South. Do you observe this?

Steffen Bauer: Yes, absolutely. When I said before that this North-South divide, in inverted commas, has become more pronounced recently, I think that is directly related to waning credibility and the lack of trust that results from it.

Nicholas Goedeking: And why is that? Where is this mistrust coming from?

Steffen Bauer: You could bring it down to the simple formula of broken promises. If I can give an example that I think stands out, it's the discussions around loss and damage. Loss and damage is the negotiation term for impacts of climate change that can't be avoided. We usually try to respond to those by boosting resilience and enhancing adaptive capacities. But in some areas we can't adapt enough. So impacts will happen, and that is referred to as loss and damage. It is a particular concern for small island states, but also for other parts of the world. Many of these countries, least developed countries and small island developing states, have lobbied for a very long time to establish loss and damage as a third pillar of the climate governance architecture, next to mitigation, the reduction of greenhouse gases, and adaptation, the coping responses. This has been pushed for a long time. Eventually, not so long ago, the international community conceded that loss and damage needs to be introduced. It is anchored in the Paris Agreement of 2015 as a distinct category. Then it took another few years of negotiation to ask: What follows from this? How do we deal with loss and damage now that we accept it's something that needs dealing with? A few COPs ago, a few UN climate conferences ago, it was agreed to have a fund that will provide money for affected countries to cope with losses and damages. At the time, that was hailed as a big breakthrough. But now the fund is there, and the money that goes into it is minuscule. Some would even say that establishing loss and damage and this fund is now something like a Pyrrhic victory. It was a milestone in the negotiation process, but it's not as consequential as one would have hoped, because it lacks the resources.

Nicholas Goedeking: The next major UN climate conference will be held in Türkiye this November. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on what to expect. I think it's called COP 31. What would have to happen at COP 31 for you to come away thinking that international cooperation is moving in the right direction?

Steffen Bauer: Yes, it is called COP 31. It's the 31st Conference of the Parties of the UN climate convention. It's hosted by Türkiye, technically together with Australia, and the conference is going to happen in Antalya, which in itself is interesting on many counts. We have just discussed North and South, and you could say Türkiye is a bit on the fence on that. It is a NATO country and a geopolitical player. And in climate policy, it would like to be considered part of the South. So that's very interesting. Hopefully they will have a conducive presidency.

Nicholas Goedeking: And your expectations?

Steffen Bauer: Once more, finance issues will be high on the agenda. If the multilateral process is not to derail further, the EU and other middle powers, obviously we need to count out the United States, need to bring something to the table, especially with regard to adaptation finance. That's going to be a big issue. Trade issues will loom large. And more generally, the conference should hopefully make progress on what we talked about at the beginning of our discussion: the need to shift from negotiation to implementation. That also requires the negotiators to develop, because negotiating and diplomacy is what they know and what they've always been doing. As one of our colleagues, Nicholas Wagner, has argued in a recent blog piece, the discussions around implementation require much more deliberation rather than negotiation, and that may require different formats. So some institutional learning will be required in that respect. But turning again to the bigger political issues: Sitting back at the beginning of 2027 and looking back on whether COP 31 has moved in the right direction, one thing to look out for is whether the European Union and its allied middle powers, Canada prominently, but also others, find a good way to collaborate more strongly with China on global climate issues, in spite of the geopolitical rivalry that is obviously there. Here, the absence of the US could prove helpful. We were hoping for that at the last COP in Brazil already. It didn't play out. But COP 31 provides a new chance, and the urgency has only become stronger. The other big point, I think, is accommodating the legitimate interests of least developed countries better than previously, so that they stay on board of the multilateral processes. Because we need all hands on deck, and not only in the proverbial sense. We're dealing with a global challenge. If the EU and others want to keep it multilateral in a universal sense, they need to be more accommodating to least developed countries and their legitimate concerns. It's not only about money. Money is important, but it's also about sovereignty over territories and the right to development. And that needs to be treated in a credible, serious, prudent way, to strengthen the multilateral process again and to curb this spreading distrust and frustration. Maybe the many catastrophes that have been mounting, even between the last COP and the upcoming one, will make the sense of urgency translate into a better negotiating climate. I'm a bit whistling in the woods here. There are many reasons for skepticism. But you were asking what the indicators would be that it's moving in the right direction, and I would flag those.

Nicholas Goedeking: Before we conclude: What are three books or papers you would recommend to our listeners who want to learn more about global climate governance or politics?

Steffen Bauer: First, Jessica F. Green's book "Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix Them", published by Princeton University Press last year. Second, "Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment", by Timmons Roberts and colleagues, published by Oxford University Press last year. And finally, a forthcoming volume by Joanna Depledge, "Preventing Dangerous Climate Change: A History of the Climate Negotiations, 1988 to 2025", to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Nicholas Goedeking: We're going to add links to these three books in the comments section for those of you who want to look them up. Steffen Bauer, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time to share some of your thoughts.

Steffen Bauer: Thanks for having me. I appreciate your interest in my humble opinion.