Thirty years of national and international climate policy have not led to sufficient reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The intergovernmental negotiation process, in particular, is widely criticized. While thousands of diplomats, activists, business leaders and scientists annually convene for the conferences of the parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, progress at these gatherings is painfully slow, oscillating between outright failures—such as the 2009 conference in Copenhagen—and rays of hope, such as the conference in December 2015 in Paris.
In this situation, Hayley Stevenson and John S. Dryzek’s Democratizing Global Climate Governance shows a way forward in their call for a more deliberative and democratic global governance system. They draw in their masterful study on a large body of theoretical literature—largely developed or inspired by Dryzek and his colleagues at the Center for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance—and bring these ideas to bear on one of the most wicked problems of world politics: collectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonizing the global economy.
Democratizing Global Climate Governance combines rich and insightful theoretical, empirical, and reform-oriented analysis. It offers an extensive argument that lays out the basic tenets of deliberative democracy and the components of a “deliberative system” for global climate governance (Chapter 2); identifies major discourses that have been prevalent in a number of international and transnational institutions, including “mainstream sustainability,” “expansive sustainability,” “limits,” and “green radicalism” (Chapter 3); and assesses the (rather limited) deliberative qualities of multilateral climate negotiations (Chapter 4). Stevenson and Dryzek then expand their analysis beyond the confines of intergovernmental settings and investigate the deliberative qualities of novel types of networked governance, which are at times advanced as alternatives to traditional intergovernmentalism, such as the Clean Technology Fund, the Clean Technology Initiative’s Private Financing Advisory Network, and the private network Verified Carbon Standard (Chapter 5). Perhaps surprisingly for proponents of such networked alternatives to intergovernmental institutions, these mechanisms also do not seem to fare much better in terms of deliberative quality. In Chapter 6, Stevenson and Dryzek focus on the transmission of discourses in the “public space”—the free debate among civil society and other actors—to the “empowered space” of intergovernmental decision-making, with the overall conclusion that such transmission is often limited, unequal, and imbalanced. Chapter 7 discusses the question of accountability, with a view to both intergovernmental regimes and networked governance. These six theoretical and analytical chapters then form the basis for a set of policy proposals that stand, in some ways, at the heart of Democratizing Global Climate Governance, offering a host of novel, useful, and broadly convincing ideas for how to move forward in global climate policy, ranging from the exploration of the role that “mini-publics” could play in improving the deliberative quality of governance, to the need of developing deliberative (as opposed to punitive) accountability mechanisms, and the proposal of a deliberative “Chamber of Discourses” within multilateral negotiations or networked governance systems (Chapters 8 and 9).
Overall, Democratizing Global Climate Governance is an important contribution to current debates in the field. By applying theoretical tenets of deliberative democracy to a particularly intractable problem of world politics, the book contributes to both political theory and policy practice. Stevenson and Dryzek’s list of proposals on how to democratize global climate governance almost takes the form of a handout for decision-makers, providing vital and often very detailed suggestions for how to do better. By and large, the proposals developed in Democratizing Global Climate Governance seem compatible with, and complementary to, many other existing policy proposals in the field, including arguably my own blueprint of institutional reform elaborated in Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2014), and the policy outline that I published with 33 colleagues ahead of the 2012 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (Biermann et al., “Navigating the Anthropocene: Improving Earth System Governance,” Science, 16 March 2012).
My comments on Democratizing Global Climate Governance have therefore less to do with what the authors write and more with what they neglect.
For one, Democratizing Global Climate Governance is still predominantly informed by experiences in industrialized societies, often relying on examples from Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, or Denmark. A research desideratum in this field is hence a more systematic expansion of experimentation and analysis to other parts of the world, such as Africa, South Asia, or China. Such biases are also a problem with a view to the “public space” at the global level, including global civil society. For instance, recent research has shown that the highly promoted online stakeholder dialogues around the 2012 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development—which could be seen as example of a global deliberation in “public space”—were heavily biased towards participants from just a few countries, with a particular bias towards English-speaking countries. In one online stakeholder dialogue that my colleagues and I analyzed, nearly 50% of all “voters” came from four English-speaking countries that account for only 6.2% of the world’s population (UK, USA, Canada, and Australia), while Chinese and Indians represented only 1.7% of the participants (Sénit, Kalfagianni, and Biermann, “Cyber-Democaracy?.” Global Governance, forthcoming.). Recent research has also emphasized the vast disparities in funding for, and hence influence within, environmental nongovernmental organizations, generally seen as core elements of “global civil society.” Given its relatively high donations, even small countries such as the Netherlands have managed to acquire permanent seats in the decision-making bodies of environmental NGOs (Kathrin Dombrowski, Bridging the Democratic Gap: Can NGOs Link Local Communities to International Environmental Institutions? London School of Economics and Political Science, 2013).
Stevenson and Dryzek are of course aware of such disparities and frequently acknowledge biases within and among countries in their book. I was particularly impressed, for example, by their detailed and refreshing analysis of Bolivia’s political role as the leading proponent of an anti-capitalist “green radicalism” discourse. And yet, how deliberative democracy in “public space” will function at the global level remains an important conceptual and practical challenge for this line of research, given a situation where—to list only a few of the challenges—842 million people have insufficient access to food, 61% of all people do not use the internet (including 84% of Africans and 68% of people in the Asia/Pacific region), and the richest 20% of all people account for 76% of global private consumption.
A further challenge might lie in the transfer of the notion of “discourses” from an analytical category of political theory to a political category in institutional redesign. When discourses are unfairly represented or insufficiently respected in political practice, how likely is it that mainstream political actors will want to change this outcome in international negotiations? Given that for example Bolivia and Cuba’s discourse of anti-capitalist “green radicalism” is hardly represented in “empowered space,” how could this be ameliorated by institutional reforms? And how would the discourses that are to be more fairly represented be identified in the first place?
At times, Democratizing Global Climate Governance could also be seen as more traditional than it seems at first stance. For example, the analysis of “public space” often revolves around the study of side events at diplomatic conferences and the influence of global civil society on the “empowered space” of the intergovernmental negotiation hall. One might question, however, whether such side events have any significance in the first place, and whether they correctly represent a global “public space.” As another example, Stevenson and Dryzek propose to replace the chair of the intergovernmental “conference of the parties” by a professional facilitator. While this might be a sensible proposal, it is hardly likely to revolutionize climate governance, also given that conference chairs are usually highly experienced ambassadors with a long record of intergovernmental negotiations. Further, one might wonder whether the distinction between empowered space and public space, fundamental to much writing in deliberative democracy theory, is not increasingly outdated in itself, given that loci of authority have migrated from U.N.-based negotiations to novel private governance networks, and civil society actors have taken on rule-making and rule-implementing functions.
In the end, like much other writing in the field, Democratizing Global Climate Governance also remains close to piece-meal incrementalism, despite its at times fundamental critique of current politics. Deliberative democracy is, as the authors repeatedly argue, less an ideal state than a slow process by which international politics can be made more democratic and deliberative, and by that also more effective. Also deliberative democracy is, to cite Max Weber’s metaphor, a process of slowly drilling holes into thick planks of wood. This does not mean that far-reaching visions from political scientists are superfluous. Political science is needed, among others, to provide the bold blueprints of how institutional structures could be revised, based on a careful analysis of the current shortcomings and political constraints. As such, Democratizing Global Climate Governance is an outstanding, important example of a bold theoretical vision of better governance—here in the form of deliberative democracy—combined with a detailed set of proposals on how such vision could be approached by incremental institutional reform.
