Many multilateral environmental agreements have adopted differentiated rules for groups of countries, based on the recognition of their different circumstances, or their different contribution to the environmental problem addressed. Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), such differential treatment was operationalized as a division of the world between the Annex I group of countries with emission reduction targets (OECD and transition economies) and the non-Annex I countries without such commitments (all other countries). Amendments to the list of mitigation obligations by Annex I parties require ratification by three fourths of the parties, which makes changing the status quo extremely difficult to achieve.
In this article, I argue that by establishing such a rigid differential treatment design, the climate regime has constructed new lines of confrontation above the substance-based disagreements between countries. The existence of these two country groups generates a particular type of path dependence, which renders broad cooperation more difficult in the future. Accordingly, the Annex I / non-Annex I dichotomy has survived for over 20 years despite changing economic and environmental realities, and is no longer able to achieve the UNFCCC’s mitigation goals effectively.
The goals of this article are (i), to measure to what extent the artificial split of UNFCCC parties into Annex I and non-Annex I countries has led to a division of these two groups in the negotiations, beyond the countries’ actual preferences; and (ii), to elucidate what causal mechanisms have led to such division.
I draw on a new dyadic dataset with a count variable measuring agreement and disagreement in positions of country pairs over time, coded from reports of the climate negotiations between 1995 and 2014 published in the Earth Negotiations Bulletins. The dyadic design allows me to investigate the effect of membership into Annex I and non-Annex I on supportive or opposing statements between all countries. An extensive set of controls allows disentangling the effect of group construction from the effect of countries’ background characteristics. The long time series allows me to test hypotheses regarding two potential causal mechanisms: creation of new incentives or long-term socialization effects. I follow the approaches used in the socialization literature, which expects socialization effects to take place over long periods of time, as they require the adoption of and identification with common rules and norms. In contrast, if the causal mechanism is simply the creation of new incentives, the effect of group differentiation on negotiation behaviour should be observed much earlier. In addition, if the incentives argument is correct, it should affect behaviour in issue areas related to the differences in commitments between Annex I and non-Annex I, and to group membership, but should not affect more general positions.
A first analysis will be conducted with standard panel regression methods. In addition, propensity score matching will be used to address the potential bias generated by heterogeneity in the country sample.
