Civic and democratic triggers towards climate treaty

The fundamental task of constructing an international climate treaty is reviewed hereby broadly in terms of recognizing and maintaining equitable shares of a public good. To scope this task broadly, it is necessary to define the stability of climate precisely as such a global good of the common heritage of mankind. This general definition immediately bears the need to ensure safe and just property rights for states, societies, and communities. A contradiction of opportunities appears as sovereign states may enjoy the gains of the political and economic externality of free riding – that is – acquiring the benefits and resources of a public good, without sharing the cost of its maintenance, control, and periodic renewal. Discarded, ignored and undesirable externalities reveal themselves in plentitude of forms. States and economic regions as political actors may calculate that it is more advantageous to postpone or even stall reduction measures for carbon emissions. Such steps may help increase their economic competitiveness and reduce their production costs. These goals are strategic milestones for any society. They underwrite significant social ambitions that are far from trifle matters for any group of policy makers.

Free riders in general expect to benefit by measures taken by other economic actors, that foster the preservation and renewal of global public goods. A sovereign state can exploit the evident benefits of free riding because it is legally equal with all other states in the international system and free to manage its own internal and foreign affairs. In the vast web of calculations of pragmatic realism which govern the community of states, sovereign actors aim to maximize their gains by acquiring the benefits of public goods as much as their leverageable power allows. At the same time states would gladly cast away externalities by taking advantage of shortages in global property rights. Despite such patterns of conduct states still in many cases overcome transnational conflicts of interest. At the level of economic relations, they need to manage cross border spill-over of undesirable and negative outcomes emanating from all kinds of industrial and commercial activities. There are after all motivations, be it calculations, to step out of the cold and unforgiving realism of free riding – relying on the capacities of sovereign power, and turn to modes of collaborative conduct in inter-state affairs. Such motivations it is fair to assume are again based on a rational and sovereign calculation. That it is costlier for the state to solve every single international dispute through competitive power politics. At times it is worth preserving valuable resources and engaging in collaborative and multi-lateral solutions. Hence the instruments and practices of international treaties are brought about to protect global public goods, to control their depletion such that to modify the natural behavior of states and societies.

International treaty negotiation and eventual construction is a slow and lengthy process. At the onset of the diplomatic efforts proponents of the climate treaty need to compose a coherent argument of necessity, which contains a sense of urgency and inevitability. At its core the proposition essentially needs to deliver a compelling argument for transformation in many aspects of the existing political order of managing the property rights of a global public good, so that pending social disorder on a large scale and catastrophic outcomes are avoided. A forceful thesis is needed, which demands that a new order of managing the common heritage of climate stability is installed as a measure against chaotic outcomes and systemic social collapse. The credibility of this proposal relies on the premise that climate stability is a global and common resource of prosperity and social stability. The veracity of this argument is put to the test within the current environment of perpetual and interconnected crises that bring about a political reality, where torrential change is unleashed upon a fragile system.

The argument for a treaty defending climate stability may require a significant transformation in policy and redirection in priorities by key participating players. Thus, a proposed climate treaty framework will be submerged under the logistics, process, and bureaucracy of a long journey of negotiation, so that the sharpness of its impact is smoothed. This negotiation and treaty construction activity would take place within a political environment of multiple and interconnected priorities and issues with weights and linkage to the highest order of national security concerns. The complexity of transformation is further burdened by the speed of torrential change in many other areas of the political, economic and security realms, which actively influence the treaty making process. Various methods of action and forms of engagement are needed in the search of an effective equilibrium between chaos and order, between collapse and systemic stability.  The burden of this search and continuous political experimentation weighs upon the abilities of the treaty champions above all other actors.

Economic interdependence is one such form of engagement which turns out to be a factor of unpredictable nature. It has potential to provide leverage and be a source towards establishing common treaty goals. An actor may choose to use it as linkage in the negotiation process. Interdependence is also a source of economic competition in the web of global markets, where goals of reaching various national and regional gains in the form of prosperity milestones may significantly outweigh initiatives towards constructing a climate treaty. Economic prosperity is a strategic issue for sovereign states. Proponents of an effective climate treaty have an arduous task – that is to overcome opposition born from divergent and competing goals among key global players, due to linkage to objectives strategically outweighing climate negotiations. It is a laborious and complex effort for any champion in an international engagement where the promotion and construction of binding agreements to control climate variability may not rank at the top of the agenda of strategic international negotiations among key players. It requires mastering the art of operating within the realm of uncertainty and political fragility. Operating and proceeding in this manner tests both the political resilience of the system and the skill of the actors both institutional and individual. The political will required to push through such an enterprise will entail more than an effort to simply assess the potency of future risk and threats on account of past crisis and shocks already known and previously experienced and only then to devise a remediation strategy. The champions of this treaty should be prepared to persevere in order to pivot towards engineering a change in established political cultures and fundamental social values. At the core societal level, to be translated eventually to the strategies of political and economic elites, a powerful trigger must unleash a storm of new thinking that leaves behind the practice of free riding as much as possible. This is no less than engineering the emergence of a new, unknown, and untested systemic culture. Potent occasions, which may trigger this emergence of new cultural values and deep changes in social desires and ambitions are traditionally defined as systemic catastrophes. These events produce an environment of extreme scarcity, uncertainty, and at times of violence on large scale. This inevitably unleashes a Hobbesian struggle of all against all. On the stage of state relations this is not a fanciful hypothesis or an apocalyptic vision, but these are the stories of grave realities and our multi-millennial historical experiences. At such time of social and economic calamity communities and states do hold together and resist the forces which pull them to disintegration. These are the positive gravities of balance and regeneration, of return to normality.

Historical experiences prove that systemic catastrophes can trigger processes towards deep cultural changes at the broad societal foundation as well as for the narrower core of political elites. However, the strategies of a developed society must have evolved and cannot remain tied to passively relying on the capacity of major disasters to trigger change in political and economic thinking. Our strategies must have evolved towards acting to avoiding such outcomes. On the other hand, this evolutionary path in new strategic thinking may not be complete yet. Such political thinking may not have reached critical mass at the present day so that its application by state actors would make a meaningful difference in an international engagement aimed at constructing and adopting a climate treaty. Waiting for these changes may prove to be too dangerous of a strategy and put the whole effort out of the limited timespan available to make an impact to the process of constructing and adopting a global climate treaty. Other paths are to be explored – paths that are less cataclysmic and less shattering to social systems already exhausted from twenty years of perpetual, interlocked and cascading crises. A critical premise to the success of any such strategy emerges in the need for building an intellectual center for new social intelligence where exchange of knowledge, ideas, and support are actively groomed.

The high complexity of the problem of shared property rights of a global public good demands activation of such higher form of social intelligence. A quick conceptual and intellectual upheaval has the potential to lead the change. While an upheaval is indispensable, it must be born from rapid political growth in ideas, evolution in culture rather than come as a shock result from a systemics catastrophe. There must be a socially relational structure between political ideas and diplomatic goals leading to growth in initiatives for construction and adoption of a climate treaty. Fear, necessity, and strife can produce such a societal structure but that is a path proven to lack democratic legitimacy, to have high humanitarian costs, and thus needs to be avoided vigilantly and at all cost. The task then is to guide the chaos of indecision and inaction into shapes of acceptable order and in this manner lay the ground for a relational structure between social intelligence and the goals of international climate diplomacy.

Social intelligence is the glue that binds the people and their democratic representatives as actors to this process of international treaty making. Since there is a dispute at hand on property rights for a global common good the appearance of the democratic element is inevitable. Conflicts of property rights are after all one of the oldest kind of disputes known to history. Once the people guided by their representatives appear as a public actor on the scene of international relations, then all considerations of democratic nature are injected into the path of conflict resolution, remediation and eventually of treaty making and negotiation. At first the political appearance of democratic actors splinters the reality of international climate initiatives. It does not necessarily augment this process rapidly and radically. The democratic intervention of representatives and civil society groups at first must find a parallel channel to already existing traditional and established institutional realities. Such democratic actors with civil society roots, if equipped with good skill and aware of good measure, will exploit opportunities to increase their influences upon existing processes rather than to try to deconstruct them thoroughly. Local and national politics are thus infused in parts of international affairs of climate diplomacy, where they have not previously had influences or opportunities to cause realignment or disturbance. It begins when equality of property rights is claimed by democratically elected representatives and civil society groups. Equality of rights to a global heritage of humankind is actively used as premise of self-preservation and intended to motivate political action. Global externalities being at the heart of international failures in treaty negotiations are now targeted to be reduced and remediated by actions and claims of social self-preservation. Such course of action by the democratic element comes to augment the behavior of actors with strong incentives to look for non-cooperative free-riding equilibrium. Oftentimes, negotiations, proposals, voluntary commitments fail simply because of lack of an enforcement mechanism. Sovereign actors have multiple incentives not to participate in international climate agreements and thus multi-lateral action becomes fully ineffective.

Democratic and civil society actors may then choose to focus on raising awareness of the nature of catastrophic damage in order to motivate action on climate treaty. Quantifying uncertainty about the catastrophic impacts of excess climate variability is essential for reducing impediments and thresholds of ambiguity in diplomatic patterns of action during multi-lateral treaty efforts. At any time a shock of economic and national security nature may disturb the equilibrium and fragility of the global system of international relations. Such an occurrence will create a cascade of problems in social dynamics among political actors feeling nervous and demotivated to make progress in climate treaty negotiations. Thus democratic representatives and civil society groups are tasked to use their influence to guard and insure against attempts of unfavorable political linkage to contentious issues, which may derail the negotiation process. Yet searching for a perfect accomplishment by deeply engaged actors may be unreasonable. Equilibrium needs to be reached between two extreme views of negotiation – on one hand that all issues must be resolved at once in a large and fully binding international treaty, and on the other that very little can be achieved. As with other difficult and prolonged multi-lateral treaty making engagements the forces of urgency set the pace to great strides with ambitious milestones. While institutional inertia, vested interest, uncertainty and ambiguity of action and hence of outcomes always hold for gradual, measured and evolutionary progress. This general pattern of continuous realignment, retrenchment and disturbance in global treaty making renders progress slow and laborious. Then exploiting unique and contingent opportunities proves to be an effective course of action. Balanced solutions need to emerge, while negotiations move forward through the exchange of reasonable concessions. At the hour of making critical progress legitimacy itself for any negotiated and adopted binding solution can only come from embedding its political outcomes in the communal, regional and national objectives of the democratic processes.

Ivelin M. Zvezdov
Ivelin M. Zvezdov
Ivelin Zvezdov is a financial and insurance economist by training. He has masters' degrees from the Universities of St. Andrews and Oxford. He works on natural and man-made catastrophe modeling and product development for the (re)insurance industry. His research interests include climate change and environmental risk, contagion and propagation of systemic risk, sustainable and ecosystems approaches to managing natural resources. Mr. Zvezdov has published research papers on financial and insurance quantitative methods for risk management, and on environmental and biodiversity risk estimation.