Introduction
Climate change is undoubtedly one of the great challenges of the 21st century. For about 30 years, global and local communities have sought to tackle this challenge. In 1988, the United General Assembly (UNGA), at the initiative of Malta, recognised climate change as “a common concern of mankind” (United Nations, 1988), and the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organisation were tasked with establishing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate change entered the international agenda, and has only increased in importance since.
Multilateral negotiations on a global climate agreement started in 1990 – also the year in which the IPCC published its first assessment report. Only two years later, negotiations culminated in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Since 1995 – one year after the Convention’s entry into force – the international community has met annually at the Conference of the Parties (COP) to further negotiate and implement the Convention’s ultimate objective of “prevent[ing] dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” (UNFCCC, 1992). These climate summits have become “environmental mega-conferences” (Gaventa, 2010) with thousands of participants, and receive considerable academic, political, media, and public attention (Bäckstrand, Kuyper, Linnér, & Lövbrand, 2017; Lövbrand, Hjerpe, & Linnér, 2017; Schmidt, Ivanova, & Schäfer, 2013; Schroeder & Lovell, 2012).
A core feature of the climate change negotiations, and in fact of any multilateral negotiation, is that many states do not negotiate individually, but through groups or coalitions; Dupont (1996) even defines “negotiations as coalition building”. At the same time, some states, particularly larger ones, may also engage in negotiations individually, although they typically are also members of a coalition. In the context of multilateral negotiations, coalitions can be defined as cooperative efforts between at least two parties to obtain common goals (e.g. Elgström, Bjurulf, Johansson, & Sannerstedt, 2001; Narlikar, 2003; Starkey, Boyer, & Wilkenfeld, 2005). For some, this refers only to short-range, issue-specific objectives (Dupont, 1994, p. 148; Gamson, 1961). For us, coalitions are more long-term, and refer to repeated coordination to obtain shared objectives.
The terminology used in research and practice differs widely, ranging from alliances, negotiating groups, climate clubs, dialogues, or blocs. Some scholars use these terms to refer to specific types of coalitions. Narlikar (2003), for example, distinguishes issue-specific strategic “alliance coalitions” from broader, ideology-based “bloc coalitions”. In line with this divergent terminology, coalitions in the climate negotiations have divergent names such as “Alliance of Small States”, “Coalition of Rainforest Nations”, “Environmental Integrity Group”, “The Cartagena Dialogue for Progressive Action”, or “Association of Independent Latin American and Caribbean Countries” (our emphasis). For simplicity, in this volume we refer to coalitions throughout, regardless of the specific form of that coordination. Coalitions can thus be broad or issue-specific, strategic or ideology-based, ad-hoc or long-term, etc. Indeed, one of the objectives of the present volume is to develop some way of differentiating between coalition types. Before we proceed to outline the individual contributions of this volume, let us briefly review coalition research, in particular work on coalitions in multilateral climate negotiations.
Coalition research in and beyond climate change negotiations
Coalitions exist in multiple contexts beyond multilateral negotiations, and research has paid far more attention to coalitions outside of multilateral negotiations. A large part of coalition research is interested in coalition building from a game theory perspective (Bandyopadhyay & Chatterjee, 2012; Gamson, 1961). Much of this research remains conceptual. Applications to climate change are rare and remain rather theoretical (e.g. Buchner & Carraro, 2006; Wu & Thill, 2018). More common are applications to multi-party coalitions in parliamentary democracies and bargaining in business and organisational studies (e.g. Agndal, 2007; Stevenson, 1985), as well as individual behaviour in psychology (e.g. Bazermann, Curhan, Moore, & Valley, 2000). Many of these studies are also theoretical, or based on experiments, often with student subjects, and focus on small-scale negotiation settings with just two or three actors (e.g. Sagi & Diermeier, 2017). In international relations, coalition-building in the European Union has been studied in some depth (Bailer, 2004; Elgström et al., 2001; Finke, 2012), yet because of their majority voting system, these negotiations resemble government coalition-building at the national level, rather than multilateral UN negotiations.
Multilateral UN negotiations, such as those on climate change, are very different and much more complex: they involve almost 200 parties; they cover a large agenda with multiple, highly technical, and partly overlapping items; they are long-term with regular, repeated interactions; and they work through consensus, rather than majority voting. The intricacies of multilateral negotiations are less studied and less well-understood than bilateral settings, and thus require additional work (Crump & Zartman, 2003; Gray, 2011).
In theory, coalitions fulfil two essential functions (Dupont, 1994, 1996): they reduce the complexity of multilateral negotiations, and they increase members’ negotiation capacity and bargaining power.
To come together in a coalition, states must share some objectives and positions (Atela, Quinn, Arhin, Duguma, & Mbeva, 2017; Bhandary, 2017; Ciplet, Khan, & Roberts, 2015; Costantini, Crescenzi, Filippis, & Salvatici, 2007). By highlighting commonalities in state positions, and by reducing the number of actors and positions, coalitions reduce complexity and make the process more manageable (Dupont, 1996). Additionally, coalitions improve members’ negotiation capacity by allowing them to pool resources and information, and they are thus able to engage more effectively in negotiations. Finally, coalitions increase members’ bargaining power, as positions shared by several states carry more weight than those of individual states (Dupont, 1996; Rubin & Zartman, 2000). These functions make coalitions particularly relevant for smaller and less powerful countries (Chasek, 2005; Narlikar, 2003; Penetrante, 2013; Williams, 2005).
On the other hand, coalitions also add a layer to the negotiations, and therefore represent “negotiation within negotiation” (Starkey et al., 2005, p. 40). This additional layer does not come without costs. Coalition formation and maintenance require significant coordination efforts, which represents a challenge in particular for smaller and poorer countries who mostly can send only small delegations to negotiations (Borrevik, 2019; Calliari, Surminski, & Mysiak, 2019; Mrema & Ramakrishna, 2010). Further, coalition positions are necessarily compromise positions that need to be negotiated. Since power asymmetries also exist within coalitions, this compromise position may not equally reflect every coalition member’s preferences (Jones, Deere-Birkbeck, & Woods, 2010; Narlikar, 2003). Even if the group position carries more weight, it may be rather far from an individual member’s national position (Costantini, Sforna, & Zoli, 2016; DeSombre, 2000; Tobin, Schmidt, Tosun, & Burns, 2018).
Under which conditions do the benefits of coalition formation outweigh its costs? When do states create, or join, coalitions? Which coalitions are more successful, and why? Although coalitions are so central to the functioning of multilateral negotiations, they have received surprisingly little academic attention. Coalition formation, maintenance, and effectiveness are not well-understood in multilateral (climate) negotiations (Blaxekjær & Nielsen, 2015; Drahos, 2003; Gray, 2011), partly because negotiation research and scholarship on climate negotiations are disparate fields (Crump & Downie, 2015). As Carter (2015, p. 217) writes, “[d]espite the importance of coalitions in climate change negotiations, there remains a lacuna in the literature on coalition-building and coalition diplomacy in the regime more broadly”.
What do we know about coalitions in multilateral negotiations so far? There is some research on the negotiation strategies of small states, for which coalitions are of particular relevance, for example at the United Nations (Albaret & Placidi-Frot, 2016; Panke, 2012, 2013; Thorhallsson, 2012) or within the European Union (Panke, 2011; Thorhallsson, 2016; Thorhallsson & Wivel, 2006). Several studies focus on (developing country) coalitions in world trade negotiations (Cepaluni, Lopes Fernandes, Trecenti, & Damiani, 2014; Costantini et al., 2007; Drahos, 2003; Jones et al., 2010; Lee, 2009; Narlikar, 2003; Narlikar & Odell, 2006; Odell, 2006; Oduwole, 2012; Singh, 2006), or – more rarely – other UN negotiations (Hampson & Reid, 2003). A number of studies also focus explicitly on environmental negotiations (Allan & Dauvergne, 2013; Mrema & Ramakrishna, 2010; Williams, 2005), including those on climate change.
Research on the climate change negotiations has in particular examined the strategies, challenges, and achievements of individual coalitions, notably the Group of 77 and China (G77) (Chan, 2013; Kasa, Gullberg, & Heggelund, 2008; Vihma, Mulugetta, & Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, 2011); the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) (Betzold, 2010; Chasek, 2005; de Águeda Corneloup & Mol, 2014; Deitelhoff & Walbott, 2012; Ronneberg, 2016); the emerging economies, Brazil, South Africa, India, and China (BASIC) (Brütsch & Papa, 2013; Downie & Williams, 2018; Hallding, Jürisoo, Carson, & Atteridge, 2013; Hallding et al., 2011; Happaerts, 2015; Hochstetler & Milkoreit, 2014; Hurrell & Sengupta, 2012); and the European Union (Afionis, 2011, 2017; Bäckstrand & Elgström, 2013; Groen & Niemann, 2013). The EU, however, is a s...
