From Kyoto to Paris and Beyond: The Emerging Politics of Climate Change

Saurabh Thakur
Additional contact information
Saurabh Thakur: Saurabh Thakur is an Associate Fellow, Blue Economy and Climate Change, at the National Maritime Foundation, New Delhi. He currently holds the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) fellowship (2021–22), for which he is working on the topic of India’s port-led development model and impacts of climate change. Previously, he has held the prestigious Kodikara fellowship (2020–21) at the regional centre for strategic studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, where his work focused on climate security, Anthropocene and South Asia. His research interests include global climate governance, international politics and sustainable development, looking specifically at the climate security and blue Economy discourses in South Asia.

India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, 2021, vol. 77, issue 3, 366-383

Abstract: Anthropogenic climate change has emerged as the most disruptive socio-political issue in the last few decades. The Kyoto Protocol’s failure to curb the rising greenhouse gases emissions pushed the UNFCCC-led negotiations towards a more flexible, non-binding agreement at the Paris COP21 meeting in 2015. The Paris Agreement’s hybrid approach to climate change governance, where flexible measures like the nationally determined commitments are balanced against the ambition of limiting the global temperature within the two-degree range, ensured the emergence of an increasingly complex and multi-stakeholder climate change regime. The article outlines the roadmap of the transition from the top-down approach of Kyoto Protocol to the legally non-binding, bottom-up approaches adopted for the post-Paris phase. The article outlines the post-Paris developments in international climate politics, which hold long-term geopolitical and geoeconomic implications. The article focuses on the fundamental shifts and balances within the UNFCCC architecture and examines the four fundamental features of this transition—the interpretation of differentiation and common but differentiated responsibilities, the evolving role of emerging economies in the negotiations, the rising profile of non-party stakeholders in shaping the climate action strategies and the emergence of climate justice movements as an alternate site of climate action.

Keywords: Climate change; Paris Agreement; global environmental politics; equity; UNFCCC; climate justice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09749284211027252 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:indqtr:v:77:y:2021:i:3:p:366-383

DOI: 10.1177/09749284211027252

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().