Examine the main problems and challenges involved in looking after environmental concerns in world politics. (2016, 20 Marks)
The environmental crisis is not a failure of knowledge. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assessed the science since 1988, and most remedies are known. The difficulty is political: the damage is global, the authority to act is national, and the states best able to act are often the least willing.
Structural problems: commons, free riders and sovereignty
- Collective action: the atmosphere and oceans are global commons, and abatement is a global public good. Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” (1968) and Mancur Olson’s logic of collective action explain why each state prefers that others carry the cost.
- Sovereignty: Principle 21 of the Stockholm Declaration (1972) affirms each state’s right to exploit its own resources. No authority above the state can set or enforce a national emissions limit.
- Short horizons: costs are immediate, benefits arrive decades later, and environmental concern seldom decides elections. Amitav Ghosh (The Great Derangement, 2016) reads this as a crisis of imagination, in which politics has become a stage for individual moral expression, unfit for collective action.
The North–South divide
- Historical responsibility: Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain (1991) distinguished the survival emissions of the poor from the luxury emissions of the rich. Rio (1992) codified the principle as common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR). India’s cumulative share of carbon dioxide since industrialisation is under 4%, and its per-capita emissions are about 2.2 tonnes.
- Northern reluctance: the United States never ratified Kyoto, left Paris with effect from 27 January 2026, and in January 2026 announced it would leave the UNFCCC and the IPCC.
- A divided South: small island states and least developed countries press large emitters such as China and India to cut. The South coheres on finance but splits on mitigation.
Economic and technological challenges
- Costly clean technology: green technologies often cost more than conventional ones, and Northern patents raise transfer costs.
- Finance deficit: the US$100 billion pledge for 2020 was met only in 2022. The Baku goal of US$300 billion a year by 2035 falls short of adaptation needs alone, assessed at over US$310 billion a year.
- Consumerist capitalism and corporate power: growth-driven economies and careless consumption drive throughput. Fossil lobbying shapes rules, while pollution havens with weak enforcement and political exemptions attract dirty industry.
- Trade friction: the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, definitive from 1 January 2026, is seen by India as a unilateral measure that ignores CBDR.
Institutional weaknesses
- Fragmentation: hundreds of treaties and a UNEP that coordinates rather than commands.
- Consensus rule: at COP30 in Belém (2025), more than eighty countries sought a fossil-fuel roadmap, but none entered the decision. The plastics treaty talks collapsed at Geneva in August 2025.
- Soft obligations: Paris binds states to submit and pursue nationally determined contributions, not to achieve them. Full implementation of current pledges still points to about 2.3–2.5°C of warming.
Weighing the record
The record is not wholly bleak. The Montreal Protocol has put the ozone layer on course to recover by mid-century. India’s non-fossil sources passed half of installed power capacity in 2025, and its 2035 NDC targets 60%. The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of 23 July 2025 held that climate duties also arise from customary and human rights law. Liberal institutionalists credit transparency and reciprocity; realists reply that rules fail when the hegemon withdraws.
Conclusion
The central challenge is to fit a planetary problem into a system of sovereign and unequal states. Progress depends less on treaties than on finance that rebuilds trust, equity that keeps the South engaged, and the polycentric action of cities, firms and courts that Elinor Ostrom described beneath a stalled multilateral track.