Critically evaluate the approaches of global south towards addressing environment concerns. (2014, 15 Marks)
The Global South bears a double burden: it must industrialise to end poverty while suffering most from a crisis it did least to cause. Its approach has combined equity-first diplomacy abroad with a widening range of action at home. The result is morally strong but strategically uneven.
The main approaches
- Equity diplomacy: from Indira Gandhi’s Stockholm speech (1972) to the G77 and China’s defence of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), the South has insisted that historical emitters lead. Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain (1991) gave it a per-capita, “survival versus luxury emissions” logic; the Kyoto firewall was its first major win.
- Means of implementation: finance, technology transfer and flexibility on intellectual property, culminating in the loss and damage fund (Sharm el-Sheikh, 2022) and Belém’s call to triple adaptation finance by 2035 (2025).
- Vulnerability diplomacy: small island states made 1.5°C a survival claim. Mohamed Nasheed’s underwater cabinet meeting (Maldives, 2009) dramatised it, and Vanuatu’s campaign produced General Assembly resolution 77/276 (2023) and the ICJ’s advisory opinion of July 2025.
- Leadership and institution-building: India’s International Solar Alliance and Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, its Panchamrit pledges at Glasgow (2021) and its NDC for 2031–35 (approved March 2026); Brazil’s Tropical Forest Forever Facility (Belém, 2025).
- Grassroots environmentalism: Chipko, Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement and Ecuador’s constitutional rights of nature (2008) embody what Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martínez-Alier (Varieties of Environmentalism, 1997) call the “environmentalism of the poor”, rooted in livelihood rather than post-material values.
Strengths
- It placed justice at the centre of the regime: CBDR, climate finance and loss and damage exist largely because the South insisted on them.
- It has moved from veto to agenda-setting, using courts, coalitions and new institutions rather than resistance alone.
Critical assessment
- Equity as shield: Navroz K. Dubash identifies a “growth-first” strand that uses equity to keep obligations out; coal expansion in India and coal approvals in China feed that reading.
- A divided South: the Arab Group resists fossil-fuel language while AOSIS demands it, and China’s per-capita emissions, near European levels, strain a shared equity claim.
- Domestic shortfalls: weak enforcement and poor data undercut delivery, while dams, mining and plantations displace the communities the rhetoric invokes.
- Capacity gaps: many least developed states lack the means to design, monitor and finance adaptation.
- Dependence: strategy hinges on Northern finance that arrives late, as loans and below need, as Baku’s $300 billion goal showed.
- A borrowed model: dependency and Marxist critics argue that Southern elites pursue the resource-intensive growth they condemn in the North, and that offset markets can become carbon colonialism by other means.
Conclusion
The South’s approach is right on principle and has reshaped the regime’s moral vocabulary. Its weakness is credibility: equity claims persuade only when matched by domestic delivery. India’s renewable build-out and the island states’ legal strategy point to the mature version, leading by example as well as by argument.