Would you agree that the on-going debates on international environmental politics continue to be marred by a new North-South ideological divide over historical responsibility and developmental model? Illustrate your answer with suitable examples. (2018, 15 Marks)
Since Stockholm (1972), environmental diplomacy has pitted a North that speaks of a common future against a South that points to an unequal past. The divide is real and shapes every negotiation. It is, however, less a clash of two ideological blocs than a contest over fairness and money within a fragmented South and a divided North.
Historical responsibility: the persisting fault line
- The Southern case: warming tracks cumulative emissions, and the industrialised world, its growth partly fed by colonial extraction, used most of the atmospheric space. Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain (Global Warming in an Unequal World, 1991) called equal blame for “survival” and “luxury” emissions environmental colonialism; Henry Shue (1993) made the same distinction in moral philosophy.
- The Northern reply: past emitters acted in excusable ignorance, and what matters now is the current flow, where China emits about 30% of global CO₂.
- The mutual alibi: in 2001 George W. Bush rejected Kyoto because it exempted China and India; both pointed back to American non-ratification.
- Live examples: the India–China coal “phase-down” amendment at Glasgow (2021); India’s rejection of Baku’s $300 billion finance goal (2024) as inadequate; the loss and damage fund, conceded only with language excluding liability; and the EU’s CBAM, in its definitive phase from January 2026, which developing states call a unilateral measure contrary to CBDR. Belém (2025) could only set up dialogues on such trade measures.
Development model: the ideological layer
- Northern orthodoxy is ecological modernisation: green growth, carbon markets and border standards, which the South often experiences as green conditionality.
- The Southern counter defends the right to development, from Indira Gandhi’s claim that poverty is the greatest polluter to India’s Mission LiFE, aimed at the consumption of the rich. India’s NDC for 2031–35 (approved March 2026) still uses an intensity target, refusing an absolute cap.
- Radical strands cut across the line: degrowth is a Northern critique of growth, while Joan Martínez-Alier’s “environmentalism of the poor” and Bolivia’s rights of Mother Earth come from the South.
Why it is no longer binary
- Southern fragmentation: small island states and least developed countries press large developing emitters, India included, for deeper cuts; the High Ambition Coalition carried Paris across the old line.
- Diverging profiles: China’s per-capita emissions now rival Europe’s, eroding its equity claim, while India’s (about 2.2 tonnes) still holds.
- Northern split: the EU legislates while the United States left Paris again (January 2026) and has notified exit from the UNFCCC.
- Self-differentiation: Paris dissolved the Kyoto firewall; every party now sets its own contribution.
- Beyond ideology: Dipesh Chakrabarty (“The Climate of History”, 2009) argues the crisis also demands thinking of humans as a species, without erasing unequal responsibility.
Conclusion
Largely yes: historical responsibility remains the organising grammar of climate politics, sharpened by unmet finance and carbon border measures. But “ideological” overstates it. The quarrel is now distributive and cross-cutting, and will be settled by finance and technology flows, not by either side winning the argument about the past.