Bodansky: The Durban Platform Negotiations: Goals and Options

Daniel Bodansky (Arizona State Univ. - Law) has posted The Durban Platform Negotiations: Goals and Options. Here's the abstract:

In December 2011, the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted the Durban Platform, which launched a new round of negotiations to develop "a protocol, another legal instrument, or an agreed outcome with legal force," to be effective from 2020. This essay for the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements analyzes the elements of the Durban Platform and the possible goals of the new round of negotiations. It then examines three possible models of how international law might address climate change: a contractual model, a prescriptive model, and a facilitative model. The essay questions both the contractual and prescriptive models, the contractual model because there does not appear to be a contract zone within which agreement by the major emitters is possible; the prescriptive model on grounds of effectiveness. This leaves the facilitative model, which is uncertain to deliver the level of emissions reductions believed necessary to prevent dangerous climate change, but might still be of significant value in slowing the rate of global warming. Until there is agreement among states about which general approach to pursue, the Durban Platform process will continue the pattern of the last decade, in which states are engaged, not in a negotiation of the text of an agreement, but rather a meta-negotiation about what to negotiate.