It's About Development, Stupid!International Climate Policy in a Changing World

It has become an increasingly accepted understanding that international climate policy is about socioeconomic development at least as much as it is about environmental politics. The corresponding trend to consider international climate negotiations in a development context arguably gained prominence since the UNFCCC's twelfth conference of the parties (COP12) convened in Nairobi in 2006 and in conjunction with the attention to development issues in the IPCC's fourth assessment report.¹ The latest gathering of international climate diplomacy in Durban (COP17, 2011) is another case in point: progress that was eventually made on the adaptation agenda proved crucial in helping governments save face and avoid an all-but-complete failure of the conference. The United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank have also acknowledged climate change as a key parameter for development in recent flagship reports.²

This essay seeks to review the extent to which the emphasis on development is reflected in recent environmental studies scholarship on international climate policy. It appraises three edited volumes that comprise the bulk of the research that was conducted under the ADAM project (Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies: Supporting European Climate Policy), a four-year multi-million-Euro research project funded by the European Commission under the EU's Sixth Framework Research Programme. The respective volumes add to the rapidly expanding literature on international climate policy.

The volume edited by Andrew Jordan et al. provides a comprehensive institutional history of climate policy within the European Union. To this end it employs a remarkably coherent conceptual framework that—broadly speaking—builds on interrelated sets of "policy choices" and "governance dilemmas" faced by European policy-makers. After retrospective analysis offered in early chapters, the notions of choices and dilemmas are then applied to a scenario-based identification of future challenges for EU climate policy. The consistency of this exercise should help prevent the book from becoming quickly outdated, even as international climate policy represents a moving target. The presentation of empirical insights is remarkably accessible for a book dealing specifically with EU institutions.

The volume edited by Frank Biermann, Philipp Pattberg and Fariborz Zelli provides a state-of-the-art outlook on the future of global climate governance, zooming in on (a) its evolving institutional architecture, (b) the relevance of nonstate actors and (c) the prospects of adaptation to ongoing global warming. The editors' concept of institutional "fragmentation," previously published in Global Environmental Politics,³ provides a useful lens for the entire volume, although it pertains especially to the architecture section and seems less consistently applied than the neat organization of the overall book suggests at first glance. For instance, the laudable effort to consult modeling studies to better grasp the pros and cons of fragmented versus universal regimes is hardly taken up by the other authors. Still, the application of the fragmentation concept to the multifaceted conundrum of global climate governance proves its worth as a useful heuristic alternative to the regime complex literature⁴ or Ostrom's take on polycentric climate governance.⁵

The volume edited by Joyeeta Gupta and Nicolien van der Grijp offers an extensive account of political efforts to mainstream climate change in development policy in the specific context of European development cooperation. As such, it addresses a considerable gap in the scholarly literature at the nexus of environment and development studies. While reflecting the editors' broad grounding in both fields, the cumulative organization of the volume appears to have prompted a bit of conceptual overload in its introductory and theoretical sections. With this overload comes a regrettable lack in focus and coherence, at [End Page 111...