Voting Power in Environmental Policy Making

Abstract

Subject of the present work is to examine the decision structure of the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change, discuss possible changes within that structure like a different decision rule, or the implementation of voting weights and the consequences of those changes related to the distribution of voting power amongst the member states of the UNFCCC with the possibility of a priori unions. Power is one of the most important concepts in the social sciences. By applying power measures, we estimate the impact of the various agents in instrumental arrangements like the UNFCCC. We examine the climate institutions ‘United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’ and the ‘United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification’. We give a detailed description of the bodies of the conventions and the actors in the negotiation process. As ‘climate’ is a public good we therefore apply the PGI, the Coalitional Solidarity PGI and the Union PGI and thus estimate the impact of the various agents in these instrumental arrangements taking a priori unions into consideration. For the UNFCCC the decision rule is unanimity and for the UNCCD there is a two-third majority decision rule. There are equal voting weights. Voting power and responsibility are thus equally distributed amongst the parties to the conventions if we do not include a priori unions. We define ten a priori unions and apply the corresponding a priori power measures. Depending on the decision topics, developing countries can hold more power and responsibility than developed countries. Both conventions refer to responsibilities of the parties as common but differentiated responsibilities. The primary responsibilities and thus power should fall to the industrial countries which is not reflected in our calculations. The second part claims that the existing a priori unions within the UNFCCC get obsolete. Over the past few years new negotiating coalitions emerged due to new decision topics. It is important for small countries that do not hold much power in the political arena to cooperate allowing them to share information and coordinate their actions. This paper makes use of a hierarchical cluster analysis to identify the a priori unions/coalitions. We consider 194 member states of the UNFCCC (cases). To cluster these cases three decision-fixed variables (GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity, contributions to the core budget of the UNFCCC, Environmental Performance Index) and in each decision case one clusteridentifying variable (Forest area, CO2 Emissions, Renewable internal freshwater resources per capita) for the three different decision situation (decisions on ‘reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation’ (REDD), decisions on CO2 emission cuts and decisions on water shortage) are taken into account. We calculate three cluster cases (10, 15 and 20 clusters) for the decision topics. To estimate the impact of the resulting a priori unions and accordingly the member states of the UNFCCC within the decision making process we apply the Coalitional Solidarity PGI and the Union PGI. We suggest a two-third majority decision rule as within the UNCCD and there are no voting weights in this setup. The third part deals with the allocation of voting weights within the UNFCCC. The ability of the UNFCCC to function effectively is limited. The one-country/one-vote system of decision making within the UN is unrealistic, bearing no relationship to the actual distribution of power amongst the world’s nations. Therefore, its decisions are mostly only recommendatory rather than binding. Weighted voting has been suggested as one possible solution to the problem of representation in the conference of parties. We calculate voting weights based on contributions to the UNFCCC regular budget, GDP, the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), and a measure of the equality of sovereign states. These factors are assigned different weights in order to formulate three sets of weighted votes. After this, we calculate the a priori voting power based on theSolidarity PGI and the Union PGI for the three different decision topics we dealt with in the second paper (cuts in CO2 emissions, REDD, and water shortage).