UNFCCC and the REDD+ Partnership from a networked governance perspective

Abstract

The idea of establishing a financial mechanism to mitigate emissions from the forest sector in developing countries (REDD+) has received strong support, but the unsatisfactory progress of the post-Kyoto process jeopardizes its fate under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Despite the pending decision on an international regulatory framework for the mechanism, REDD+ projects and policies are already put in practice at all governance levels. In 2010, the interim REDD+ Partnership was established as a supplementary process to make further progress in this regard. With its focus on implementation it formally stands outside of the UNFCCC, but de facto it constitutes an alternative forum for relevant issues dealt with under the convention.

The relationship between the convention and the partnership is far from linear and appears at odds with classical concepts of ‘regimes’ in international relations theory. Notable parallels between the two processes and the observation that the partnership influences the negotiations under the convention, and vice versa, illustrate the mutual interactions of different modes of governance. Drawing from theories of global and multilevel governance, this paper takes a perspective of ‘governance in networks’ and uses the REDD+ Partnership as a case to further the understanding of global environmental politics as dynamic phenomena that span various political levels and tie various actors together in partly competitive, partly cooperative ways.

Introduction

Currently, unsustainable use of forests and land use change represents the largest sources of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in most developing countries (Pan et al., 2011). In Brazil, for instance, the land use sector accounts for more than 50% of the total domestic emissions, whereas in other cases, like Indonesia or the Democratic Republic of Congo, this rate may be as high as 80% (Dutschke and Pistorius, 2008). So far, these sources remain unaddressed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), but since 2005 it has been discussed how this regulatory gap could be filled in a future post-Kyoto agreement. As a result, the parties have shaped the idea of an international financing mechanism that provides positive incentives to developing countries which succeed in decreasing their national deforestation and forest degradation rates – currently labelled REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries; and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries). It is generally believed to be an effective and also efficient instrument to mitigate climate change (Eliasch, 2008).

REDD+ raised high expectations and gained strong support early on from many public and private stakeholders in the climate policy arena. The negotiations on this compensation mechanism under the UNFCCC advanced more quickly than those on many other agenda items (Davis and Daviet, 2010), but it has not yet materialized. This is partly owed to the fact that REDD+ is intricately linked to a successful negotiation of a comprehensive post-Kyoto agreement, whereas numerous parties have emphasized that there will not be decisions on single agenda items. The overall UNFCCC process remains in a fundamental stalemate, and with that a REDD+ compensation mechanism is out of sight.

Notwithstanding this logjam which precludes regulatory and financial security, the support and will of private and public stakeholders for realizing REDD+ has triggered the emergence of various activities on all governance levels. They have quite different foci, ranging from the development of national strategies and governance capacity building to concrete project implementation in local settings (Wertz-Kanounnikoff and Kongphan-apirak, 2009). The activities are characterized by different forms of actor involvement that stretch from classical state-driven processes to private modes of governance, such as different certification schemes (Merger et al., 2011). They are mainly funded with so-called fast-start financing channelled either via conventional bi-national development assistance or bundled and subsequently dispersed through recently established multilateral agencies, such as the UN-REDD Programme or the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) of the World Bank. Lately, however, private financing has also increased considerably, mainly for REDD+ projects traded in the voluntary carbon markets (Diaz et al., 2011). With that, REDD+ governance is already put into practice in various forms and arenas and these actions are in many cases “running ahead of policy processes and state-driven decisions” (Corbera and Schroeder, 2011: 90) under the UNFCCC.

Composed of a multitude of different governance approaches and actors, the REDD+ Partnership most visibly illustrates this development. The partnership was inaugurated early in 2010 as an interim and supplementary process to further “scale up REDD+ actions and finance” (REDD+ Partnership, 2010a). According to the founding document it serves as a learning platform that brings together the aforementioned activities, and seeks to identify the institutional, technical and financial gaps that hamper beneficiary countries from implementing or “getting ready for REDD+” (ibid.). Formally, with its programmatic focus on implementation and its ‘voluntary’ governance setting with ‘no negotiations’, the partnership supposedly stands outside of the negotiations under the convention. With that, it marks a distinct form of governance that is structured strongly along more horizontal and less formalized governance principles, while still being closely linked to the state-led international negotiations on REDD+. However, in contrast to the political rhetoric the partnership provides de facto an alternative discussion forum since it covers the same technical and political issues dealt with under the UNFCCC negotiations. Moreover, it mediates between multiple levels – from the international, over national and subnational to local levels – as well as between public and private actors. It appears that these activities not only respond to the evolving mechanism but gain momentum in their own right and shape the intergovernmental negotiations of a binding REDD+ mechanism. In that context, the question arises as to how these different REDD+ governance arenas actually interact and mutually inform each other. This is the empirical question taken up in this paper.

On a conceptual note, such non-linear interlinkages between state-centred and non-state-centred processes appear at odds with established concepts of the origins and impacts of international regimes. Classical regime theory tends to distinguish between regime formation and regime implementation as two distinctive stages. Regime formation as a formal process of institutionalization typically occurs between nation states and is either imposed, negotiated or self-generating (Young, 1982). Implementation, in contrast, denotes a cascade-like trickling-down of international rules to lower levels, where rules are simply carried out (Young, 1982). More recently, the debates on global and multilevel governance questioned and extended this rather unidirectional and state-centred perspective by highlighting the role of networks of public and private actors operating across various hierarchical levels (e.g. Pattberg, 2010). In this school of thought, ‘partnerships’ have been introduced as an important theoretical concept.

Generally, partnerships are understood as “collaborative arrangements in which actors from two or more spheres of society (state, market and civil society) are involved in a non-hierarchical process through which these actors strive for a [common] goal” (Glasbergen, 2007: 2). In the context of global policy-making, partnerships differ considerably in their objectives, structures and character, yet a common and distinctive feature of global partnerships is that public policy objectives are pursued within a non-hierarchical transnational network structure (Pattberg et al., 2012). With that, partnerships are assumed to denote a clearly distinguishable mode of global governance, often contrasted with state-led international negotiation arrangements. While there is a growing body of literature focusing on specific global partnerships and their internal procedures and practices, there are only few scholars who have analysed the interactions between partnerships and other modes of (more governmental) steering (e.g. Visseren-Hamakers et al., 2011).

In order to partly fill this research gap, we propose a theoretical framework of network interplay in Section 2 of this article. Drawing on global (environmental) governance and multilevel governance theories this framework builds on the premise that both, inter- and transnational governance, are principally better captured by the concept of ‘networks’. In Section 3 the theoretical discussion is empirically substantiated by analysing the interactions between REDD+ under UNFCCC and the REDD+ Partnership regarding four distinctive analytical perspectives. The paper concludes in Section 4 by discussing the implications of mutual interlinkages between different global governance modes for the design of the international REDD+ mechanism.