Four questions for Copenhagen

The success or failure of Copenhagen will depend not only on the substance of the deal but on the spirit and message of the talks as well. The legitimacy of any climate agreement will depend on answers to four questions:

1. Where will the deal get struck and who will participate?

2. How will commitments be implemented?

3. Who will pay for the sharing of burdens?

4. How will firms and private citizens respond to the signals that come out of the climate negotiations?

My article on the GEG blog, Making Copenhagen count, engages with these questions to highlight the prevailing and potential tensions in climate change discussions. A longer list of my current research on climate change governance (on technology transfer, financing, trade and climate links, monitoring and enforcement) is available here.

Lotteries and poker games in climate finance

Lotteries are games of pure chance. Poker is a game of part chance, part strategy. Climate negotiations hinge on, among other things, creating a pool of finance to share the burden of mitigating and adapting to climate change. The game is not one of a winner taking all by sheer luck, but of who contributes how much to the common pot. No country is willing to act first; doing so would be to fold. Countries are taking a chance on the level of aggregate effort needed to avoid dangerous climate change, but their strategy is to avoid revealing preferences.

The absence of internationally enforceable mitigation commitments means that the burden on climate finance will increase. Unilateral promises will depend on whether sufficient financing is available to achieve the scale of actions needed. So, who will pay, how much, and through which mechanisms? I explore some of the games being played in climate finance and the implications for the Copenhagen meetings in my latest op-ed in the Financial Express, Even climate is about money.

Climate finance - it's still the one

Climate finance is one of the four issues on which a future climate regime will rest (the others being mitigation, adaptation, and technology development and transfer). It will also prove to be the main stumbling block during the Copenhagen meeting on climate change this December.

This weekend came the news that the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Trinidad had agreed to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown's and French President Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal to establish a $10 billion fund to help developing countries reduce their emissions and adapt to a changing climate. The fund, expected to kick in by 2010, is an important step - one more push towards securing at least a political outcome in Copenhagen.

But several issues remain unresolved. The most important is the 'additionality' of funding. This is jargon for the demand from developing countries that funding made available for climate change should be over and above existing allocations for official development assistance. In other words, they do not want climate change finance to simply substitute money intended for education, health and other development aspirations. Today, The Guardian reports that it has evidence that the European Union is trying to delete references to additional funding from the Copenhagen text. The United Kingdom supports additional funding, but even its climate-related aid allocations have come from existing aid budgets, not as extra money. As a clarification, a Department for International Development spokesman said, 'Additional funding for climate change would be made available from 2013...'

At one level, the question of additionality is problematic because it is difficult to distinguish between assistance for general development programmes, say improving water management systems, and activities geared towards climate adaptation.

But the bigger problem is that the funds required are several multiples of what is currently spent (only $1 billion a year on adaptation). On mitigation, too, scholars suggest that at least $50 billion might be needed annually in the form of public financing support (see my paper with Kevin Watkins; Lord Nicholas Stern repeats the point in an op-ed today). But current levels of public financing are much lower (since 1991, the Global Environment Facility has cumulatively provided only $2.5 billion for climate financing and leveraged another $15 billion).

A further problem - and related problem - is the long history of unmet commitments on development assistance, which has resulted in an atmosphere of sheer mistrust and bad faith between rich and poor countries. Moreover, the richest country (the United States) has yet to table any offer regarding climate financing. President Obama admitted at the G8 summit in July this year that the United States had 'sometimes failed to meet its responsibilities so let me make it clear those days are over.' It doesn't look like those days are over yet.

So, why will climate finance prove to be the stumbling block? Because all other actions will be contingent on the available funding. Over the last few weeks, we have seen one country after another offering unilateral commitments to reduce emissions (Brazil; Russia; South Korea; United States) or carbon intensity (China; even India is considering an announcement). Fast growing developing countries are adopting measures that they believe to be in their interest anyway. But any additional actions will depend on additional funding. As one developing country delegate in climate negotiations earlier this year complained, asking poor countries to take on climate-related actions without promised financing was like selling lottery tickets without announcing the prize! Such tickets would not find many buyers, he noted.

No toilet, no bride

Women in rural north India are demanding toilets before consenting marriage. The Washington Post reported today about a 'No toilet, no bride' campaign, whereby parents of girls are insisting that their prospective grooms have toilets in their homes. In Haryana state, 1.4 million toilets have been built since 2005. The local government subsidises the costs incurred.

Globally, some 2.6 billion people do not have access to improved sanitation facilities. In India, alone, that number is closer to 700 million, with a greater proportion of Bangladeshis having access than Indians, even though per capita incomes in India are 1.6 times higher. Women are worst affected by this condition, facing a loss of dignity in conjunction with health problems. In addition there is an economic cost in the time spent to walk to a safe place to defecate or to collect water. In 2006 the Human Development Report argued, '[T]he weak voice of women in shaping spending priorities within the household means that the constituency with the strongest expressed demand for sanitation has little control over expenditures...Empowering women may be one of the most successful mechanisms for increasing effective demand.' The ability to say no to a hand in marriage is turning out to be a significant source of such empowerment.

Supported by the Total Sanitation Campaign, in Haryana the idea has caught on in the popular imagination. A radio jingle teases, 'No loo, no "I do"!' Soap operas are using the the campaign for plot lines. And it seems to be having an effect. Christian Science Monitor reported in May that there was at least one case of a woman who divorced her husband for lying that he had a toilet in his house. According to the local representative of Sulabh International (the sanitation advocacy organisation) in the past four years the proportion of rural households in Haryana with a toilet has reached 60% (up from 5%). The Hindu reports that one-third of these toilets have been built by households under the poverty line.

In his autobigraphy, Mahatma Gandhi recounted a meeting in 1896 with the Rajkot Sanitation Committee. At the meeting, members of the 'untouchable' caste voiced their frustration: 'Latrines for us! We go and perform our functions out in the open. Latrines are for you big people.' More than a century later that message is still not heard widely enough but there are signs of change.

Indian embassy in Kabul attacked

At 0827 hours local time, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb outside the Indian embassy in Kabul. Today's attack was similar to the one on 7 July 2008, which had cost the lives of two Indian diplomats and about 60 Afghans. This time the casualties were lower (17) but no less unfortunate. Innocent Afghans on a busy commercial street in Kabul paid the price.

Even as investigative agencies gather evidence (the Taliban has claimed responsibility but they might not be the only ones responsible), a few questions arise immediately.

First, is this a reaction to India's growing influence in Afghanistan? The answer is yes and no. Yes, there is certainly concern within Pakistan that India's activities in Afghanistan are giving it 'strategic depth' at a level that makes Pakistan uncomfortable. No, India's development-related activities in Afghanistan cannot be a justification for wanton acts of terror.

India has no military presence in Afghanistan. It has built a 281 KM road that connects the landlocked country to Iran (and by extension to seaports). It has installed a new power transmission line to bring 24-hour electricity to Kabul. In addition, there are projects for building hospitals, women's training, administrative training, hydropower, solar power, etc. (A fuller listing of development activities can be found here.) Unlike other countries which have built fortresses out of their embassies, and despite the bombings last year as well, India has refused to move its embassy out of a commercial part of Kabul. India believes that a simultaneous and fuller engagement in many sectors of Afghan society and economy is a more constructive approach to nation building than merely military activities.

Many argue that this is mere hogwash, that India has ulterior motives in giving more than $1 billion in aid and that this is just another segment of the Great Game. At one level, this is an obvious point. All official development assistance has explicit political purposes. No one can dispute that. Further, all countries have intelligence assets in regions where their national interests are affected, including in friendly countries. The question should not be whether India has interests in Afghanistan, but how is it exercising its influence? To suggest that development assistance has political motives would imply that diplomatic contact between sovereign states cannot ever be possible without hints of political suspicion. More importantly, there is a tendency to paint the actions of different countries differently. Thus, NATO/western assistance is meant to 'win hearts and minds' whereas Indian assistance is called 'meddling' in Afghanistan's affairs. Diplomacy is the art of finding common interests. The explicit Indian and Afghan position is that it is mutually beneficial for both countries that India engage in development activities there rather than put troops on the ground. This is why India's activities in Afghanistan cannot be equated to NATO's; nor can terrorism against Indian civilians (diplomats as well as private workers, road-builders, engineers, medical personnel, teachers, administrators) be justified.

A second question: do these attacks prove that India (and Kashmir) must be roped in an Af-Pak strategy? This was the original plan of the Obama administration. But there is a serious risk in linking Kashmir to the Af-Pak issue. Just because groups linked to the Taliban are tactically deployed in Kashmir does not make it the same problem. Linking the two would be only a short-term military tactic; it would not resolve the underlying political factors that drive the two conflicts. The administration believes that resolving the Kashmir problem (or in the least easing tensions between India and Pakistan) would free up Pakistani forces to fight the Taliban on its western border. But this would not necessarily increase political stability in Afghanistan. The Af-Pak border has never been accepted by the Pashtuns, an ethnic-political grievance that has taken on religious dimensions. That is a political issue that Pakistan and Afghanistan would have to resolve together - and it is going to be a long process. Kashmir has nothing to do with it. That does not mean that Pakistan's tensions with India do not distract it from the Afghan war effort. The point is that the problems are different and need different political solutions. What is militarily imperative in the short term is not a long-term political solution.