ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
action. Indeed, environmental diplomacy may offer new bargaining oppor-
tunities for the South. Although the interests of developed countries have
generally prevailed in regime bargaining, it is the mutual vulnerability of
all states to global problems that has persuaded developed states to concede
limited financial and technology transfers.
However, turning the principle of equity into something concrete has gen-
erated considerable conflict. The success of regime bargaining will depend
on all participants accepting that the proposed arrangements are both effec-
tive and fair. Yet the concept of equity is highly contestable. Climate change
politics have generated several competing interpretations of what constitutes
a‘fair’ allocation of carbon emission reductions between different countries
(Grubb et al. 1992 ;Rose1992;Rowlands 1997 ). Grubb et al. ( 1992 :312–14), for
example, identify seven possible equity rationales applicable to greenhouse
gasburden-sharing, ranging from the idea that all humans should be enti-
tled to an equal share in the atmospheric commons, through the ‘polluter
pays’ principle that countries should pay for the pollution that they have
generated, to a ‘status quo’ position that accepts a state’s current rate of emis-
sions almost as a ‘squatter’s right’. The different perspectives are informed
byawide variety of philosophical concepts of justice, including egalitarian
rights, utilitarianism, Rawlsian and basic-needs approaches (Grubb 1995 ).
These concepts, in turn, raise other tricky issues, such as whether a ‘right to
pollute’ exists and how responsibility should be allocated, which have impli-
cations for the way history is treated. For example, does historical usage
create a kind of common-law right to continue producing at a particular
level, or should countries pay for their historic responsibility in using up
adisproportionate share of a global resource (Rowlands 1997 : 5–6)? Whilst
theconcept of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ has been widely
adopted in recent regimes in ‘an attempt to meet Northern concerns that
all countries have obligations and Southern concerns that those obligations
are not the same’ (Elliott 2004 :174), it has done little to resolve equity con-
flicts, because it allows the South to argue for reductions based on historic
responsibility (i.e. placing the burden on the North), while the North can
argue that future emission levels must be built into the equation (i.e. the
South must make commitments too). Thus the fact that the richest 20 per
cent of the world’s population is currently responsible for about 60 per
cent of greenhouse gases (and that figure exceeds 80 per cent if past con-
tributions are included) was critical in persuading the developed world to
agree the Kyoto Protocol, but with China set to overtake the USA as the
largest emitter of greenhouse gases by around 2020, any post-Kyoto agree-
ment must surely impose targets on many of the fast-growing industrialising
nations.
Each approach to equity will affect countries very differently (Rowlands
1997 ). Within Europe, those states with the biggest populations – Germany,
France, Italy, the UK – are responsible for the largestvolumeof greenhouse
gas emissions. By contrast, per capita emissions vary by at least a factor of