Determinants of bargaining success in the climate change negotiations

Abstract

A novel data set, combining interview data with negotiation delegates and hand-coded data of delegate statements, was used to empirically test six hypotheses about the determinants of bargaining success in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. The success of a state's bargaining strategy was evaluated by first measuring the distance from a state's original position on eight policy issues (e.g. emissions reduction targets) to the current state of the negotiations. The results were then readjusted using salience weights to control for how important each negotiation issue has been for each delegation. It was found that the external power of a state and how vulnerable a state is to climate change positively influence its bargaining success, while the extremity of a state's position and its share of emissions appears to negatively influence it. In addition, the use of soft bargaining strategies by a state, which mutually benefits all concerned actors, was found to positively influence success when a negotiation issue was particularly salient to it. Thus, it appears that the influence of powerful nations, such as the US and China, in the climate change negotiations may not be as strong as previously thought.