Responsibilities in Transition: Emerging Powers in the Climate Change Negotiations

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The BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) play an increasingly prominent role in global climate negotiations. Climate governance spotlights burden-sharing arrangements, asking countries to take on potentially costly actions to resolve a global problem, even as the benefits are generally indivisible public goods. This article examines the BASIC countries' own Joint Statements and their individual and collective submissions to multilateral climate negotiations to identify the rationalist and principled arguments they have made about the climate burden-sharing requirements that developed countries, developing countries, and they themselves should face in global climate governance. It argues that their expectations for their own role are particularly unclear, with greater national action than international commitments to do so.