Rethinking Cooperation: Inequality and Consent in International Climate Change Politics

Abstract

This article analyzes how low-income state agreement has been produced for contemporary international climate change treaties. These treaties have dramatically weakened the legal framework for action on climate change, with likely unequal impacts in the poorest countries. The case demonstrates that theories of international cooperation are not fully equipped to explain the processes through which low-income states offer their consent to multilateral agreements. This article develops and applies to this case a neo-Gramscian framework of negotiated consent, which reveals three mechanisms in the production of low-income state consent: material concessions, norm alignment, and structural conditioning. This approach views international cooperation as a process of strategic power relations co-constituted by strong and weak states, in coordination with nonstate actors. As such, it is useful for bridging the agent-structure divide prevalent in cooperation theory and sheds light on the durable nature of inequality...