Thirty years on: Planetary climate planning and the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee

Abstract

On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, this principal supra-national institution remains paramount to the project of planetary climate planning and governance. Reflections on this anniversary should serve to recall the contestations through which this foundational institution was formed, and the delegate dynamics that continue to be reproduced in its wake. The contentious debates and political dynamics that afflicted the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee tasked with crafting the Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as dissension in the periphery, remain as relevant today as they were three decades ago. Reprising these dynamics through detailed historical and archival analysis, this article excavates the negotiations of the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, which met in 5 sessions during 1991–1992. The aim is to identify key fault-lines and conflicts in the lead-up to the finalization of the 1992 Convention, in order to demonstrate whose epistemic and normative commitments came to be reflected in the final outcome and to show how the legacy of this process endures to date. I seek to render visible actors and proposals peripheralized in the formation of planetary climate governance to extrapolate normative boundaries and proffer heterodox lessons from the margins.