Understanding Climate Change Negotiations: Contributions from International Negotiation and Conflict Management

Abstract

Climate change is the largest and most complicated interdependent issue the world has confronted. Yet there is little negotiation and conflict management knowledge within the climate change context. To address this gap, this theoretical article reviews the sparse extant literature and provides a brief overview of the science of climate change public policy. This review establishes a foundation for examining negotiation and conflict management research questions that emanate from current and future climate change negotiations. Such questions are considered for climate change mitigation negotiations and climate change adaptation negotiations. This article demonstrates how the negotiation and conflict management field can make important contributions to the study of interdependency in a context of climate change.