As the international community continues climate negotiations on the road to the Paris 2015 UN-sponsored climate talks, attention has turned to the review of countries’ emissions mitigation contributions and commitments. This builds on the evolution toward a pledge and review regime established in the 2009 Copenhagen and 2010 Cancun negotiations.
In my new RFF discussion paper, “The Crucial Role of Policy Surveillance in International Climate Policy,” I note how information-creating mechanisms—such as reviews—can enhance the transparency of and can support participation and compliance in international agreements. Drawing from game theory, international relations, and legal scholarship, I argue that through transparent policy surveillance, negotiators can make possible a more effective international climate change policy architecture.
Lessons from policy surveillance in multilateral economic, environmental, and national security contexts—including IMF Article IV Consultations, the WTO Trade Policy Review Mechanism, OECD Economic Surveys, as well as implementation under the Montreal Protocol, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and arms control agreements—underline my evaluation of the historic practice of monitoring and reporting under the global climate regime. Teams of permanent staff experts review countries’ economic policies through the IMF, WTO, and OECD processes and produce credible information for use in peer review and peer consultations. Not only can expert and peer review demonstrate how a country’s effort and outcomes square with its pledged mitigation contribution, but it can also identify best possible practices that could be pursued in other countries. Establishing standard data collection and analysis procedures as well as codes for good policy practice can enhance the technical capacities of national governments as well as lower the transaction costs of participating in multilateral agreements. Individual country-level evaluations feed into aggregate assessments of global economic and trade policies, and the same could be undertaken in an international climate policy surveillance regime.
In short, surveillance allows stakeholders and decisionmakers to compare efforts to mitigate climate change, and highlights the capacity of the combined, global effort in climate agreements. A key aspect is that it also provides those involved with evidence and data—a critical ingredient for continued learning to be applied to policy design going forward. Indeed, policy surveillance can provide the groundwork for a number of different climate policy architectures—from an extension of a Kyoto-style top-down agreement to a Copenhagen-style pledge and review. In my view, and based on this analysis, transparency is a fundamental part of the equation as negotiators work toward the next round of global climate policy agreements.
