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The “top-down” Kyoto Protocol? Exploring caricature and misrepresentation in literature on global climate change governance

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Abstract

The literature on global climate change governance frequently refers to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol as a “top-down” instrument, often in unfavourable comparison with the 2015 Paris Agreement, described as “bottom-up”. However, the meaning ascribed to “top-down” is often left undefined, contributing to a surprisingly widespread misunderstanding that the Kyoto Protocol, and in particular its emission targets, were imposed on governments. Against this background, this paper seeks to answer the following research question: To what extent can the Kyoto Protocol’s emissions targets be justifiably referred to as having been imposed through a “top-down” process? To answer this question, the paper reviews the literature on the Kyoto Protocol, with particular attention paid to the historical record and authoritative accounts of the negotiations. Having found evidence that denoting the Kyoto Protocol as “top-down” without further explanation is misleading, to the point of caricature and misrepresentation, the paper takes on a second research question: What factors lie behind the misleading characterisation of the Kyoto Protocol as “top down”? In answer to this question, the paper points to confusion between process and substance. It also invokes a wider tendency to unduly discredit the Kyoto Protocol, along with strategic efforts to emphasise differences between the Protocol and the Paris Agreement in order to legitimise the latter. The paper ultimately finds that the “bottom-up/top-down” metaphor obscures more than it illuminates, and that our understanding of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement would be best served by abandoning it.

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Notes

  1. Very many other examples could be cited. This paper was in fact motivated by the author’s experience as a former editor of an international journal on climate change, which received countless submissions whose introductions or background sections would include some kind of casual, unsubstantiated mention of the “top-down” Kyoto Protocol, usually in derogatory terms.

  2. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/top-down

  3. The COP also serves as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP) and as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA).

  4. Of course, the collective goal or criteria would themselves have to be agreed, raising the same questions about the process for doing so that we are discussing in this paper.

  5. President Bush is quoted in the New York Times (2001) as stating: “The targets themselves were arbitrary and not based upon science”.

  6. A reference to the Zen traditions of Kyoto, imagery that was often used during the negotiations.

  7. The EU always maintained that, whatever emissions target the bloc took on under the Kyoto Protocol, it would be shared out among its member states through an internal burden sharing arrangement. Known as “the EU bubble”, this arrangement proved highly controversial and was criticised as a case of double standards, given the EU’s opposition at that time to both emissions trading and the differentiation of emission targets among Annex I more broadly. Under the Kyoto Protocol itself, each EU member state has a -8% target inscribed for it in Annex B, but the final internal burden sharing arrangement arrived at in June 1998 redistributes this across the range of -28% (Luxembourg) to + 27% (Portugal).

  8. FCCC/CP/1997/CRP.4.

  9. FCCC/CP/1997/CRP.6.

  10. Transcript of interview for Asia Times, 1 December 2017. On file with author.

  11. Richard Kinley, transcript of interview for Asia Times, 1 December 2017. On file with author.

  12. Compare Annex B to FCCC/CP/1997/CRP.4 with table 2 in UNFCCC (2000).

  13. See decision 1/CP.3, paragraph 5(d), mandating further work on “the situation of Parties … for which single projects [a planned aluminium smelter in Iceland] would have a significant proportional impact on emissions”.

  14. This is not the only instance where a lazy parody has developed. The often-cited claim that the 2009 Copenhagen Conference was a catastrophic “failure” is another case in point. A more thoughtful assessment would point to the Conference as having crafted or at least pioneered almost all the antecedents of the Paris Agreement (Kinley et al, 2020; Coen et al, 2020).

  15. Excess emission credits due to lenient targets for the Russian Federation and other post-Soviet economies.

  16. One could add low-carbon investment and experimental learning around mitigation in developing countries through the clean development mechanism (CDM), and the privileging of adaptation financing through the Adaptation Fund.

  17. Why the US delegation in Kyoto adopted, and the US later signed, a treaty that quite clearly could never enjoy the advice and consent of the Senate is an important question, but one that is outside the scope of this paper.

  18. It is ironic that the “newness” of the Paris Agreement has been so emphasised, when its acceptance by Presidential Executive Order (the only way in which it could ever have been signed into US law) was dependent on the exact opposite, that is, not including any new commitments relative to those of the UNFCCC.

  19. See IPCC (2022), chapter 14 for a nuanced assessment.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Michael Grubb, Richard Kinley, Chris Spence and Harald Winkler for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Sam White for editorial assistance. All errors remain my own.

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    Joanna Depledge

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Depledge, J. The “top-down” Kyoto Protocol? Exploring caricature and misrepresentation in literature on global climate change governance. Int Environ Agreements 22, 673–692 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-022-09580-9

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