This year’s prize has been awarded to Anqi Sun (1st year BSc Politics and International Relations).
Read more about Marco and the prize here
To most, the pandemic has failed to instil a heightened sense of responsibility, solidarity, and collective purpose. It revealed the structural weaknesses of a global governance framework wherein egotism prevails.
What lessons, if any, can we draw from the international response to the COVID-19 pandemic for global governance on climate change?
The long-awaited UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released on 28 February emphasised the urgency for immediate collective action to address the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change. However, such international, multilateral collective action — the foundation of global governance — was put to the test during the COVID-19 pandemic. To most, the pandemic has failed to instil a heightened sense of responsibility, solidarity, and collective purpose. It revealed the structural weaknesses of a global governance framework wherein egotism prevails. Nation-states did not share responsibilities for a global challenge that ultimately required consensual and symbiotic international cooperation, waiving UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s appeals for ‘a new model of global governance based on inclusive and equal participation in global institutions’.
Yet, global governance can work. A coordinated and consensual international response was achieved during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and H1N1 pandemic. Collaboration of technology and information between the US and the PRC accelerated the global development of a vaccine. Similarly, nations like India remaining in the Paris Agreement after the US 2020 withdrawal demonstrates the willingness for collective action. Nonetheless, in the same year, an uncoordinated, slow, fragmented, inward-looking posture by several nations toward COVID-19 hindered the hopes for effective global governance as a whole.
Collaboration of technology and information between the US and the PRC accelerated the global development of a vaccine.
There are two major reasons for this. First, an effective enforcement mechanism is lacking. Individual states are predominantly responsible in modifying citizens’ behaviours, such as implementing lockdowns or imposing carbon taxes on corporations, not the World Health Organization (WHO) or the IPCC. Excessive bureaucracy, chronic underfunding, and competing donor demands by these multilateral organisations may prevent adequate reforms vis-à-vis global governance. Accordingly, collective action is inhibited by deficient leadership, free-riding, and great power rivalries, all of which evident during COVID-19.
Second, the politicisation of the pandemic by former US President Trump demonstrates a Foucauldian dichotomic othering which instils hierarchies of power in any endeavours for collective action. These illustrate international power asymmetries and overall disjointedness in common endeavours, hindering the success of international consensus and cooperation in global challenges. While Global South nations were appealing for PPE donations from wealthier nations, these were hoarding equipment. Similarly, developed nations, historically more responsible for climate change, frequently appeal for reductions of CO2 emissions to emerging nations, themselves highly dependent on loose carbon quotas for economic development.
Accordingly, there are several lessons drawn from the pandemic applicable to global climate governance.
First, nations ought to act quickly and proactively tackle the problem, or they might encounter novel and exacerbated challenges. Nations that quickly imposed lockdowns or pursued scientific data were more successful in reducing transmission rates. Similarly, nations acting proactively in climate efforts are more likely to achieve greenification. Crucially, domestic success can be a motivating factor for other nations to adopt effective political and economic strategies.
Pandemic control and climate change ought be framed as global public goods, requiring contributions from all nations,
Second, pandemic control and climate change ought be framed as global public goods, requiring contributions from all nations, namely through Pigouvian taxes or an international financial burden sharing scheme to minimise negative externalities. The notion that ‘failure somewhere is a failure everywhere’ should be emphasised.
Third, science and technology can generate domestic solutions that can be then shared internationally. The pandemic vindicated the potential of mobilising scientific expertise in guiding policymaking and obtaining empirical results through state-funded, academia-led vaccine programmes. Individual nation-states must ensure that adequate funding reaches the most promising Eco-entrepreneurial science-led projects such as Elon Musk’s Gigafactories. Consequently, successful technocratic outcomes can foment international consensus and cooperation to accelerate the transition toward a carbon-neutral Eco-civilisation.
Lastly, the global community understood that egoistic ‘zero-sum’ thinking is counter-productive when faced with global challenges. While a global governance structure is inherently challenging given the anarchic predisposition of the international system, mutually beneficial international cooperation is irrefutably more effective.
The global community understood that egoistic ‘zero-sum’ thinking is counter-productive when faced with global challenges.
Please note that the views expressed and linked to on this blog are those of the authors, and not the position of the Department of International Relations blog, nor of the London School of Economics.
