Burden Sharing in Global Climate Governance

Academic and policy debates on how to allocate rights and obligations in global climate governance have resulted in various normative criteria, for instance historical responsibility for global warming, contemporary GHG emissions, economic capacity, growth prospects, and vulnerability to climatic changes. The implications of these principles for burden-sharing arrangements vary to some extent, though, by-and-large, all of them assign a larger mitigation burden to industrialized than to developing countries. In this chapter we discuss macro and micro level facets of the burden-sharing problem in global climate governance. The chapter starts by outlining the most important normative criteria for burden sharing. The following section translates a selection of these criteria into specific burden sharing formulas. It looks at how a given global emissions budget could be allocated to countries or groups of countries, and then adds the possibility of transfer payments. The chapter then moves to a discussion of how laboratory experiments and surveys contribute to measuring and explaining individual citizens’ burden sharing preferences. This focus on the micro level is important because the implementation of climate policies has very direct effects on citizens. Hence the need to allocate the global GHG mitigation burden in ways that are widely regarded as fair by citizens (voters). The concluding section connects insights from macro and micro level research on burden-sharing and argues for a more integrated approach to studying both.

Bernauer, Thomas, Robert Gampfer and Florian Landis (2014), Burden Sharing in Global Climate Governance, in: Todd L. Cherry, Jon Hovi, David McEvoy (Eds.), Routledge Advances in Climate Change Research, Routledge (Verlag)