Notwithstanding the fact that most states are said to be independent and sovereign and the governments of small and weak countries are usually not bashful in laying claims to this status, global political economy suggests a different story. Apart from financial and political coercion, which can be exercised directly or indirectly by the wealthy and powerful countries through their usual control of the more important global economic institutions, the power of the developed countries is exercised in other ways.
For example, by the mere refusal to participate in the discourse, as was clearly demonstrated by the 2001 withdrawal of the United States from the Kyoto Protocol. ‘While never a leader in the international climate negotiations, US participation was considered central to the effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol’ (Henrik Selin & Stacy VanDeveer (2009) Changing Climates in North American Politics: Institutions, Policymaking. MIT Press).
Importantly, the capacity of the developed countries to utilise their power to set the agenda on issues of global governance is well known, but particularly obvious where the issue of climate change is concerned.
In dealing with the ethical issues that exist in international environmental relations, Antje Brown and Gabriela Kutting argued that generally the developing countries see climate change as a historical problem and want past emissions to be incorporated into possible emission reduction strategies, but as we shall see, this idea is given short shrift by the developed countries. Developed countries are, however, quite serious about future emissions being taken into consideration. The debate is clearly framed to ensure that ‘today’ is the date from which discussions on equity start and anything that happened before today is excluded from the debate.
Since there is a temporal element to the debate, which is concerned with the present and the future, they argue that,
