Climate Diplomacy

This article explores the diplomacy of climate change negotiations – their form, structure, and the principles that shaped them. It focuses on two interacting levels of climate change diplomacy – one empirical and one analytical. The first – the empirical level of analysis – examines the architecture of climate change negotiations, starting with the UN General Assembly resolution that set the terms of reference for the intergovernmental negotiating committee on a framework convention on climate change and ending with the sixteenth conference of parties in Cancún, Mexico in December 2010. The second level of analysis locates the move from club to network forms of climate diplomacy on a larger canvas of debate about the nature, relevance, and adequacy of diplomacy in a complex and global world. The story explored here raises questions about legitimacy and effectiveness that are central to debates about global governance.