Kai Monheim - Böcker

The 2015 Paris Agreement represents the culmination of years of intense negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Designed to curb climate change, it was negotiated by almost 200 countries who came to the table with different backgrounds, perceptions and interests. As such, the Agreement represents a triumph for multilateralism in a period otherwise characterized by nationalist turns. How did countries reach the historical agreement, and what were the driving forces behind it? This book paints a full picture by providing and analysing multifaceted insider accounts from high-level delegates who represented developed and developing countries, civil society, businesses, the French Presidency, and the UNFCCC Secretariat. In doing so, the book documents not only the negotiation of the Paris Agreement but also the dynamics and factors that shaped it. A better understanding of these dynamics and factors can guide future negotiations and help us solve global challenges.

The 2015 Paris Agreement represents the culmination of years of intense negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Designed to curb climate change, it was negotiated by almost 200 countries who came to the table with different backgrounds, perceptions and interests. As such, the Agreement represents a triumph for multilateralism in a period otherwise characterized by nationalist turns. How did countries reach the historical agreement, and what were the driving forces behind it? This book paints a full picture by providing and analysing multifaceted insider accounts from high-level delegates who represented developed and developing countries, civil society, businesses, the French Presidency, and the UNFCCC Secretariat. In doing so, the book documents not only the negotiation of the Paris Agreement but also the dynamics and factors that shaped it. A better understanding of these dynamics and factors can guide future negotiations and help us solve global challenges.

Multilateral negotiations on worldwide challenges have grown in importance with rising global interdependence. Yet, they have recently proven slow to address these challenges successfully. This book discusses the questions which have arisen from the highly varying results of recent multilateral attempts to reach cooperation on some of the critical global challenges of our times. These include the long-awaited UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, which ended without official agreement in 2009; Cancún one year later, attaining at least moderate tangible results; the first salient trade negotiations after the creation of the WTO, which broke down in Seattle in 1999 and were only successfully launched in 2001 in Qatar as the Doha Development Agenda; and the biosafety negotiations to address the international handling of Living Modified Organisms, which first collapsed in 1999, before they reached the Cartagena Protocol in 2000. Using in-depth empirical analysis, the book examines the determinants of success or failure in efforts to form regimes and manage the process of multilateral negotiations. The book draws on data from 62 interviews with organizers and chief climate and trade negotiators to discover what has driven delegations in their final decision on agreement, finding that with negotiation management, organisers hold a powerful tool in their hands to influence multilateral negotiations. This comprehensive negotiation framework, its comparison across regimes and the rich and first-hand empirical material from decision-makers make this invaluable reading for students and scholars of politics, international relations, global environmental governance, climate change and international trade, as well as organizers and delegates of multilateral negotiations.This research has been awarded the German Mediation Scholarship Prize for 2014 by the Center for Mediation in Cologne.