International Affairs (Balsillie School of)http://hdl.handle.net/10012/98862024-03-28T13:25:07Z2024-03-28T13:25:07ZRestricting fossil fuel supply: Examining and amplifying the role of the Least Developed Countries’ Group in the United Nations Climate NegotiationsSaha, Choyonhttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/202752024-01-24T03:31:09Z2024-01-23T00:00:00ZRestricting fossil fuel supply: Examining and amplifying the role of the Least Developed Countries’ Group in the United Nations Climate Negotiations
Saha, Choyon
The demand for restricting fossil fuel supply—exploration, extraction, and transportation—has intensified recently and become the cornerstone of the global climate debate. Notwithstanding numerous impressive contributions of fossil fuels to socioeconomic developments, this demand has escalated. This is mainly due to the principal role of fossil fuel-based greenhouse gas emissions in pushing the Earth’s climate system outside of the safe boundary and stable state, thereby creating and worsening the cataclysmic consequences of climate upheaval worldwide. In the broader landscape of growing demand for constraining global supply of fossil fuels, the United Nations (UN) climate summit—Conference of the Parties (COP)—has become an important site to confront fossil fuel-producing countries and restrict their fuel supply. In COP climate negotiations, the Group of 46 Least Developed Countries (LDCG), a negotiating bloc of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), finds itself in a unique position to challenge fossil fuel incumbents, thereby developing international policies to limit fossil fuel supply, which is widely known as supply-side climate policies (SSCPs). To analyze this position, this dissertation seeks to explore—and amplify—the role and capacity of the LDCG in UN climate negotiations to advance SSCPs. To do so, this dissertation sets and resolves three distinct interconnected questions, which have been addressed in the three manuscripts.
Manuscript-I asks and addresses what the paradox occupied by the LDCG looks like and to what extent this paradoxical position can be justified by the global distributive justice lens. Drawing on existing scholarship, this study examines the LDCG’s paradoxical political position and argues that LDCs call for G20 states in COP negotiations to phase out fossil fuels while expanding their own fossil fuel supply-related projects with support from the same G20 nations. By calling for G20 states to phase out their fossil fuels, the LDCG has been playing a vitally important role in developing international SSCPs through UN climate negotiations. However, the continued expansion of fossil fuel supply projects in LDCs has resulted in diverse inherent concerns, while this extension is supported by the global distributive justice lens due to their fragile socioeconomic conditions, developmental needs, less access to energy, and negligible contribution (0.4%) to global CO2 emissions. These concerns are related to resource curse risks (e.g., corruption, violence, and conflicts around controlling fossil fuels), emissions growth, uncertainty around staying below 1.5°C of warming, and obstacles to achieving sustainable development goals and the net zero target. Therefore, the analysis suggests that G20 states’ investments for fossil fuel expansion in LDCs should be redirected toward developing the low-carbon energy system. Likewise, the analysis focuses on reinforcing LDCs’ efforts to press G20 states to begin phasing out fossil fuels globally.
Manuscript-II provides answers to the questions of how the coalition of LDCs is strategizing to confront fossil fuel incumbents (producers and consumers who have benefitted from fossil fuels and prevent decisions in negotiations related to the transition from fossil fuels) and their norms and practices, and to what extent the coalition has the capacity to do so. Drawing on oral interviews and the strategic power approach, this study argues that while negotiators use “soft” strategies in climate negotiations to call upon incumbents to cut fossil fuel consumption, observers undertake “hard” strategies at side events to pressurize incumbents to phase out production. The results demonstrate that the coalition is ill-equipped to challenge fossil fuel incumbents for the transition from fossil fuels. This fragility mainly lies in the coalition’s strategic capacity, which is deeply obstructed by weak strategies of negotiators, diverse interests and fragmentation in the coalition and the G77+China (a negotiating group of developing countries), interstate relations between LDCs and incumbents influenced by colonial legacy and political-economic factors. The findings finally suggest that as the coalition’s capacity to challenge incumbents is very fragile, it needs to be upheld to facilitate the development of SSCPs through COP negotiations.
Manuscript-III resolves the questions of how the LDCG can advance SSCPs in climate negotiations and how the Group can reshape international mitigation policymaking through the UNFCCC. By addressing these questions, this study spotlights the compelling need to pinpoint strategic pathways to improve the LDCG’s capacity to play stronger roles in negotiations, which are very vital to accelerate the advancement of restrictive policies on the supply of fossil fuels. Drawing on interviews with negotiators and observers, this study offers politico-economic, institutional, and nonmaterial (e.g., knowledge and argumentative power) strategic pathways that would improve LDCs’ negotiation capacity to argue with producing states to curtail extraction, enable the LDCG to play more robust roles in negotiations and help address barriers that LDCs face while developing policies to constrain fossil fuel supply. The analysis suggests that the application of these strategies is crucially important for the LDCG to reshape the development of climate mitigation policies via the UNFCCC. This is because these strategies would help the LDCG facilitate the advancement of a consensus on transitioning from fossil fuels, the equitable development of supply-side policies in negotiations as compared to demand-side policies, and the diminution of the influence of fossil fuel corporations on climate negotiations.
In short, the findings presented in the above three manuscripts—and/or this dissertation—stand to make novel contributions to the scholarly fields of supply-side climate politics, SSCPs, and politics in UN climate negotiations. In addition, the results also enrich the theoretical literature by expanding the realm of distributive justice, enhancing the usefulness of strategic power, and materializing the logic of supply-side climate policies.
2024-01-23T00:00:00ZResponse to International Human Rights Norms in Asia: Challenges of Ethnic Movements in Nepal and ChinaJnawali, Hari Harhttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/195942023-07-04T13:31:40Z2023-06-29T00:00:00ZResponse to International Human Rights Norms in Asia: Challenges of Ethnic Movements in Nepal and China
Jnawali, Hari Har
This thesis examines the factors that prevent the Chinese and Nepalese governments from
recognizing ethnic minorities’ claims to self-determination within their national jurisdictions. The Tibetans in China and the Madheshis in Nepal have sought the recognition of their self- determination through autonomy. But the Chinese and Nepalese governments consider that autonomy leads to territorial disintegration and hesitate to address this claim. In international norms, the meaning of self-determination has shifted from the right to independence to the right to accommodation; minorities can exercise self-determination through autonomy within the state’s boundaries. This normative development has not lessened the fear of secession among the Chinese and Nepalese political actors. Against this background, this thesis has examined the following question: why do the Chinese and Nepalese governments consider self-determination as potentially leading to secession? It identifies that these two governments associate self- determination with secession due to i) their respective political regimes, ii) the anti-colonial interpretation of self- determination, and iii) foreign intervention in ethnic conflicts. The Chinese government rejects self-determination to defend its centralized political regime whereas the Nepalese government rejects self-determination to strengthen its democratic regime that values individual rights and legal equality. Likewise, both governments interpret self-determination as the right to independence, but this understanding has affected the Nepalese government more than its Chinese counterpart. Finally, foreign intervention has also produced hesitation toward self-determination. Both governments assume that foreign actors are working against their territorial norms, and the external actors’ contradictory response to ethnic conflict provides grounds for this allegation.
2023-06-29T00:00:00ZXenophobic citizenship, unsettling space, and constraining borders: Assembling refugee exclusion in South Africa’s everydayKandjii, Jenniferhttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/191462024-02-01T05:50:05Z2023-01-31T00:00:00ZXenophobic citizenship, unsettling space, and constraining borders: Assembling refugee exclusion in South Africa’s everyday
Kandjii, Jennifer
This dissertation investigates how myriad actors, including the state, citizens, civil society, refugees, and the media, intersect to shape refugee experiences in urban centers in South Africa. Building on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, it focuses on refugee lived experiences in this context to determine the actors, their relations, processes, and factors that condition refugees’ everyday existence. This dissertation argues that we cannot understand refugee experiences in the urban context without attending to the relations among a multiplicity of actors, their interpretations of social phenomena related to refugees, and the meanings that emanate from these different actors as they forge to condition the day- to-day living of refugees. Furthermore, it argues that situating refugees’ everyday lives as the object of the study reveals how exclusionary practices are constructed, enacted, tolerated, reinforced, and challenged in contingent moments. In this mundanity where daily life is constituted and experienced, we see how collectives of various actors, imbued with multiple rationalities and enacting distinct yet intersecting processes, induce outcomes greater than the sum of their individual parts. Indeed, when refugees manage to escape the gaze of the state, they fall prey to that of citizens—whose aggressive actions are tolerated and emboldened by the state. Furthermore, the media mediates these state-citizen, citizen-refugee, and refugee-state connections, framing them and the attendant discourses that form social attitudes. The convergence of all these actors’ interests, perspectives, actions, and processes has devastating consequences for refugees’ everyday acts of shopping, walking, studying, or simply living. Notwithstanding these compounding acts of exclusion from access to rights, services such as healthcare and education, and physical space, refugees exhibit herculean acts of agency and resistance when navigating local and national refugee regimes and traversing everyday space. These heroic ways of being include strategies to claim asylum, obtain refugee status and documentation, secure economic and other resources, negotiate social services, escape police and citizen brutality, and avoid expulsion. By expulsion, I mean the multiple ways that myriad actors seek to force out refugees from territorial geography. These include, but are not limited to, deportation by the government, violent xenophobic
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force by locals, and institutional extra-legal processes for determining refugee status.
This dissertation combines assemblage thinking and critical citizenship and migration
scholarship concepts of citizenship, space, and borders to analyze the experiences of people who are pushed to the edges of society and live in constant fear of violence and spatial expulsion. It contributes to critical citizenship and migration scholarship in three ways. First, it demonstrates that conditions of uncertainty, precarity, and vulnerability result from the confluence of multiple actors who enact processes that reinforce each other in cyclical ways, rather than just being a product of institutional actors (such as the state). This means that refugees and other non-citizens are made to seem like "immanent others" not only by the state but also by ordinary citizens and the media. In what I call "assembling refugee exclusion," I show how a collective of actors portray refugees as burdens and threats—individuals who are undeserving of rights but should be exorcised from the nation’s imagination and physical location—regardless of their legal status and formal documentation. Assembling refugee exclusion reveals how the confluence of multiple actors, as opposed to a single actor, induces overburdening pressure on the wellbeing of refugees, resulting in more negative health and socioeconomic effects.
Second, it exposes how nation-building and identity formation, constructed at the expense of individuals on the fringe of society, such as refugees and excluded others, can be more than acts of state practice. State and non-state actors unite behind citizenship ideas to exclude and expel the imagined other. Thus, refugees’ identity and physical presence in urban areas are inextricably tied to nation- building, belonging, citizenship, and entitlement to rights and services. By jettisoning refugee protection under national and international refugee law, the state panders to citizens’ exclusionary interests and discriminatory feelings to foster collective national identity and pride. Simultaneously, with collective values regarding citizenship, I argue that non-state actors are emboldened to use language to distinguish themselves from the other, establishing hierarchical relationships and moral categories that lead to modes of bordering action and xenophobic violence against the other. Furthermore, this form of
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exclusionary language is reinforced through media discourse and public communication creating a continuous loop of difference. While this qualitative case study uncovers a slew of discrimination against refugees stemming from the attitudes of multiple actors accumulating in everyday space, I find that exclusionary practices coexist with powerful forms of refugee agency that are both enabled and restricted in specific moments and spaces. Therefore, third and finally, the dissertation contributes to citizenship and migration scholarship by delving into how agency emerges from complex relationships of micro and macro politics, demonstrating how refugees leverage support from non-government organizations (NGOs), their communities, and allies not only to challenge exclusionary state discourses and actions but also to enact strategies and navigate spaces constructed and populated by a variety of relational actors. Overall, the dissertation asks us to consider how a myriad of actors, both state and non- state, and meanings derived from their perceptions and interpretations of citizenship, space, and borders intersect to shape the lived experiences of refugees. This question prompts policymakers, scholars, and practitioners to consider the implications of this convergence of players for refugee governance and refugee protection in the twenty-first century.
2023-01-31T00:00:00ZMapping the Complexity of Mining & Peacebuilding in GuatemalaSilburt, Avivahttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/188842022-10-14T02:31:05Z2022-10-13T00:00:00ZMapping the Complexity of Mining & Peacebuilding in Guatemala
Silburt, Aviva
This dissertation examines the intersection between foreign owned mining operations and peacebuilding efforts in Guatemala, responding to a number of academic debates and practical issues. Two mines were comparatively analyzed using complex systems theory and qualitative research methods. Although mining was not a core issue from Guatemala’s 36-year Internal Armed Conflict, it became an issue in Guatemala’s “post-conflict” peacebuilding context. This is because Guatemala prioritized economic development by means of an extractive development model based on foreign investment as a means to implement commitments from peace accords signed in 1996—following the advice of the international community. Mining generated significant controversy and conflict in ways that are both shaped by and impacted peacebuilding efforts. Mining reinforced pre-existing inequalities and exclusion in the communities near the two mines examined. These were important underlying issues from Guatemala’s Internal Armed Conflict that peacebuilding sought, but failed, to address. These issues characterized the dynamics of mining-related conflict in different ways at the two mines that reflected important differences in each town’s history and situation in Guatemalan society. In this sense, peacebuilding issues shaped mining-related conflict. In doing so, however, mining also made these issues more difficult to address as part of peacebuilding, and thereby impacted peacebuilding. That said, mining conflicts are just one of several issues that Guatemala faces in its post-conflict peacebuilding context, many of which are also a consequence inequality and exclusion. These various other issues were interconnected with each other and formed part of a positive feedback loop that reinforced inequalities and exclusion in context of each mine. This complicated the dynamics of mining conflict and compounded each issue and the situation overall in ways that ultimately undermined longer-term sustained efforts needed to address inequalities and exclusion as part of peacebuilding. International influence in both Guatemala’s peacebuilding progress and mining governance framework undermined Guatemala’s ability develop capacity and accountability to overcome its peacebuilding challenges and appropriately govern the extractive sector.
2022-10-13T00:00:00Z