In 1997, a coalition of state and non-state actors concluded the Ottawa Treaty, a comprehensive ban on anti-personnel landmines (APL). Considered impossible less than a decade before, it passed with surprising speed and popularity. In doing so, lead campaigner Jody Williams argued in her Nobel Peace Prize Lecture that the landmine coalition had “changed history.”Footnote 2 It brought new actors into the center of arms control negotiations, established innovative diplomatic strategies, and produced a new standard of “good” arms control policy, all of which have since facilitated treaties on cluster munitions (CM) and conventional weapons transfers. These treaties mark a distinct break with the Cold War. Although some acknowledged the human costs of landmines, cluster munitions, and the arms trade in the 1970s, humanitarian arms control failed to overcome opposition both within and between states. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the primary focus of multilateral arms control agreements has been to ameliorate the adverse humanitarian effects of conventional weapons and protect human security.
Why were advocates successful in pushing humanitarian arms control only after the Cold War? Explanations that rely simply on the end of bipolarity miss out on the power interactions that have shaped post-Cold War security governance. I argue that the initial, radical uncertainty of the post-Cold War security environment provided the political space for smaller states and non-state actors to use diplomatic innovation to bypass institutional constraints, frame problems, and mobilize support to make new agreements possible. Advocates were intentional and strategic in seeking new treaties, but their success, speed, and widespread support in negotiating them was unexpected. The Ottawa Treaty created the model, strategies, and momentum to pursue humanitarian controls on other weapons. Nevertheless, advocates have had to adapt the landmine campaign’s strategies to respond to larger skeptical states’ efforts to tamp down – with some success – on the scope of subsequent agreements.
More than a decade after the APL ban, the CM Convention and Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) demonstrate both the lasting influence of the Ottawa Treaty and the limits of protean power as it interacts with control power in the complex post-September 11 security environment. Skeptical states with significant military capabilities have used their institutional, political, and economic resources to weaken post-APL agreements. In some cases, their technological resources have allowed them to work around (and therefore make acceptable) new regulations and prohibitions. In the absence of viable work-arounds, however, they have exerted their control power to weaken agreements. In turn, pro-control coalitions have adapted their strategies to the realities of control power, just as NGOs have had to do in the climate negotiations described by Jessica Green in Chapter 12. As a whole, these negotiations thus reflect a push and pull between control and protean power in global security governance, with important consequences for the design and effects of contemporary arms control agreements.
Risk, Uncertainty, and Complexity in International Security and Arms Control
Conventional weapons restrictions tap directly into the heart of control power, limiting a key source of states’ coercive capabilities. Humanitarian arms control agreements can therefore be a difficult sell to security-conscious states. Moreover, the states with greater military capabilities also tend to be the states with greater formal agenda-setting and voting privileges in international institutions. Thus, they possess a wide range of control power resources, which can allow them to block agreements they dislike from being adopted or even discussed. Not surprisingly, these states have typically been the most hesitant to negotiate conventional weapons restrictions. Instead, smaller states and NGOs have been the primary source of arms control initiatives seeking to promote humanitarian values and protect human security. Yet although big states’ control power has largely persisted, the effects of protean power have altered its utility and strength in shaping post-Cold War arms control.
It is therefore not enough to argue that the end of bipolarity caused the shift in the focus of international arms control. Rather, Cold War bipolarity and its end are linked to changing experiences of risk and uncertainty in international security, which in turn provide changing opportunities and constraints for the interaction of power. In the radical uncertainty of early post-Cold War international politics, political space opened for innovative state and non-state actors to pursue new strategies and policies. Of course, small states have often had to be more agile and creative in order to manage their vulnerability to changes in their external environments.Footnote 3 Yet the post-Cold War security environment enabled their partnerships with NGOs and other diplomatic innovations to create arms control agreements once thought impossible. At the same time, bigger states’ control power has remained a force of resistance and placed limits on the extent to which other actors can push new agreements, especially in recent years as radical uncertainty has subsided in favor of operational uncertainty (see Chapters 1 and 2).
Cold War Security Environment
The Cold War international security system was marked by clear leadership, an absence of major power war, and broad consensus over the nuclear threat as the predominant international security concern. Whether due to the bipolar distribution of material capabilitiesFootnote 4 or nuclear weapons,Footnote 5 the international security environment at this macro-level was seen as stable. To be sure, superpower war had the potential to end in mutually assured destruction. As a result, however, attacks “out of the blue” were seen as “so improbable for a nuclear age as to approach virtual certainty that it will not happen.”Footnote 6 As Schelling and Halperin famously argued, war was seen as the result of decisions mitigated by the logic of deterrence theory.Footnote 7 This “risk-based understanding of chance,” Katzenstein and Seybert note, has in turn “had a pervasive influence on the theory and practice of nuclear deterrence for the last half century” (Chapter 2, p. 42). Arms control thus served to “slow the tempo of decisions,” improve communications, and provide assurances between adversaries to better assess risk and reaction.Footnote 8 Certainly, the Cold War was not without a keen sense of threat and insecurity, but it was generally viewed as a “known” threat in which risk could be calculated, managed, and even manipulated.
By the 1970s, this security environment had fostered an arms control culture led by the superpowers and focused on managing the risk of nuclear war. The superpowers (and sometimes the international community more broadly) reached agreements to limit nuclear arsenals, testing, and proliferation. By maintaining strong weapons programs and negotiating strong arms control agreements, argue McNamara and Bethe, “the risk of nuclear war will constantly recede and confidence that we are masters of our fate will be rebuilt.”Footnote 9 In the meantime, crisis scenarios could be laid out and responses planned (at least in theory). Thus, the superpowers used arms control as a tool to impose greater control over state security in a high-risk world.
In this control-power dominated world, the arms control agenda was set principally by the superpowers. Other states could choose between security relationships with one of two centers of power or independence through armed neutrality,Footnote 10 but they largely accepted the nuclear-focused agenda. For Soviet client states in Eastern Europe, threat of military intervention formed a clear-cut social system based on control power and policy acquiescence. United States’ domination of its clients’ security affairs was more varied in form but generally founded on promises of material assistance. Moreover, some former colonies were simply too new and ill equipped to exercise political leverage.Footnote 11 To the extent that non-superpowers attempted to deploy diplomatic innovation, resources focused on “[dissipating] conflict between the two blocks.”Footnote 12 As the case studies show, in this security environment, humanitarian weapons restrictions failed to gain broad political traction against superpower preferences.
Post-Cold War Security Environment
The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union upended the established bipolar system and introduced radical uncertainty into the global security environment: what world order would replace the old order; who would take a leadership role; and what would be the primary threat to systemic stability? Scholars debated whether the system would be unipolar or multipolar; if multipolar, which state (or states) would lead; the prospects for international stability; and the security consequences for individual states and regions.Footnote 13 Threats became diffuse and connected to weak actors in regions previously seen as the periphery. Societal instability and internal conflict challenged traditional understandings of interstate security, the relevant actors in world politics, and the relevant policy tools to manage conflict. Scholars wrote about “the coming anarchy,” “the clash of civilizations,” the anti-democratic but conflicting trends of “Jihad vs McWorld,” “organized chaos,” “new wars,” and “the contest between forces of integration and fragmentation.”Footnote 14 Suddenly, the system was in flux and more open to small states and NGOs taking a prominent role, diplomatic innovation, and the generation of protean power.
With the post-9/11 focus on global terrorism, states’ security environment has become more complex (Chapter 1, pp. 16–25), oriented toward operational uncertainty and the interaction of control and protean power. Threat is both known and unknown, connected to geographically diffused and often-fluid violent non-state groups with agile networks operating outside established diplomatic rules and norms (Chapter 9). Militarily strong states have confronted that growing complexity with a reassertion of control power and attempts to exert military means of domination. Militarily weaker states and NGOs, in turn, have had to respond to its control-power endowed opposition and improvise on their strategies of the 1990s.
As post-Cold War international security has undergone this evolution from uncertainty to complexity, protean and control power have increasingly interacted. Certainly, the scope of potential policy outcomes remains noticeably broader than in the 1970s. Yet the space for new actors to implement new strategies and comprehensive arms control policies against big-state wishes is somewhat more constricted relative to the 1990s. Bigger states continue to rely on control power resources as a means by which to grapple with complexity, advancing new defense technologies while downsizing military forces. They are therefore reluctant to limit their access to and development of new weapons. Smaller states continue to rely on cooperative military relationships to respond to their changing security needs and secure their own access to arms.Footnote 15 In doing so, however, they have been less beholden to superpower alliances in defining their foreign policy preferences than in the past.
As a result, small states and NGOs have been more willing and able to engage in creative policymakingFootnote 16 to achieve cooperative responses to security challenges relevant to their own interests and values. Reshaping arms control to focus on humanitarian goals has been one key way in which coalitions of “like-minded” small states and NGOs have innovated in response to the causes and consequences of local instability and international uncertainty. In addition, the radical uncertainty of the 1990s enabled these actors to apply information, resources, and mobilization strategies to pursue their arms control agendas. Bigger states have had to adapt to these policy initiatives and, in more recent years, have employed control power to limit them. In the process, their varying degrees of resistance also demonstrate the limits of protean power. Where possible, they have harnessed technology to make new weapons restrictions either acceptable or inapplicable. Absent technological work-arounds, they have more directly sought to block or weaken humanitarian restraints to protect their own interests.
Case Studies
Three key humanitarian arms control agreements demonstrate the evolving relationship between control and protean power in the post-Cold War international security environment: the 1997 Ottawa Landmine Treaty, the 2008 Cluster Munition Convention (CMC), and the 2013 ATT.Footnote 17 The first two agreements outlaw anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions, respectively. The third, the ATT, outlines humanitarian criteria to guide states’ transfers of small and major conventional arms.
Attempts to address all three during the Cold War failed as nuclear risk dominated the international security agenda. However, varying interactions of control power and protean power effects after the Cold War have shaped the campaigns, negotiations, and outcomes of each of these agreements. The experience of radical uncertainty enabled coalitions of smaller states and NGOs to develop innovative diplomatic strategies to win support for the historic Ottawa Treaty. Later, as radical uncertainty subsided, these coalitions improvised on their landmine strategies to pass the CMC and ATT. Although skeptical big states are no longer able to use their control power to keep humanitarian arms control initiatives off the table, they have used it to weaken negotiation results. Their success in doing so thus demonstrates the limited effects of protean power as it interacts with control power in a complex international security environment.
Anti-Personnel Landmines: Diplomatic Innovation
The 1997 ban on the production, use, stockpiling, and trade in APLs broke all past expectations of arms control rooted in Cold War nuclear risk management and came about with surprising rapidity after the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) was formed in 1992. APLs are mines designed to kill or maim foot soldiers, and, until 1997, were commonly employed by military forces around the world as a low-cost means to protect territory from invasion. Landmine use dates back to the US Civil War, but concern over their effects on non-combatants first surfaced in the 1970s – but with little effect. It was the radical uncertainty experienced in the initial post-Cold War years, I argue, that opened up the political space to make the Ottawa Treaty possible and that allowed advocates to establish new diplomatic strategies that – in modified forms – would later facilitate the CMC and ATT negotiations.
Attention to landmines during the Cold War resulted from the efforts of a few state and non-state actors. From 1974 to 1977, the Swiss government convened a series of meetings to increase protections for non-combatants during armed conflict. In preparation, nineteen governments requested the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to “consult with specialists on the problem of conventional weapons which may cause suffering or have indiscriminate effects,” including APLs.Footnote 18 The ICRC’s 1973 meeting (which did not include a US representative) concluded that “certain uses of antipersonnel mines … can lead to indiscriminate effects and injuries far in excess of what is required to put combatants out of action,” and called for “intergovernmental discussions … with a view to possible restrictions upon their operational use or even prohibition.”Footnote 19 However, at meetings in 1974 and 1976, states disagreed about whether APLs should be banned as inherently indiscriminate, or whether built-in self-destruct mechanisms could resolve the problem. If there could be a technological fix, the logic went, the weapon need not be banned.
The political opportunities and interests for smaller powers to assert initiatives that contradicted superpower preferences were absent in Cold War multilateral institutions and alliances. In the end, the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions did not include any weapons restrictions. The major powers argued that the APL problem was confined to the irresponsible practices of less-developed militaries and guerilla groups.Footnote 20 Evidence demonstrating the extent of the problem came only in the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and as Western aid organizations gained access to areas affected by the US war in Vietnam.Footnote 21 Although small states like Sweden had wanted prohibitions, they failed to attract broader support against superpower opposition. NGOs were also limited in number, and the primary organization, the ICRC, “[seemed] to have decided not to touch the law relating to different types of weapons.”Footnote 22 Even so, the 1977 meeting led to the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), prohibiting indiscriminate APL use and restricting mine placement to outside populated areas. However, the CCW has been considered ineffective, filled with loopholes, and too limited in its membership.Footnote 23
Thus, the APL problem predates the end of the Cold War, but it did take the end of the Cold War to produce an international security environment conducive to concluding an APL ban against great power preferences. This time, the political space was more open to small states and NGOs reorienting discussions about international security and arms control to include human security, mobilizing public opinion, and leading diplomatic initiatives. The rapid success of the ICBLFootnote 24 in coalition with like-minded states in pushing through the Ottawa Treaty in 1997 is well known.Footnote 25 Advocates made up for their lack of traditional control power sources in international institutions by coordinating innovative diplomatic strategies. For example, the ICBL relied on victims’ personal stories and celebrity advocacy to mobilize public opinion, and used information and expert testimony to counter skeptical governments’ arguments against a new treaty. In doing so, these actors took advantage of the radical uncertainty surrounding threat and leadership in post-Cold War security politics, in which other threats and superpower interests did not overshadow attention to or discourage interest in the humanitarian side of arms control.
Importantly, unlike the 1970s, advocates were able to support arguments with extensive evidence that APLs were inherently indiscriminate and caused harm to civilians long after conflicts ended. They also strategically connected – or “grafted”Footnote 26 – that information to arguments that an APL ban would fall within states’ existing obligations under international law. Finally, they brought in retired military leaders to argue that APLs were unreliable weapons of little strategic value. APLs did not need a technological work-around; they simply were not needed.
These arguments, however, only partially overcame big-state opposition. The United States in particular saw continued strategic value for APLs and refused to support a treaty without exceptions for its specific security interests. This time, however, advocates proceeded without bending to US demands. When the 1996 CCW review conference failed to achieve consensus on a total APL ban, Canada proposed a meeting of pro-ban states outside the UN framework, excluding opposing states and shedding consensus requirements in order to create the strongest possible treaty. Canada also coordinated a group of eight small core states with the ICBL and ICRC.Footnote 27 In contrast, the United States failed to keep negotiations in its preferred venue, the UN Conference on Disarmament, where it could better control meeting outcomes. Russia and the United States attended the extra-UN meetings as observers only, and China stayed away from the process. Organizers refused to grant the United States any concessions, not wanting to water down the final treaty text. Nevertheless, given the initiative’s popularity and the low overall strategic value of APLs, big opposing states seemed disinclined to actively block it. The final product – a full, legally-binding APL ban – quickly gained widespread support, with 122 states signing on in December 1997. As of 2017, it has 162 members. And although states with the most control power continue to refuse to join, many have generally complied with its provisions.Footnote 28
Cluster Munitions: Definitional Improvisation
The Ottawa Treaty initially appeared to have changed the course of arms control history, introducing new actors and diplomatic strategies to achieve humanitarian arms control in the face of big-state opposition. In doing so, advocates believed that the landmine campaign had opened up a more certain way forward on small arms and cluster munition controls. However, the 2008 Cluster Munition Convention was negotiated in the more complex post-September 11 security environment. Advocates faced a need to compromise and alter their strategies in order to deal with opposing states’ reassertion of their control power. A cluster munition is a conventional munition “designed to disperse or release explosive submunitions.”Footnote 29 They have been in use since the Second World War and briefly came to international attention during the US war in Vietnam, once again with no policy response. While the success of the 1997 landmine ban did galvanize and shape the CM campaign, advocates had to contend with the more direct mobilization of control power in opposition to a comprehensive treaty. As a result, the CMC is a less far-reaching treaty in terms of scope and membership than the APL ban.
Cluster munitions were first discussed along with APLs in the 1970s. At this time, CM technology was limited to the United States, Britain, France, and Germany.Footnote 30 Experts at the 1973 ICRC meeting noted CM’s “obvious and uncontrollable tendency toward indiscriminateness.”Footnote 31 At the 1974 meeting, seven states proposed a ban. The initiative was led by Sweden, which had convened its own domestic group of experts in the early 1970s, prompted by public concerns about the conduct of the Vietnam War.Footnote 32 Yet although fewer states were using CMs and there was more awareness of the CM problem, cluster munitions were not included in the CCW. The proposal managed to gain support from only thirteen states by the 1976 meeting, where it lacked the consensus to move forward.Footnote 33 By dropping it, Borrie argues, “pragmatism appears to have prevailed”: proponents decided to back other less ambitious CCW proposals seen as more likely to succeed.Footnote 34 The United States and the United Kingdom especially sought to downplay and deflect questions about CM use and effects.Footnote 35 Thus, more information about their effects did not save CM controls from failure in this period; like landmines, superpower interests got in the way.
After the Cold War, CMs eventually made their way back onto the international agenda, despite their more widespread possession and use. At least thirty-four countries produced cluster munitions, and at least seventy-seven stockpiled them.Footnote 36 But although Human Rights Watch began following CMs during the 1991 Gulf War, the ICBL feared that including them in the landmine campaign might prompt some states to withdraw.Footnote 37 It was not until 1999–2000 that NGOs began to organize more widely around CMs,Footnote 38 propelled both by landmine treaty success and by their widespread and sharply criticized use in Kosovo and Chechnya. Efforts gained further momentum in 2006 after Israel’s use of cluster munitions in its war with Lebanon,Footnote 39 again showcasing CM use as a persistent landmine-like problem. Importantly, the success of the landmine treaty now made additional humanitarian arms control initiatives appear politically possible, set a new reputational standard by which to pressure states to commit, and supplied proponents with proven strategies to generate public attention and governmental support.
Thus, the CM campaign was neither a case of innovation born of the effects of protean power nor of “habit” created by APLs, but rather one of deliberate decision-making built on learning from an important success. The campaign did not invent new strategies, using instead what had worked for landmines and improvising on those strategies when met with control-power opposition. Like landmines, advocates framed CMs as problematic under existing international law, due to imprecise and therefore potentially indiscriminate targeting and to unreliable detonation, which might allow explosives to remain dormant but hazardous for long periods of time. Some small states adopted domestic bans as an example for others,Footnote 40 and together with NGOs framed the problem in ways similar to APLs (including as “de facto landmines”). Also like landmines, small states and NGOs led the creation of the Oslo Process outside the UN in 2007 after attempts to create a comprehensive ban within the CCW stagnated due to opposition from bigger states.Footnote 41
Skeptical states used control power to reassert their opposition in the CM case, however. The United States, Russia, and others actively used CMs in conflict, saw them as useful weapons (a narrative advocates found more difficult to change in this case), and were even more resistant to restrictions on their military capabilities in the post-September 11 world. Rather than a total ban, the United States and other skeptical states advocated for CCW regulations, pointing to possible “technological fixes” for the indiscriminacy problem.Footnote 42 Once again, the CCW presented institutional advantages for these states. First, its decision-making rules allowed them better control over negotiation outcomes. Second, the institution had a much more lenient approach to weapons regulations in general, “wherein even the hypothetical possibility that a certain weapon might be used in a manner appropriate under [international humanitarian law] had been enough to argue against attempts to establish prohibitions.”Footnote 43
Although skeptical states’ control power was again insufficient to keep negotiations in the CCW, it was sufficient to convince negotiators that they needed to temper opposition (or even win support) through compromise with some influential states. Advocates made creative use of definitions in the treaty text to allow for the comprehensive ban they sought with a scope restricted enough to appease some of its opponents. The CMC thus lays out a comprehensive ban for weapons falling within a carefully specified definition of CMs, thereby excluding all other munitions from the ban. This concession left open the possibility of legally developing “smarter” CMs with electronic self-destruct mechanisms and more accurate targeting,Footnote 44 without sacrificing the underlying legal and normative foundations of the ban.
Control power thus played a more prominent role, interacting with the effects of protean power, in the CMs case. Compared with the landmine treaty, support was not as widespread for the 2008 CMC, with its 107 original signatories and 100 state parties as of 2017. On the one hand, control power enabled skeptical states to push advocates to improvise on the Ottawa template and accept a less comprehensive agreement. On the other hand, control power made it possible for skeptical states to accept a compromise solution at all.Footnote 45 By providing the means to develop and integrate technological advances into their military arsenals, skeptical states could accept (and in some cases even sign) the CMC. Similar to APLs, the CMC has also further stigmatized CM-use, including by non-signatories, even as CMs have been recorded most recently in conflicts in Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere.Footnote 46 Yet, as the ATT case will show, without such technological alternatives, agreements may be even more restricted in scope.
The Conventional Arms Trade: Accommodating Control Power
The process of creating the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty gained momentum in 2006, overlapping with CMC negotiations. Yet from the start, advocates had to do even more to accommodate the preferences of states seeking to protect their control power resources. Small and major conventional weapons are a broad category of weapon, including guns, tanks, ships, military aircraft, and many more. States have never entertained a blanket ban on the trade or use of all conventional weapons, and, unlike APLs and CMs, NGOs have largely accepted regulations rather than prohibitions as their policy goal in order to make some kind of agreement possible. The rare multilateral initiatives to regulate the arms trade before the late 1990s came from major powers seeking to control access to clients and strategic regions, but failed to take hold as their political interests clashed.Footnote 47 Like the CMC, “responsible” arms trade initiatives have built on the success of the Ottawa Treaty and the changed expectations for “good” policy it created.Footnote 48 Yet the general public has been less engaged in the ATT process, and major powers have been much more integrated and accommodated. As a result, treaty scope and strength have been more restricted, pointing once again to limits on the effects of protean power in the complex post-9/11 security environment.
During the Cold War, conventional arms transfers were seen as a tool of superpower foreign policy and an economic necessity for European producers. Most states were therefore reluctant to place limits on their arms transfers, a policy tool associated directly with control power. The only activity came under US leadership during the Carter Administration, in response to the 1976 US presidential election in which the American public voiced unusual opposition to what it saw as “out of control” US arms exports to unstable regions.Footnote 49 The Carter Administration established unilateral criteria, including human rights, to restrict US arms export decision-making. It also proposed multilateral Conventional Arms Transfer (CAT) talks with the aim of restricting the volume of arms transfers to specific world regions.
Yet while control power might have enabled the United States to bring conventional arms to the table during the Cold War, it was insufficient to overcome significant internal and external opposition – also backed by considerable control power – to grapple with the issue. European arms producers declined to participate, wanting the superpowers to accept restrictions first. US–Soviet talks were stymied by clashing strategic interests between the two countries, who still wanted to use arms transfers to manage their alliance and client relationships, and by bureaucratic opposition in the United States over policy disagreements. The CAT talks finally fell apart as the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter’s unilateral attempt to link human rights performance to US arms transfers was also widely considered a failure, constantly sacrificed in order to use arms transfers to meet US security interests abroad.
Arms export controls returned to the international agenda after the end of the Cold War in two phases. First, the 1991 Gulf War shone an unexpected spotlight on “irresponsible” arms transfers to Iraq during the 1980s, which generated early – if less well-coordinated – momentum to identify and limit destabilizing arms transfers. The absence of the strategies and coalitions that would grow with the ICBL, however, meant that the first policy phase remained limited. In response to calls for arms trade transparency, the UN adopted a Register of Conventional Weapons in 1991, sponsored by Japan and the European Community. On the one hand, this was a path-breaking response to post-Gulf War public pressure: states had long considered confidentiality to be necessary for a smooth-functioning arms trade and their reputations as reliable arms suppliers. On the other hand, in order to encourage broad participation, transparency measures were voluntary, did not ask for information on price or type of weapon, and were not accompanied by any export control criteria. At first, they did not “even provide a precise definition of what constitutes an arms transfer or when a transfer takes place.”Footnote 50 Broader, more innovative initiatives were stopped in their infancy. Canada suggested involving more exporting states and more importing world regions, but the United States quickly limited the idea to the P5 exports to the Middle East only. Even then, the P5 talks failed to overcome politics and competition between the major powers, leaving arms export regulations seeming as elusive as ever.Footnote 51
The second post-Cold War phase began with the success of the Ottawa Treaty, which generated momentum for dealing with humanitarian arms export controls directly. NGOs highlighted the control of small arms and light weapons (SALW) as the next arms control target after landmines.Footnote 52 They also took advantage of growing arms trade transparency, which yielded more information about states’ export practices. The issue proved much more difficult than landmines, however. Unlike APLs, SALW are a broad category of conventional weapons, a cornerstone of states’ military and police forces, a more profitable market, and impossible to categorically characterize as inherently indiscriminate.Footnote 53 In addition, NGOs were more divided on message and strategy, and public attention was more difficult to attract on the bureaucratic nuances of regulations rather than a clear-cut absolute ban. States were therefore the primary advocates in this case – still in partnership with Control Arms campaign-affiliated NGOs – but less willing to push initiatives as far as pro-control NGOs might have been on their own. Lead states, like the United Kingdom, did unexpectedly expand the initiative from SALWs to include both small and major conventional arms in 2005. But – with the exception of bringing relevant non-state actors (NGOs and occasionally defense industry representatives) into their negotiating delegations, in a sense co-opting them for both political insight and political cover – they also tended to stand by more conventional diplomatic strategies and avoided breaking away from UN negotiation frameworks.
In this case, bigger states most overtly invoked control power to resist policy initiatives and protect their ability to transfer arms in support of their domestic and foreign policy goals. Their less accommodating stance stemmed from two interrelated causes: the complex post-2001 security environment, which exacerbated their perceived need to preserve their arms export flexibility; and the lack of technological alternatives to work around broad export restrictions. The United States was the primary opponent of a legally binding treaty until late 2009. It used its institutional control power and dominant arms market position to squash multilateral controls on licit SALW transfers in 2001 and 2006, hold up formal ATT negotiations until late 2009, and delay finalizing the treaty in 2012. Yet proponents were reluctant to pursue a treaty without support from at least one of the world’s top exporters (the United States or Russia), which they believed would have limited the ATT’s support base, legitimacy, and potential effectiveness. ATT leaders therefore adapted their strategies in response to US opposition, delaying negotiations until US support could be acquired in late 2009. Later, to keep the United States on board, they modified treaty language in response to US preferences for flexibility, excluded provisions on non-state actors (a “red line” issue for the United States), and kept negotiations within UN consensus rules at US insistence.
Thus, ATT negotiations appear much more “traditional” and dominated by control power than its predecessors. Although the ATT owes its existence to changing policy expectations established by the landmine treaty, the process was more state-based and less NGO-driven. Leaders also deliberately held negotiations within the UN framework and left out provisions that might strengthen treaty content at the expense of its membership base and US support especially. As a result, the ATT excludes provisions on transfers to non-state actors, provides significant flexibility for national interpretation of its export criteria, and lacks enforcement mechanisms. Perhaps its most protean power moment was leaders’ decision to move the final treaty vote from the consensus-based negotiation forum into the majoritarian UN General Assembly. Although the United States supported the ATT at the end of negotiations in March 2013, Iran, North Korea, and Syria blocked the consensus needed to open the treaty for signature. Institutional rules favored these weaker states in the context of consensus but were easily overridden in the April 2013 General Assembly vote, 154 to 3 (with 23 abstentions). The ATT came into effect in December 2014 and, in 2017, had 130 signatories (including the United States), with ninety ratifications/accessions.
Conclusions
Post-Cold War arms control has reflected an evolving interaction of control power and the effects of protean power, as state and non-state actors have responded to changing experiences of uncertainty in the international security environment. In the 1990s, small states and NGOs unexpectedly captured and redefined the international arms control agenda to reflect their values and interests, which they had been unable to do in the risk-dominant, control power environment of the Cold War. NGOs initiated the Ottawa Treaty and used innovative diplomatic strategies to generate public and governmental support. The outcome was both intentional in advocates’ careful strategizing to make it possible and surprising in its rapid success. This success, in turn, has shaped subsequent arms control discussions, provided diplomatic strategies, and changed the standards by which “good” arms control policy is judged.
Yet the application of APL advocates’ strategic innovation to later humanitarian arms control initiatives has been met, to varying degrees, by control power resistance. Advocates have had to adjust their strategies and compromise treaty contents in order to reach agreements. As a result, the competitive push and pull between control and protean power has had important consequences for the design and effects of humanitarian arms control agreements. When militarily strong states were able to rely on technological resources to work around CMC restrictions, those restrictions were less of an obstacle for negotiations, and the agreement was substantively stronger. When these states were unable to adapt to proposed ATT restrictions, however, they sought to weaken the agreement with more accommodating language and a further reduced scope. In this regard, the ATT case especially illustrates limits on the effects of protean power as it interacts with control power in complex security environments. Actors without control power may only be able to push so far against those that have it.
Moreover, while states and NGOs have been the primary players in the humanitarian arms control story, it is important to point out that defense companies have also played a significant, if quieter, part. Support from APL producers, for whom the expenses of landmine removal promised more profit than the sales of cheap landmines, helped to remove roadblocks to the Ottawa Treaty. In the ATT case, the defense industry worried first and foremost about its sales. Defense industry representatives therefore sought to have a say in treaty design and were more directly integrated into negotiations. Representatives from some lead states – who already faced national or regional “humanitarian” export criteria – also joined diplomatic delegations to promote similar criteria with defense industries in skeptical states and “level the playing field” for their own exports. While their support did not cause governments to commit to humanitarian arms control, the absence of their opposition made it politically and economically easier for many governments to do so.
What are the implications for pending arms control issues? In 2017, a group of non-nuclear weapons states and NGOs negotiated for a humanitarian ban on nuclear weapons, a popular proposal modeled on the APL and CM agreements. Nuclear weapons states and their allies opposed the treaty, however, and it seems unlikely that past strategies will produce similar effects on an issue they see as core to their national defense, especially absent an obvious technological work-around. In addition, some non-state advocates have begun to campaign to ban lethal autonomous weapons systems, or “killer robots.” A ban would certainly tread new ground: it would be imposed on a weapon not yet in use, based on the presumed problem of assigning legal liability and responsibility for harmful effects they might cause,Footnote 54 rather than on established humanitarian consequences. This analysis suggests that NGO campaigning alone may be insufficient to move a ban forward without also acquiring substantial state support. Discussions have been introduced in the CCW, but states have been unwilling to do more than support a Group of Governmental Experts to study the issue. Many oppose outright a ban. Drones and cyber weapons also raise ethical and legal questions – but are weapons already in use. Norms may emerge in both cases.Footnote 55 Yet again, however, state support for formal prohibitions or regulations has so far appeared minimal. Indeed, the development of these weapons may partly be a response to pressures to regulate warfare more generally, reduce fatalities, and (in theory) improve targeting precision. In all cases, pro-control advocates will have to contend with opposition from big states and negotiate the interaction between control and protean power.
New and old weapons will continue to pose such problems, challenging the boundaries and agility of existing arms control laws and norms, and pitting the desires of some states to maximize their control power against the innovative tactics of those who seek to curb the destructive potential of violence. The outcomes will likely depend on the prevalence of risk and uncertainty in the international security environment and developments in defense technology. In this sense, history has changed more gradually than 1997 might have suggested at the time, as both sides continue to draw on and contribute to the circulation of power in world politics to resist, cope with, and promote change in international arms control policy.
Forests cover approximately 30 percent of the globe. Estimates suggest that deforestation and unsustainable use of forests are responsible for between 15 percent and 20 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions.Footnote 1 And yet, until recently, deforestation has played a relatively small role in the international rules to govern climate change. From the negotiations on the Framework Convention on Climate Change in the late 1980s and early 1990s, through the development of the carbon markets of Kyoto, only a tiny fraction of intergovernmental efforts has focused on maintaining or enhancing the world’s forests. Addressing deforestation seriously entered the climate agenda about eight years ago – despite the fact that carbon “sinks” are a critical component in managing climate change.
Why did this happen? How was the issue of carbon sinks transformed from a footnote in the climate regime to the lead story? This transformation was, in part, the result of the emergence of protean power stemming from the actions of environmental NGOs. Using past experience in forestry and their political acuity, NGOs responded to political defeat in their advocacy efforts with improvisation. In so doing, they helped to bring the issue of sinks to the fore. The end result was the eventual incorporation of protean power within a more traditional frame of control power. This “nested” relationship between the two forms of power shows that this is a limited case of protean power, where complex layers are only evident through an historical analysis.
This chapter demonstrates that NGOs’ role in sinks policy is a limited case of protean power, which arose because their material endowments – a virtual monopoly on expertise about the measurement of carbon sinks early in the policy process – eventually coincided with a political window of opportunity, which they recognized and acted upon.
NGOs were the first to develop methods to measure carbon sequestered in carbon sinks, such as forests and grasslands. Since measurement is a prerequisite for market transactions, these NGOs possessed a body of knowledge that intergovernmental bodies did not. When carbon sinks were virtually eliminated from the global carbon market created by the Kyoto Protocol, NGOs became regulators in their own right, creating a separate “voluntary” market for carbon offsets, which included carbon sinks. (Since NGOs are serving as private regulators, I use the two terms interchangeably throughout the chapter.)
The surprise in the carbon sinks story is that the voluntary market did not exist only in parallel to the Kyoto markets. The twists and turns in the intergovernmental climate negotiations, coupled with NGO improvisation resulted in protean power: ultimately, environmental NGOs moved beyond the realm of partnering with corporations to shaping interstate bargaining as it evolved. Here, protean power emerged as an effect of NGOs’ response to a fluid political situation.
Moreover, and consistent with protean power, these outcomes could not have been anticipated at the outset. NGOs were engaged in a constant process of evolution and adaptation, as a way of maintaining their strategic relevance through the ebbs and flows of the intergovernmental process. Yet, in the end, the practice of protean power was firmly nested within control power. A hierarchy was established, in which practices developed by NGOs were translated and then appropriated into the intergovernmental process. In this sense, the sinks case is an outlier among other cases in the volume as an example of relatively limited protean power.
The role of uncertainty in this case is also somewhat of an outlier. Climate change is perhaps the most uncertain of all issues discussed in this volume. The radical uncertainty surrounding increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is profound, including the threat of abrupt changes in the climate and accelerating positive feedbacks. Even if scientists could predict temperature changes accurately, there would still be uncertainty about the consequences of these changes. Wagner and Weitzmann illustrate this contrast quite clearly, noting that “as recently as 2007, consensus science predicted an Arctic free of summer sea ice by the latter half of the century. Today, we are on track to have this occur in closer to ten than fifty years, even though our temperature estimates have not changed.”Footnote 2
Yet the policy responses to climate change do not reflect the reality of this radical uncertainty. Indeed, the intergovernmental process appears to be almost willfully blind to it. In general, traditional approaches to policymaking (i.e., control power) do not mix well with radical uncertainty. As Sabel and Victor note, deep uncertainty about the “feasibility of achieving policy outcomes, such as lower emissions, at acceptable costs” makes policymaking under conditions of radical uncertainty very challenging.Footnote 3 A common response, then, is to focus on what is knowable, assuming a world of risk, rather than one of unknown unknowns. In “risk-based models of power-as-control [actors] assume that they are playing the odds” (Chapter 1, p. 12). Such assumptions, though perhaps inapt, make decision-making easier.
Ironically, this is precisely what happened in the case of climate policy – where radical uncertainty is profound and pervasive, though conspicuously absent from the policymaking process. Most discussions surrounding carbon sinks were limited to operational uncertainty, over which actors can attempt to assert control. Though this is not the usual condition that facilitates protean power; in the instance of carbon sinks, private regulators were able to leverage this operational uncertainty by developing policy tools to create and successfully commodify carbon sinks. This initial operational uncertainty about how to do carbon sink projects enabled the emergence of protean power. This is distinct, however, from power that might emerge from the radical uncertainty surrounding the broader effects of climate change. Unable to access the underlying context of radical uncertainty, protean power did not generate more uncertainty, as is described by Bridgen and Andreas in the migration case (Chapter 5). Innovation quickly abated, and was circumscribed – and ultimately nested within the larger ambit of control power.
The relatively restricted role of protean power is both a story of the success of control power as well as one of limiting uncertainty to a less radical form, though in practice it is difficult to disentangle the two. Either way, the effects of protean power are fairly circumscribed. The incorporation of private rules on carbon sinks into public regulations is small. Thus, it fails to catalyze the generative effects that Seybert and Katzenstein describe (Chapter 1, pp. 10–11). Only a small number of public policies on carbon offsets draw on private rules, and, even then, they do so largely for voluntary, rather than compliance-based programs.Footnote 4 In this case, protean power results from improvisation, but is then promptly subsumed into traditional hierarchical models of authority. Thus, in the end, protean power as an effect of private actors’ efforts is indistinguishable from the status quo of control power. Without looking at the provenance of individual rules, it is impossible to detect the fingerprints of improvisation and early innovation.
Carbon Sinks: An Early History
Carbon sinks sequester carbon dioxide in living matter, such as forests, grasslands, and other terrestrial ecosystems. Given that land-use conversion and deforestation comprise such a large fraction of global emissions, slowing this process through the preservation of carbon sinks is a potentially powerful tool for combatting climate change.
Using carbon sinks as a policy tool is not a new idea. As early as the 1980s, a number of international environmental NGOs created “debt-for-nature swaps.” The precursor to the commodification of carbon was conservation projects, which paid developing country governments to keep trees in the ground. NGOs raised money to purchase the debt of a developing country. In exchange for the cancellation of debt, the developing country agreed to enact conservation measures, usually in the form of protecting large swathes of forests.
The first debt-for-nature swap agreement was concluded in 1987 between Conservation International (CI) and the government of Bolivia. CI purchased US$650,000 of Bolivian debt (for US$100,000) and in exchange, Bolivia enhanced legal protections of the Beni Biosphere Reserve, and created surrounding protected areas. It also provided local funds to finance the activities therein.Footnote 5 By the early 1990s, these types of transactions had become a significant phenomenon; twenty-three debt-for-nature swaps were active in 1992 in fourteen countries, ranging from South America to Africa.Footnote 6 All were initiated by environmental NGOs. These efforts were focused more on the preservation of biological diversity than on the climate benefits of sequestering carbon; indeed, climate change had barely appeared on the international agenda at that time.
In addition to debt-for-nature swaps with governments, a number of international NGOs cooperated with large corporations to help them offset their carbon emissions. Applied Energy Services worked with the World Resources Institute, CARE, the Nature Conservancy, and Oxfam to plant trees, fund conservation zones, and promote proper land titling to indigenous peoples to preserve tropical rainforests.Footnote 7 The Nature Conservancy also created one of the longest-running carbon offset projects in concert with a Bolivian NGO and three energy corporations, the Noel Kempff project.Footnote 8 The project has been operating continuously since 1997, and is expected to avoid emissions of 7–10 million metric tons of carbon over thirty years.Footnote 9 It has since been re-born as a pilot project under the UN REDD program. REDD is shorthand for “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and is a fancy way of saying “keeping trees, grasslands, and other carbon dioxide-absorbing plants in the ground.” UN REDD is one of the many REDD-related programs, and serves as an umbrella organization for the large swathe of international organizations working on REDD.
These activities were the beginnings of protean power that would unexpectedly emerge in later phases of the climate regime. Through the creation of debt-for-nature swaps and other offset projects, environmental NGOs developed both expertise and know-how not present among other actors; this laid the foundation for their future role as private regulators.
As we will see, in later phases of the climate regime, states became interested in reviving carbon sinks as a policy, but lacked the key knowledge to implement it. The first phase of carbon sinks history demonstrates one key characteristic of protean power of this case: actors’ knowledge is not homogeneous. Information available to NGOs was not available to others; their early experience in establishing tools for measurement and creating and commodifying carbon sinks provided them with key knowledge that would be the source of protean power to them in future phases of the climate regime.
Negotiating the Kyoto Protocol: Leveraging Expertise
Environmental NGOs’ early experiences with carbon sinks quickly began to pay dividends. In the negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they were able to parlay the expertise they had cultivated into a decisive force in the intergovernmental negotiations. This force was not so much protean power – since radical uncertainty about the effects of climate change was far removed from the policy debates – but at the nexus between protean and control power. The fluidity of the negotiations allowed NGOs to exercise considerable influence over the discussions around sinks, and, eventually, to ensure that sinks were effectively excluded from the market mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol.
In the intergovernmental arena, the issue of carbon sinks first surfaced in the drafting of the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, but at that point they were discussed only in the most cursory fashion. The real debate about sinks did not begin until the negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol, and, specifically, in the design of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM is one of three market mechanisms created by the Protocol.Footnote 10 It allows developed countries to meet their reduction targets by paying for emissions reductions in the developing world. However, when it was agreed to in 1997, the CDM was little more than an idea. The so-called “Kyoto surprise” was agreed to at the last minute, without any details about how it would actually function.Footnote 11 As a result, the role of sinks in the CDM was not discussed until after Kyoto was signed, with the bulk of the debate occurring between 1997 and 2001.Footnote 12
The last minute insertion of the CDM was critical in many respects. First, it made the whole agreement possible; it provided a much needed “escape hatch” in the event that countries were unable to meet their reduction commitments domestically. Second, it created a great deal of policy uncertainty. Though states agreed to the basic principles of the CDM, major decisions about how it would actually function were postponed until later. Third, despite postponing key design issues, states did agree to incentivize an early start to the CDM. Article 12, paragraph 10 of the Kyoto Protocol states, “Certified emission reductions obtained during the period from the year 2000 up to the beginning of the first commitment period can be used to assist in achieving compliance in the first commitment period.” This language indicates that early actions could be counted under the CDM, even before the Kyoto Protocol entered into force, and even before states figured out what “counting” really meant.
Thus, even before entry into force, the creation of the CDM set new processes in motion. Those who sought recognition for early action would need ways to demonstrate that action. Thus, shortly after the signature of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the process to draft rules began.
The rule-making period was extremely contentious, largely because of an acrimonious debate about the appropriate role of sinks in the CDM. States quickly divided on the issue. The negotiating bloc representing the largest group of developed country emitters strongly supported the use of sinks as a way for developed countries to meet their reduction targets.Footnote 13 The G77 and China, the largest negotiating bloc of developing countries, objected to their use on the grounds that the Protocol should not include any joint measures, but rather should focus solely on developed country action.Footnote 14 Indeed, in its proposed negotiating text, it removed all references to sinks.Footnote 15
In addition, most civil society groups participating in the negotiations were also opposed to the inclusion of sinks in the CDM on scientific, moral, and efficacy grounds. Under the auspices of the transnational advocacy network, the Climate Action Network (CAN), they initially pushed for safeguards and other policies that would ensure that sinks projects would not threaten biodiversity or indigenous peoples, and that projects actually produced emissions reductions. Once it became clear that such rules would not be included, they lobbied against the inclusion of sinks as an allowable type of offset project in the CDM. CAN argued that sinks would be hard to measure, would absolve developed countries of obligations to reduce emissions domestically, and, in the end, might not actually reduce overall emissions.Footnote 16
From a moral perspective, they argued that sinks would effectively serve as a loophole, allowing developed countries to avoid strong emissions reductions policies at home. (Since technically, there is no limit to the supply of offsets, prices would not necessarily rise in response to increasing demand.) Indeed, domestic inaction was a distinct possibility, depending on the amount of reductions allowed via sinks and other types of offset. The efficacy arguments suggested that the challenges of calculating the level of emissions reductions against a hypothetical baseline (how much carbon would be emitted in the absence of the project?) would mean little in the way of actual reductions.Footnote 17 One prominent member of CAN, speaking on behalf of his organization, argued that the inclusion of sinks combined might even permit an increase in emissions.Footnote 18
These different views were further exacerbated by a relative lack of scientific consensus on the matter. In 1998, as states began to consider the design of the Kyoto Protocol, and its market mechanisms, the Subsidiary Body on Scientific and Technical Advice (SBSTA) asked the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to prepare a special report on land-use change and forestry (i.e., sinks) to help inform the negotiations. Many hoped that clear definitions of basic concepts such as forests, afforestation, reforestation, and deforestation would help states to build political consensus.
However, when the report was released in 2000, it did little to advance the collective discussion on sinks. One scholar notes that the IPCC special report “had not brought an end to the epistemic chaos generated by the sink concept.”Footnote 19 The lack of scientific consensus contributed to an unanticipated chain of events, and, as we will see below, this provided the opportunity for protean power to emerge. In the absence of epistemic consensus, states staked out different approaches to the measurement of sinks, using approaches consistent with their political preferences.Footnote 20 This hodge-podge approach continued, and provided the space for the increasingly vociferous objections of environmental NGOs. Their objections almost derailed the negotiations.Footnote 21
The result of this controversy is that sinks play a very limited role in the Kyoto Protocol. Although they are permitted in the CDM, sinks are limited to afforestation and reforestation activities – or more simply, “the establishment of trees on non-treed land.”Footnote 22 This meant that “avoided deforestation” – that is, keeping trees in the ground – was not permissible under the rules. Sinks projects were also limited temporally to the first commitment period of Kyoto, and quantitatively to 1 percent of 1990 emissions levels times five.Footnote 23 These restrictions are evident in the data on the CDM: less than 1 percent of registered CDM projects fall under the category of afforestation and reforestation.Footnote 24
A conventional reading of this debate is one of failed (or only semi-successful) advocacy by NGOs – a classic case of control power. But a more accurate interpretation, seen through the longer timeline, is as an incomplete case of protean power. Environmental NGOs had worked on sinks initiatives long before the arcane debates surrounding the CDM arose. As a result, they had both knowledge and expertise that others involved in the rule-making process did not. Even the IPCC – ostensibly the designated expert – did not make authoritative claims to knowledge that were expected of it. Thus, the common knowledge assumption operating in conceptualizations of control power did not hold. In one view, environmental NGOs had a relative monopoly on expertise around sinks: they were among the few who had actually done the work on these types of offset projects.
Yet, as Seybert and Katzenstein note, protean power generally operates under conditions of radical uncertainty; this scope condition is more complex in the sinks case. Though clearly, there is radical uncertainty surrounding the effects of climate change, the intergovernmental negotiations took place within a simpler context of calculable political risk. Thus, there is room for protean power, even in cases of operational uncertainty. As they note, protean power is generated in specific moments (Chapter 1, p. 10). The pitched political battle over sinks in the CDM created one of those moments.
The epistemic advantages enjoyed by environmental NGOs can therefore be seen as conferring capabilities in probabilistic situations (intergovernmental negotiations) nested within a more uncertain context (the tangible effects of climate change on the planet). Risks nested within a larger context of radical uncertainty did not enable protean power: private regulators did not use agility to improvise or adapt to uncertainty until after their efforts at sinks advocacy had failed (see next section below). However, they were able to refuse the complete exercise of control power (Chapter 2, Figure 2.1). The result was the near-exclusion of sinks from the rules governing the CDM.
Parallel Relations: The Rise of the Voluntary Market
The bulk of the debate about sinks was concluded in 2000 in Marrakesh, Morocco.Footnote 25 In addition to settling on the rules for the CDM, states also decided that the new market could become operational, even though the Kyoto Protocol had yet to enter into force. The logic to the early start was not only to get the CDM market off the ground, but also to incentivize early reductions, which could eventually be counted toward compliance requirements once Kyoto was legally binding.
The effective exclusion of sinks projects from the CDM, coupled with its early operation, spurred a new phase in the development of sinks in policy and practice. As the Kyoto markets got underway, NGOs involved in early sinks projects and in the debates over CDM design turned to a new strategy: creating their own rules to govern and sell forest carbon.
This “voluntary” market existed alongside the compliance market of the Kyoto Protocol, and grew quickly in the early 2000s. The voluntary market targeted actors – mostly firms – that chose to offset their emissions, even though they were not (or not yet) legally bound to do so. Most participants were (and remain) corporate actors gesturing toward their “greenness” through the purchase of offsets in the voluntary market. Some are NGOs, and a small number are individuals.Footnote 26
The voluntary market grew quickly. Between 2000 and 2014, almost forty private offset standards were created, many focused on sinks.Footnote 27 The value of the voluntary market, though much smaller than the CDM market, also exploded in the early 2000s, in the limbo years before Kyoto took effect. By 2008, the voluntary market had transacted more than fifteen times more carbon credits than the CDM.Footnote 28 Many of the private standards that govern offsets in the voluntary market aim to achieve goals beyond the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. For example, some promote sustainable livelihoods, while others seek to preserve biodiversity. In short, many of these private regulators have chosen a “niche” not covered by the CDM.Footnote 29
Moreover, despite a very limited role in the CDM, sinks comprise a major part of the voluntary market for carbon offsets. In 2013, the voluntary market transacted US$140 million in forest carbon credits (i.e., sinks). By contrast, the equivalent figure for the CDM market was just US$0.2 million.Footnote 30
Not only does the voluntary market deploy sinks projects widely, they are considered part of best practice. The International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance was created in 2008 “to promote best practices in the [voluntary carbon] market.”Footnote 31 Since then, it has created a code of good practice for carbon management, which includes standards on carbon offsets. The code endorses five private offset standards, all of which include sinks. In other words, as private regulators seek to ensure quality and bring uniformity to their rules and standards, they have chosen to include sinks as part of this definition.
Early experiences with debt-for-nature swaps and corporate conservation efforts generated expertise among these NGOs, which they then parlayed into private authority – where non-state actors make rules and set standards that other actors in world politics adopt.Footnote 32 Their monopoly on expertise provided claims to legitimate authority, and hands-on experience when others had none. These demonstrable successes were critical in the rise of protean power: they were able to overcome the operational uncertainty surrounding sinks – which, as we will see, was important in future phases of policymaking.
Consistent with protean power, improvisation is evident in the rise of the voluntary market. The political losses in the CDM negotiations prompted a new tack by environmental NGOs. Affirmation bred improvisation. Previous failures at control demonstrated that a new tack was needed, one in which the probability or type of success could not necessarily be calculated ex ante. NGOs transformed themselves from advocates to regulators.
From Green to REDD: Translating Private Practice to Public Rules
As the voluntary market gathered steam, carbon sinks re-entered the intergovernmental climate negotiations – this time in the form of “REDD”: reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. This third phase of sinks policy, marked by the rise of REDD, demonstrates yet another shift in the relationship between protean and control power.
In the third phase, protean and control power interact in two ways: through translation and appropriation. As Seybert and Katzenstein note, translation occurs when power is exercised across heterogeneous groups, often through non-central actors. Rather than delegating power from one group to another (an example of control power), translation occurs when “agents observe would-be commands, following their own specific reasons as they translate, or are enrolled into, the projects of those who wield control power” (Chapter 2, p. 32). Private actors in the voluntary market used REDD as a mechanism to translate their preferences and experience into the evolving practice of sinks policy, as elaborated by states. Conversely, states appropriated the work done in the voluntary market as part of the broader REDD initiative. In this way, protean power was circumscribed within a broader structure, dominated by control power.
Translation
As the third phase of sinks policy demonstrates, private actors’ limited protean power took yet another new form when the political context around sinks changed. States’ renewed interest in sinks created a window of opportunity for private actors, who were now serving as regulators of the voluntary carbon offset market. They were able to leverage their long-standing experience and know-how; as such, translation gave rise to protean power.
In 2005, Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea (PNG) – two heavily forested countries – proposed that states consider additional ways to reduce emissions by addressing one of its largest sources: deforestation.Footnote 33 They founded and were soon backed by a larger “Coalition for Rainforest Nations,” which advocated for new policies to address avoided deforestation and forest degradation – the very activities that were excluded from the CDM.Footnote 34 These categories of activities were excluded at the outset for fear that they would create perverse incentives for developing countries to threaten to cut down forests in order to receive funding for their “protection.”
In the proposal, Costa Rica and PNG insisted that “their emphasis is on carbon emissions, not ‘sinks.’”Footnote 35 Yet REDD is clearly a sink by another name: what was once avoided deforestation was reborn with a new name and lots of political support.Footnote 36
REDD was a clear call for experimentation – a way to reduce states’ uncertainty about how to “do” sinks policy. Local uncertainty was a factor in REDD’s creation: states had only limited knowledge about sinks; this would have to be corrected if REDD were to be adopted as climate policy. The Costa Rica and PNG proposal was an incremental and non-binding way to correct this “operational” uncertainty.
Thus, in 2007, following the lead of Costa Rica and PNG, states endorsed a multifaceted approach, encouraging parties “to explore a range of actions … including demonstration activities” to preserve carbon sinks.Footnote 37 The decision also provides guidelines on the methods and approaches to use. However, the breadth and flexibility of the guidelines indicate that they are essentially a carte blanche to all those interested to go forth and experiment.
A number of international organizations have organized REDD programs – viewing this as a way to participate in climate policy, and potentially garner more resources.Footnote 38 The most prominent is UN REDD, which was launched in 2008 to run demonstration projects to ascertain how REDD could be carried out in practice. It is a collaboration of the Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Development Programme, and the UN Environment Programme. There are now national programs in sixteen countries, funded by approximately $US120 million in contributions by Denmark, Japan, Norway, and Spain.Footnote 39 There are a variety of other efforts by international organizations, including the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (run by the World Bank); the Forest Investment Program (run jointly by multilateral development banks); and the International Climate and Forest Initiative (funded by Norway). The Global Environment Facility also funds projects on sustainable forest management and REDD. The Coalition for Rainforest Nations, the original proponents of REDD, also have a host of activities to promote its implementation at the national level.
The intergovernmental call and international organizations’ response can be viewed as a classic example of control power. States took a decision, setting an agenda for action, and empowering agents with the appropriate capabilities and resources to respond. The flexibility in agents’ choice of response should not be conflated with protean power, since the structures clearly indicate and circumscribe the desired outcomes. Direct action leads to a set of anticipated, though not previously specified outcomes: control power in practice.
By contrast, the involvement of environmental NGOs and other private actors in REDD can be viewed as an act of translation and an effect of protean power. The voluntary market, somewhat unexpectedly, became an important site for implementing REDD. Private actors were able to use their existing knowledge and activities through unanticipated channels – yet these were in the service of the exercise of control power.
Following the Costa Rica/PNG call for experimentation, there was a precipitous increase in the amount of forest carbon traded on the voluntary market. In 2009, the think-tank EcoSystem Marketplace noted that despite measuring transactions since before 2002, two-thirds of all market value for forestry credits occurred between 2007 and mid-2009.Footnote 40 This significant uptick clearly coincides with the emergence of REDD on the intergovernmental agenda. Moreover, their research shows that in 2009, 96 percent of all carbon sink projects came from the voluntary market.Footnote 41 What was once a separate market, created largely in response to the discontent with control power, now became the primary locus for sinks activities. By contrast, and as noted earlier, sinks projects were nearly non-existent in the CDM: fewer than 1 percent of all CDM projects were sinks projects.
Indeed, a more careful look at the voluntary market demonstrates how private regulators were able to translate their existing activities into REDD activities. For instance, despite the fact that REDD was initially a state proposal, to be incorporated into the intergovernmental climate regime, a private regulator, the Verified Carbon Standard, was the first entity to transact REDD credits.Footnote 42 In addition, some of the earliest conservation projects have been converted by private actors into REDD projects under the intergovernmental regime. For example, the previously mentioned Noel Kempff conservation project was initiated by environmental NGOs in 1997; it has since been transformed into a REDD project under the auspices of the intergovernmental regime.
In addition, two privately created carbon standards, the Verified Carbon Standard and the Climate, Community and Biodiversity AllianceFootnote 43 (CCBA) created rules governing REDD, specifically for the purpose of being integrated into domestic regulatory regimes. The CCBA standard, called REDD+SES, is specifically designed to be used by governments at multiple scales: “to support the development and implementation of effective social and environmental safeguards for government-led strategies and action plans for REDD+.”Footnote 44 Five nations – Ecuador, Nepal, Tanzania, Brazil, and Indonesia – are currently implementing the standard. All but Indonesia have government representatives participating in the standards committee, which oversees standards development and implementation.
The Verified Carbon Standard is also targeting governments as end users of its standards. It has created what is referred to as a “nested REDD” standard, which allows bottom-up REDD projects to nest within existing regulatory frameworks. This name is appropriate, given that it can also be construed as a manifestation of the nesting of protean power within the broader ambit of control power. According to the program’s website, it “establishes a clear pathway for existing and new subnational jurisdictional activities and projects to be integrated (or ‘nested’) within broader (higher-level) jurisdictional REDD+ programs.”Footnote 45 Like the REDD+SES standard, it is being piloted in multiple nations. Its advisory council includes representatives from states as well as NGOs.
In sum, the renewed interest in sinks, now dubbed REDD, allowed for a happy coalescence between control and protean power. The voluntary market became a legitimate place where a once-ostracized policy could be successfully implemented. This allowed private actors to engage in translation – bringing their “outsider” efforts within the ambit of control power.
Appropriation
From the perspective of states, now demanding the incorporation of sinks into intergovernmental policy, the intersection of control and protean power can be viewed as an act of appropriation. By the time the REDD proposal emerged, carbon sinks projects were now a long-standing policy, vetted by many, and increasingly bought and sold on the voluntary market. With less operational uncertainty surrounding them, they could be safely brought into the ambit of control power.
The reversal is striking. The Costa Rica/PNG proposal did not spark the same acrimonious objections that surrounded the CDM negotiations. In fact, the opposite was true: previously opposed actors embraced REDD. The EU had opposed all manner of flexibility mechanisms, including sinks in the CDM. By contrast, in July 2008, the EU tabled a proposal to promote REDD activities, which emphatically endorsed the potential of sinks to combat climate change: “We shall not, in the EU’s view, succeed in limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius without efforts in all sectors. This includes action to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.”Footnote 46
China also did an about-face. As part of the G77, it had earlier tabled a proposal that systematically deleted all references to sinks. Now, China called for “innovative incentives … for emission reductions from avoided deforestation, conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries.”Footnote 47
Finally, the CAN followed states’ lead. It had lobbied extensively to exclude sinks, and particularly avoided deforestation from the CDM, but it also changed its views. In 2006, it tabled a position paper in which it “strongly welcomes the initiative to discuss reducing emissions from deforestation as proposed by PNG and Costa Rica and discussed at COP-11 in Montreal.”Footnote 48 Shortly thereafter a representative of Greenpeace addressed the plenary on behalf of CAN, noting that a discussion about deforestation was “long overdue.”Footnote 49
Conclusion: The Productive Intersection of Protean and Control Power
By 2006, the acrimony and contention surrounding sinks had all but disappeared. While a full explanation of this shift is beyond the scope of this chapter, the improvisation of private actors, in their creation of the voluntary market was at the very least a contribution to this renewed enthusiasm for sinks in a number of different ways. The early entry of private actors in the world of carbon sinks led to several unanticipated, and arguably unintentional, outcomes.
First, their expertise led to strong views about what was and was not desirable in the realm of forest carbon. In turn, this led to the mobilization of advocacy efforts, and successful refusal: in part due to their advocacy efforts, private actors were able to keep most sinks projects out of the CDM. As Seybert and Katzenstein point out (Chapter 1, Figure 1.1), their successful refusal was a preliminary step – and likely a necessary condition – for the innovation that later produced protean power.
Second, with the knowledge developed through early “green” conservation projects, private actors seized upon the exclusion of sinks in the CDM as an opportunity. They reoriented their efforts, transforming themselves from advocates to regulators. This shift cemented their protean power, albeit in a limited fashion. The voluntary market became the locus for sinks projects, rendering the intergovernmental markets (i.e., control power), all but irrelevant. Instead of further fights over what the regulatory framework for sinks would look like, would-be consumers simply took their preferences to the voluntary market. Since the emissions reductions required by Kyoto were relatively modest, sinks did not have to be part of the bargain. An easier solution, recognized by environmental NGOs, was to create a market for willing participants where they would not be bogged down by political constraints.
In the first two phases of sinks policy, the effects of NGO improvisation were certainly limited. The voluntary market was (and remains) a fraction of the size of carbon markets created to comply with domestic and international climate regulations. The voluntary market, while an important realm for policy experimentation, was politically at the margins of the climate debate. Until it wasn’t.
The gridlock in the negotiations led states to look for new policy areas upon which they could begin to build consensus and action. Sinks, previously abandoned as too politically contentious and too difficult to measure, were resurrected. The new emphasis on finding common ground, coupled with an understanding of the limits that uncertainty imposed, created yet another shift in sinks policy – and an opportunity for a largely compatible confluence of protean and control power.
This confluence is consistent with experimentalist accounts of governance, which identify uncertainty as an important driver of successful cooperation. Sabel and Victor describe an “experimentalist governance” approach to climate policy: “Experimentalist governance emphasizes that regulator and regulated, alike, rarely know what is feasible when they begin to tackle a problem under uncertainty; it prizes a diversity of efforts rather than monopoly. It identifies and continuously improves upon solutions that work.”Footnote 50
This relatively easy arrangement can be attributed to the fact that protean power was translated and nested within the overarching framework of control power. Environmental NGOs and others in the voluntary market translated their goals into those that were compatible with the larger objectives of REDD. Ayoub (Chapter 4) makes a similar point about translation in the context of LGBT rights in Europe. Despite the universality of human rights, advocates had to engage in the translation of universal norms to “local” practice. This local tailoring of rights-based claims allowed LGBT advocates in Poland to overcome homophobic claims that sexual rights were incongruent with national identity.
The nesting of protean power within control power met the political aspirations of all the actors involved, without any serious challenges to the status quo. As a result, there was minimal pushback. Nesting resulted in the appropriation of private rules by states. In a way, appropriation can be viewed as the desired pinnacle of protean power in the case of sinks: private rules are legitimated through their incorporation into public rules. Protean power becomes invisible, taking on the mantle of traditional hierarchical structures.
By contrast, Erickson’s (Chapter 11) case on arms control shows how protean power directly challenged states’ freedom to defend themselves in the manner of their choosing. As a result, powerful states developed technological work-arounds to arms restrictions wherever possible, and, absent the ability to dodge new rules, they challenged them directly. In the sinks case, such challenges were rendered moot through processes of appropriation.
In cases of limited uncertainty, such as this one, nesting is perhaps the most desirable outcome for private regulators. Radical uncertainty is a scope condition for protean power, but it was simply too far removed from the political discussion to have any generative effects. The radical uncertainty surrounding the effects of climate change is a separate consideration from the nuts and bolts of carbon markets. Thus, private regulators – those exercising some degree of protean power – did the best they could, given the constraints they faced.
This is not to say that protean power is absent from the story of sinks. Two decades of experience with carbon sinks produced a surprising, and initially unknowable, outcome – the nesting of protean power within a larger framework of control power. The de facto uncertainty of previous phases of sinks policy helped environmental NGOs to develop the expertise, and eventually the power, to create and implement rules governing carbon sinks. As Seybert and Katzenstein note, the unforeseen outcomes of previous activities are emblematic of protean power: “Under conditions of uncertainty it is not necessarily strategic actions but their emerging byproducts that create the most consequential effects” (Chapter 1, p. 16). Ex post, as observers we can see that NGOs’ loss on their campaign against sinks was a decisive moment in the production of protean power. It precipitated their shift from advocates to regulators and further embedded their operational expertise.
Moreover, there were some unanticipated outcomes along the way. Despite the expansive set of rules created by the Kyoto Protocol – easily conceptualized as control power – sinks policy never operated within that domain. Indeed, the voluntary market continues to be an important player for sinks projects. And some of the private actors involved in it have become increasingly involved in rule-making at the national and subnational levels. The interrelationships established between public and private, protean and control power will not be easily undone.
This limited case of protean power can be read as a revised recipe for successful advocacy in a world of control power. Though protean power is by definition unpredictable, important patterns emerge. First, advocates often seek to shift the framing of issues so that they are more amenable to their goals. In this case, reframing worked in the other way. States set the frame (choosing to revive sinks policy through REDD), and private regulators sought to populate that frame with a specific meaning (or in this case, set of practices) – their existing forestry projects.Footnote 51 Second, as is often highlighted in the social movements literature, environmental NGOs moved between “inside” and “outside” the halls of policymaking. This movement (and, perhaps, the blurring of who was where and when) allowed protean power to emerge even within established channels of control power.
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