Empty Institutions in Global Environmental PoliticsR A D O S L AV S . D I M I T R O V
Western University
https://politicalscience.uwo.ca/people/faculty/full-time_faculty/Empty%20Institutions%20-%20ISR%20article.pdfintro ........
On December 18, 2009, in a live broadcast from Denmark, United States Presi-
dent Barak Obama and other heads of state announced to the world that a United
Nations (UN) conference on climate change was a historic success. The main evi-
dence for their claim was the newly minted “Copenhagen Accord.” In reality, this
draft agreement was a nonbinding political declaration of two-and-a-half pages that
involved no policy obligations for any country. The accord was part of a premedi-
tated attempt to mask the failure of global climate negotiations over the previous
two years.
One month before the conference and behind closed doors, key country
delegations had made the collective decision to abandon the ambition for a climate
change treaty and establish instead a vacuous nonbinding agreement that would
mislead the public into believing that the summit was productive. This stratagem
to greenwash the conference was planned in advance and enjoyed broad political
support by government delegations from many countries 2 Empty Institutions
Through participatory research, the study presented here documents efforts by
governments to create empty institutions that are deliberately designed to not de-
liver substantive policy. As a result, some multilateral agreements and permanent
organizations are ostensibly stripped of capacity for policy development or imple-
mentation. The mandate of the United Nations Forum on Forests effectively pro-
hibits it from formulating, implementing, or funding policy at either national or in-
ternational levels. The Commission on Sustainable Development existed for twenty
years as a permanent body without policy powers. Their policy impotence is a result
of neither faulty design nor inefficient implementation.
The vacuity of such bodies
was a conscious choice by the governments who created them: the formal mandates
were carefully designed to preclude the institutions from producing policy output.Empty institutions are defined as social arrangements that consist of relatively stable rules
and procedures that exclude regulatory policymaking or policy implementation.1 They in-
clude explicit and implicit rules and procedures, may or may not involve a perma-
nent bureaucratic apparatus, and entail an institutionalized process that includes
budgets for regular (international) meetings and domestic preparation to partici-
pate in them. The focus of this project is on no-policy agreements and organiza-
tions negotiated by state governments at the international level, without prejudice
to other types of institutional arrangements by state and nonstate actors that also
deserve academic investigation.
The existence of such entities creates a theoretical puzzle: why do governments
create empty institutions that could not deliver instead of no institutions at all? State
efforts to negotiate international policy agreements do not always succeed but we
would expect failure at regime formation to result in the absence of institutions.
Today there are no policy agreements on competition policy, coral reefs degrada-
tion, or the control of tactical nuclear weapons (Dimitrov et al. 2007); UN agencies
do not regulate biofuels production (Bastos Lima and Gupta 2013); and govern-
ments have discussed Arctic haze but never attempted to negotiate formal solutions
(Wilkening 2011). The failure of international negotiations on prominent prob-
lems is an interesting topic that is the subject of a small literature on nonregimes.
But why empty institutions instead of no institutions?
