Abstract
The BASIC countries (Brazil, China, India, South Africa) have played a major role in recent climate negotiations. We argue that a focus on identities—both their individual national identities as emerging powers and their joint identity as the BASIC coalition of emerging powers—is useful for understanding the coalition’s negotiation stances and the larger negotiation dynamics between 2009 and 2011. BASIC countries maintain a hard defining line between themselves and developed states in terms of their climate obligations but accept some differentiation between themselves and other developing countries, thus adding a destabilizing third category of countries to the climate negotiations.
International negotiations about climate change have raised fundamental questions about how to apportion the responsibility for addressing the problem among states. From the beginning, global agreements have drawn a sharp distinction between the appropriate roles of already-developed and developing states for addressing climate change. Almost immediately, however, some developed states challenged that distinction, arguing that it wrongly exempted wealthier and faster-growing developing states from taking on climate obligations. After more than a decade of pressure, a quartet of those developing states—Brazil, China, India, and South Africa—decided to join forces as the BASIC coalition, negotiating together in climate meetings beginning with the Copenhagen conference of 2009.
This paper analyzes the relevance of this new actor—the BASIC group—in the climate negotiations using an identity lens. While national identities have become an established framework for foreign policy analysis, joint identities of states as members of groups (e.g., negotiation alliances) have so far been neglected outside the context of the European Union. Negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have previously been studied in terms of negotiation groups and alliances, but such analyses have tended to focus on collective interests rather than joint identities. Distinguishing between the national identities of each of these four countries as emerging powers, and their emergent joint identity as the BASIC group, we argue that the tension between these two layers of identity could be productive for the future of the international climate regime. Both layers contain an “emerging power” element, which could help unlock the stalled climate negotiations by creating flexibility and opening up novel negotiation space in the sense that it makes the BASIC group available as a new actor with unique rights, obligations, and normative commitments.
We do not find strong empirical evidence that the joint BASIC identity has changed the national negotiation positions of the group members so far, with the partial exception of South Africa in Copenhagen. We see the 2011 conference in Durban as indicative of one kind of impact the group might have: the BASIC grouping helped facilitate the agreement on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP), with more-willing BASIC members nudging a reluctant India to accept the agreement. The four countries have continued to meet quarterly since Durban to coordinate their actions, while China and India are also joining forces with the new Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC) group. Thus, the BASIC group continues as a potential framer of these countries’ future climate action, even as they keep their options open.
We trace the links between the climate negotiation positions of the BASIC members, the BASIC group, and their evolving identities—both individual and joint—as emerging powers. Their internal debates about whether they are “developed enough” to take on international commitments that they rejected as growth-limiting a few years ago provide significant inputs for the current efforts to create a BASIC joint identity. At this stage, the content, associated norms, and limits of the joint emerging power identity are still unclear and contested. We find two different developments in a short time period. In the face of external pressures to take on increasing mitigation responsibilities, the four countries drew together to coordinate their positions and to present themselves as the BASIC coalition in 2009–2010. But differences quickly surfaced by 2011, when the group was forced to specify in more detail what it collectively stood for. While members shared beliefs regarding other groups’ responsibilities, they were not able to agree on the appropriate norms for themselves as emerging powers.
The coalition’s struggle to define and develop a shared BASIC identity continues and is likely to evolve along with the changing rhythm of the climate negotiations. Albeit unevenly, the BASIC countries are considering a joint identity as emerging powers that would carry with it new behavioral expectations regarding their rights and responsibilities in the provision of global public goods like climate stability. Moving from a system with two major categories of countries to three—developed, developing and emerging—would carry multiple implications for the structure, dynamics, and analysis of the evolving climate regime. India’s particularly strong resistance to this move demonstrates the potential stakes in such a change (Joshi 2013). 1
Roles, Identities, and Global Climate Governance
We argue here that understanding the role emerging powers will play requires moving away from the material focus of much of the current literature (e.g., Alexandroff and Cooper 2010; Wade 2011) to focus on the critical mediating effect of identities and self-conceptions, which do not track perfectly with the changing material reality. Material interests and identities are not opposing or mutually exclusive motivations for political behavior; rather they are interdependent factors that both require analytical attention. In the climate change area, the BASIC countries’ material interests straightforwardly point them to climate inaction, as reducing emissions is costly. Yet, we argue below that the BASIC countries individually and jointly take positions in climate negotiations that are also “bolstered and guided by a moral component,” as Phillip Stalley said for China (Stalley 2013, 6), notably when they insist that there are greater moral obligations for developed countries to do their share first. Questions of equity and fairness are central to their considerations, as well as to academic environmental justice debates (BASIC Experts 2011; Harris 2011; Roberts and Parks 2007). We also show that when they do commit to act—so far individually and voluntarily—those commitments are grounded in a changing sense of their national identities, even as their material incentives for inaction have changed little over these three years. The BASIC countries still display significant variation on this issue, with Brazil and South Africa increasingly proactive while China and India are more reluctant to make commitments.
We explore the underlying tensions between their national identities as individual emerging powers and their emerging joint identity as BASIC (as opposed to other possible collaborators) and consider the implications of the diverging trajectories of the two factions within BASIC for future climate negotiations. The study of national identities and their impact on foreign policy positions has roots in earlier foreign policy role analysis, as well as more recent constructivist interest in the role of ideas in shaping behavior through the “logic of appropriateness.” In this section, we survey these literatures and the empirical guidelines they offer.
The basic claim of identity approaches is that “the questions ‘Who are we?’ and ‘How are we perceived by others?’ seem to be prominent factors influencing the external behavior of these states and their internal policymaking processes” (Kaarbo 2003, 159). While these are not new preoccupations for international relations scholars, questions about the changing nature of state identity in the European Union were a major empirical driving force behind a renewed research focus on identity in the 1990s and since. Scholars tend to approach this question through the constructivist spotlight on the role of ideas and beliefs in shaping foreign policy (e.g., Christiansen, Jorgensen, and Wiener 1999 2 ; Kaarbo 2003; Risse et al. 1999; Thies 2010).
The analysis of collective identities has its roots in social psychology, which describes the processes through which group members come to believe that they have characteristics in common, while they simultaneously differentiate themselves from other groups. These processes of in-group association and out-group differentiation create a sense of shared collective identity. International relations scholars utilize these insights in two ways. First, national identities are considered a subset of collective identities that individuals can hold, based on territory and citizenship. Second, using the state rather than the human being as the unit of analysis, and consequently national identities as individual rather than collective identities, scholars open up the possibility of studying higher-level collective identities shared by groups of states, including what we refer to here as a joint BASIC identity. The EU is an iconic focus of this type of group identity analysis, but this move is also at the core of English School theorizing about an international society of states (Buzan 1993).
One of the strengths of the identity approaches is their ability to cross levels of analysis from individual to national to international (Thies 2010), but joint identities are not unproblematic aggregations of the identities of member states. This is not least because individual states often embody many different and sometimes conflicting identities (Risse et al. 1999, 154–55). 3 Joint identities like that of the BASIC group also share such potential aggregation strains. Their integration struggles are the focus of this article, which describes them as potentially productive group dynamics that could help unlock the stalled climate negotiations.
We distinguish between the individual national identities of Brazil, South Africa, India and China, and their joint identity as the BASIC group. Each country’s national identity has been undergoing changes recently, adding a new emerging power dimension. This dimension has different issue-specific expressions, for example, regarding the UN Security Council, nuclear nonproliferation, or global financial governance. Recent research on Chinese national identity, for example, shows that Chinese policy statements on what it means to be a “responsible” rising power vary quite a bit for different issue areas and contexts (Scott 2010). While the “emerging power” identity dimension might be expanding at the moment, it still remains only a subset of the larger national identity for all four countries.
The joint emerging power identity shared by the four also has different issue-specific expressions. In the climate change context, the emerging powers mutually recognize each other through their alliance in the BASIC group. This joint identity builds on the emerging power elements in the four individual identities but is not necessarily a simple aggregation of these. For example, the joint identity may be “less than” the richer national emerging power identities if only some of these elements are agreeable to all four group members. At the same time, the joint identity can become “more than” any individual emerging power identity if it expands in novel ways that would not be possible for a single country. Group interactions that change the joint identity layer (e.g., adding elements) subsequently might spillover to the individual national identities, creating a feedback effect. 4 This is where contestation and identity struggles take place. Whether a joint identity among multiple states has these emergent properties is an empirical question that we seek to answer for the BASIC group in this article.
The identity approach also seeks to link identities to behavior. Constructivists describe the link as following the logic of “appropriateness,” where actors behave in ways they and others consider appropriate for the kind of actor they are (Christiansen, Jorgensen, and Wiener 1999; Risse et al. 1999, 158). This is a logic of rule-based action, where “Human beings are imagined to follow rules that associate particular identities to particular situations, approaching individual opportunities for action by assessing similarities between current identities and choice dilemmas and more general concepts of self and situation” (March and Olsen 1998, 951). Several scholars (Kaarbo 2003; Thies 2010) have pointed out that this understanding has important predecessors in earlier foreign policy literatures on role theory (Holsti 1970; Walker 1987; Wish 1980). The relevant strand of role theory focuses on symbolic interactionist and cognitive processes, where behavior is seen to arise from expectations, cues, and demands (Thies 2010). The overall idea is that a particular identity will include in it expectations about the behaviors that would instantiate and thus be appropriate (versus inappropriate) to the identity. The move from seeing themselves as emerging powers to having a shared understanding of what behaviors are then appropriate has been very difficult for the BASIC countries.
Based on these insights, we would expect a developing joint identity of the BASIC group to increasingly affect the negotiation positions of its members within the UNFCCC process. Depending on the content of new norms of appropriate behavior for BASIC members, future changes in their negotiation positions could be positive in the sense that they promote cooperative behavior and raise ambition. They could also be negative, preventing negotiation progress and providing group members cover for shirking international commitments. This process will be shaped not only by the BASIC countries and their respective domestic political processes but also by their interactions with other groups in the climate negotiations, who will put forward proposals, make demands of the group and request commitments in various forms.
We use a general analytical framework proposed for studying identity to organize our presentation below of the current state of the joint BASIC identity and the “appropriate” behaviors associated with it. This framework examines four types of identity content, while a second contestation dimension asks about the degree of consensus on the content (Abdelal et al. 2006). The four content types begin with constitutive norms that recognize identity-defining practices. The second element of the identity framework concerns the BASIC countries’ joint social purposes in the climate negotiations. Third, their own joint identity is refined in relational comparisons that specify other groups that help to determine their own group’s limits. Finally, cognitive models are the “worldviews or understandings of political and material conditions and interests that are shaped by a particular identity” (Abdelal et al. 2006, 696).
In the empirical sections below, we systematically assess the documents that the BASIC countries individually and jointly submitted to the climate change negotiations as well as the Joint Statements of their quarterly ministerial meetings since the end of 2009. We use these to take stock of the identity dimensions the delegations expressed and the degree of contestation both inside the BASIC grouping and in the formation of national positions on climate change. Additional national-level documents and interviews complement this effort, as does our observation of the Copenhagen (2009) and Durban (2011) negotiation sessions.
Negotiating Climate Change: The Rise and Decline of the BASIC Coalition
In this section, we track the BASIC countries’ identity-grounded repositioning in the Copenhagen and Cancún negotiations in 2009–2010, when the BASIC coalition reached a high point of collective agreement and action, and then the Durban negotiation of 2011, when cracks in the young coalition appeared. For each time period, we examine the four identity components just outlined and conclude with an assessment of the level and nature of contestation.
All four countries had perceived the initial global climate regime as legitimate; the framework was generally favorable to the preferences of developing countries in emphasizing that developed countries were obliged to reduce their emissions first (Hochstetler and Viola 2012; Hurrell and Sengupta 2012; Sengupta 2012). While the BASIC countries have always considered climate change as a serious global issue, they did not see mitigation as a task for countries of their kind—developing countries—to do, when the historical responsibility of developed countries was so evident. The BASIC countries have never changed their minds about the latter claim. 5 Even so, contestation over their own position led to some important changes beginning in 2009.
Copenhagen and Cancún: The Rise of the BASIC Coalition
China, India, and Brazil had been major players since the beginning of the climate negotiations in the 1990s, but the negotiations in Copenhagen (2009) and Cancún (2010) marked the arrival of BASIC as a group and turned out to be a high point of their coordination.
Shared Positioning
In the run-up to Copenhagen, increasing coordination among the four countries that would become BASIC became visible, with China and India usually taking the lead. Beginning in the mid-2000s, the BASIC countries met occasionally to discuss their climate strategies, at their own initiative and that of others, for example, the Obama administration’s invitation to join the Major Economies Forum (MEF) of the seventeen largest emitters. Pressures on them to act increased in the weeks before the conference, but their cooperation grew out of a longer time frame including coordination in other issue areas (Hallding et al. 2011, Ch. 2). These conversations highlighted that the BASIC countries’ first priority was a new round of commitments for all the Annex 1 countries of the Kyoto Protocol, including the United States. As the Copenhagen conference neared, the BASIC countries crafted an alternative draft negotiation text and threatened to walk out together if developed countries imposed their preferred language that focused on action by emerging powers. 6
Heads of state were invited to Copenhagen in anticipation of a major new agreement to succeed the ailing Kyoto Protocol. Instead, lack of progress on one negotiation track spilled over into blockage of another. In the final days, the BASIC heads of state joined U.S. President Obama to propose a new direction for the climate agreements, one that featured new voluntary commitments to reduce their climate emissions. For developed countries, the novelty was the voluntary nature versus the legally binding (if unmet) Kyoto goals; for developing countries, the novelty was in articulating an international commitment to reduce climate emissions. The ensuing debate among the heads of state was long and angry, and the proposed Copenhagen Accord was not adopted in Copenhagen. A large number of countries filed their voluntary action plans by the end of January 2010 anyway, 7 including all of the BASIC countries, and the Accord was adopted in Cancún with their unified support.
A BASIC Identity
Constitutive norms that create identities
In global climate negotiations through 2008, the four countries individually held to binary constitutive norms that placed themselves in the category of developing nations. As such, they believed they should not make international commitments to reduce emissions, despite increasing claims that they were now developed enough—and emitting enough—to take at least some action alongside developed countries (Harris 2011; Joshi 2013; Roberts 2011). Yet they had each begun to take steps to address climate change at home. In 2006, China added mandatory energy efficiency and other climate-relevant aims to its new five-year development plans. In 2007 and 2008, they all began climate action plans and considered further legislation (Hallding et al. 2011, 53, 59, 70; Hochstetler and Viola 2012). They had also (to varying degrees) begun to individually consider the argument that they might now be in a category of emerging powers with new role expectations. The Copenhagen compromise, where they did announce international commitments of a voluntary kind along with some other developing countries, reflected both the parallel evolution of national positions that eventually cohered in the BASIC coalition and a broader trend among non-Annex 1 countries to accept nationally appropriate mitigation actions (NAMAs). For BASIC this commitment carried extra symbolic weight because their size and rapid growth imbued their choices with geopolitical implications (e.g., Roberts 2011). Yet, the joint position taken by the BASIC group in 2009 consisted of little more than bundling a subset of their changing national discourses on themselves as individual emerging powers. Although agreement to comparatively costly voluntary commitments was a new international position that reflected the BASIC countries’ understandings of themselves as emerging powers, as a manifestation of joint identity it is a “less than” joint position, showing less identity movement than the member states had on their own.
For example, Indian lead negotiator Ramesh expressed the logic of his country’s new national position succinctly:
[W]hen India is refashioning its place in the world community based largely on its economic performance (and not just potential) its climate change negotiating strategy—both in terms of substance and style—has to be nuanced, flexible and responsive to changing circumstances and challenges. (Foreword to Dubash 2012, xxi)
Similarly, Brazil’s president Lula had mused at a press conference in May 2009 in Beijing that
Brazil has entered, I would say, in the position of being one of the big respected countries . . . We used to think small. We did not exercise our self-esteem and we didn’t have a strategy to have a bigger role in the world. And that is what we are constructing now.
He made very similar claims when he came to Copenhagen, breaking with his own Foreign Ministry to declare that Brazil not only did not need climate aid but also was prepared to give aid to others if that would move the negotiations forward. 8
China and South Africa each only expressed part of such claims of a new national identity as an emerging power. President Zuma of South Africa stressed South Africa’s commitment to being a “responsible global citizen” and acknowledged its role as a major emitter in Africa. 9 While South Africa had come to think of itself as an emerging power and would seek entry into the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) group in 2010, the existence of the BASIC coalition prodded it to translate that new identity into climate terms. As the other BASIC countries announced their plans for action, President Zuma wanted to also make a significant commitment that would draw media attention; his announced target would require large changes in South Africa’s energy sector and was conditioned on receiving substantial international funding. 10 The Chinese negotiator in Cancún took the opposite tack. He spent much of his speech to the plenary insisting on China’s poverty but eventually promised assistance to developing states for their climate efforts. 11
What is striking is that the BASIC countries speaking together have said even less than China and South Africa individually to claim a joint identity as emerging powers. At Copenhagen, they joined forces and named their unit, BASIC members consulted with each other “hourly” during the meeting (Hallding et al. 2011, 23), and their presidents engaged in a visible tussle with the United States and EU. But ideational rhetoric around what it might mean for them to engage together as emerging powers lagged well behind their national statements even as their new unity brought behavioral changes. First, and most importantly, the group established a new constitutive norm for emerging powers in the climate regime: they make voluntary mitigation commitments, taking responsibility for climate stability but in a manner distinct from developed countries. A second behavioral norm concerns the initiation of quarterly meetings of BASIC ministers that result in Joint Statements summarizing their position on the climate negotiations.
However, these Joint Statements since 2010 have said little directly about the joint BASIC identity, largely lacking any stated expectations for the BASIC countries themselves. Instead, the ministers repeatedly define their expectations for two other categories of identities quite explicitly. They see a category of developed countries, from which they expect a prompt conclusion of a post-Kyoto legally binding international agreement and adequate finance for developing countries with closely monitored and verified results. BASIC ministers repeatedly reminded developed countries that the UNFCCC charges them with leadership in addressing climate. Developing countries largely appear as victims of climate change, with national actions to be supported by others.
Social purpose
The BASIC coalition arose in the context of global climate negotiations to provide a discussion and coordination venue for a set of countries that are increasingly distinguished—by themselves and by others—from the rest of the developing world due to their comparative material success. The BASIC group’s social purpose consisted of three core elements. The first purpose was to collectively fend off and manage a common threat: the pressure to take on costly, legally binding obligations for climate change mitigation. Connected to this was the second goal: protecting their development interests despite their increasing economic weight. Toward both of these purposes, the coalition stressed that developed countries continued to stand apart from themselves and other still-developing countries in having a moral obligation for action. There was a significant tension between these two goals and the third: the desire of all four countries to be perceived as responsible global stakeholders in a context where they knew they were receiving extra scrutiny. At COP-15 in Copenhagen, all three purposes could be reconciled by “avoiding blame” for the failure of the negotiations (Hallding et al. 2011, 20), but two years later in Durban, the contradictions were more evident.
Cognitive model
One of the strongest foundations of the BASIC coalition is a shared cognitive model of who is responsible for causing and, consequently, addressing climate change. Its basic elements appear in the Joint Statement at the end of the Third Meeting of BASIC Ministers in 2010:
Equity will be a key issue for any agreement. Ministers noted that the Copenhagen Accord sets a global goal of keeping temperature increase below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, without jeopardizing economic growth and poverty alleviation. This implies a certain global carbon budget. The implications of this budget for individual countries require careful analysis, and must be based on a multilateral agreement about equitable burden-sharing, including historical responsibility for climate change, the need to allow developing countries equitable space for development, and adequate finance, technology and capacity-building support provided by developed countries for all developing countries.
In this summary, we find the logic underlying the role expectations identified above: a set of developed countries that must act first in a formal, binding, international framework because they caused global warming as they became wealthy and developed versus developing countries whose development must be facilitated as the collective global temperature goal is met. Assertions of the historical responsibility and leadership demanded of developed countries are in every one of the twelve ministerial statements. North–South inequality is a defining feature of this cognitive model. Even if the BASIC countries are more developed than some other developing countries, they continue to be distinct from the North.
The worldview does allow for the possibility that the BASIC countries have a special responsibility to control their emissions as emerging powers among developing countries, but it would have to come with “careful analysis” of what is equitable for them individually. Through the Copenhagen and Cancún conferences, all defended the idea that they were best able to make that assessment themselves, through their domestic political processes. Thus, the voluntary Copenhagen Accord fit their worldview and social purposes well. Maintaining sovereign control over their own domestic development is a priority for these states, in climate change and global governance more generally (Dubash 2012; Hurrell 2006; Scott 2010).
Relational comparisons
The relational comparisons component of the BASIC identity reflects a dynamic range of coalitional possibilities. The four BASIC countries met together for the first time in November 2009 just before the Copenhagen meetings. Brazil, India, and South Africa had formed an earlier “partnership of emerging industrialized economies” in 2003 as IBSA to coordinate their international initiatives, especially on reform of the UN Security Council and some trade issues (Vieira and Alden 2011, 507). China was cool to expanding the Security Council, but the four saw enough climate commonalities to work together. Finally, while the BASIC countries have met since November 2009, without changing their membership, they regularly invite the current head of the G77/China, signaling their ongoing association with it.
The group is equally interesting in who is left out. BRICS partner Russia hosted the first meetings of their heads of state in June 2009. With Russia as an Annex 1 country under the Kyoto Protocol, however, it made a poor climate partner. BASIC is also a small subset of the seventeen “major economies” that the United States had invited to meet monthly from April 2009 to create the political leadership and joint strategy necessary for a successful conclusion to the Copenhagen negotiations that December. Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, and Russia were also in the MEF. Russia, as noted, is an Annex 1 country, and Korea and Mexico left the G77/China to join the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), but Indonesia is a mysterious exclusion given that it is closer to the others in population and economic size than is South Africa. Whoever might be their peers as emerging powers, the BASIC countries have never wavered from insisting they do not fit with developed countries, a central derivation from their cognitive model.
Contestation
The identity framework we are using points out that identities can vary significantly in terms of how consensual they are and that that variance helps account for political outcomes. A strongly consensual identity is likely to generate corresponding behaviors, while identity content that is highly contested is more likely to generate outcomes that reflect the contestation than the identity itself. In this initial period, there is very little contestation due to the superficial alignment of interests and positions. The BASIC countries stressed their commonalities and were able to keep their unity by focusing on the line that distinguished them from developed countries. They supported each other, both in resisting formal commitments that both Europe and the United States wanted and then in the voluntary agreements of the Copenhagen Accord. In a sense, they presented a negative unity—clearly identifying what they were not willing to commit to.
Overall, the joint identity layer added by the creation of the BASIC group was very thin to begin with and largely made possible by an alignment of domestic policy progress and the ideas of political leaders in the four individual states around 2009. Much of the shared identity content is a continuation of positions held by the G77/China over long periods of time, and other developing countries joined them in now committing to voluntary mitigation action. Even so, in deciding to set up a regular meeting cycle to engage with each other more intensively, the creation of the group signaled the mutual recognition of each group member as an emerging power—a recognition that creates a boundary, and in its exclusiveness created a new political category and contributed to the fragmentation of the G77/China.
Durban 2011: A Retreat from BASIC Unity
The period between COP-16 in Cancun and COP-17 in Durban was shaped by the collective desire of the UNFCCC parties to operationalize a number of elements of the Cancun agreements: the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN), the Adaptation Committee, and guidelines for a measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) regime. While this is a practical agenda that appeared to serve many shared BASIC interests, the group displayed a remarkable lack of unity during the end-of-year conference in Durban. Surprising other negotiation parties and observers, BASIC not only sought to avoid the formal appearance of a negotiation bloc but also split over one of its central issues, the mitigation obligations of developing countries in the future climate regime.
Shared Positioning
The joint ministerial statements of the BASIC group throughout 2011 placed increasing emphasis on the notion that BASIC is part of the G77/China and not a separate negotiation group. At COP-17, the desire to be perceived as a “normal” member of the G77/China was expressed even more strongly. BASIC made only one plenary intervention as a group—China spoke on its behalf during the opening ceremony. Otherwise all BASIC members associated themselves with the statements of the G77/China. Along the same lines, there was only one submission to the UNFCCC on behalf of all four countries throughout the entire year, while one or several BASIC members issued submissions jointly with a number of other G77 countries. When asked about the BASIC position on an EU proposal during a press conference in Durban, Brazilian Ambassador Corrêa do Lago said bluntly that there was no shared BASIC position on this issue and that “BASIC is not a negotiation group.” 12 Similarly, the Chinese chief negotiator Xie argued during the only press briefing by BASIC countries on December 6, 2011, that BASIC was not a group but that the BASIC countries were developing countries and members of the G77/China. 13
Collectively, these signals might have indicated an attempted retreat back into a binary worldview, using the cover of a developing country designation to fend off pressures for taking on a more central role in climate governance. Having created a third category of countries—the emerging powers group—as a defensive unit in Copenhagen, the new category and its possible rights and obligations might have felt more like a vulnerability than a protection mechanism in the run-up to Durban. Consequently, the BASIC countries established a set of behavioral patterns that strengthened their links with the G77/China and deemphasized its separate character as a group. One might read this reversal as a sign of uncertainty about the utility of the BASIC group, which had now entered a difficult phase in which it was forced to define its group identity and shared positions in more detail. With Jairam Ramesh replaced as India’s lead negotiator, India in particular returned to an insistence on a North–South binary that was arguably closer to its much poorer material status and to the position of many Indian policy elites (Joshi 2013; Vihma 2011), while Brazil and South Africa moved in the opposite direction.
Wanted: Identity!
The observed divisions in the BASIC group that have become apparent since Cancún beg the question whether and to what extent they manifest a joint identity as emerging powers in the climate regime. In this section, we analyze the status of the four identity dimensions in 2011/2012, observing a heightened level of contestation within the BASIC group. This highlights difficulties the four have had in agreeing on the behavioral expectations of an emerging power joint identity. At their root are increasingly incompatible developments in national identities, which are tied to national interests that only partially overlap.
Constitutive norms
Throughout 2011 and 2012, the BASIC members continued to share constitutive norms relating to group membership and maintained patterns of interactions such as the quarterly ministerial meetings. The first ministerial statement post-Durban was issued in February 2012, continuing major themes from the previous two years. But while the group members appeared to continue to see themselves as sharing an emerging powers identity, they were more divided over the behavioral expectations that accompanied this joint identity. In Durban, a rift opened up between BASIC members concerning the interpretation of equity and the phrase “common but differentiated responsibilities” from the original convention, signaling some fundamental differences in their self-perceptions and individual identities on the global stage. These identity-related differences are tied to the perceived national interests of each country, in particular the need to develop and address poverty. Each country faces challenges of a very different scale in this regard due to vastly different domestic conditions.
A clear division between South Africa and Brazil on the one side and China and India on the other surfaced on the topic of legally binding mitigation targets for developing countries. South Africa and Brazil began to signal their willingness to take on future binding emission targets, deviating from the previously established BASIC position that emerging powers should only take on voluntary mitigation obligations. While they continued to insist that developed countries lead, Brazil and South Africa appeared to accept that emerging powers could have responsibilities of a nature similar to those of developed countries (legally binding). At the same time, they left open the possibility of differentiating substantive obligations (e.g., depth of emission cuts) based on “respective capabilities.”
This proposed change of a BASIC constitutive norm was largely rejected by India and did not receive a clear response from China. Keeping in line with the previous BASIC positioning, India maintained its strong opposition to the notion that developing countries should have legally binding responsibilities until the final moments of the conference (see also Joshi 2013). Although India eventually acquiesced to a text without the standard equity language, the dispute over the appropriate behavior of BASIC countries was not resolved. The post-Durban discussions in Bonn revealed that India’s interpretation of the phrase “a protocol, another legal instrument or agreed outcome with legal force” applicable to all UNFCCC parties is very different than that of Brazil and South Africa.
Nevertheless, one could argue that this division among BASIC members was key for bringing about the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP agreement). The ADP, whatever its ultimate effects, did thoroughly unsettle what had become a sclerotic process by breaking down the distinction between Annex 1 countries and others in the Kyoto Protocol. Not only did two BASIC members support such a breakdown but also the lack of unity left India “isolated, and fighting its own corner” (Hurrell and Sengupta 2012, 472)—literally in the final hours, as representatives of the BASIC countries, the EU, and the United States huddled in the middle of the floor. The peer pressure created by the existence of BASIC as a group and two group members advocating for a change in positions very likely influenced India’s decision to support the ADP. In the absence of such peer pressure, or in the opposite situation of a unified BASIC position opposing legal commitments, the famous Durban huddle might not have resulted in an ADP agreement.
Social purpose
The group’s shared social purpose continues to be triangular: defending against pressure to take on a larger share of the mitigation burden, protecting domestic development interests, and wanting to be perceived as responsible global stakeholders. While these goals provided the glue for the BASIC alliance in Copenhagen, it seemed increasingly difficult to reconcile them when moving toward COP-17. Given the changing material conditions, especially China’s ascent to be the top global emitter, the conflict between the notion of being responsible and the rejection of legally binding mitigation targets had become too obvious to ignore, at least for two out of the four countries. In a move that demonstrated growing concerns over their global image as responsible actors, Brazil and South Africa began to argue that being a developing country does not mean that you have no responsibilities. 14
Relational comparisons
In the post-Cancun period, BASIC members reemphasized their alignment with the G77/China. In doing so, they slightly shifted their relational comparisons, underlining their own character as developing countries and most clearly distinguishing themselves from the opposite category—developed countries. They continued to jointly de-emphasize their emerging powers status.
Cognitive model
The cognitive model that the BASIC countries continue to share is a worldview in which inequality is a defining feature (Hallding et al. 2011, 27), historical responsibility is a key element of equity in the climate regime, and mistrust of the developed countries is appropriate. These shared elements continued as a cohesive force holding BASIC together even during and after the disagreement in Durban but do not distinguish them from the G77. In this time frame, BASIC countries spoke of their own mitigation action mostly to emphasize that they had taken action “at substantial cost to their economies” that developed countries had not matched (Joint Statement 9, November 2011).
While there seems to be an at least partly shared worldview regarding the importance of a notion of equity based on historical responsibility, the BASIC Joint Statements in the course of 2011 display a notable lack of clarity on the substance of these general principles. A group of BASIC experts produced a report on “Equitable Access to Sustainable Development,” which was presented to the BASIC ministerial meetings in May and August 2011 (BASIC Experts 2011). The Ministers “welcomed” the work but did not use the study to clarify or outline the BASIC position on equity. One of the reasons for such a hesitant embrace of this attempted synthesis might have been the realization that there was very little common ground among the different frameworks of equity used by the country experts. 15
Contestation
In the post-Cancún period, the difficulties of aligning or even integrating national identities into a joint BASIC identity increased significantly. With two BASIC members stepping forward—toward a conception of appropriate behavior for them more akin to that of developed countries—and one stepping back toward a self-perception as a developing country, the alliance seems to be in disarray. While the Doha round of negotiations is beyond the scope of this article, the disarticulation has continued, with China and India associated with the LMDC group that calls only for developed country action 16 rather than with its BASIC counterparts. At least some of the reasons for these increasingly visible differences and continuing norm contestation can be found in the national identities of the BASIC members.
In the case of South Africa, its role as the host of COP-17 with the associated responsibility to act as a bridge-builder doubtless contributed to its stance as an emerging power willing to take on more responsibility in the climate regime. First, any conference host has a vested interest in reaching an agreement, which is related to its reputation of possessing skilled and professional conveners. Second, African expectations for the conference were very high, and South Africa was compelled to act in the interest of the most vulnerable countries to demonstrate leadership on the African continent (Masters 2011). Third, this process-driven mediator identity was coupled with a self-perception as a hybrid between a developed and a developing country, and as having an innate conflict-resolution skill, based on its history of peacefully ending apartheid. In addition, South Africa has come to consider climate change and the need to transition to a low-carbon economy as an opportunity rather than threat, adjusting its industrial policies toward that goal (Republic of South Africa 2011). Combining these identity elements—responsible global stakeholder, bridge-builder, hybrid—with an identifiable economic interest in global climate action, South Africa was one of the first to accept that developing countries should take on legally binding mitigation obligations in a future climate agreement.
The Brazilian delegation found itself in a similar situation as host South Africa. Wanting to be perceived as a competent and capable political player, especially in the run-up to the Rio+20 summit Brazil would host in 2012, Brazil presented itself as an important actor in the climate negotiations, giving daily press briefings, smoothly using corridor diplomacy to interact with other big players, and emphasizing its domestic successes in establishing climate policies, especially in the area of deforestation. The BASIC position—demanding action and help from others to enable domestic development—conflicted with Brazil’s assessment that it now combined characteristics of a developed and a developing country and its confidence in its domestic capabilities to make a significant contribution to the climate regime (Hochstetler and Viola 2012). Being part of BASIC was a constraint at a point in time when Brazil felt the desire to build a strong international reputation by showcasing some of its impressive domestic policy.
The Asian giants, especially India, appeared more concerned with their economic needs and the limits of their domestic capabilities to put effective climate measures in place. The Indian negotiator who had led India’s more flexible position in the Copenhagen and Cancún conferences had faced withering questions from Indian parliamentarians afterward and was replaced (Dubash 2012). Even Indian environmental activists believe that India should not make internationally binding commitments to reduce climate emissions (Sengupta 2012). India seems to have retreated back into a strong developing country position in the course of 2011, emphasizing the need for equity, and outlining in detail what actions India expects developed countries to undertake. As the most active and “noisy” negotiation party of the four BASIC members in Durban, India made numerous individual and joint submissions to the UNFCCC. These included a proposal to add three contentious items to the already crowded COP-17 agenda, which placed South Africa in a difficult position as both the conference chair and BASIC member. India, by far the economically weakest of the four, did not see that it should do more in the face of developed countries’ failures to shoulder their own share of the responsibility. In the Indian view, India has done more than its share (Joshi 2013).
Seeking to avoid either lock-in positions or isolation (Hallding et al. 2011, 72–74), China not only argued that it is a developing country (Xie 2011) but it also showed signs of pragmatism and real concern about the potential negative domestic implications of unabated climate change. Given this intentional ambivalence, China prefers to follow rather than lead other BASIC members, but they are leading in different directions.
This leaves open the questions of what defines the BASIC identity, how this identity will play out in future negotiations, and whether there will be a sufficient level of shared identity perceptions to allow BASIC to remain a group as the climate regime enters a new negotiation phase. Clearly, there is an ongoing struggle to create a joint BASIC identity. Continuing regular meetings suggest that the four BASIC countries value the group despite the emergence of substantive differences regarding the normative commitments group members should make. However, the specific value and utility of the group remains unclear, especially with a view to the fact that China and India increasingly coordinate their negotiation position with the LMDC. If the struggle to develop a strong joint identity fails, BASIC might dissolve in the run-up to the 2015 COP in Paris.
This identity-building dynamic has had some effects on the climate negotiations, including the voluntary mitigation commitments made in 2009, and the facilitation of the more-ambiguous ADP agreement in 2011. It appears increasingly less generative of mutually agreed new initiatives among the BASIC countries, however. Moving forward, the tension between BASIC members can be productive for the climate negotiations when it pulls reluctant parties forward—like it pulled India in Durban—rather than allowing reluctant parties to hold others back or providing excuses for doing less. There is reason to be optimistic that the current developments will be beneficial for the climate negotiations since they build—among other things—on the joint desire to be perceived as responsible global stakeholders. As long as the BASIC states keep interacting with each other and collectively with other players in the negotiations, there will be opportunities for identity-based change and novelty. If nothing else, the existence of BASIC as a group offers other negotiating parties a target for demands, proposals, offers, expectations, and a general advance of the ideational relationship with the emerging powers.
Conclusion
Global climate governance has been unsettled by the rise of the BASIC coalition, through which Brazil, China, India, and South Africa have tried to coordinate their participation in the negotiations. We have shown both the promise and the limits of this coalition through a focus on identity. On the one hand, the four countries drew on their new national identity elements concerning their emerging powers status to justify working together and began to explore the possibility that they might form a third kind of actor in global environmental politics, decidedly not developed, but not wholly developing. In the Copenhagen and Cancún negotiations, this translated into an agreement that voluntary international commitments for climate action might be appropriate for such an actor that was eventually adopted as the Copenhagen Accord.
Yet, such a new joint identity is at best a work in progress and never became “more than” the sum of the national parts. By the Durban negotiation of 2011, Brazil and host South Africa were continuing to push forward in this direction, but India had retreated from this image of itself and its role. With China articulating conflicting positions, the group members did not play a strong joint role as a negotiating coalition but worked more as individuals or within the G77/China. Nevertheless, their group dynamics played a role in shaping the Durban outcome, which some consider the most promising development in the climate negotiations since the Kyoto Protocol. While they continue to meet regularly, the four have struggled to agree on specific rules of behavior and norms applicable to emerging powers, even as they continue to share expectations of developed states. Thus, they were able to converge on a sense of shared identity as emerging powers, but quickly diverged on the details of what that might mean, in ways that would be difficult to explain with interest-based theories. Changes in joint identities evidently do not happen evenly and without backtracking, as is true also for the European identity that launched this recent area of research.
Systematic analysis of national and joint identities provided important analytical tools for this research on the roles of emerging powers in global climate governance. We were able to identify the limitations of their joint identity even during the period when it appeared most robust. The BASIC countries’ complex self-perceptions help to account for their stances in international climate negotiations where their counterparts were puzzled or even angered by their reluctance to take on formal mitigation commitments despite the evident changes in their material status. Their heavily principled joint identity favors a reluctant and defensive position that emphasizes the responsibility of the developed countries on grounds of equity and historical responsibility.
The BASIC group clearly shows the aggregation strains that are possible when trying to develop joint identities. Yet, we argue that their efforts to work together have been productive for global climate governance. Their experiments with the idea that they might form a third kind of actor have broken up some of the “ossification” of climate negotiations (Depledge 2006). Their different understandings of the behavioral expectations for emerging powers have sometimes introduced a productive tension into negotiations, pushing more reluctant members to cooperative action at crucial points in time. Over time, the group itself might expand the space of possible negotiation solutions by devising new norms of behavior grounded in a joint identity as emerging powers. At the same time, their negotiation partners can utilize this expansion of the possibility space and contribute to its development through interaction with the BASIC group—a practical reification of an entity that might not yet be very stable. Seeking productive engagement, they can encourage the development and strengthening of normative commitments of the BASIC group in line with a responsible stakeholder reputation. This is particularly important given that two BASIC members, China and India, are actively pursuing alternative coalition opportunities in the UNFCCC, in particular the LMDC. Considering this effort to keep all options open, positive interactions with the BASIC group that foster a joint BASIC identity could shape future negotiation dynamics in important ways.
Finally, the identity dynamics and variation we have observed among the emerging powers in the BASIC group might have implications for global governance far beyond the climate change arena. The emergence of a third actor category that is neither developed nor developing offers opportunities for novel governance arrangements, the redistribution of rights and obligations, and the burden-sharing arrangements for the provision of global public goods. In a time when the demand for global governance, especially crisis management, is on the rise, this is a welcome development.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the editors of the special issue, Bertrand Badie, Amancio Oliveira, and the anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper. Samantha Wisnicki provided helpful research assistance.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors would like to acknowledge financial support provided by Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for the research and publication of this article.