THE FRAMING OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND
DEVELOPMENT:
A Comparative Analysis of the Human Development Report
2007/8 and the World Development Report 2010
Des Gasper, Ana Victoria Portocarrero, Asuncion Lera St.Clair
Pre-publication version of a paper in Global Environmental Change, 23(2013), pp. 28-39.
1. Introduction
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fourth
Assessment report has shown how the relations between development
pathways and climate change vulnerability, adaptation and impacts present
fundamental challenges for our generation and those that will follow (IPCC
2007). Multilateral organizations working on development issues and poverty
reduction have started to assess the implications of climate change for their
work. The impacts of climate change will in general affect more strongly the
low-latitude developing countries and poor people and communities across the
planet. The IPCC Special Report on extreme weather events, for example,
shows how socio-economic conditions substantially determine the extent of a
disaster (IPCC 2012). Communities with little social power are, similarly, more
likely to be negatively affected by policy responses to climate change such as
forest protection and agro-fuels cultivation (Barnett and O’Neill 2010; Marino
and Ribot 2012). The connections between climate change and development
are, however, deeply contentious, partly because of the inverse relation
between vulnerability to climate change and responsibility for the change.
There are disagreements too over whether market-based growth can and
should be the leading tool to address both poverty and climate change. Diverse
perspectives and narratives have emerged.
This paper analyses and compares the major statements on climate change
and development of probably the two most prominent international
development policy agencies: the United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP) and the World Bank, whose perspectives often cascade to other
agencies and governments around the world (UNIHP, Stone 2012). In late
2007 UNDP published its Human Development Report 2007/8 on the
connections between climate change and development, the HDR 2007/8. The
World Bank followed with the World Development Report 2010:
Development and Climate Change, WDR 2010, published in 2009 on the eve
of the Copenhagen conference. These two reports are particularly influential
amidst the increasing policy-oriented literature on the tensions and relations
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between climate change and development. Ideas in these reports become
legitimized as expert knowledge and communicated to a large variety of users
(McNeill and St. Clair 2009; Mosse 2011; Stone 2012).
We compare the Overviews of the two reports, using a frame- and
content- analysis methodology. We focus on their key terms and ideas, framing
choices, similarities and differences. We contextualize this analysis by reference
to studies of how the institutions work and of past experiences in the processes
of knowledge production leading to their Reports. While giving some attention
to the Reports as a whole, which are of book-length, we concentrate on the
very substantial Overviews. The Overviews are by far the most read and most
influential sections, and are the most carefully prepared, reflecting an interplay
between knowledge and politics that is typical for intergovernmental
organizations (Broad 2007, Mosse 2011; St. Clair 2006a). Close reading and
content analysis of the Overviews will provide insights into different
worldviews that are prominent in the climate and development debate.
In the next section we present the organisational and intellectual contexts
of the reports and for understanding their influence. Section 3 summarizes the
methodology of frame- and content- analysis. Section 4 compares the problem
diagnoses in the two Overviews; how they frame the challenge of climate
change. Section 5 then compares how they frame the approach to policy in
response to that problem. Section 6 sums up our key findings, and notes areas
for further work.
2. The nature and influence of the Human and World Development
Reports: organizational, intellectual and situational contexts
Global development organizations attempt to be agenda-setters, normsetters, and knowledge-brokers. They operate in a global arena of multiple
actors who try to exert influence through use of discursive as well as material
power. Documents such as the annual global Development Reports form key
channels for this and compete for legitimacy and attention from the academic
and policy communities. They aim to offer policy guidance but also, and as a
prerequisite, to demonstrate expertise. A large body of research has analysed
these processes of knowledge production in global multilateral institutions
showing how it is a complex co-production involving in-house experts,
consultants, and policy makers framing, reframing and editing. The products
are ‘travelling rationalities’ (Craig and Porter 2006), standardized packages of
knowledge framing and solutions framing, that reach out to national
governments, practitioners and other knowledge networks and frame issues in
particular ways (see e.g.; McNeill and St.Clair 2009; Mosse 2011; Stone and
Wright 2006; Stone 2012). But unlike a knowledge organization like for
example the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which does
not conduct research but rather assesses in a comprehensive manner existing
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published academic papers, most UN specialized agencies and especially the
World Bank produce their own knowledge often based on their own existing
ideas and publications (Mosse 2011; St.Clair 2006a, 2006b).
The World Bank is known amongst global development researchers and
practitioners as ‘the Bank’. It is the largest source of knowledge for
development worldwide, given an enormous research budget and capacity to
access financing for events, gathering and distributing data, and promoting and
disseminating its ideas through diverse mechanisms. Furthermore, the
intellectual production of the Bank acquires special weight given the lending
role the Bank plays, both directly and in coordinating consortia, and the
support it draws from countries such as the United States and other global
financial actors. The ideas presented in WDRs thus have direct and major
influence on policy-making in client countries’ governments and on bilateral
donor countries. Much work on the Bank has revealed the roles of politics and
power in its processes of knowledge production and the frequent scientific and
policy disagreements, especially in preparation of the Bank’s flagship report,
the World Development Reports (Broad 2007, Goldman 2005, Lawson 2009,
Mawdsley and Riggs 2003, McNeill and St.Clair 2011; Stone and Wright 2006;
Stone 2012; Wade 2001).
The World Development Reports are produced by the World Bank’s
research and data arm, the Development Economics Vice-Presidency, and are
supervised by the Chief Economist. World Development Reports position the
Bank as an expert in global debates about development and poverty reduction,
and have major impact. For example, the World Development Report 2000/01
has framed the subsequent approaches to poverty by many donor countries
and governments in developing countries, despite the publicized disagreements
on its policy recommendations and scientific basis which had led to the
resignation of the lead editor (Kanbur 2001, Wade 2001). The World
Development Report 2008 on agriculture came down in favour of market-led
industrial agribusiness above small-scale agriculture and local food sovereignty,
rejecting views in the intergovernmental assessment of agricultural knowledge,
science and technology (IAAST) of which the Bank itself was a participant
(Feldman and Biggs 2011). The Bank’s conclusions displaced in many policy
circles serious attention to agricultural models that were considered more
sustainable and equitable by the IAAST. The Bank returns to ideas that small–
scale agriculture is inefficient and that local knowledge and local agricultural
practices must give way to market forces (McMichael 2009). This sort of
framing and policy power, as well as the repeated use of political power in the
research process, has been analysed in regards also to the WDRs’ framing of
equity and development and to the attempted subsumption of a whole
discipline, geography, to economic analysis (Lawson 2009; McNeill and St.Clair
2011; Rigg et al 2009). Many scholars who have explored the Bank’s knowledge
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production processes describe them as self-referential and dominated by
reductionist economic thinking. (Besides references above, see Wade 2002.)
Draft WDRs are scrutinized by country representatives in the Bank’s
Board of Governors and must be approved by the Executive Board of
Directors. They tend to become statements of the ‘institutional message’.
Because of the need to maintain a sense of coherence in an organization that is
highly heterogeneous and complex, new ideas and themes tend to be built
upon older and well established Bank ideas; critical views are excluded, in what
Wade (1996) and Broad (2006) call ‘the art of paradigm maintenance’.
Disagreements are resolved in closed-door interactions. Ideas that are not
suited to the tools of analysis and instruments of policy of the Bank (for
example, the role of human rights in bringing about fair development
processes) tend to be excluded (McNeill & St.Clair 2011).
Unusually, the 2010 WDR was co-directed by an outsider, Rosina
Bierbaum, Dean of Environment at the University of Michigan, working with
Bank economist Marianne Fay. The Bank also has sections that promote more
socially aware perspectives. For example, the former head of the social
development department, Steen Jorgensen, co-authored a paper that argues for
a ‘no regrets’ approach to climate change and an important role for social
protection mechanisms (Heltberg, Siegel, and Jorgensen, 2009). But the WDR
2010 matches instead the Strategic Framework for the World Bank Group
(WBG), which represents the formal institutional position of the Bank. This
states that the Bank can no longer avoid addressing climate change as part of
its ongoing work on poverty reduction and development, but that its mandate
is to focus on building growth and reducing poverty (St.Clair 2010). The
document emphasises expanding business opportunities in relation to energy
efficiency, and stresses that ‘resources will not be diverted from financing core
development needs’ (World Bank 2008: 5). The core business of the Bank—
promoting and funding huge investments, often in fossil-fuel based sectors, as
in the recent $3 billion loan for the coal-fired Medupi power plant in South
Africa—tends to overshadow its intellectual engagement in issues of climate
change (Storm, 2011).
In contrast, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s
historical and intellectual evolution has had a more open character, even if, like
any knowledge organization, it has its own investments in particular ideas and
theoretical perspectives (McNeill and St.Clair 2009; Murphy 2006). UNDP has
evolved from an agency created to coordinate UN technical and scientific
assistance to less developed countries (LDCs) on a project basis, to become a
policy agency that provides advice, advocacy and resources. It has achieved an
intellectual leadership role particularly since the creation of the Human
Development Report Office (HDRO), which has published the annual global
Human Development Report from 1990 onwards. This Report’s ‘human
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development paradigm’ was the result of a partnership between especially the
late Mahbub ul Haq, as the first HDRO Director, and the economist Amartya
Sen. ‘Human development’ has become a morally grounded conception of
development, supported by Sen’s capability approach that conceptualises
development as extension of the range of attainable ‘doings and beings’ that
people have reason to value. An orientation also to human rights grew under
later HDRO directors, including from 2004 to 2008 Kevin Watkins, former
research director of Oxfam. Watkins was lead author for the HDR 2007/8.
The HDRs’ ability to articulate this alternative perspective relies on the
independent position of the HDRO vis a vis the governments in the board of
UNDP. The HDRO is located officially outside UNDP. This gives it more
freedom to criticise the status quo, though it can later limit the ‘clout’ that its
ideas have at country level (McNeill and St.Clair 2009). The human
development paradigm has helped to revive UNDP as a leading multilateral
(Murphy 2006) despite its tiny funding compared to the World Bank, but this
does not mean it automatically achieves policy influence.
Since the 1990s, the gap in ideas between these two multilateral
organizations has reduced, as the Bank has increasingly opened up to
acknowledging the complexity of development processes and the
multidimensionality of poverty. However, although both organizations endorse
the target of reducing emissions so that warming does not exceed a 2 degrees
average, the two differ significantly in how they frame the challenge of climate
change in relation to development, as we will see.
3. Methodology: frame- and content-analysis
We undertake a frame-analysis of the two Overviews, supported and
disciplined by content-analysis. Sections 4 and 5 will present a systematic
comparison of the Overviews’ ideas, inclusions and exclusions. This is
grounded in, first, attention to the Reports’ socio-political context and the
organisations and units responsible, as sketched already in section 2; and,
second, in content-analysis, with special attention to lexical choice since a
vocabulary conveys a world-view, a pattern of attention and perception. The
present section explains the methodology.
Frames are ‘underlying structures of belief, perception and appreciation’
(Schön & Rein 1994: 23). De Boer et al. give a similar definition: ‘[the set of]
organizing principles that enable a particular interpretation of a phenomenon’
(2010: 502). People see and think in terms of systems of meanings, but much
of the patterning of language-use is unconscious; language users inherit and
absorb standardised ‘packages’ of norms, conventions and usages, that operate
beneath the level of full conscious control. Frame theory, of various types,
looks at this patterning (e.g., Benford and Snow, 2000; Goffman, 1974;
Kahneman and Tversky, 1984; Lakoff 2001). A mental frame directs and
5
organises attention: it includes or highlights some things, occludes or omits
others, and links the included features together in a sense-making pattern that
suggests relationships and gives order to complexity. In policy discussions a
policy-frame adds an orientation towards action. Schön and Rein (1994)’s form
of policy-frame analysis gives special attention to the choices of metaphor and
of value-stance which guide and sustain this orientation process.
Frame analysis can be essayed too casually. Sometimes one does better
to use the verb, framing, rather than the noun, frame, if the latter leads one to
underestimate the range of patterns that people employ and combine.
Presumptions about the presence of standard versions of already-known
frames (‘neo-liberal’/ ‘Marxist’/…) in the work of others vitiate much casual
discourse analysis. A leading critical discourse theorist opens a recent textbook
with this warning: “Usually in the social sciences, text sequences are used as
illustrations, sentences are taken out of context, and specific text sequences are
used to validate or reject claims without relating them to the entire textual
material and without providing any explicit justification or external evidence
for their selection” (Wodak, 2008:1). Correspondingly, serious ‘Discourse
Analysis Means Doing Analysis’—methods-based analysis across all of a text—
in the words of Antaki et al. (2003). They warn against reliance on assertions of
the presence in a text of mega-discourses (‘neo-liberal’/…) on the basis of a
few supportive quotations, and against overgeneralization beyond the analysed
texts. Genuine discourse analysis combines close contextual analysis with
systematic attention to both the micro- and macro-structures of texts (van Dijk
2009; Wodak 2008).
We respond to this challenge by essaying a detailed contextual, structural,
and micro-textual analysis of the whole of the centrepiece of each of our two
Reports: the self-contained Overview section. We include word-frequency
comparisons for the whole of the Overviews. Simple frequency counts that
show very large differences will help to indicate different world-views, since
the two Overviews have almost exactly the same length: 11,000 words,
excluding notes, references, and supplementary boxes. (See also Fløttum and
Dahl 2012.)
The HDR Overview is available in two versions: as part of the full report
(pp.1-18), and as a longer self-standing document on the HDR website
(http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_20072008_Summary_English.pdf, pp.7-30 of
a 31 page ‘Summary’ file that also contains tables, diagrams, the frontmatter,
Foreword, contents list, etc.). Page references and wordcounts that we give in
this paper are to the self-standing version (), since that is more comparable to
the WDR Overview, which also contains tables and diagrams; we add page
references to the full report version in square brackets. Wordcounts for the
WDR Overview (pp.1-29) will exclude its References section since the HDR
Overview has no such section.Word counts were done via Adobe Acrobat 7.0.
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Besides formal content analysis, using word counts across a whole text, we
use several of the methods for systematic micro-analysis that Alexander (2009)
presents and illustrates in his investigation of discourses on environment. He
advises careful attention to the following: 1. Terms of praise (‘purr terms’),
terms of belittling and ridicule, and euphemisms, for each of these give hints
regarding implied conclusions; 2. The usages of ‘we’ and ‘our’, for they imply a
choice of viewpoint and loyalties; 3. Choices of metaphors, for these embody
and convey a perspective more powerfully than does abstracted language; 4.
Definitions (including through searching for uses of ‘as’, ‘define’, etc.); 5.
‘Naturalizing’, whereby some things are declared or assumed to be natural,
normal, inevitable or the like; 6. ‘Nominalization’, the replacement of processverbs by nouns, which similarly exaggerates the fixity or inevitability of present
arrangements and removes attention from their possible reform; 7. The
concealment of agency by use of passive verbs, which again serves to naturalize
and divert attention from responsibility and changeability; 8. Recurrent
vocabulary; and 9. What the recurrent and key terms (like ‘we’) are paired with,
the immediately adjacent words. We pay special attention to aspects 1-5 and 8.
Yanow (2000) brings together many such methods in an integrated
approach to interpretive policy analysis. Schmidt (2006) does the same in his
similar adaptation of Rein’s ‘value-critical policy analysis’, which gives special
attention to the value choices that guide the selections and combinations made
in framing. Table 1 below summarizes these approaches and lists some of the
methods relevant in each stage.
Stages 1, 2, and 3 must often be done iteratively, but in our case the
interpretive communities and artefacts are relatively clearcut. We look at the
World Bank’s development economics research wing, at the Human
Development Report Office in UNDP, and at the main publication by each on
climate change and development. The chosen Reports are exactly comparable,
and each was launched shortly before a UNFCCC Conference of the Parties
annual meeting (those of 2007 and 2009) and sought to structure the thinking
of parties involved in that process. We focus on their Overviews, since these
are large-scale, widely distributed statements that represent the most publicly
visible and intensively accessed statements on climate change by the two most
prominent international development organizations, the World Bank and
UNDP. Further, they are self-contained analyses that hardly even cross-refer to
other chapters in the Reports.
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Table 1: Stages in interpretive policy analysis
YANOW (2000):
ACTIVITIES/STAGES
IN INTERPRETIVE
POLICY ANALYSIS
SOME RELEVANT
METHODS
1. Identify interpretive
communities
2. Identify key meaningladen artefacts, symbols
(language, objects, and/or
acts)
3. Identify the embodied
systems of meanings
Stakeholder analysis
4. Compare the systems
used by different
communities
5. Clarify sources of
disagreements
Compare systems in terms of
components, scope, consistency
etc.
6. Reflect, assess, perhaps
synthesise
Use of sector expertise and
judgement
Frame analysis, content
analysis, category analysis,
metaphor analysis, argument
analysis
Ditto
All of the above
SCHMIDT (2006):
STAGES IN VALUECRITICAL ANALYSIS
OF A POLICY
DEBATE
1. Identifying the issue and
the protagonists
2. Describing the context
and the protagonists’
policy proposals
3. Describing the
arguments and the core
values, aspect by aspect,
using sector-specific
knowledge
4. Value-critical analysis of
the core arguments and
choices
5. Drawing conclusions;
making recommendations
The selection of aspects for description and comparison depends partly on
general discourse analysis theory—for example Alexander’s checklist includes
much of importance—but also on knowledge in the substantive area
concerned and on detailed detective work within the texts under examination.
Thus, in Section 4, for comparing how the two reports frame the problem of
climate change in relation to development we look at the following: 1. The
importance given to climate change; and for whom and for what it is
considered a problem – for economic growth, for poor people, for future
generations? 2. The grouping of countries, with reference to vulnerabilities and
responsibilities. 3. The links seen between climate and development, with
attention to meanings attached to ‘development’. 4. The specification of causal
linkages and structural rigidities. 5. Usage of the term ‘efficiency’, including
whether it is used to direct policy attention to activities in poor rather than rich
countries. 6. How far the reports consider the field in terms of human rights.
Some of these questions arise out of awareness of ongoing debates around
climate change and development; some, including items 4 and 5, emerged from
exploration of these specific texts; and in the case of item 6, a standard item
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for comparison—degree of attention to human rights—grew in importance as
a result of such exploration, as we will now illustrate.
The HDR uses the same title for its Report and its Overview: Fighting
Climate Change – Human solidarity in a divided world. The title provides an ethical
and political message about struggle, division, and overcoming that division in
order to face a shared crisis. It appeals to ideals of bravery, solidarity and
human community. The Overview maintains this style. It opens with a
quotation from Martin Luther King Jr., which urges people to confront ‘the
fierce urgency of now’ and to take action, for ‘Over the bleached bones and
jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: Too
late.’ (p.7). The Report cites Gandhi and Chico Mendes in similar ways. Its call
for solidarity is illustrated by its frequent use of the word ‘we’, which appears
vastly more often in its Overview than in the closely similar length WDR
Overview (56 usages versus 11).
In contrast, the WDR 2010 adopts a bland Report title: Development and
Climate Change. It sees a ‘challenge’ not a ‘fight’ (p.18). Its Overview has a
separate title, Changing the Climate for Development. ‘Climate’ here refers not only
to meteorological features but to conditions that influence development such
as institutions, markets and political stability. The title conveys that the Report
will describe how to manage this climate in order to achieve or enhance
development. The message is not a political and ethical statement asserting a
We, but a managerialist ‘Can-Do’ that reflects a framing of climate change as a
challenge that can be tamed with sufficient funds and technology and matches
the Bank’s predominant technocratic-bureaucratic style (McNeill and St. Clair
2009). The word ‘can’ appears more than twice as often in the WDR Overview
than in the HDR one (77 uses versus 32). The WDR in effect takes as its
motto ‘a climate-smart world is within reach’ (a section title on p.10).
Although the Overview in the HDR does not use the term ‘ethical’ or
‘ethics’, ‘moral’ appears three times, ‘justice’ seven times (usually as ‘social
justice’) and ‘human rights’ eleven times. It includes strong and repeated
messages on ‘social justice and respect of human rights’ (p.13 [6]), and speaks
of an impending ‘moral failure on a scale unparalleled in history’ (p.8 [2]) if we
fail to prevent runaway climate change. The WDR Overview makes no use of
the terms ‘ethical’, ‘moral’, ‘justice’, ‘human development’, ‘human security’ or
even ‘human rights’. ‘Climate-smart’, a term that conveys technocratic
orientation and can-do ability, appears nine times, versus not at all in the HDR
Overview. ‘Equity’ and ‘equitable’ are the WDR’s vaguer preferred normative
terms, appearing 15 times, versus twice in the HDR Overview. The WDR
Overview uses even the terms ‘political’ and ‘politically’ just six times
(compared to 23 times in the HDR Overview) and focuses instead on
economic growth and on ‘efficiency’ or ‘efficient’ (48 uses, compared to 21).
Unlike in the HDR, ´growth´ in the WDR Overview almost invariably means
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economic growth. It asserts from the outset that: ‘Critical to the progress [in
reducing poverty, lengthening lives and improving nutrition is]: rapid economic
growth’ (p.1), and repeats this often. It conceals issues by referring to ‘growth
and poverty alleviation’ as an indissoluble package, which it treats as a singular
noun not a plural (p.1).
The WDR Overview also gives much emphasis to economic calculations
of efficiency and returns. It cites ‘a global average GDP loss of about 1
percent’ from climate change (p.5); and gives only one sentence at the end of a
paragraph to the expected deaths from business-as-usual economic expansion:
‘And over 3 million additional people could die from malnutrition each year.’
(p.5). In contrast, the HDR focuses on human impacts more than on GDP.
The first page of its Foreword says: ‘In terms of aggregate world GDP, these
short term effects may not be large. But for some of the world’s poorest
people, the consequences could be apocalyptic.’ (p.3 [v]).
We will probe these radical differences in style and declared priorities, and
then ask how far the two Reports differ in reality as policy frameworks.
4. Framing the problem
In exploring how climate change is framed in each report, we look at the six
themes identified in the previous section: 1. the importance given to climate
change, and for whom and for what it is considered a problem; 2. the grouping
of countries and attribution of responsibilities; 3. the links seen between
climate and development, and the meaning given to ‘development’; 4. the
specification of structural rigidities and their implications; 5. understandings
and usage of the term ‘efficiency’; 6. how far is the field considered in human
rights terms.
4.1. Importance and urgency of climate change – and for whom?
The HDR presents climate change as the most urgent and grave problem of
our times and as an ‘outrage to the conscience of mankind’ (p.10 [4]). The
‘battle’ against it ‘is part of the fight for humanity’ (p.13 [6]). (The HDR
Overview uses ‘fight’ or ‘fighting’ nine times, apart from in its title, and ‘battle’
six times. The WDR Overview never uses either term. ) The Foreword of the
HDR makes a call to ‘act now’ (p.3 [v]), while the opening page of the
Overview states (in 2007) that ‘The world has less than a decade to change
course’ (p.7 [1]); its conclusion section portrays climate change as perhaps ‘the
gravest threat ever to have faced humanity’ (HDR p.27 [15]). The Overview
uses the term ‘danger’ or ‘dangerous’ in combination with ‘climate change’ 27
times compared to only three times (plus twice in its Notes) in the WDR
Overview.
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Specifically, the HDR highlights climate change as an inter-generational
issue, for ‘our generation is running up an unsustainable ecological debt’ (p.9
[3]); as a human rights issue, for to allow runaway climate change ‘would
represent a systematic violation of the human rights of the world’s poor and
future generations’ (p.10 [4]); and as a human development issue, for ‘doing
nothing offers a guaranteed route to […] mutually assured destruction of
human development potential’ (p.12 [5]). It repeatedly uses ‘blunt’ language,
including condemning the ‘complacency and prevarication that continues to
characterize international negotiations on climate change’ (p.13 [6]).
Underpinning this impatience is a notion of threshold: a danger point
beyond which damage greatly accelerates. ‘Threshold(s)’ appears seven times in
the HDR Overview, versus only once in the WDR Overview. The HDR notes
(e.g., in Ch.1) that the idea has its own dangers. First, it sometimes elides the
issue of ‘dangerous for whom?’ A stage of climate change that is not
immediately dangerous for most of the affluent is already past the danger point
for millions of poor people: ‘262 million people were affected by climate
disasters annually from 2000 to 2004, over 98 percent of them in the
developing world’ (p.16 [8]); and ‘The 1 billion people currently living in urban
slums on fragile hillsides or flood prone river banks face acute vulnerabilities’
(p.18 [9]). Much of the human development damage is irreversible (p.19 [10]);
being born in a drought year in a poor country, for example, markedly
increases one’s likelihood to be malnourished years later (p.16 [9]).
Second, the notion that we are not yet at the dangerous level, but are
approaching it, is meant to generate a sense of urgency but it can operate in the
reverse way, like the idea that there is a safe range for smoking. By giving the
feeling that we have a safe space, it can induce inertia followed by the wistful
hope that the real threshold is a bit further away than we were previously told.
For example, the level of 450 ppm CO2-equivalent for greenhouse gases
(GHGs) has widely become seen as a safe level, when it implies in fact a 50%
chance of breaching the 2 degrees warming threshold. The HDR rightly points
out that 450 ppm is not safe (p.14 [7]). But the unsafe supposedly safe level, or
even higher levels, are widely converted into targets calling for cuts of ‘at least
X’ which become diluted in political practice to mean ‘at most X’. In the WDR
the 2 degrees ceiling itself quickly gets downplayed: ‘From the perspective of
development, warming much above 2°C is simply unacceptable’ (p.3; emphasis
added) – but warming a bit above 2 degrees is left implicitly as tolerable,
certainly from other perspectives than ‘development’ (meaning there a concern
for low-income nations and low-income people). For the WDR the target
instead becomes ‘staying close to a 2°C warming’ (p.196).
In comparison then to the WDR 2010 and some other prominent work,
the HDR reads as bold and ethical, including in declaring already in 2007 450
ppm as the GHGs target (p.29 [17]) when the Stern Review for the UK
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Government, led by the Bank’s former Chief Economist, had just adopted a
target of 550 ppm as politically palatable, even though it had acknowledged
elsewhere that ‘550 pm CO2-e would be a dangerous place to be’ (Stern 2007:
329). In face of the accumulating evidence of faster deterioration and greater
risks, Stern (2010) later adjusted his target, though only to 500 ppm.
The WDR portrayed climate change as an urgent issue, but considerably
less urgent than in the HDR. The HDR Overview uses four times the idea of
‘window of opportunity’, a chance that must be taken within a fixed period or
will be lost; the WDR Overview uses it not at all. Instead it presents figures of
modest potential GDP losses: ‘a global average GDP loss of about 1 percent’
(p.5) and not more than a year’s foregone growth even in low-income
countries. The figures are based on the relatively conservative 2007 IPCC
climate projections and estimate the possible direct monetary costs of damage
to agriculture, to coastal areas and so on; they ignore other human costs and
the indirect impacts of social and political unrest, conflict and migration, such
as presaged in the Darfur crisis. The WDR Overview gives considerable space
instead to discussions by economists about balancing the estimated monetary
values of direct costs of climate change against costs of mitigation: ‘In the
major models, the benefits of stabilization exceed the costs at 2.5°C warming
(though not necessarily at 2°C)’ (p.8), or even only perhaps at ‘well above 3°C’
(p.8). These ‘major models’ are by neoclassical economists who value effects
according to market prices: ‘The optimal target is defined as the concentration
that would result in the lowest reduction in the present value of global
consumption’ (p.8); and they rely on in some cases obsolete estimates of the
(in)sensitivity of various linkages. Such models do not impress many climate
scientists (see e.g. The Independent, 2009).
4.2. Grouping of countries: responsibility versus vulnerability
Climate change is a global problem because emissions in one location affect
other locations. The reports agree that this justifies a response that includes all
countries and that high-income countries ‘cannot continue to fill up an unfair
and unsustainable share of the atmospheric commons’ (WDR p.1).
Considering also countries’ different levels of development, both reports stress
that countries should respond differently to the problem. Both reports,
especially the WDR, proceed largely in terms of countries as the units of
analysis, and divide them into two main groups.
Both reports, especially the WDR, focus more on the victim, the
developing countries. The picture of high-income economies is vaguer. We
know from the Reports that they are substantially responsible for what is
happening and will happen, but we do not learn much about how, nor about
how the problems of power in high-income economies (HIEs) could be
addressed. Additionally, the image of victim can deny LDCs their own voice
12
and capacity of action. The ‘responsible’-‘vulnerable’ divide, while valid, can be
used to reinforce a system of international relations in which HIEs exert
control over LDCs on the grounds that it is their responsibility (now using the
word in a second sense) to be in charge.
The HDR emphasises more strongly that while LDCs have contributed to
climate change much less, they are more vulnerable to its impacts (e.g., p.9 [3]),
but it retains the dualism just described. The inequalities in terms of causal
responsibility and of vulnerability, as well as the special needs of more
vulnerable groups, are held to justify financial transfers from high-income
countries to LDCs.
4.3. The climate-development link and the meaning of development
Both reports then emphasize that climate change is an obstacle for
development, the advance of low-income countries; that ‘High levels of
poverty and low levels of human development limit the capacities of poor
households to manage climate risks’ (HDR p.16 [8]); that climate change is
‘drawing resources away from development’ (WDR p.1); and that high-income
countries must reduce their emissions, but that developing countries still need
‘massive expansions’ (WDR p.1). They differ, however, on what trade-offs they
see and indeed in how they interpret ‘development’.
Climate change is placed by the WDR, from the outset, in a subordinate
relation to ‘development’. It largely uses the concepts of development and
(economic) growth interchangeably. For example, mitigation can be ‘without
sacrificing growth’ (p.1), and, a few sentences later, is ‘compatible with
furthering development’ (p.2). The same equivalence is found in successive
sentences in the middle of the next column on p.2 and in many other places.
The only difference in the WDR’s usage of the two terms appears to be that
‘development’ is reserved for low-income countries. Damage is discussed
largely in terms of GDP.
The conception of development in the HDR is ‘human development’,
‘human well-being and prosperity’ (p.3 [v]). It discusses damage in terms of
people's quality of life and questions the dominant paradigm that equates
development to unending economic growth.
There could be no clearer demonstration than climate that economic wealth
creation is not the same thing as human progress. Under the current energy
policies, rising economic prosperity will go hand-in-hand with mounting threats
to human development today and the well-being of future generations. But
carbon-intensive growth is symptomatic of a deeper problem. One of the hardest
lessons taught by climate change is that the economic model which drives
growth, and the profligate consumption in rich nations that goes with it, is
ecologically unsustainable. (UNDP, 2007: 15).
13
While the WDR Overview says virtually nothing on such issues for rich
countries, the HDR Overview reiterates the message in its Conclusion:
‘economic wealth creation is not the same thing as human progress’ (p.27 [15]);
and even if it were: ‘the profligate consumption in rich nations […] is
ecologically unsustainable’ (p.27 [15]). But the HDR seems internally divided:
the next paragraph in the Conclusion says ‘with the right reforms, it is not too
late to cut greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels without sacrificing
economic growth: […] rising prosperity and climate security are not conflicting
objectives’ (p.27 [15]). To restrict this judgment to only low-income countries
appears to have been too politically sensitive for a Conclusion section, even in
the HDR.
The WDR argues that some climate change policies have co-benefits in
terms of growth and that climate change policy is not a choice between growth
and the environment. The two goals can be combined, though particular
patterns of consumption and production are dangerous. Development remains
treated as economic growth, but new ways of growing have to be devised. The
WDR goes further: ‘there is no reason to think that a low-carbon path must
necessarily slow economic growth’ (p.7): no reason, even though climateproofing redirects resources and even though reorientation takes time. The
arguments given are economic not ecological and consist of analogies with past
environmental regulations. Here is a second fundamental premise in the WDR
(the first being that economic growth is required to remove poverty):
economic growth does not need to be slowed in order to avoid dangerous
climate change. This certainty is not shaken by evidence elsewhere in the
WDR, such as that: ‘the coal-fired power plants proposed around the world
over the next 25 years are so numerous that their lifetime CO2 emissions would
equal those of all coal-burning activities since the beginning of the industrial
era. Only those facilities located close enough to the storage sites could be
retrofitted for carbon capture and storage (if and when that technology
becomes commercially available)’ (p.11). Investments already envisaged for the
next couple of decades may lock the world into a high-emissions pattern.
4.4. System inertia -- hence a policy focus on LDCs ?
Both the HDR and the WDR address ‘inertia’ in the processes around climate
change, using also other metaphors. The WDR applies the theme to more
issues and declares ‘Inertia is the defining characteristic of the climate
challenge’ (WDR: p.3). The first type of inertia, which both reports address,
concerns the nature of climate change: the emissions of today affect GHG
concentrations, temperatures and sea levels for hundreds or even thousands of
years. So a delay in mitigation now makes it almost impossible to avoid
crossing the threshold of 2ºC warming that both reports warn against.
14
Both reports also consider inertia in economies. If changes are not made
today in LDCs’ investment patterns, their economies will become ‘locked’—
like those of rich countries, it is argued—in patterns of production that will be
very difficult and costly to change in the future. If already developed
economies are seen as ‘locked’ in a specific model of production and
consumption that is hyper-expensive to ‘unlock’, then it is efficient to invest to
avoid this model being adopted by LDCs. That the HDR Overview uses the
structuralist language of ‘lock’ (seven uses, versus the WDR Overview’s five)
and ‘trap’ (five uses) is not surprising. But the WDR employs also the language
of ‘inertia’ in development processes, which leads in the same direction, and it
highlights two further types of inertia that reduce speed of response.
The next type affects research and development. According to the WDR,
the time required for innovation and development of new technologies and
energy sources is nearly always long. So, one must invest now in order to have
the required technology and systems when they will be needed. The final type
of inertia is related to the ‘ingrained’ behavior of individuals and organizations,
which is difficult to change (p.20). The WDR mentions high risk-aversion,
social norms that rigidify patterns of consumption and production, and the
ways in which political leaders and managers make decisions. This last type of
inertia, added to the previous ones including especially the rigidity of
economies, implies the need to re-direct people's behaviour at many levels,
especially in the presently ‘un-locked’ LDCs (see e.g. pp.17-18).
Overall, the physical metaphors of locking and inertia give a picture,
especially in the WDR, of high-income economies as fixed in their models of
production and consumption. So the policy focus should be on economies that
are not yet fixed, those of the LDCs. The framing of the problem leads to the
framing of the solution. In the WDR the focus on LDCs is furthered also by
the interpretation given to ‘efficiency’.
4.5 The ‘efficiency’ shift of attention regarding reduction of emissions,
from HIEs to LDCs
Unlike the WDR, the HDR refers to power when analyzing the causes of the
lack of emission reductions in HIEs. It points out that power imbalances
between countries, and between different groups within the same country (let
alone between the living and the unborn), have determined the negotiations
agendas and their unsatisfactory results. Lobbying by powerful business groups
is one reason why ‘caps on emissions have been set far too high’ in the
European Union’s Trading System (HDR p.20 [11]). In contrast, in the entire
WDR, a huge report, of the over 200 usages of ‘power’ and ‘powerful’, none
relate to power imbalances or powerful groups.
A key concept in both reports, but especially the WDR, through which
attention is shifted to reduction of emissions in LDCs, is ‘efficiency’.
15
According to the HDR ‘[l]ow levels of energy efficiency in developing
countries are currently a threat to climate change mitigation efforts’ (HDR p.22
[12]). The WDR advocates cuts in subsidies and increases in taxes for energy in
LDCs, to give incentives for more efficient use. It argues that the changes
required in agricultural practices and in use of land and water are in LDCs,
‘because agriculture in high-income countries is already close to maximum
feasible yields’ (p.17). LDC agriculture must become more productive without
increasing environmental damage; it must become more efficient like that in
HIEs. The WDR does not explain in terms of what values it considers
agricultural practices efficient. Elements such as nutrition habits, cultural needs
and ecological footprint, among others, are not considered in its assessments
of what is ‘efficient’. Rural communities are assumed to be in need of
modernization and technification, as it discusses in detail in its chapter 3.
‘Efficiency’ refers to the rate at which benefits are produced per quantum
of resources invested; ‘efficient’ means attaining the maximum attainable net
benefits. The relevant benefits and costs can be interpreted in narrower
technical or financial/economic or broad social terms. If the required output is
a certain reduction in emissions compared to what they would otherwise have
been, it is efficient to invest in LDCs, the WDR states, because less resources
are required to achieve the output. However, if the efficiency that concerns us
is in terms of human development per unit of emissions, then, due to the
enormous needs in the LDCs, might it be more efficient to cut emissions in
HIEs and redistribute emission quotas to LDCs?
Framing the problem in terms of ‘inertia’ and ‘efficiency’, as in the WDR,
leads to putting the spotlight for policy action upon developing rather than rich
countries. A focus on efficiency in energy use, as conventionally conceived,
may shift attention from total emissions, for which HIEs are much more
responsible, to inefficient usage, where LDCs are deemed worse.
4.6 A Human Rights issue?
According to the HDR, climate change ‘raises profoundly important questions
about social justice, equity and human rights across countries and generations’
(HDR p.8 [2]). The Report equates non-action in relation to climate change
with a violation of human rights. It cites and endorses strong formulations
such as ‘adaptation apartheid’ (pp.24 [13], 26 [18]) to describe a situation in
which countries with more resources will be able to invest in adaptation, while
countries with less income will not be prepared for the worst consequences of
climate change. Hence the HDR calls for ‘stronger international commitment
on adaptation’ (HDR p.13 [6]), in the name of human rights.
In contrast, the WDR Overview makes no mention of human rights or
‘social justice’ . Later, a text-box on ‘Ethics and climate change’ in Chapter 1
touches on human rights (and has the Report’s one reference to ‘justice’; p.53).
16
It considers the possible use of human rights as a criterion to evaluate impacts
of climate change, but focuses on use of formal legal channels within which
responsibility and harm must be decisively proven, and so lists problems for
taking human rights impact as a criterion in evaluation of climate change.
Similar narrowly legal understanding is evident in the 2006 WDR on equity and
development and in internal Bank debates about the role of rights (McNeill
and St. Clair, 2011). However, law is not the only relevant channel for applying
human rights concerns. Thus the HDR, in contrast, takes human rights as
priority criteria that should influence policy-level design.
In sum, the HDR frames the problem partly in terms of human rights and
human development, with much emphasis on duties of rich countries. The
WDR frames the problem more as one of inertia and inefficiency, with
emphasis on adjustments in poor countries. In the next section we consider to
what extent the differences in the problem-framings give rise to different
proposed solutions.
5
Framing the solutions
After the significantly different problem-framings, the solution-framings in the
two Reports are considerably closer. Both present a model that includes these
features: (1) Developing countries need more development. (2) High Income
Economies should adopt carbon-pricing: either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade
system. (3) These mechanisms will generate funds that should be administered
by a multilateral mechanism for transfer of finance and technology to LDCs
for both mitigation and adaptation. (4) The transfers will be programme-based
and conditional on LDC commitments to quantitative goals and policy changes
in terms of mitigation, adaptation and management of resources such as water,
land, and energy. (5) More reliance on competitive markets.
Less on the surface, while recognising that major emissions cuts must
happen in high-income economies if the 2ºC ceiling is to be respected the
reports accept that in a world of nation-states the rich nation-states are not
forced to make commitments. No global enforcement mechanisms are
proposed, nor any mechanism that would make financial commitments
automatic and obligatory. Even the HDR does not draw many institutional
implications from its arguments about human rights and who bears
responsibility for past damage. It does recommend ‘a national carbon budget in
all developed countries with targets for reducing overall emissions from a 1990
reference year incorporated into national legislation’ (p.29). But it fails to clarify
the principles of responsibility that are to guide action – which mixture of the
principles of causal responsibility (‘polluter pays’) and response-ability (‘ability
to pay’) does it advocate, asks Opschoor (2008: 1199). The WDR stays with
17
the vague term ‘equity’, and remains ‘singularly unclear about the principle of
equity which should underlie [its proposed] global deal’ (Storm, 2011: 402).
The reports implicitly appeal to the following: in the HDR, feelings of
sympathy; in both reports, an enlightened self-interest that is able to look
beyond today and tomorrow to the longer-term; and, perhaps combining the
two (Opschoor, 2008), identification of win-win options. Enlightened selfinterest is often advocated, especially in the WDR, in the unthreatening
language of ‘insurance’; unthreatening because it does not highlight the implied
appeal to show concern also for future generations. At some points the WDR
comes close to calling on rich countries to extend their calculations in terms of
‘self’ to their children and children’s children: ‘the losses implied by delays are
so large that there are clear economic benefits for high-income countries
committed to limiting dangerous climate change to finance early action in
developing countries’ (WDR, p.12). The WDR makes no claim on the basis of
broader sympathy and solidarity with poor countries. We look first at the
nature of the Reports’ commitment to more growth; second at the ideas about
insurance; and then at some of the detailed individual proposals.
5.1.
The intermediary means: more growth
Both reports see fighting climate change and fighting poverty as interrelated.
According to the WDR, economic growth enhances the resilience of countries
that are vulnerable to climate change. However, the Report also states that
growth is not sufficient because it is not fast enough, can increase vulnerability
to climate hazards, and is not equitable enough to assure that the poorest
people will be protected (WDR p.7). Hence the Report advocates growth along
a low-carbon path, with adaptation measures to take care of the more
vulnerable. This is for low-income countries.
We saw that for rich countries the HDR sometimes rejects an unending
growth-strategy but sometimes hesitates. The WDR’s location in a
development bank controlled by representatives of finance ministries in the
US, Europe and Japan guarantees its silence on foregoing growth in rich
countries. Instead it asserts that growth provides the resources to make all
necessary transitions. ‘WDR 2010’s almost exclusive focus on “win-win”
techno-fixes suggests, without solid grounds, that the structural shift to a low
carbon path can all be painless—without sacrificing growth and development’
(Storm, 2011: 400). Storm explores the full Report and suggests the flimsy
basis of many components and the incoherence of the overall structure:
‘…serious climate stabilization is not consistent with strong global income
growth …. However much WDR 2010 wants us to believe it’ (p.415).
18
5.2. Insurance and the underlying ethics
‘Efficiency’ is a language of maximizing aggregate net benefits, whereas
‘insurance’ is about covering against possibilities which are known to exist at
aggregate level but whose disaggregated occurrence at some lower level cannot
be predicted reliably. The Reports, especially the WDR, employ both
languages. They portray climate-change related investment as an insurance to
avoid the worst consequences of climate change: a familiar reassuring framing.
The HDR stresses that we have sufficient certainty about climate change –
the evidence is ‘overwhelming’ (p.12 [5], 14 [7]), ‘the debate is over and climate
scepticism is an increasingly fringe activity’ (12 [5]). US $1 of pre-disaster
prevention and preparation ‘can prevent losses of US $7’ (p.24 [14]). However
there is uncertainty about effects in detail and their distribution, so that an
insurance rationale is relevant; ‘if we value the well-being of our children and
grandchildren, even small risks of catastrophic events merit an insurance-based
precautionary approach’ (p.8 [2]).
Located next door to the US Congress and the fossil-fuel lobby, the World
Bank is more cautious, but shares these conclusions. The WDR explains that
given the difficulties of doing a simple cost-benefit analysis of climate change,
plus the uncertainties about the potential ‘catastrophic risks’ of the
phenomenon, it is justifiable to undertake ‘earlier and more aggressive action’,
which can be seen as ‘climate insurance’ (WDR p.9). ‘Spending less than half a
per cent of GDP [net] as “climate insurance” could well be a socially
acceptable proposition’ (p.9).
The WDR puts forward the argument for climate policy as insurance
rather tentatively. It employs more hedging than normal, reflecting the implicit
move beyond its usual aggregating economic cost-benefit calculations. The
short paragraph about climate insurance on page 9 contains ‘may well’, ‘could
be thought of’, and ‘could well be’. In contrast, hedging is absent when the
Report later sums up its policy diagnosis, much of which is far more
contentious: ‘The previous pages describe the many steps needed to manage
the climate change challenge.’ (p.18). Why such hedging about insurance? An
insurance argument in this context introduces an assumption of moral
community, at some level or levels: across generations, within nations, between
nations. Often the risks fall largely on the poor and the premiums on the rich.
Climate change insurance is largely for the benefit of future generations, mostly
abroad. Even if the argument is that HIEs should invest now in the efforts of
developing countries in adaptation and mitigation, because this investment
prevents future ‘catastrophic risks’ for all (p.9) – for example from an increase
of migration flows from South to North due to climate change – there is a
presumption of solidarity of the present day rich North with at least the future
generations in the North. In other words the WDR discussion relies on moral
premises that, unlike the HDR, it is not bold enough to recognize or discuss.
19
5.3 Proposals for mitigation and adaptation
The WDR remains vague about emissions ceilings for rich countries, let alone
for poor countries. Instead it uses a language of ‘acting together’ (pp. 3-4, 1011), in order to engage developing countries in the effort for mitigation and to
involve HIEs in the effort for financing. Acting together diminishes mitigation
costs for everyone; and postponing mitigation in developing countries because
of lack of finances would greatly increase the cost of preventing more than a
2ºC temperature rise. In that sense, investing in mitigation in developing
countries brings economic benefits not only for developing countries but for
high-income countries as well.
The HDR is again bolder. Its main mitigation strategy is for new emission
limits for the post-2012 Kyoto Protocol period that must be consistent with
the ‘global carbon budget’ (HDR p.19). That budget must be translated into
‘practical national strategies–and national carbon budgets’ (p.20 [10]). Reaching
these emissions targets will be supported by grants and loans from a Climate
Change Mitigation Facility (p.23 [12]). The HDR adds that ‘any multilateral
agreement without quantitative commitments from developing countries will
lack credibility in terms of climate change mitigation’ (HDR p.28 [16]).
The target of avoiding more than 2ºC warming requires further that by
2050 rich nations reduce their emissions by at least 80 percent relative to levels
of 1990, notes the HDR (p.15 [7]). While drawing on the same calculations
from UNFCCC, IPCC and others, the WDR mentions the figure only in the
fourth chapter of the whole Report, in a small text-box at the bottom of page
189, not in the Overview. The initial pages of the WDR address the
importance of reducing emissions drastically, but the Overview does not state
the percentage reductions required of HIEs. The WDR’s techno-optimism,
married to a faith in the magic of markets, plus firm tutelage from HIE
government representatives to the Bank, seem to result in leaving the details
hazy. While the Bank recognises the need for ‘almost complete decarbonization of the power sector’ (Storm, 2011: 410), it continues to fund vast
coal-fired power stations and puts its faith in questionable scenarios of hugescale economical carbon-capture-and storage, bio-fuels production, and so on.
Yet ‘half of the energy models reviewed in the [WD] Report conclude that the
required de-carbonization (before 2050) is technologically infeasible (at
acceptable costs, whatever that may mean)’ (loc. cit.).
The WDR emphasises the urgency of investment in adaptation in
LDCs. This covers ‘changing the kinds of risks people prepare for; where they
live; what they eat; and the way they design, develop, and manage
agroecological and urban systems’ (WDR p.10). The HDR goes somewhat
further. Given its diagnosis of the problem in terms of impacts on human
rights and human development, it identifies relevant responses differently and
more broadly. ‘Successful adaptation policies cannot be grafted on to systems
20
that are failing to address underlying causes of poverty, vulnerability and wider
disparities’ (p.27 [15]). It insists that HIEs are morally ‘obliged to support
adaptation capacity development’ (p.25 [14]), and brings in the threat of LDCs
responding to damage by invoking ‘the legal principles of protection from
harm and compensation for damage’ (p.25 [14]). It is outspoken about the
‘derisory’ response (p.25 [14]) so far by rich countries to help poor countries
adapt to damage caused by the rich; and insists on the rich’s obligation to
provide ‘new and additional’ support for adaptation, not divert other aid (p.26
[15]).
5.4. Mobilisation and orchestration of the proximate means -technology and finances – via a multilateral mechanism
North-to-South transfer of technologies and finance, for both mitigation and
adaptation, is a major topic in both reports. The WDR discusses it at special
length, perhaps reflecting Bank ambitions to coordinate the transfers. It uses
repeatedly the notion of a ‘global deal’ between high-income and developing
countries: the WDR Overview employs the term ‘deal’ (as a noun) sixteen
times, as in ‘global deal’; the HDR Overview not at all. Forester (2009) remarks
that the conception of bargaining a ‘deal’ rests on a picture of given fixed
identities and purposes, and can obscure many opportunities and dangers.
The WDR ‘deal’ includes, first, international transfers of clean
technologies, cost-sharing agreements, and financial support for the
incremental cost of adopting new technologies. Second, pricing carbon
through taxes or cap-and-trade will generate finance, though most finance
required for infrastructure will come via the private sector (WDR p. 24). Third,
the public sector must create incentives for climate action, flexibly regulate
private infrastructure service providers, supply information and education, and
eliminate market failures. Fourth, a system for financing and administration of
the deal. Additionally, says the WDR, the deal must be acceptable for highincome countries, which means their competitiveness must not suffer,
especially in relation to middle income countries (p.22).
The HDR too strongly advocates financial and technology transfers (p.23
[13]), but it frames the issues in terms of responsibility and social justice (p.28
[16]), and does not refer to maintaining HIE competitiveness. For pricing
carbon in HIEs, via carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade mechanisms to
generate finance, it takes the same line as the WDR.
Both reports advocate a planned, controlled and orchestrated process of
action in LDCs. Who will plan, control and orchestrate? Both reports see a
multilateral mechanism as ideal to manage the transfers from HIEs to LDCs.
Various statements in the WDR suggest the Bank’s wish to position itself
centre-stage in climate funds management, which is ‘no trivial matter’ (p.2). It
stresses the expertise needed, how ‘action must be enabled by an efficient and
21
effective international agreement, one that factors in development realities’
(p.19), and how 'the aid experience does offer critical lessons’ (p.22), including
the need for centralization rather than having innumerable funders. It hints
thus at a new ‘deal’ for the World Bank too, the self-styled ‘knowledge bank’.
In contrast, the HDR argues that: ‘While project-based support has an
important role to play, the locus for adaptation planning has to be shifted
towards national programmes and budgets’ (p.27 [15]).
5.5 Market mechanisms
Both Reports emphasize the role of markets to raise finance and re-incentivize
activity. According to the HDR’s Foreword, price mechanisms should be used
instead of quotas (p.5 [vii]); and ‘putting a price on carbon emissions [is] the
starting point’ (HDR p.20 [10]), which can be done through either a carbon tax
or cap-and-trade. The HDR seems not to mind which, and its final list of
recommendations includes suggestions for both options (p.29 [17]).
The reports agree that a global carbon market is a long-term project. In
the short run the markets will not be global, because ‘the world lacks the
required governance system’ (HDR p.20 [11]). The HDR proposes ‘rich
countries [should] develop carbon pricing structures [and] [a]s these structures
evolve, developing countries could be integrated over time as institutional
conditions allow’ (HDR p.20 [11]). The WDR gives a similar discussion in later
chapters.
The HDR recognises that ‘market pricing alone will not be enough’ for
carbon (p.13 [5]), given the numerous forms of market failure seen in carbon
trading. Governments must set regulatory standards and support low-carbon
R&D and deployment (HDR p.21 [11]). Although the influence of power
groups in the determination of the caps for emissions is acknowledged in the
Report, Opschoor complains that its ‘analysis remains superficial. So does the
discussion on the flaws of [the Clean Development Mechanism]’ (2008: 132).
Both Reports incline towards open global product markets. The HDR’s
mitigation strategy includes expansion of alternative fuels markets, such as for
ethanol, where tropical countries may have comparative advantage (HDR, p.22
[12]). The WDR argues the same (p.308) and advocates open markets in
general. ‘To ensure adequate water and nutrition for all, the world will have to
rely on an improved trade system less prone to large price shifts’ (p.14).
‘Improved’ is equated to more open and global, on the grounds that more
integrated world markets will allow LDCs access to rich country markets when
LDCs have surpluses, and will reduce local price fluctuations. But integrated
markets allow food to be moved out to areas of higher purchasing power, away
from poor people, and they allow food crops to be displaced by more lucrative
production for global markets on land from which poor people have been
displaced. Storm (2011) comments on the WDR’s lack of discussion of the
22
interests of ‘rural landless workers, the urban poor and the non-agricultural
workers’ as food prices rise (p.409), and on the assumptions that markets in
poor countries will generate the historically unprecedented required agricultural
productivity rises as climate deteriorates and populations rise. ‘The discrepancy
between “required” yield growth and “likely yield growth with moderate
warming” is huge in the developing world, but rather small in the rich
regions…[Further,] The principal uncertainties in the estimates are all on the
downside’ (Storm p.409).
The WDR focuses on an area that is considered much less in the HDR:
changes in the management of energy supply, agricultural practices, water and
other resources in LDCs. To cut GHG emissions in LDCs without sacrificing
growth, the WDR advocates higher fuel taxes and reduction of energy
subsidies (pp.14-15). In contrast, it says nothing in the Overview about energy
prices, subsidies and taxes in high-income economies, such as the USA. The
pricing measures in LDCs should be accompanied, according to the WDR, by
other tools for advancing energy efficiency, such as norms, regulatory reform
and financial incentives that attract private power companies. Such reforms are
not scheduled for the North because rich countries are supposedly ready for
adapting without help, both reports imply. Proposals to further privatize
energy supply would leave national states with less control and capacity to
manage shocks related to energy. Control over energy production would
probably lie in the hands of international investors. The opening of LDC
markets can bring greater control over resources in LDCs by powerful market
actors, funding agencies and, indirectly, rich country governments. The HDR
says far less on systems for the management of resources in LDCs, but the
multilateral mechanisms that it envisages might similarly open the door for this
in weaker economies.
6
Two ways of approaching the future?
The structured comparison of the problem-framing and solution-framing in
the two Reports, supported by attention to key vocabulary, has given us many
insights beyond those in earlier review essays such as by Opschoor (2008) and
Storm (2011) who do not analyse the texts systematically or comparatively.
Similarly, we go significantly beyond Flottum and Dahl (2012) who compare
linguistic content but do not extend this into a frame analysis in terms of issues
from the literatures on climate change, policy analysis and international
development organisations. We suggest two major findings.
First, the HDR 2007/8 and the WDR 2010 represent importantly
different perspectives on the problem of climate change in relation to lowincome people. For the Human Development Report the problem is a
fundamental civilizational issue, in which the basic life quality and even
23
sometimes the lives of poor people--‘rural communities in Bangladesh, farmers
in Ethiopia and slum dwellers in Haiti’ (p.10 [3])--are endangered, in large
degree by actions by others, in rich countries, who thus have a compelling
moral obligation to provide support and to modify their current patterns of
living. The HDR makes frequent use of terms and phrases like ‘the world’
(including as an actor, such as ‘If the world acts now…’; p.10 [3]), ‘humanity’,
‘the world’s poor’, ‘the international community’, ‘human community’, ‘our
children’, ‘our children and grandchildren’, ‘future generations’, ‘the world’s
poor and future generations’. None of this language characterises the World
Development Report (see Table 2). Its Overview never mentions
grandchildren or future generations, and rarely employs even the pronoun ‘we’,
the indicator of shared fate and shared concern and commitment. Its favoured
terms are ‘manage’ and ‘efficiency’. The contrast of vocabularies shown in the
table is stark and revealing.
Beyond the local messages conveyed by choices of terms, we have looked
for the overall messages embodied in patterns of argumentation (van Dijk
2009). Section 4 compared the main problem specifications across the two
Overviews, and Section 5 did so for their policy designs. We saw important
differences between the two Reports in framing the problem space, differences
that have implications for the framing of the solutions space and the choice of
policy options. The WDR evinces less urgency, which reflects its greater
concern with monetary magnitudes and hence implicitly with the interests of
those with more resources to protect themselves from possible future stresses.
The HDR’s reliance on a currency of human welfare highlights that lives can
be broken and stunted, and contributes to its greater sense of urgency and
willingness to query unending economic growth in rich countries. These
differences are substantive, though the Reports also share ideas about inertia
and possible lock-in, which can, together with a standard market-based
conceptualisation of ‘efficiency’, direct attention primarily towards influencing
the faster-growing LDCs rather than to major changes in high-income
countries.
24
TABLE 2
Vocabularies of the Overview chapters in HDR 2007/8 and WDR 20101
We
Children
our children
Grandchildren
future generations
the world’s poor and future generations
the world’s poor
the poor [as a noun; in addition to uses of
‘the world’s poor’]
the world
Human
Humanity
community/communities
the international community
global community
human community
56 (29)
11 (3)
4 (2)
3 (1)
19 (0)
6 (0)
17 (0)
12 (0)
11 [2]
3
0
0
0
0
0
1 [1]
32 (8)
102 (19)
8 (0)
11 (2)
2 (1)
1 (0)
2 (0)
13 [6]
8 [2]
1
9
1
0
0
climate smart
efficiency/efficient/inefficient/inefficiency
Effective
0 (0)
21 (1)
2
9
48 (4)
12
Consumption
threshold/s
catastrophe/s/catastrophic
‘window of opportunity’
insurance/ insurers/ insure
climate insurance
precaution / precautionary
7 (0)
7 (0)
13 (2)
3 (0)
3 (3)
0 (0)
1 (0)
19 (0)
1 [1]
7 [2]
0
16 [2]
5
1
Fight
5 (4)
1
challenge/s
Can
manage/(mis)management/mismanaging
27 (6)
32 (3)
6 (0)
10 [2]
77 (3)
26 [8]
The HDR Overview is electronically available as a file that includes front
matter and the Foreword, itself an important statement that functions as close partner
to the Overview. Table 1 distinguishes word-occurrences in the HDR Overview and
the Foreword/Contents (the latter occurrences are given in round brackets.) Their
sum (plus occurrences in the front matter) gives the total count for the downloadable
file. The WDR 2010’s Foreword is far less significant, only a third the length of the
HDR’s, and is functionally distinct and presented in a separate file. The main word
counts in Table 1 for the WDR Overview exclude its References section, since the
HDR Overview has no References; counts in square brackets concern the References.
1
25
Our second major finding is that, compared to their significantly different
diagnoses of the problem space, the two reports are surprisingly similar in
major policy proposals. They largely share a technocratic, market-based
programme: a carbon price in rich countries, which will help to finance a global
insurance system of efficient mitigation measures and prudent adaptation
measures in poorer countries and support the growth that those countries
need; a multilateral mechanism for conditional, expert, program-based
planning and disbursement of the support; which together with an increased
reliance on global markets will imply greater control by powerful global actors
over LDC economies, combined with a lack of multilateral enforcement
mechanisms for rich countries. There are also differences: the HDR calls for
carbon budgets for all countries and more program flexibility for LDCs, and is
explicit about the ethical underpinnings—solidarity over time and obligations
of rich countries arising from the damage to others that they are responsible
for—which together imply (but here the HDR hesitates) limits to further
economic growth in rich countries; whereas the WDR tries to proceed with
only a language of self-interest and win-win ‘deals’, with little or no talk of
Northern obligations or self-limitation, let alone of human rights. Yet the bulk
of the proposals are the same.
Following its stress on human rights and ethical principles, the HDR does
relatively little to apply those ideas in policy proposals (Opschoor, 2008: 1201).
It takes for granted that its proposals are compatible with the intrinsic value of
human beings and their rights, though market mechanisms are only suitable
where it is possible and appropriate to price things (and people). It does little
to query existing climate policy mechanisms as potentially negative to
vulnerable people; to articulate possible creative new solutions driven by local
actors; and to use existing policy frameworks, laws and norms and other UN
specialized agencies to convert its framing of the problems into a framing of
actions. Such proposals were present in the HDR 2000 on the relations
between human development and human rights (UNDP 2000). The 2000
Report was a more consistent document, outlining policy options for
development work aligned with human rights principles and the constitutional
rights established in many countries.
Whether the key constraints were the training of HDR 2007/8’s team in
economics schools in the North, its modest budget compared to the World
Bank’s research resources, political pressures within and upon a multilateral
agency in a global political environment resistant to address the challenges that
climate change poses to growth driven development models, or even other
factors, would require a separate study to try to answer. Fault lines may be
sensed between the HDR’s Foreword, co-written by Kemal Dervis, the UNDP
Administrator, who had spent a quarter-century in the World Bank, and its
Overview, led by Kevin Watkins, who had spent much of his career in Oxfam,
26
which espouses a rights-based approach. The Foreword, while steeped in ‘We’
language, insists on the priority of market solutions (p.5 [vii]). The HDR
2007/8 seems a classic UN report, influenced by inspiring humanist
perspectives but with lesser resources for research than the WDR and little
associated funding for programs with which to induce others to accept its
ideas. It was perhaps then led to propose a synthetic set of practical measures
that did not offend potential funders and largely relied on proposals worked
out by richer agencies.
In contrast, the WDR represents a working-out of a mainstream economic
vision of a world smoothly ordered by corporations and markets, and is
marked by convenient omissions and techno-optimism wherever required for
maintaining this vision (Storm, 2011) and by absence of reflection regarding
the models of development that have led to the climate crises. In the WDR’s
organizational and intellectual context, climate change and poverty are
technical problems to be addressed by economic policy and technological
innovation, led by the development aid bureaucracies and global business. The
problems will be resolved, not intensified, by economic growth. Societies
become judged then according to their aggregate consumption achievements,
more than by the way they treat their most vulnerable members; and marketbased ‘solutions’ are put forward to whatever difficulties may arise, such as
climate change (O’Brien et al. 2010; St.Clair, 2009). ‘Economic growth alone is
unlikely to be fast or equitable enough to counter threats from climate change’
acknowledges the WDR in one of its summary ‘Main Messages’, but this can
supposedly be compensated for by the carbon-pricing and multilateral-guided
programs for mitigation and adaptation that the Report outlines.
As climate impacts become more visible and a global agreement on
mitigation measures remains elusive, and as research investigating current
policy options for climate solutions unveils serious failures and even negative
impacts on the poor and vulnerable, the analysis presented here tells us much
of relevance for the role of multilateral institutions in the current debate on
climate change and development. The structuralist belief in ‘lock-in’ already in
the North, and fear of an imminent high-carbon ‘lock-in’ too in the South, led
the HDR 2007/8 to share the mainstream focus on change of direction in the
South rather than the North. Its belief in ‘the fierce urgency of the now’ rushed
the HDR to a full policy package designed in terms of various instruments
already available on the tables of its member-state governments. Yet those
instruments may not respond well to the basic ethical and human rights
concerns that HDR 2007/8 had forcefully articulated. While support is
building for critical views such as expressed in the HDR 2007/8 (Books, Grist
and Brown 2009; Lohman, 2006, Marino and Ribot 2012, 2011; Storm ed.
2009), the failure to convert its critique far into a distinctive policy approach
shows how development multilaterals can become locked in the dominant
27
dichotomy between North and South and ineffective in unsettling
unsustainable and unjust models of development.
The United Nations Intellectual History Project (1999-2010) concluded
that to achieve practical impact a movement of ideas needs an intellectual
vision, consistent with and partnered by an inspiring set of values; and further,
that these two must become action-relevant by being operationalised in actionagendas and methodologies and practical proposals, and institutionalised in
organizations, processes and networks that carry the ideas forward and
continually press for their use (Jolly, Emmerij, Weiss, 2009). The HDR 2007/8
may have fallen short in its network of active cooperators, and especially (and
consequently) in conversion of its vision and values into practical means rather
than taking over means that have been devised to express different visions and
values. By implication, a new Human Development Report on climate change
would be appropriate, whether by UNDP or others, to go further with that
conversion, on the basis of insights from a broader network and perhaps a
different process of knowledge production, possibly more akin to that of the
IPCC. The inconsistency shown by HDR 2007/8 may also indicate more than
weakness in a single report. It could suggest that thinking about new policy
options to address the ethical and human rights challenges raised by climate
change requires more distance from existing power structures, rather than
closeness. Perhaps besides agency Reports, new process models need
consideration, such as globally coordinated assessments of available thinking,
along the lines of the IPCC assessment procedures.
Acknowledgement: Our thanks go to Trine Dahl, Kjersti Fløttum, Desmond McNeill,
Kevin Watkins, three anonymous referees, and participants in seminars in The Hague,
Durban and Oslo for valuable reactions and suggestions.
28
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