On Earth Day eve, more than a dozen scholars gathered at Horchow Hall for a brainstorming session on how to strengthen international collaboration in tackling climate change. To open the conversation, Yale’s Sunil Amrith posed a question.
“Why do some multilateral agreements succeed, while others fail?” said Amrith, the Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.
In addition to faculty members from across the Yale campus, the discussion included Carlos Alvarado Quesada, former president of Costa Rica, and Maria Ivanova ’99 M.A., ’99 M.E.M., ’06 Ph.D., director of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University and an expert on international environmental governance.
Successful treaties, Ivanova said, include mechanisms for holding parties accountable.
“When [treaties] have an architecture that ensures the countries are held accountable for the commitments that they’ve made, we can translate ambition into results,” said Ivanova, who developed the Environmental Conventions Index, a measurement tool that monitors countries’ progress implementing major international agreements on pollution, hazardous waste, protecting wetlands, and combating trade in endangered species.
And any treaty is only as strong as the commitment of its participants, added Alvarado Quesada, who is now professor of diplomacy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. All treaties, he said, require some faith to succeed.
The session marked the launch of “Regional Approaches to Global Challenges,” an initiative by the MacMillan Center to apply its regional expertise to discussions of pressing global challenges.
“The MacMillan Center has always been Yale’s hub for regional studies, combining seven regional studies councils with our global programs,” said Amrith, who is also the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “We believe there is a distinctive opportunity at this moment of global conflict and tension to reinvigorate what MacMillan can do in terms of applying our regional expertise to issues of global importance.”
For this first discussion, those possessing that expertise included faculty from across Yale, including from the School of Architecture, the School of Public Health, the School of the Environment, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Yale School of Medicine, Yale Law School, Yale Planetary Solutions, and the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture.
And there was Alvarado Quesada and Ivanova, who were both on campus to participate in the MacMillan Center’s annual George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture, which focused on the potential of regional collaboration, as opposed to global negotiations, to overcome international gridlock on climate change.
We believe there is a distinctive opportunity at this moment of global conflict and tension to reinvigorate what MacMillan can do in terms of applying our regional expertise to issues of global importance.
Alvarado Quesada, who was president of Costa Rica from 2018 to 2022, brought a pertinent experience to the conversation. In 2019, he initiated a national decarbonization plan that aimed to achieve zero net carbon emissions by 2050, putting it in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement — the international treaty on climate change adopted in 2016. Today, Costa Rica’s plan remains in effect.
But advancing climate policy, he said, can elicit political costs. Too often conversations about climate change become fragmented into exchanges about obscure topics — such as decarbonization. While these are concepts that experts can measure and theorize about, he said, focusing on such terms can also make it difficult to convey to the general public that climate measures will protect and improve their own well-being.
If he could do it all again, Alvarado Quesada said, he would come up with another name for his government’s decarbonization plan. The word “decarbonization,” he said, inadequately communicates how the actual plan benefits Costa Rica’s residents — by improving the national economy, protecting the environment, and transitioning to a more sustainable transportation system.
“People will say, ‘Mr. President, you don’t care about us, you care about decarbonization,’” said Alvarado Quesada. “’You don’t care about our livelihoods, you care about decarbonization.’”
There is a “crisis of imagination,” he added, that hampers efforts to galvanize public support for climate policies. Rather than narrowing the conversation about climate change into academic terms, he said, leaders should construct a “wholeness perspective” that conveys to ordinary people how climate measures will respect their agency and enhance their lives.
“How do we create that wholeness?” Alvarado Quesada said. “That is perhaps one of the most challenging problems we face.”
Another key piece in creating meaningful climate agreements is finding ways to keep all participants united and moving together toward established goals, said Daniel Esty, the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at the School of the Environment and Yale Law School.
Esty, who served on the U.S. delegation for the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, said that during U.N. climate conferences these days he will hear businesspeople and government officials publicly declare their enthusiasm for “transformational change” only to privately express concerns later that they will pay a price professionally for embracing change if their competitors do not.
“I have come to believe, and I say this with some sadness, that the world is too complicated and diverse to hold together in too much of a multilateral structure,” Esty said. “… I actually think we may have to go to a values-based approach where parties that are like-minded will structure plural lateral agreements at least as the starting point.”
We don’t have to take one idea and scale it. We need to see lots of ideas that work at local level.
Implementation science, which is used in public health to bridge the gap between scientific discoveries and real-world application, could help promote implementation of climate treaties, said Jeannette Ickovics, the Samuel and Liselotte Herman Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health.
“It’s about adopting an integrated evidence-based practice,” Ickovics said. “It’s addressing a research-practice gap. It’s a systematic study of implementation which includes both barriers and facilitators… Stakeholder engagement is very central to implementation. Science can’t do it without stakeholder engagement.”
‘A sense of agency’
During the conversation, Alvarado Quesada noted that it is important to devise climate solutions that can be adapted to fit the needs of different countries and communities.
“I really like the idea of adaptation,” he said. “Why? Because, by definition, adaptations occur locally. It’s about the livelihoods of people. It’s about flooding. It’s about drought. It’s about jobs. It’s about climate change. But the implementation is very close to the stakeholders. It provides them a sense of agency.”
Julie Zimmerman, Yale’s vice provost for planetary solutions, suggested that it may be more effective to “number up” multiple policy interventions proven effective on a local level instead of the typical practice of scaling up a single policy across a country or region.
“We don’t have to take one idea and scale it. We need to see lots of ideas that work at local level,” Zimmerman said. “So, number up instead of scale up.”
She also mentioned the importance of building coalitions of the willing.
“We don’t have to agree on everything, but we have to agree on direction,” she said. “And how you move in that direction is up to you.”
Following the brainstorming session, Alvarado Quesada and Ivanova joined Amrith for a conversation during the Walker Lecture at Henry Luce Hall. During that discussion, Alvarado Quesada shared an example of a regional initiative that spurred international efforts to protect the Earth’s biodiversity.
In 2004, he said, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, and Colombia partnered to establish the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor, which protects a vast swath of biodiversity-rich ocean. The agreement helped to inspire what is known as the “30x30” initiative, a global effort (endorsed by nearly 200 countries) that aims to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land, freshwater, and ocean area by 2030.
“It’s multilateralism at its best,” Alvarado Quesada said.
