Procedural justice and (in)equitable participation in climate negotiations

Review
This submission deals with an important topic - equity within the UNFCC negotiations at the various Conferences of the Parties. It is argued that if a country delegation is too small then the that country is disadvantaged in relative terms as the COP negotiations at COP meetings are now so complex involving many sessions of varying degrees of formality some of which run in parallel. In such circumstances small delegations may well be disadvantaged.

The paper is well written with some small matters of detailed English that may need attention at copy-setting stage should the authors revise their manuscript successfully. None of these are major issues and most would require one or two words to be edited.

A weakness of the paper is its tentative nature. Although many factors affect the ability of a delegation to negotiate its main thrust is that there is some "sufficient" size below which ineffectiveness is more likely than not. A number of 15 delegates per country delegation is suggested but it is crystal clear where this number has emerged from. One or two extra sentences may be sufficient to clarify a little more how this figure has been derived - is the basis for this number quantitative (e.g. is it the average number of delegates in some sub-set of countries?) or (semi)-qualitative (e.g. based on the number of delegates needed to attend say half the sessions at recent COPs?).

Another weakness is the lack of any statistical treatment of the data. The paper has a good deal of data behind it - shown in tables at the end. But the data are not analysed in any way. Some of the figures would be a good deal stronger if, for example, the relationship between variables could be analysed as a correlation. Spearman's rank correlation coefficient is easy to calculate and it, or a similar non-parametric measure might make the argument about links between delegation size and income/population more robust. There may be reasons why this does not seem an appropriate approach - for example the high variation in delegate numbers between different COPs but if this is the case then some that could be more easily argued if the average delegation size could be provided alongside some measure of variation (say a standard deviation, a range with a median, or a standard error).

I suggest the authors try to improve the statistical analysis of the results and clarify the semi-quantitative or semi- qualitative nature of their underlying data. They would then be able to reduce reliance on tentative wording in other parts of the submission. Arguments can be made to the contrary, but I feel that if these two matters were addressed in some way that would strengthen the paper --- and they should not take long to do.

I also wondered whether it would not be helpful, in terms of the completeness of the paper, to make some reference to two other matters (perhaps brief mention only and that perhaps to explain why these issues are not covered in this paper). First, there is the way some groups of countries may act in concert at COPs to improve their negotiating position. I am thinking here of groupings like the OECD, the EU, the Association of Small Island States etc. This must have an effect on negotiating power and so some comment is probably needed in either the Introduction or the Discussion if not both.

Likewise, it would be good to recognise the size of non-country delegations and, perhaps also, the presence of non-governmental delegates as part of country delegation. I am thinking here especially of the impact that the commercial "fossil fuel" delegation which I believe has outnumbered even the largest country delegations.

I can imagine that the authors would want to argue that bringing these matters into this paper would dilute its main thrust so these points on what might be called "pluri-delegations" are only suggestions for improving the paper.

Note:
This review refers to round 1 of peer review.

Review
Dear Authors,

Thank you for your valuable work. You convincingly argue that small delegation sizes are a key problem for procedurally just negotiations in the UNFCCC framework. I do think your article fits well within the scope of the journal. I shall limit my main remarks mostly to part 3, “Procedural justice in the climate negotations”, as my relevant expertise is limited to this. I will add some minor remarks after that. Most of my remarks are meant as mere suggestions, as in my view the paper does not have any major deficits.

Remarks on chapter 3

(1) You might want to consider elaborating more on why procedural justice is of particular relevance to climate negotiations. You have referred to Luke Tomlinson a couple of times, and I think he is a very good starting point. A key difficulty in these massive COP negotiations is that parties are often unable to agree to what is a good and just outcome. Different countries and peoples may have different but still reasonable conceptions of what a just outcome looks like. Tomlinson (2015) uses the term of “reasonable disagreement” to describe this situation. The same term is used in (Brandstedt and Brülde, 2019), a paper which should be of interest to you, I will refer to this below. Both Brandstedt and Tomlinson then make the point that adhering to principles of procedural justice is not only important because this kind of justice is morally relevant in itself. It is also instrumentally valuable, in that parties might be more willing to agree to an outcome once a just decision procedure has been followed. The phenomenon of reasonable disagreement is very prevalent in the UNFCCC, hence the heightened instrumental value of procedural justice.
(2) You may want to consider using a somewhat more elaborate or detailed version of procedural justice and further develop your notion of participation. You have already referenced (Grasso and Sacchi, 2015), who do an excellent job of providing a detailed list of elements of procedural justice: Voice, Information, Transparency, Correctability, Respect, Consistency. Another comprehensive notion of procedural climate justice can be found in (Brandstedt and Brülde, 2019), who mention accuracy, transparency, correctability, participation.
a. In chapter 3, you could mention that transparency is an important element of procedural justice. This would make your case for limiting delegation sizes / COP sizes stronger in part 5. I found it one of the most interesting points in your paper, the idea to limit COP sizes, as that might really help increase transparency. I do think that oversized COPs can harm negotiations. You could strengthen this point by making the norm of transparency an explicit part of your notion of procedural justice
b. You might want to differentiate between participation in the process of choice and voice as the option to voice your concerns. These are two different things and can be separate norms, so it should be clear which of the two you are talking about.
c. As to your paragraph on equal versus sufficient opportunity to influence decisions: this is indeed a tricky topic. I want to bring your attention to a passage in (Tomlinson, 2015), where he dwells on what constitutes a good criterion for who should be allowed to have a say in a decision. This is in his chapter 4, “Getting a seat at the table”. He claims that if you were to try to include all who are affected by a decision, this might prove infeasible. But, he continues, you should definitely include all those potentially coerced by a decision, that is, you should include those actors that may have their autonomy affected or violated by a decision. Back to your passage on sufficient opportunity: this coercion / autonomy criterion might be a way in which you could operationalize what constitutes “sufficient opportunity” to influence decisions.
d. Given the above-mentioned elaborate conceptions of procedural justice, you might want to make more explicit that participation is but one of multiple elements of procedural justice. Then you could either give reasons for why you focus on participation or include other principles (voice, transparency, accuracy) … For another notion of procedural climate justice with multiple distinct elements you can also consider looking at my own work on procedural climate justice, (De Ridder et al., 2023). It goes without saying that I do not demand that you consider this, it might just be an interesting read and help you in further developing your notion of procedural justice.

Other remarks
• Do you have data on the compositions of delegations? It would be helpful to know what fraction of delegates actually negotiates / participates in discussions and what fraction is just there for logistical / other purposes
• The graphs need some work
o I find the line in figure 1 somewhat misleading, as it looks like a process / development over time, where it is not that. Maybe use points / markers instead of the line to display the averages.
o For figure 3A, to actually find a relationship between income and average delegation size it might be more appropriate to use not a categorical x-axis but (log) income values on the x axis, then display the actual data points and add a simple regression line. Same applies to 3B, just with the actual population size as x values
• As to your last sentences “As such, the negotiations fail to adequately represent all citizens and stakeholders. Indigenous peoples, future generations, or non-humans are marginalised and un(der)-represented in intra-state climate negotiations. True procedural justice would thus require a reform of the UNFCCC.” This I would phrase somewhat more carefully. These are grand claims and you have spent most of your paper substantiating other claims. You could consider rephrasing the issues to do with indigenous peoples and future generations as further problems for procedural justice to be considered in further research. Moreover, the UNFCCC as such is not the one and only and potentially not even the main governance level / tool to solve climate change. Many issues will need to be solved on a lower governance level, like state or regional or communal levels. I believe that the issues of transparency, participation, voice and so on are very well complemented by a principle of subsidiarity: decisions should be taken on a as low governance level as possible. This could be a suggestion for how to limit the size and scope of COPs: only consider issues on COPs which indeed need global coordination, and delegate other issues to lower governance levels.
• Delete “here” in sentence 3
• On page 9, the required quadrupling of support, where does that number come from?
• Chapter 6, paragraph 2, sentence one: delete “here”. Sentence 2: delete “it” before “providing”


As I have already mentioned above, all these points are to be seen merely as suggestions (except maybe for my points on the figures, as I find the figures do not display optimal empirical practice). I hope there are some points that you find interesting and that offer an improvement to your paper.

Sincerely,
Kilian de Ridder
Vienna, 24th of August 2024.


Brandstedt, E., Brülde, B., 2019. Towards a Theory of Pure Procedural Climate Justice. J Appl Philos 36, 785–799. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12357
De Ridder, K., Schultz, F.C., Pies, I., 2023. Procedural climate justice: Conceptualizing a polycentric solution to a global problem. Ecological Economics 214, 107998. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2023.107998
Grasso, M., Sacchi, S., 2015. Impure Procedural Justice in Climate Governance Systems. environ values 24, 777–798. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327115X14420732702699
Tomlinson, L., 2015. Procedural Justice in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: Negotiating Fairness. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17184-5

Note:
This review refers to round 1 of peer review.