The Making, Becoming and Functioning of IPCC: A Transnational Legal Process Perspective
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Chen, Wen-Wei
Abstract
The governance of climate change is a transnational legal process as proposed by international legal scholars such as Harold Koh and Jiuun-rong Yeh. In 1998, international society established Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to improve the understanding and consensus of climate change governance in a global scale. IPCC, established by United Nations Environment Programme and World Meteorological Organization under the auspice of United Nations General Assembly, incorporates both individual scientists and government representatives into the institution, in order to shape the global scientific consensus of climate change governance. In the past decades, IPCC has served as one promoter of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol by delivery of several global authoritative scientific assessment reports. Besides the promotion of global climate change convention systems, IPCC has also expanded its membership, strengthened its internal regulation in the past twenty years. From this perspective, the institution of IPCC should be served as a dynamic legal process. Moreover, IPCC is heterogeneous to other international regimes in the aspect of its membership, internal regulation and organizational function. Therefore, to observe and analysis the legal process of IPCC becomes crucial. The thesis is a research based on the abovementioned prerequisites. In order to better sketch the general picture of global climate change governance, this research aimed to answer the following questions: What is the process of IPCC’s making, becoming and functioning? What characteristics does the legal process of IPCC show? What forces have driven the organizational and functional development IPCC? What legal theoretical meaning does the legal process of IPCC hint? And finally, where and how do we locate IPCC within the system of global climate change governance? To answer the questions, the thesis was composed of the following parts. Part 1 mapped the research by discussing the existing literature, the to-be-answered questions and relevant theoretical approaches. Part 2 sketched the historical context of the development of climate change science and international atmospheric research regimes as the background knowledge, in order to describe the origin of IPCC in 1988. Subsequently, Part 3 focused on the organizational process of IPCC by observing its membership, institutional body and working procedure. Later in Part 4, the author categorized IPCC’s organizational and functional development into four historical phases. The author proposed that IPCC’s organizational and functional developments are interactive and mutually corresponding to each other. Part 5 addressed the characteristics of IPCC’s legal process, together with the analysis of the driving forces to IPCC’s making, becoming and functioning. The author proposed that, while climate change served as a scientifically sensitive global issue area, both the political structure and the scientific professionals had served as the driving force to the development of IPCC. Moreover, as the global consensus to govern climate change incrementally grew, demands on the scientific information for climate change governance had also become other driving forces. The paper concluded in Part 6. The author concluded that notwithstanding the legal process of IPCC well echoed Harold Koh’s transnational legal process theory, the example of IPCC had underpinned another possible answer to the question which international legalists have always tried to answer: why nations make international law and obey. The making, becoming and functioning of IPCC had showed that scientific uncertainty to govern climate change served as a more satisfactory answer to why nations develop and obey the norms. Given IPCC served as part of global climate change governing system, IPCC is and ought to be considered a feasible governing model in dealing with climate change, just as administrative branches and courts do in dealing with other issue areas in the transnational legal context.
Subjects
climate change
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
transnational legal process
scientific assessment
global governance
SDGs
Type
thesis
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