Multi-layered differentiation in the climate regime: the gradual path from Rio to Paris

According to a commonly held view, states have fundamentally re-organized the differentiation between developed and developing countries in the climate regime in the 2015 Paris Agreement. In this view, the Paris Agreement replaces the ‘rigid’, ‘static’, and ‘dichotomous’ system of differentiation based on Annexes I and II to UN Framework Convention on Climate Change with a more ‘flexible’, ‘dynamic’, and ‘subtle’ solution. I argue that this view is incomplete. In fact, the early climate regime included additional layers of differentiation that go beyond the binary distinction between Annex and non-Annex parties. Through a discussion of three episodes in which states adjusted the system to the ‘special circumstances’ of regime members, I show how informalization and individualization – two hallmarks of differentiation in the Paris Agreement – had become central well before COP-21 and that the international climate regime thus developed a lot more gradually than is often assumed.