Transcripciones y adaptaciones en sistema Braille

Taking a historical view requires a long time-period for inquiry, but UNFCCC negotiations and policy are well-documented and UNFCCC documentation is largely publicly available, providing primary sources covering the entirety of the period in question. The full range of data sources that were used for the qualitative analysis is set out here:

4.5.1 Official COP output

The key primary source for analysis of how the UNFCCC itself has evolved was official policy documents produced at each annual COP meeting, beginning with the 1992 UNFCCC Convention itself then continuing in 1995, before which no COP was held because the UNFCCC was being ratified. These documents detail the policies agreed by UNFCCC Parties across the spectrum of UNFCCC governance, and therefore represent the official output of the institution. This can be construed as the rules created by the institution that detail what is expected of Parties and how policy areas will function. Content includes the official institutional link between the COP and GEF, guidance from the COP to the GEF and other funds created subsequently, the governing instruments of the Adaptation Fund and GCF, and specific climate finance commitments and instructions, as well as myriad other references to climate finance contained within other policy areas such as guidance for national governments’ communications to the UNFCCC and deforestation policy. The detail and specificity vary, but this is the highest level of policy and covers all Parties, so granularity in terms of implementation by each national government is not included.

4.5.2 Earth Negotiations Bulletin

Official COP output is vital to show what policies have been agreed by Parties and how institutional rules are developing, but these documents cannot tell us how that agreement has been reached or reveal the process of negotiation. In order to go beyond COP output, Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) commentaries offer the best available insight into negotiation processes. The ENB is a balanced and independent service produced by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), a Canadian non-profit organisation. ENB staff produce a 2-4 page summary and commentary immediately after

each day of UN environment and development negotiations, including UNFCCC negotiations, and a longer summary at the end of each meeting. The service began as an NGO joint initiative at the 5th _{preparatory meeting in advance of the 1992 Earth Summit,}

when the Convention was signed, and has continued ever since (IISD 2017). The ENB records used for this project cover main annual UNFCCC COP meetings, multiple meetings of states under the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and Subsidiary Body for Science and Technology Advice (SBSTA) where policy is developed and brought to the COP meetings. In addition, meetings under the AWG-LCA and ADP processes that led to COP-15 in 2009 and COP-21 in 2015 respectively, and various other informal or intercessional meetings are included.

UNFCCC negotiations are not minuted or transcribed, but the ENB offers a detailed and consistent commentary that gives some insight into the positions taken by different countries, key points of disagreement and how negotiations progressed in advance of the final policies articulated in official COP output. This insight is vital, since historical institutionalist analysis involves seeking evidence of whether and how actors have adapted to each other and to institutional rules, and whether and how previous policy has shaped expectations and negotiating positions, for example in terms of how developing country actors alter their demands or choose language that indicates they have adapted to institutional rules. The ENB has been used as an authoritative source of information about negotiations by numerous scholarly publications (e.g. Müller, 2006, p. 6,12,16,23-24; Betzold, 2010, pp. 138–140; Winkler and Beaumont, 2010, p. 644,646; Rietig, 2014, pp. 381–384; Pauw et al., 2018, p. 24), and more centrally in a small number of other analyses of UNFCCC negotiations, such as Castro et al. (2014), to provide detailed insight into the policy process.

4.5.3 Party submissions and other UNFCCC documentation

Parties are able to submit documents to the UNFCCC before and during meetings, providing a means to articulate their perspectives or make proposals on how policy should be drafted. With official policy the result of multi-Party negotiations and Parties only having limited time to state their positions within negotiations, submissions from Parties can give an indication of policy positions that may go beyond what is captured in the ENB. These are a less comprehensive primary source, since the number of submissions and the particular Parties that make them is highly variable at each stage and topic of policy making. In addition, discussions under the SBI and SBSTA were sometimes referred to as policy was developed leading up to a COP or to reveal policies that were negotiated but then not adopted officially at a COP and therefore not in COP reports. For the purposes of this analysis, Party submissions and SBI/SBSTA reports were used to add additional insight into Party

positioning to supplement ENB commentary, in relation to existing policies and institutional rules and norms, the strategies they use when presenting their positions, and, crucially, the articulation of policy proposals and the language they use. Whenever relevant party submissions or SBI/SBSTA reports or other UNFCCC documents are mentioned in the ENB or official policy documents, or identified through other secondary sources, they were obtained from the UNFCCC’s document portal.

4.5.4 Secondary literature and UNFCCC reports

Secondary literature is particularly important for analysis of institutional design. The UNFCCC was created in a process lasting from around 1990 until the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992, when the Convention was signed. There was obviously no prior institutional policy, and ENB commentary did not begin until later in the process, but it is vital to get an insight into the process of creating the UNFCCC as the basis for the institutional processes under examination in this project. As a result, books, news reports and peer-reviewed literature take on a greater significance for this stage of analysis because they offer the only means to get this kind of insight that is coeval to the design process itself. Throughout the period under analysis, however, secondary sources commenting on or analysing events in negotiations and policy output from the UNFCCC offer additional insight into the behaviour of actors and their policy choices, thereby adding an additional layer of richness to the temporally constructed narrative. In some cases, secondary literature is produced for or published by the UNFCCC, such as notable assessments of climate finance flows.

4.5.5 Breakdown of sources and documents

In the context of the UNFCCC institution, this project has made use of official negotiation reports and policy documents in combination with ENB commentary and Party submissions to ensure the most comprehensive basis from which to assess both institutional rules and actor behaviour adapted in line with such rules. The table below details all the documents that were analysed. A detailed list of UNFCCC and ENB documents can be found in Appendices I & II at the end of the thesis.