Pathways to a climate change pact in the Asia Pacific: towards an improved framework for analysing regimes and the conditions shaping their development

Efforts to tackle global warming have involved an increasing variety of governance arrangements, from the Kyoto Protocol to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, to a range of nonstate regimes and national measures. Under the global UN framework there is scope for the further development of regional regimes, which have the potential advantage of being tailored to the constraints and possibilities of a particular context. The aim of this thesis is to understand the conditions which shape and constrain feasible pathways to a climate change regime in the Asia- Pacific. To this end, the study seeks to develop a more regionally contextualised approach to addressing the problem of regime formation than is found in the mainstream international relations literature. It draws on a range of approaches to develop a framework for investigating how regime development is shaped and constrained by regional conditions. This framework supports an analysis of the development of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), in order to identify and analyse the processes which shape regime development in the Asia-Pacific. Interviews are conducted with practitioners in government, academia and civil society to further investigate these processes and their implications for climate change governance in the region. The study concludes that along a number of dimensions, regime development in the Asia-Pacific region occurs incrementally. The conditions considered here imply a range of constraints on the development of a regional climate regime. Given these, the study suggests one pathway which may be feasible: that a regime be established with Australia, Indonesia and Japan engaged in a compulsory emissions trading scheme, and an outer group in a non-compulsory track with incentives to upgrade. These results may contribute to discussion around implementing any commitments made at the UN negotiations in Copenhagen this year