Climate Law & Governance Armchair Sessions

Methods Lab with Prof Lavanya Rajamani:

Negotiating Multilateral Climate Agreements: Tools, Techniques and Approaches

The international climate change regime has been in evolution for nearly three decades. In this time states have negotiated three legally binding instruments - the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris Agreement - and countless decisions that have not only launched negotiations towards these instruments but also operationalised them. These instruments have been negotiated in the context of fundamental, long-standing and seemingly unresolvable disagreements between states; as such, parties have developed innovative tools and techniques to reach agreement. This Methods Lab will explore the various tools, techniques and approaches used for the multilateral climate negotiations, focusing on the use of norms regarding legal bindingness and the relationship between the legal character of these norms and their functions. We particularly encourage Masters and PhD students and Early Career Researchers from a range of relevant disciplines to attend.

 

Professor Lavanya Rajamani is the 2018 Dickson Poon Distinguished Visitor to the Law School Climate Law & Governance centre. She is Professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and an expert in the field of international environmental and climate change law. Her scholarship focuses on multilateral environmental treaty-making processes, differentiation, compliance, and the intersections of international environmental law with human rights. She has authored several books and articles in these areas. Her latest book, International Climate Change Law (OUP, 2017, co-authored with Daniel Bodansky and Jutta Brunnée) was awarded the ASIL Certificate of Merit in a Specialized Area of International Law. Prof Rajamani is scheduled to deliver a Public International Law course on the ‘International Climate Change Regime’ at the Hague Academy of International Law this summer. She served as Rapporteur of the ILA Committee on Legal Principles Relating to Climate Change (2008-2014) and has also served as a consultant to the UNFCCC Secretariat, a negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, and a legal adviser to the Chairs of Ad Hoc Working Groups under the FCCC. She was part of the UNFCCC core drafting and advisory team for the Paris Agreement. http://cprindia.org/people/lavanya-rajamani