Policy and Political challenges facing in Developing Countries.
What characterizes the COP is the massive exchanges of ideas and initiatives between countries and NGOs from all around the world. Those exchanges take place, normally, during the side events.
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One of the biggest expectations of this “Action COP” is to see how States, in groups or individually, will strengthen their national contributions, as defined in the Paris Agreement.
On the second day of the COP22, researchers from Latin America (Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay) shared their results about the elements which can enable and those which can instead prevent the achievement of national targets. We believed that the same factors are shared among the majority of the developing countries, that to say the Countries from the Global South.
The Chair, Daniel Ryan (Argentina),highlighted that among the Latin America cases (specifically Argentina, Brazil,and Uruguay) four main dimensions deserve consideration. Those are crucial for understanding the factors which play a major role to fulfill the national pledges.
1) Structural factors: most of them economic. There is a negative link between international economic in terms of demand that affects the contributions of the States.
2) Institutional Factors: we need to identify which are the best public policies and framework to facilitated the realization of the pledges. There has been some progress in the international framework, as the Paris Agreement, that push for the reduction of the emissions in the agriculture sector. Nonetheless, as happens many times, the national legislations are in contradiction with the needs of the local governments.
3) Available information and technical support: the access to information is a central issue for the creation and control of the national contributions. These contributions should not only be owned by States actors: rather, the participation of the civil society should be key. That is why the lack of access to information might be an obstacle to the application of the Paris Agreement.
4) Finally, the configuration and the coalitions in support and against the implementation of the contributions: Itnis known that environment regulations affect the economic interests of social groups. That’s why in this side event there was a call for innovation and creativity in the construction of the national contributions pre-2020, in order to obtain more inclusive policies to the benefits of all the citizens.
From next year, the States will begin to review their contributions to the Paris Agreement. The dimensions mentioned above are the fundamentals elements that have to be taken into consideration in the future actions, in the long and short term.
