Climate Policy as Accumulation Strategy: The Failure of COP6 and Emerging Trends in Climate Politics

This article challenges conventional accounts of the collapse of the climate change negotiations in The Hague in November 2000. Such accounts are usually based on assumptions about the dynamics of international environmental politics, in particular the assumption that individual state interests and collective global interests always collide. It argues that the recent emergence of an ecological modernization discourse concerning global warming raises serious questions about the validity of this assumption. The article then describes the contours of the emerging ecological modernization discourse, and discusses its implications for global climate politics.