After failing to deliver a legally binding UN treaty on plastic pollution in Busan last December, the Geneva INC-5.2 talks last week were a near facsimile. Negotiations once again collapsed, leaving country delegates and observers alike wondering if a deal will ever be reached. The talks collapsed because the divisions between countries were too strong, and because the methods for achieving consensus were once again inadequate to bridge them. In these conditions, it was hard for the Chair, Vayas Valdivieso, to construct a deal where nobody got everything they wanted but at least everybody would get something.
The negotiations will resume when countries reconvene at a later date. Yet the process cannot simply continue as before – it must reset. Deep and significant changes will be essential for INC-5.3, the upcoming seventh round of negotiations.
The process is stalled, trapped in a tone-deaf standoff between the two loudest blocs in the room. The “High Ambition Coalition” (HAC) approaches the plastics treaty through an environmental regulation angle. Even though some of the wealthiest and most industrialised members of the HAC are some of the largest global producers of plastics and are home to some of the plastics industry’s world giants, they do not see capping or reducing plastic production as a threat to their economies.
On the other side of the spectrum, the Like Minded Countries, a not fully disclosed and ever evolving cadre of countries typically comprising China, Saudi Arabia, other members of the Arab League, the Russian Federation, and Iran, and with whom India shares many positions, addresses the industrial and trade dimensions head on. These governments believe the plastics treaty, as it stands now, is an existential threat to their economies and ultimately their development.
This trade-off between “environment” and “development” is nothing new, and is an issue that has made many a negotiation derail. Since the 1980s, in multilateral processes this has been addressed through the “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR) approach, first used in the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer and adopted as one of the principles of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992. In the last decade, and especially since the Paris Agreement, it is more commonplace to talk about CBDR-RC, the “RC” standing for “respective capabilities”, thus putting further emphasis on the current distribution of financial, scientific, and technological means to act.
This last point is fundamental. While it is meant to organise the conversation constructively, CBDR-RC has lately been used as a way to distribute grievances. It seems quite misunderstood by the current generation of policymakers, because it is actually meant to organise precisely the opposite conversation, and defuse what would otherwise remain a simplistic and sterile economy of blame.
For every topic where it is applied, CBDR-RC should be used in a spirit of solidarity: past and present responsibilities are assessed together, as well as current capacities to act, in order to determine how the efforts should be distributed.
In the plastics treaty talk, it is precisely this conversation that remains locked in place, even though UNEA resolution 5/14, the measure launched the process, explicitly asked the International Negotiating Committee (INC) to take into account the principles of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.
So far, the Like Minded Countries have repeatedly asked for CBDR-RC to be at the forefront of the negotiation, yet they have never made a public submission detailing how it applies to this treaty, thus creating the impression that they are mostly posturing.
On the other side, the wealthiest members of the HAC, such as the European Union, have explicitly argued that plastics are not a “North/South issue” thus refusing to open the conversation on how efforts might be differentiated across countries.
On plastics, this question is simply impossible to address simplistically nor to brush away. The fragmented nature of the global plastics value chain, where production and consumption are spread across regions with varying points of impact across, requires a serious,more sophisticated approach – work that has yet to be undertaken by anyone within the INC process.
A recent scientific study sheds light on another difficult aspect of the plastics issue: how should we attribute the responsibility between producers and consumers? China, for instance, produces about 32% of the world’s plastics, while the U.S. and EU each contribute 14% (together, they are not so far from China).
Yet in terms of consumption, China’s share drops to 20%, while the U.S. and EU together account for 34% – despite having only half of China’s population. High-income countries and regions such as the U.S., EU, Japan, and the Middle East consistently consume more plastic than they produce, with the U.S. leading in per capita use – nearly three times higher than China and twice that of the EU.
Meaningful progress on the upstream stages of the plastics lifecycle (production, manufacture) will be impossible without developing the “mechanics” to distribute efforts – applying the CBDR-RC principle in a way that is relevant to plastics (not, e.g., a simple transposition of how it is done for climate).
This requires more research and expertise, informal work by and between countries, and a gradual acculturation by the room. The process arguably should have started there, but will have to reach this point regardless. Addressing this dimension with the care it deserves is the only way to bring greater clarity, and begin restoring trust in the process. In a geopolitical storm, and in a rapidly shifting risk landscape for the plastics industry, clarity and trust in the economic aspects of the deal will be essential to avoid another failure at INC-5.3.
Aleksandar Rankovic is the director and co-founder of The Common Initiative, an international think-tank working on geopolitics and sustainability. He holds a PhD in ecology (Sorbonne University) and a degree in international affairs (Sciences Po Paris). Previously, Aleksandar was a senior research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has also led international campaigns with the Avaaz movement, notably in support of Indigenous Peoples’ coalitions. His team has followed the INC process from the beginning and he was in Busan and in Geneva.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of SDG News.
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