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Rolland, Logane Jo

The 2015 Paris Agreement marked a significant milestone in global climate negotiations, establishing a commitment to limit global warming to below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This research focuses on Small Island Developing States’ (SIDS) advocacy for the 1.5°C target within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) leading up to the agreement. Despite traditional international relations literature often overlooking small states’ power, emerging constructivist scholarship underscores SIDS’ critical impact in climate negotiations through normative power. Accordingly, this study investigates how SIDS strategically contributed to the construction and diffusion of the 1.5°C goal as a norm, reframing climate discourse within the UNFCCC. Drawing on norm diffusion literature and frame theory, I argue that they played a significant role in advocating for the 1.5°C goal as an international norm. This claim is supported by a qualitative examination of SIDS' contribution to the UNFCCC from 2007 until 2015, using content analysis on daily Conference of Parties newsletters, along with SIDS’ submissions to climate change conferences. I find that, by leveraging their moral leadership, climate vulnerabilities, and invoking scientific evidence, SIDS effectively influenced negotiations leading up to the 1.5°C target adoption in 2015. These findings are complemented by a discourse analysis of the framings used by SIDS in their coalitions’s statements. By shedding light on SIDS' contribution to constructing and disseminating the 1.5°C norm, this study demonstrates their transformative impact in shaping the current normative dialogue and foundation around the 1.5°C norm in climate governance.

Graduating Project

eng

2024-05-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88388

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/