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Equal does not mean equitable
Written by: Sven Harmeling
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A Turkana girl poses outside her home in Lobei village of the Turkana district of drought-stricken northwest Kenya, October 2, 2009. REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya
One of the tasks facing negotiators of a new climate global treaty is setting up governing bodies to manage how funds for adaptation to climate change and other resources are spent, hardly an uncontroversial matter. How should such bodies be fairly structured? The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, produced at the pioneering Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, says that "the financial mechanism shall have an equitable and balanced representation of all Parties within a transparent system of governance". What does that mean in practice? Some governments think an equal representation of developed and developing countries is the way to go. There is a way of calling this "equal" distribution, but there are problems calling it equitable. Among the 192 signatories to the 1992 deal, there are 41 developed and 151 developing parties. An equitable representation would suggest a 21 percent to 79 percent split. This is obviously very different from an equal representation between developed and developing countries. EQUAL BY REGION? Another criterion could be regional distribution. Interestingly, there is an existing example where this regional distribution has been a cornerstone of deciding how governing bodies should be structured. The majority of the seats in the Adaptation Fund, created under the Kyoto Protocol, are divided among the five United Nations regions. Each has two seats. While this may not be an ideal way of dividing up the world by region, it is one that has been politically accepted for many decades. In this example the rest of the seats in the Adaptation Fund are given developed and developing countries - two each - and to groups representing small island developing states and the least developed countries. The last two are particularly interesting in terms of "equitable" distribution of control of resources, as these country groups have been acknowledged as being particularly vulnerable to climate change. In this scenario, developing countries have a majority of seats. Fears have been raised about domination of the process by developing countries, but to date the Adaptation Fund's board - controlled by developing nation representatives - has managed to develop a constructive working atmosphere that strives to make decisions by consensus. What do we learn from this exercise? There are ways of creating governing bodies that fit within existing framework and that work - and equal doesn't necessarily mean equitable.
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