Opinion: At COP28, Spotlight On India's Climate Diplomacy

In 2015, contrary to expectations, India did not play spoilsport at the Paris meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP), paving the way for the comprehensive agreement to tackle climate change. The deal committing nations to adopt emission standards was inked by 195 countries. India formally adopted the agreement on 2 October 2016, putting the historic accord in play.

India was not finished. It followed up this dramatic about turn at Paris by joining forces with France to announce the International Solar Alliance (ISA), further reinforcing India's commitment to combat climate change.

Indeed, this was the coming out moment for India's climate diplomacy. Long seen as a naysayer at multilateral negotiations, India dramatically reinvented itself at the global high table.

From being part of problem, it pivoted to a country willing to be part of the solution. It was also a tacit recognition that like energy, climate issues too had become front and center of foreign policy.

Though this strategy embraces downside risks India had previously avoided, it also provided much desired negotiating space. This was especially crucial as most multilateral institutions were becoming hostage to superpower rivalries.

However, world polity, since the Paris summit of COP, has undertaken a turn for the worse. Decoupling between the United States and China has accelerated; the relationship plummeted further in the aftermath of the war between Russia and China. The spread of regional wars to the Middle East has only added to global misery. Undoubtedly, deteriorating geopolitics is causing fragmentation of climate governance.

If geopolitics is splitting the world down the middle, then the world economy is another source of concern. It is yet to recover from the unprecedented back-to-back shocks, beginning with the once in a century covid-19 pandemic.

In short, the circumstances ahead of this Thursday's summit meeting of COP in Dubai are exceptionally inclement.

In this backdrop, climate diplomacy is the key as it were. Especially for countries like India, which belong to the global South and have greater stakes - given that they only just begun to play catch up on economic growth - in heading off the disastrous fallout of climate change.

The India Way

Like most bodies of the United Nations, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) - within which COP operates-is desperately in need for reforms. It has not kept pace with the rapidly changing global polity; worse, several UN bodies have undergone institutional capture, leaving them ineffective. In fact this is true for other multilateral bodies too like the World Trade Organisation, forcing countries to explore alternative governance structures.

This is exactly why India's watershed moment at the Paris summit is significant. The country embraced the unfortunate truth about existing multilateral institutions and retooled its climate diplomacy.

To be sure this did not happen in a vacuum. India has been recalibrating its stance in UNFCCC negotiations. It first signalled a rethink at the 2009 Copenhagen summit, where it accepted some voluntary targets for cutting emissions.

Since then it has nudged closer to a view that climate action has to be global and not just in developed countries. Indeed the rethink in Paris though dramatic, was a change that had been coming and a reaction to the changing climate politics.

A report, Tracks to India's Global Climate Strategy Transition, released in the run-up to COP28 by the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), summed it up best, when it said, "International climate politics has irrevocably changed. Climate discussions no longer occur only through the United Nations. Like other issues, climate is now being discussed, negotiated, and addressed across a patchwork of institutions and frameworks, which include different constituencies (public and private), are spatially distinct (bilateral, regional and global) and have varied focus (specific issues or broader economic and security concerns)."

As a result, the bottleneck in climate governance, could be circumvented by India entering into more diverse agreements and arrangements to battle climate change.

At the same time, new institutions like the ISA, made it relatively easier for India to pursue, not just for itself but also for the Global South, access to climate finance and technology for investments to decarbonise their domestic economy. A collateral gain is that this has also helped India cast itself as a much-needed bridge between the Global South and the Global North - something we recently witnessed at the summit meeting of the G20 in New Delhi.

But this is water under the bridge. India's climate diplomacy is facing its toughest test ever at COP28 in Dubai. Will it rise to the moment?

(Anil Padmanabhan is a journalist who writes on the intersection of politics and economics.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.