Ambiguity and Decarbonization Pathways in Southeast Asia

Ambiguity and Decarbonization Pathways in Southeast Asia Lorraine Elliott (bio) In a 2023 keynote address on Southeast Asian energy transitions, Asian Development Bank vice president Ahmed Saeed argued that the complexity of climate change mitigation and adaptation would require the region to become "comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity."1 This essay examines what that uncertainty and ambiguity looks like as members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) commit to transition to low-carbon economies under the provisions of the 2015 Paris Agreement that was adopted under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). While the "plurality of meanings" that created space for "more than one interpretation"2—i.e., constructive ambiguity—was strategically important for reaching international consensus on the Paris Agreement, it has at times proved counterproductive in the determination and governance of decarbonization modalities across ASEAN. As this essay will demonstrate, decarbonization ambiguity in Southeast Asia can be characterized as "the type of uncertainty that emerges from complexity,"3 in this case the bio-physical complexity of climate systems and the technological, social, and economic complexities and uncertainties of climate mitigation pathways and outcomes. Constructive ambiguity as a diplomatic strategy and possible governance modality is implicated in pathway and outcome ambiguities. This runs the risk of sending conflicting messages to both public- and private-sector stakeholders that can result in risk-averse responses, ineffective policy measures, or even policy paralysis in the face of complexity and uncertainty.4 [End Page 11] Constructive Ambiguity in the Climate Governance Context Under the Paris Agreement, parties committed, in principle, to ambitious efforts to keep global average temperatures "well below" 2ºC degrees above pre-industrial levels with the hope of limiting this to 1.5ºC.5 In pursuit of that goal, Article 4 of the agreement calls for a "global peaking" of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible and a "balance between anthropogenic emissions…and removals" in the second half of this century, a goal that is usually referred to as "net-zero."6 Several provisions in the Paris Agreement are deliberately or strategically ambiguous on how that ambition—itself a conceptually elusive term—might be operationalized and governed. This is relevant, for example, to Article 4 on whether a weakening or rollback of individual country mitigation commitments is permissible (though most commentators suggest that it is not),7 Article 6 on environmental integrity and voluntary cooperation on non-market approaches to internationally transferred mitigation outcomes,8 Article 9.1 on climate finance,9 and to the more general UNFCCC provisions on loss and damage.10 Aysha Fleming and Mark Howden make the case for embracing this kind of ambiguity, seeing value in "multiple knowledge spheres and the legitimacy of different values" that can, in a climate governance context, lead to new and multiple ways of acting.11 Others are not so sure. Florian Rabitz et al. worry that ambiguous technologies—those for which there is a lack of clarity about whether they generate transboundary environmental harm or provide capacities for managing environmental risk—will be implicated in governance indeterminacy and institutional drift, which could in turn result [End Page 12] in political inaction and negligence.12 Vegard Tørstad and Vegard Wiborg's deep dive into parties' mitigation commitments suggests that "ambiguity leads to lower [mitigation] ambition,"13 and David Ciplet et al. argue that the "ambiguity of how climate finance norms have been institutionalized" has weakened accountability mechanisms.14 Michael Mehling is even more blunt: the extent of "sparsely worded and…undefined or vague concepts" in the Paris Agreement is, he argues, simply "not helpful."15 The Paris Rulebook: Governing Ambiguity Guidelines for implementing the Paris Agreement mitigation goals are included in the so-called Paris Rulebook adopted at the 24th UNFCCC Conference of the Parties in Katowice in 2018, a bureaucratic process that can be read as akin to Best's "ambiguity-reducing machine."16 One of the Paris Agreement's key modalities is the nationally determined contribution (NDC), which requires parties to communicate their post-2020 climate commitments, including the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, on a rolling five-year cycle. The Paris Rulebook calls for NDCs to include...