Another round of global climate change negotiations (following the Kyoto Protocol) will begin in 2009 in Copenhagen. New rounds of negotiations regarding possible changes in dozens of global environmental agreements are also planned in the coming year. The “system” of global environmental treaty-making is still in a rather primitive form. There is much we can do to help enhance the effectiveness of the negotiations involved.
In just the past two years, we have published a number of articles and books that have contributed in important ways to theory building in the multi-party negotiation and deliberative democracy fields. Susskind and Moomaw have released Volume XV of their annual series called Papers on International Environmental Negotiation. Each year the best papers from the advanced MIT/Tufts/Harvard graduate seminar led by Susskind and Moomaw are published both on-line and in a monograph format by the Program on Negotiation. Their book, Transboundary Environmental Negotiations (Jossey-Bass, 2002) presented the best student papers from the first 10 years Their seminar will be offered again in September 2008 for 25 MIT, Tufts and Harvard students. This year’s class will focus on the upcoming Climate Change negotiations in Copenhagen. (N.B. Moomaw and PDP Associate, Professor Adil Najam (Boston University) were part of the IPPC team that shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for their work on climate change.)