Climate Leadership Through Storylines: A Comparison of Developed and Emerging Countries in the Post-Paris Era

The expectation of developed countries’ leadership is institutionalised in the United Nations’ climate agreements. Hence, climate leadership discussion often builds on the experience of the Global North and ignores the non-western contexts. This article analyses how climate leadership is socially constructed through discourse by developed and emerging countries. Here, developed countries were limited to Australia, Canada, the EU, Japan, New Zealand, and the US, and emerging countries to the BASIC group, comprising Brazil, China, India, and South Africa. The analysis was conducted by drafting storylines and discourse-coalitions based on national speeches at the UN climate conferences in 2016–2019. The results underline that the two sides differ primarily in perceptions of leadership responsibility and problematisation but share ideas about transition as a problem solution. Furthermore, neither side constructs their own leadership on the basis of responsibility, and the demand for collective responsibility particularly benefits the Global North.