CBDR in the Plastics Treaty
Common But Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR) is an important equity principle in international law that obligates wealthier countries to shoulder a proportionately greater burden in solving global environmental problems.
DEVELOPING COUNTRIESGLOBAL GOVERNANCECLIMATE FAILURECLIMATE POLITICSPOVERTYCLIMATE JUSTICEGEOPOLITICSCLIMATE FINANCECLIMATE POLICY
Neil Tangri
2/26/20261 min read
This post was originally written on October 24, 2024
CBDR doesn’t have much to do with CBD, but you might need some of the latter after plunging into this alphabet soup. CBDR stands for Common But Differentiated Responsibilites (and Respective Capabilities). Outside of policy circles, some people call this “the Pottery Barn rule”: if you break it, you pay for it.
In the context of international environmental policy, that means that rich countries (the ones that have caused most of the environmental damage) have to come up with the money to fix the problem — including helping poorer countries take a different path to economic development.
But experiences with the climate change convention (UNFCCC) have increasingly given rise to a new interpretation of CBDR: the rich countries should get their own house in order first, and allow poorer countries to take a dirty development path, which can be cleaned up later. This has been a spectacular failure at the UNFCCC.
So, in the global plastics treaty, we should revert to the original meaning of CBDR: we’re all working in the same direction, but some of us have to pay more than others.
I wrote a whole policy brief on this!
You can read it here: https://scholars.org/contribution/common-differentiated-responsibility-global
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