Many international environmental agreements (IEAs) have adopted differentiated rules for groups of countries, based on the recognition of the different circumstances of parties, such as special needs of certain parties (especially developing countries), or the different contribution of parties to the environmental problem at hand. The resulting differential treatment usually consists of differences in the stringency of obligations, different timing of their application, and/or international financial, capacity-building or technological assistance. The existence (and design) of preferential treatment for some groups of parties may be a precondition for their entering the agreement in the first place. But in the long term, some types of preferential treatment may lead to new incentives that make broader (and deeper) cooperation more difficult, as observed for the climate change regime by Castro et al. (2011).
In this article, I consider the relationship between different designs of developing country differentiation, the policy process that led to their creation, and future bargaining behaviour within IEAs. I expect that different design features of differential treatment may lead to different effects on future negotiation dynamics. Using a comparative study across IEAs, I seek to find out (1) what were the processes that led to the creation of institutionalized country groupings with differential treatment in IEAs, (2) what are the characteristics of such groupings, (3) under what circumstances is it possible to agree to objective criteria for defining them, and (4) how different designs of differential treatment have affected future negotiations. Case selection will be based on an initial analysis of the secondary literature that has so far discussed the emergence of differential treatment in multilateral agreements (especially from the international law literature). To inform the analysis, I will use interviews with experienced negotiators and experts and analysis of negotiation reports and secondary literature in a qualitative process-tracing design.
