Common but Differentiated Responsibilities: A common but misunderstood principle

Roberto Bissio, Coordinator of Social Watch, participated in the a side-event by the Permanent Mission of Brazil to the UN, CIDSE and Social Watch on Thursday, January 29, 2015 in the UN Conference Building, New York. Dealing with responsibilities in a financing sustainable development context, this event generated discussion on conceptual challenges such as an evenhanded approach to the three pillars of sustainable development, adapting a framework like the Financing for Development process to the universal agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals without denaturalizing and decontextualizing it and how to incorporate important principles agreed at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development.

Bissio said that developed countries that have a major share in the historic responsibility of filling the atmosphere with human-generated emissions of carbon dioxide since the start of the industrial revolution, two centuries ago, are expected by the climate convention of the UN to have a greater responsibility.

Similarly to the main character in Molière's “Le Bourgeois gentilhomme”, who spoke in prose without knowing it, the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities is intuitively applied every day by millions of people who never heard of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR).

If the speakers here go for dinner, we will have a common responsibility to pay the bill, but if I drink expensive wine and the rest only tap water, they will rightly argue that my responsibility is “differentiated” and I should pay more than the others.

This is why in developed countries that have a major share in the historic responsibility of filling the atmosphere with human-generated emissions of carbon dioxide since the start of the industrial revolution, two centuries ago, are expected by the climate convention of the UN to have a greater responsibility.

Countries might also benefit more from the results of common actions, or they may just be in better conditions to pay, as a result of history or different levels of development. Every country has one vote in the General Assembly of the UN, but the budget of the Organization is not divided equally: The United States pays 22 percent of the budget and my own country, Uruguay, only 0,05. This derives from the principle of “capacity to pay”, a variation of CBDR, that underlines a formula that takes into account total gross national income and levels of indebtedness, with a bonus for countries with low average per capita income. Thus, China pays 5.1 percent of the budget of the UN in the current three year period, even when its population and economy are among the biggest of the world.

It is, precisely, when we have a “budget” that the common responsibility emerges and the debate about how to divide that budget faily starts. There is an implicit “atmospheric budget” in the climate negotiations and there should be one for all of the “planetary boundaries” identified by science, swhich include climate, but also fisheries and ocean acidification, Nitrogen use by agriculture, freshwater use and loss of biodiversity. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) deal in one way or the other with all of the planetary boundaries, but without using that term or acknowledging the limit (which is essential to a notion of “budget”). Thus, the well intentioned calls to refrain from excesses don't have quantitative goals or any formulas to share the burdens to comply with our common responsibilities.

In non-environmental areas, the financial and economic crisis that started in 2008 has a big characteristic in common with climate change: both originated in irresponsible behaviour in the developed North and both have the vulnerable in developing countries as their main victims. And yet, even when banks that are “too big to fail” were clearly at the origin, they managed to escape the CBDR principle and the cost of their failures was passed to the public via generous bail-outs and tough austerity policies that undermine social services.

Further, in the case of competitive devaluations or the “race-to-the-bottom” in taxation, the result is not a “zero-sum” game where the losses of one party are the wins of the other. The bottom line for the whole is negative. The benefits enjoyed by a few fiscal havens are much less than the damage in term of lost fiscal revenue that they create in other countries. The need for international collaboration could not be clearer.

The achievement of global financial stability (for example through a financial transactions tax), collaboration in tax matters (where many developing countries can be granted the benefit of valuable information about corporations without the requierement of similar information that they may not be in a condition to gather) or putting in place of a mechanism to resolve disputes over sovereign debts are all examples of areas of international collaboration in finances where the collective benefits are clearly much bigger than any possible loss.

The FfD should concentrate on this issues, rather than devoting most of the time to discuss the policy mechanisms that developing countries could apply to attract corporations. This might start a new deregulatory race to the bottom and clearly contradicts the principle, already established, of the primary responsibility of each government over the development of its country. Instead, Addis Ababa should deliver international action to strengthen “development states,” able to regulate over their finances and therefore positively contribute to their common responsibility to make the right to development a reality.

Roberto Bissio, coordinator, Social Watch

Reconstructed from the notes by the author for his intervention at the side-event on Applying Common but Differentiated Responsibilities in Financing Sustainable Development, co-organized by the Permanent Mission of Brazil to the UN, CIDSE and Social Watch. Conference Room 7, UN Conference Building, Thursday, January 29 2015.

Download here the invitation.