MacMillan initiative launches with session on building better climate agreements

On Earth Day eve, more than a dozen scholars gathered at Horchow Hall for a brainstorming session on how to strengthen international collaboration in tackling climate change. To open the conversation, Yale’s Sunil Amrith posed a question.

“Why do some multilateral climate agreements succeed, while others fail?” said Amrith, the Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

In addition to faculty members from across the Yale campus, the discussion included Carlos Alvarado Quesada, former president of Costa Rica, and Maria Ivanova, director of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University and an expert on international environmental governance. 

Successful treaties, Ivanova said, include mechanisms for holding parties accountable. 

“When [treaties] have an architecture that ensures the countries are held accountable for the commitments that they’ve made, we can translate ambition into results,” said Ivanova, who developed the Environmental Conventions Index, a measurement tool that monitors countries’ progress implementing major international agreements on pollution, hazardous waste, protecting wetlands, and combating trade in endangered species. 

And any treaty is only as strong as the commitment of its participants, added Alvarado Quesada, who is now professor of diplomacy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. All treaties, he said, require some faith to succeed.

The session marked the launch of “Regional Approaches to Global Challenges,” an initiative by the MacMillan Center to apply its regional expertise to discussions of pressing global challenges. 

“The MacMillan Center has always been Yale’s hub for regional studies, combining seven regional studies councils with our global programs,” said Amrith, who is also the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “We believe there is a distinctive opportunity at this moment of global conflict and tension to reinvigorate what MacMillan can do in terms of applying our regional expertise to issues of global importance.”

For this first discussion, those possessing that expertise included faculty from across Yale, including from the School of Architecture, the School of Public Health, the School of the Environment, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Yale School of Medicine, Yale Law School, Yale Planetary Solutions, and the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture. 

And there was Alvarado Quesada and Ivanova, who were both on campus to participate in the MacMillan Center’s annual George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture, which focused on the potential of regional collaboration, as opposed to global negotiations, to overcome international gridlock on climate change.