{"id":14460,"date":"2026-04-28T07:20:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T07:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/portfolio\/max-van-deursen\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T07:20:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T07:20:34","slug":"max-van-deursen","status":"publish","type":"us_portfolio","link":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/portfolio\/max-van-deursen\/","title":{"rendered":"Max van Deursen"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":true},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":true},"author":7,"featured_media":14461,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"us_portfolio_category":[45],"class_list":["post-14460","us_portfolio","type-us_portfolio","status-publish","post-password-required","hentry","us_portfolio_category-new-template"],"acf":{"naam_van_het_proefschift":"Multilateralism for Whom?","samenvatting":"Welke landen zijn het meest verantwoordelijk voor het ondernemen van klimaatactie? Welke soorten klimaatactie zijn passend en tellen mee voor de wereldwijde inspanning om klimaatverandering aan te pakken? Deze vragen vormen de essentie van de mondiale klimaatpolitiek. Deze omstreden politiek maakt het onderhandelen over multilaterale overeenkomsten zo moeilijk en fascinerend. De laatste mijlpaal in het onderhandelen over een dergelijke overeenkomst was de aanname van het Akkoord van Parijs. Het Akkoord van Parijs verankerde een nieuwe benadering van mondiaal klimaatbestuur. Deze benadering berust op vrijwillige, nationaal vastgestelde doelen die door iedereen moeten worden ingediend. Het is in dit tijdperk van vrijwillige doelen dat transparantie \u2014 d.w.z. rapportage en toetsing \u2014 steeds centraler is geworden. Algemeen wordt aangenomen dat transparantie verantwoording en versterkte klimaatactie vergemakkelijkt. Het is door wetenschappers en praktijkmensen zelfs de 'ruggengraat' van het Akkoord van Parijs genoemd.\n\nMaar maakt transparantie deze belofte in de praktijk waar? Gezien de hoge verwachtingen is het opvallend dat de effecten van transparantie in het klimaatregime nog nauwelijks zijn bestudeerd. Dit proefschrift beoogt deze lacune in het onderzoek op te vullen. Dit gebeurt vanuit het perspectief van kritische transparantiestudies. Dit perspectief gaat ervan uit dat transparantie niet losstaat van de bredere politiek waarbinnen het wordt geoperationaliseerd. Door deze lens beoordeelt dit proefschrift welke effecten door transparantie in het mondiale klimaatregime worden gegenereerd.\n\nDe belangrijkste onderzoeksvragen in dit proefschrift zijn:\n\n1. Wat zijn de effecten van transparantie in de mondiale klimaatpolitiek?\n1.1 Welk soort transparantie is vereist en van wie, en hoe gaan landen op nationaal niveau om met deze transparantievereisten?\n1.2 Welke klimaatacties worden door dergelijke transparantie genormaliseerd en wie wordt verantwoordelijk gemaakt om deze uit te voeren?\n1.3 Hoe bevordert dergelijke transparantie verantwoording en versterkte klimaatactie, en voor wie?\n2. Welke lessen kunnen uit deze analyse worden getrokken over de vraag of en hoe ontwikkelingslanden profiteren van klimaatmultilateralisme?\n\nMethodologisch steunt dit proefschrift op gedetailleerde analyses van internationaal overeengekomen transparantieregels, evenals twee casestudies over de binnenlandse toepassing in India en Zuid-Afrika. De bevindingen zijn gebaseerd op een achtergrondanalyse, vier originele empirische studies en een kort commentaar.\n\nHoofdstuk 2 analyseert de groeiende centraliteit van transparantie in het klimaatregime. Hoofdstuk 3 presenteert een analyse van de mitigatie-gerelateerde onderhandelingen en stelt dat deze de voorkeur geven aan de opvattingen van ontwikkelde landen. Hoofdstuk 4 laat zien hoe de prioriteiten van ontwikkelingslanden op het gebied van adaptatie, verlies en schade en financi\u00eble steun worden gemarginaliseerd in de uitwerking van de regels.\n\nHoofdstuk 5 problematiseert het idee dat betrokkenheid bij transparantie een neutrale, technische oefening is. Aan de hand van een casestudy in India wordt geconcludeerd dat er een mismatch is tussen de focus van transparantieregels en binnenlandse prioriteiten. Hoofdstuk 6 onderzoekt Zuid-Afrika en ziet transparantie als een kanaal waarlangs dominante opvattingen over klimaatactie worden verspreid, waarbij Zuid-Afrika strategie\u00ebn van weerstand toepast. Hoofdstuk 7 illustreert de beperkte ruimte voor door transparantie mogelijk gemaakte verantwoording tussen staten.\n\nHoofdstuk 8 concludeert dat transparantie geen neutraal instrument is. Het proefschrift stelt dat transparantie ingrijpt in de politiek door een mitigatie-gerichte agenda naar ontwikkelingslanden te kanaliseren, terwijl de verantwoordelijkheden van ontwikkelde landen worden verhuld. In essentie problematiseert dit onderzoek het idee dat het Akkoord van Parijs een neutraal mechanisme is; het roept op tot voortdurende kritische blik op hoe het ontwerp van het akkoord ingrijpt in de bredere politiek van mondiale klimaatactie.","summary":"Which countries are most responsible for taking climate action? What types of climate action are appropriate and count towards the global effort to collectively address climate change? These questions capture the essence of global climate politics. These contested politics are what makes negotiating multilateral agreements so difficult\u2014and fascinating. The latest milestone in negotiating such multilateral agreement was the adoption of the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement cemented a novel approach to global climate governance. This approach rests on voluntary, nationally determined targets to be submitted by all. It is in this era of voluntary, nationally determined targets that transparency\u2014i.e. reporting and review\u2014has become ever more central. Transparency is widely assumed to facilitate accountability and enhanced climate action. It has even been termed to be the \u2018backbone\u2019 of the Paris Agreement by scholars and practitioners alike.\n\nYet does transparency live up to this promise in practice? Given the high hopes pinned on transparency, it is striking that the effects of transparency in the climate regime remain hardly studied. This thesis aims to address this pressing research gap. It does so by drawing on critical transparency studies perspective. This perspective takes as a starting point that transparency is not isolated from the broader politics within which it is operationalized. It is through this lens that this thesis aims to assess what effects are generated by transparency in the global climate regime.\n\nThe main research questions and sub-questions addressed in this thesis are:\n\n1. What are the effects of transparency in global climate politics?\n\n1.1 What kind of transparency is required and from whom, and how are countries engaging with such transparency requirements domestically?\n\n1.2 What climate actions does such transparency normalize and who is responsibilized to undertake them?\n\n1.3 How does such transparency further accountability and enhanced climate action, if at all, and from whom does it do so?\n\n2. What lessons can be learned from this analysis for whether and how developing countries benefit from climate multilateralism?\n\nMethodologically, this thesis relies on detailed analyses of multilaterally negotiated transparency rules, as well as two case studies on domestic uptake of transparency rules in India and South Africa. These sites of analysis are studied by relying on interviews, a focus group discussion, policy documents, observations of negotiations, country submissions to the negotiations and secondary reports of the negotiations as data sources. These data sources were analyzed qualitatively drawing on interpretivist approaches. The findings of this thesis are based on one background analysis, four original empirical studies, as well as one short commentary.\n\nChapter 2 contains a background analysis of the growing centrality of transparency in the climate regime. The centrality of transparency manifests through, first, the central role of transparency in the climate negotiations, where transparency was often implicated in high stakes trade-offs around the nature of targets; second, the institutional complexity and extent of the transparency rules; and third, in the amount of time and resources that are devoted to operationalizing transparency arrangements.\n\nChapter 3 presents a detailed analysis of the mitigation-related transparency negotiations, the agreed outcomes, and their detailed operationalization. This analysis problematizes the notion that enhanced transparency was universally desired, universally enhanced, and based on shared understandings of mitigation action. Instead, mitigation-related transparency arrangements privilege developed country understandings of appropriate climate action.\n\nChapter 4 unpacks whose priorities are reflected in the enhanced transparency framework on matters relating to adaptation, loss and damage and international support. This chapter argues that the priorities of developed countries ultimately prevailed. Specifically, the chapter showed how it is in the detailed operationalization of transparency rules where the priorities of developing countries are circumscribed. This begs the question how developing countries engage with transparency rules that may not align with their domestic priorities. This is the question addressed in Chapter 5.\n\nChapter 5 problematizes the notion that engagement in transparency arrangements is a neutral, technical exercise that is seen by all stakeholders as beneficial. Based on a case study in India, this chapter proposes a novel typology of perspectives on the merits of engagement in UNFCCC transparency arrangements, ranging from embracing to strategic to dismissive. All these perspectives are simultaneously reflected in the content of India\u2019s transparency reports. The chapter concludes that India is between a rock and a hard place, given that there is ultimately a misalignment between the focus of transparency rules and domestic priorities and needs. This raises questions about the extent to which developing countries are rule makers or rule takers in the climate regime. These questions are taken up in Chapter 6.\n\nChapter 6 examines South Africa\u2019s engagement with UNFCCC transparency arrangements. This chapter conceptualizes global transparency arrangements as a channel through which dominant understandings of appropriate climate action are diffused to domestic contexts. South Africa is not a rule maker as transparency rules do not reflect their priorities. But it is also not a rule taker, as it applies strategies of resistance to the dominant understandings of climate action that are being channeled through transparency arrangements.\n\nChapter 7 examines a very specific empirical case where developing countries sought to hold developed countries accountable based on information disclosed through UNFCCC transparency arrangements. This chapter illustrates the limited scope for transparency-enabled formal state-to-state accountability in the climate regime.\n\nChapter 8 concludes that transparency is not a neutral tool that furthers accountability and enhanced climate action from all. Instead, this thesis finds that transparency intervenes in the broader politics of global climate action by channeling a mitigation-centric agenda to developing countries, while obscuring responsibilities of developed countries. These steering effects are also resisted, especially by developing countries, who often hold other visions of what equitable multilateral responses to climate change would look like. In essence, this thesis problematizes the notion that the Paris Agreement is itself a neutral institutional mechanism to raise climate ambition for all. Not all forms of multilateralism are created equal, and this thesis calls for continued critical scrutiny of the ways in which the Paris Agreement\u2019s design intervenes in the broader politics of global climate action.","auteur":"Max van Deursen","auteur_slug":"max-van-deursen","publicatiedatum":"13 mei 2026","taal":"EN","url_flipbook":"https:\/\/ebook.proefschriftmaken.nl\/ebook\/maxvandeursen?iframe=true","url_download_pdf":"https:\/\/ebook.proefschriftmaken.nl\/download\/f6ee3ef2-aa70-46fa-93d7-8fb2f355cc12\/optimized","url_epub":"","ordernummer":"18890","isbn":"","doi_nummer":"","naam_universiteit":"Wageningen University","afbeeldingen":14462,"naam_student:":"","binnenwerk":"","universiteit":"Wageningen University","cover":"","afwerking":"","cover_afwerking":"","design":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/us_portfolio\/14460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/us_portfolio"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/us_portfolio"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/us_portfolio\/14460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14463,"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/us_portfolio\/14460\/revisions\/14463"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"us_portfolio_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/us_portfolio_category?post=14460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}