Explain the shift in mitigation strategies from the Copenhagen COP of 2009 to the Paris Agreement of 2015 and to what extent it relates to changes in perceptions of “development” and divisions between developed and developing countries.
Your list of explanations for the shift would need to be justified and prioritised (i.e. you explain why you have chosen them, and which are the most to least significant, if ranking them is helpful). Of the likely explanations, the question itself hints at a significant one: changes in perceptions of dev and divisions between dev’ed and dev’ing countries.
it is NOT about how ideas of development have changed over time, but how the change in status of the BRICS, especially China, undermined the entire framework of Kytoto (which was basically set up on the premise of good vs bad guys). What happens when a supposed dev’ing country becomes one of the largest emitters in the world: the geopolitics of this made it impossible to continue with the Kyoto approach.
Also it may be worth assessing the problem that both agreements treat countries as the accounting unit: emissions are added up for a country, not for where those emissions are ‘consumed’. China is producing ‘our’ emissions but this is not considered.
