The global community and distributions of rights and responsibilities

The concern about climate change as a common concern of humankind and the global equity recommendations from the Brundtland report added an explicit global dimension to energy policy. Countries were forced to think of their own policy in terms of global responsibility. This paved the way for a fundamental debate worldwide about the global community and the obligations each country has in relation to abatement, mitigation, adaptation, and compensation. This debate was directly related to the establishment of global and international agreements with a direct or indirect impact on energy policy. In this chapter the major positions in relation to distributive criteria are discussed as an analytical key to understanding the outcome of agreements on global and EU level. It is shown how different the outcome of global and regional negotiations happened to be but also how much equity considerations have changed over time – supported by the remarkable price reduction on energy savings and renewable energy technologies.