Encouraging as many States as possible to participate in the MEA negotiating process requires bringing innovative and thoughtful approaches to the process. As noted above, there are many procedural devices used to broaden the negotiating process. This includes voluntary trust funds to enable developing country delegates to travel. There are also substantive means, such as reflecting differentiated obligations to an agreement. In some instances, the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” as set forth in the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, is expressly cited as a basis for differentiated obligations.
Substantively, some MEAs have reflected a differentiated approach to commitments, depending upon the subject matter and other factors. Differentiation can have various purposes, can take many forms, and can make distinctions among many different kinds of states.
Purposes for differentiation have included, for example, the desire to assign a greater obligation to those States that have contributed more to a particular environmental situation; the desire to recognise the particular situation of one or more States; the desire to recognise that States may have different resources and/or priorities; and, as noted above, the desire to promote broad participation in the agreement.
In terms of types of differentiation, sometimes the commitments have been the same for all States, but the time frame has been different (such as the 10-year grace period in the g[Montreal Protocol]). Sometimes, the commitments are different between or among categories of countries (such as between Annex I and non-Annex I Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol). Sometimes, certain commitments are the same while other commitments, such as those related to funding or technology transfer, are differentiated (as with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and also with the UNFCCC, with only a subset of Annex I Parties subject to funding and technology transfer requirements).