John T. Rourke's Argument Against Neoliberalism

The theory that will be suitable to picture Indonesia’s actions in addressing climate change adaptation on CT6 is neoliberalism. As refers to the 12th edition of International Politics on the World Stage’s book written by John T. Rourke, neoliberalism developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Neoliberalism agrees with neolrealists that competition among sovereign states in an anarchical world system causes conflict. However, neoliberalism contend that the system is not early an anarchical as neorealists claim. According to neoliberals, the international system is anarchical, but growing order. Neoliberals believe that the system is marked by complex interdependence wich lead to the increasing cooperation among states in order to gain mutual benefits
and avoid share harms. As refers to Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman’s book Progress in International Relations Theory (2003): “Neoliberalism’s argument (usually implicit) that distribution conflicts are usually less important than the potential common gains stems at least in part from its substantive concern with the issues in which large mutual benefits are believed to be possible, such as protecting the environment, rather than with dispute over territory, status, influence and dominance.”
In other words, neoliberalisms justify the cooperation among states for environmental issues, including climate change issue.
According to neoliberals, states are the most important actors, but International Organization (IO) also matter. In accordance with this research, neoliberalism justify the multilateral partnership among CT6 for the issues related to Coral Triangle ocean, including climate change impacts to Coral Triangle ocean. Before this research will determine deeper explanation on neoliberalism, it is better to understand the concept of climate change issue first. According to Donald M. Snow in his book Cases in International Relations (2012): “Global warming including climate change is clearly problem that concern to be solved by individual efforts of states, but must be done collectively if it is to be done successfully at
all.” It means, climate change is a global issue in which brings global impacts and required collective action from states – global or regional scale. This book also underline that the state alone would not able to solve the issue by it self without any cooperation among several or global states. In accordance with this research, climate change impacts to Coral Triangle ocean required collective actions from CT6 for climate change adaptation. The existence of multilateral partnership among CT6 is in charge with the issues happened on Coral Triangle ocean, including climate change issue.
Indonesia’s action for addressing climate change adaptation on CT6 through this multilateral partnership is not only helped to protect the future of CT6 but also protect the future of ecosystem. Furthermore, according to neoliberalism, the main cause of conflict in international system is the lack of central processes to regulate the competition among states. In neoliberism theory, the complex interdependence among states lead to the establishment of international law and international organizations . International organization in this point is the establishment of CT6 countries in order to gain mutual benefits, in which in this is the protection of ecosystem from the impact of climate change. Despite of the CT6, the existence of CTI-CFF as the legal body who in charge as the agency on the issue of Coral Triangle ocean is significant to analyze. CTI-CFF able to provide information, facilitate learning, and sharing lessons for climate changes among the CT6 countries in order to tackle the adaptation of climate
change. The performance of CTI-CFF among CT6 for climate change adaptation is aldo determined by it Regional Secretariat. In this research, Indonesia’s action and national policy for climate change adaptation on CT6 were totally support the performance of CTI-CFF up until its Regional Secretariat office. Indonesia in this case is fully support with the CTI-CFF agency. For summarize, this research will show the actions performed by Indonesia in addressing the issue of climate change with the adaptation on CT6 and COP21 agreement framework by using neoliberalism theory. Neoliberalism is expected to be able to be the appropriate theoretical framework for this research. Below is the theoretical framework that will help framing the later thesis: