Funding Global Public Goods: The Dark Side of Multilateralism

The funding of global public goods, such as climate mitigation, presents a complex strategic problem. Potential recipients demand side payments for implementing projects that furnish global public goods, and donors can cooperate to provide the funding. We offer a game‐theoretic analysis of this problem. In our model, a recipient demands project funding. Donors can form a multilateral program to jointly fund the project. If no program is formed, bilateral funding remains a possibility. We find that donors rely on multilateralism if their preferences are relatively symmetric and domestic political constraints on funding are lax. In this case, the recipient secures large rents from project implementation. Thus, even donors with strong interests in global public good provision have incentives to oppose institutional arrangements that promote multilateral funding. These incentives have played an important role in multilateral negotiations on climate finance, especially in Cancun (2010) and Durban (2011).     

The Limits and Opportunities of Networks: Municipalities and Canadian Climate Change Policy

Research on climate change policy and politics has become increasingly focused on the actions and influence of subnational governments. In North America, this attention has been particularly focused on why subnational governments have taken action in the absence of national leadership, what effect action might have on future national climate policy, and whether the collective action of networks of municipal governments are reshaping and challenging the character of national and global climate governance. This paper examines Canadian municipal climate in light of the absence of a comprehensive and effective climate national strategy. The paper considers various reasons why local governments in Canada have not been central players in national plans, and why their actions have not been more influential nationally. The paper argues that the potential influence of Canadian municipalities on national climate policy is weak, given the loose nature of the network and the long-held structural view that municipalities are not significant units of political analysis in national political and policy debates. The paper concludes by considering the constraints and opportunities of subnational climate networks and municipal network analysis.     

‘Neutral’ experts? How input of scientific expertise matters in international environmental negotiations

This contribution analyses under what conditions expert input is most likely to be regarded by government representatives as useful and how government representatives use input provided by experts. It widens the analytical lens examining multilateral negotiations within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) between 2009 and 2011. The findings confirm the importance of deep knowledge, long-term involvement in the policy subsystem and networks. This research illustrates the importance of policy-entrepreneurial strategies such as proactively approaching government representatives and volunteering knowledge. Joining government delegations can increase expert input as they may gain access to the negotiation text. It is crucial to provide input early on in the negotiation cycle before the national negotiation position is decided. Scientific consensus on climate change facilitated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in a convergence of the actor’s beliefs towards understanding climate mitigation and adaptation as normative imperative. Actors, however, interpret expert input based on the consensual IPCC findings differently depending on their conflicting political objectives. Thus, instrumental and political use of expert input by the interest groups overlaps in the UNFCCC.     

Public Support for Climate Change Policy: Consistency in the Influence of Values and Attitudes Over Time and Across Specific Policy Alternatives

This study examines the factors that explain public preferences for a set of climate change policy alternatives. While scholarly work indicates a relationship between attitudes and values on views toward specific issues, the literature often examines general support for issues rather than specific policy proposals. Consequently, it is unclear the extent to which these attitudes and values affect specific policy considerations. This project examines public support for five climate change policy options in two national surveys taken three years apart. The empirical analysis reveals that time is a factor and that those who are liberal, have strong ecological values, report greater concern for climate change, and trust experts are consistently more supportive of the climate policy options considered here. The results shed new light on the nuanced views of the American public toward climate change.     

Comparative Climate Change Policy and Federalism: An Overview

This commentary provides an overview of the four papers in this issue of Review of Policy Research on the politics of climate change. The papers all address in one way or another aspects of how federal‐type systems are dealing with the collective action and multilevel governance issues of climate change policy. The comparative study of federal systems provides insight into how domestic authority is so often overlapping and divided when dealing with greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Federal arrangements offer a rich array of norms, institutions, and practices for tackling these problems. Federal systems grapple continuously with the kinds of issues that are the most intractable in the climate change case, such as overcoming interregional differences of interests and values. A common federal feature is competition among subnational governments and between them and national or federated governments over climate change policy, which has been especially significant in the United States and in Canada in the relative absence of national action––although soberingly, the whole is as yet nowhere near as great as the sum of the parts. More significant, but rarer is the achievement of tighter coordination in federal systems achieved through intergovernmental co‐decision, as seen in the European Community and Australia. This has been accomplished in large part due to a consensus among all intergovernmental parties on the nature of the problem and congruence with the existing international regime, characteristics missing in the North American context.     

Comparative Analysis of Sweden’s Wind Energy Policy: The Evolution of “Coordinated” Networks

Abstract

In search of an appropriate institutional structure for successful environmental policy, many researchers focus on network governance. And while it provides the flexibility and adaptability needed for climate change initiatives, the paper argues that many networks collaborate too loosely to have the capacity to reach strategic goals or mobilize local players. There is often a disconnect between national policy goals and on-the-ground dynamics. Instead, government should adopt a network perspective which does not eliminate state action, but involves network management institutions at arm’s length of government. As an example for this mode of network governance, the research looks at the Swedish “National Network for Wind Power”, which was initiated by government and is now led by four wind coordinators managing the development of on- and off-shore wind electricity. The paper compares Swedish performance before and after the introduction of the wind network and shows how these government efforts have transformed Sweden from a weak performer to being a frontrunner in Europe.     

Farmer Representation in Australia: Avenues for Changing the Political Environment

This paper focuses on changes in the way Australian farmers have sought to influence their political environment. A taxonomy of avenues for change is constructed and used to illustrate the broad transitions in the way farmers have engaged with the formal political process. It is argued that Australian farmers have proceeded from parliamentary/electoral through militant/sectoral forms of action, and are currently pursuing sectoral action supplemented by promotional and consultative actions. Using the New South Wales Farmers' Association (NSWFA) as an example, we show how these changes in political engagement relate to a number of trends in the economic and political environment, for example economic deregulation, electoral change, administrative change, the declining economic significance of agriculture and the increasing impact of sociopolitical movements. These trends and perceived inadequate responses by sectoral interest groups and political parties have also led to rural people experimenting with alternative political avenues such as new 'populist' movements, rural summits and social movements such as Landcare and Women in Agriculture. The significance of Landcare as an avenue for renewal of rural identity and new forms of rural governance is briefly outlined.     

Building Green: Local Political Leadership Addressing Climate Change

Municipal agreements have been instrumental in communicating commitment to addressing climate change at the local level. However, what is the practical implication of this potentially symbolic decision? This study examines the power of mayoral participation in climate change agreements in driving the proliferation of sustainable or “green” building in a city as a mechanism to reach its climate change goals. In addition, mayors can localize what is otherwise a public good by framing green buildings as having other tangible impacts on a community. We analyze the impact of political leadership on green building projects in 591 cities in 50 U.S. states, controlling for a variety of city‐ and state‐level variables. Hierarchical models indicate that mayoral leadership in climate change policy fosters green building, while state‐level predictors are not as important as city policy in creating green buildings. Our research concludes that local governments can be a very effective venue in addressing broad climate change goals.     

The Shifting Politics of Climate Science

The global warming controversy has experienced a tumultuous period, with the credibility of climate science repeatedly questioned and a lack of international solidarity on the issue. While climate science institutions have accomplished much in their history, the current impasse highlights the limits of previous approaches. Determined critics have contested the authority of established scientific institutions, which have failed to measure up to their mythic ideals. While the imperfections of climate science have exposed some avenues for reform, they also suggest that the public stands to benefit from a more accurate understanding of science as both a process and body of knowledge. Uncertain and incomplete knowledge need not be an obstacle for action, and climate science can be made more robust and credible if it is removed from the center of what are largely political disagreements.     

Transparency in multilateral climate politics: Furthering (or distracting from) accountability?

This article analyzes the interplay between transparency and accountability in multilateral climate politics. The 2015 Paris Agreement calls for a “pledge‐and‐review” approach to collective climate action with an “enhanced transparency framework” as a key pillar of the Agreement. By making visible who is doing what, transparency is widely assumed to be vital to holding countries to account and building trust. We explore whether transparency is generating such effects in this context, by developing and applying an analytical framework to examine the link between transparency and accountability. We find that the scope and practices of climate transparency reflect (rather than necessarily reduce) broader conflicts over who should be held to account to whom and about what, with regard to responsibility and burden sharing for ambitious climate action. We conclude that the relationship between transparency and accountability is less straightforward than assumed, and that the transformative promise of transparency needs to be reconsidered in this light.     

Reinventing the Hong Kong state or rediscovering it? From low interventionism to eclectic corporatism

Abstract

The low-intervention state of Hong Kong in colonial times did not originate from strong neo-liberal ideological convictions. It was an artefact of the colonial political configuration, a pragmatic governing strategy adapting to the political and economic needs at the time. Political changes, economic restructuring, divestiture and marketization of state institutions since the 1980s had brought a new state form after 1997. A new business and professional elite class, embedded in an eclectic corporatist structure, evolved and brought multilateral, ad hoc and particularistic bargaining, leading to more sectoral intervention after 1997. Fragmented state institutions nonetheless weakened state capacity, making it difficult for the post-1997 state to be highly penetrative, transformative or developmental.     

The Spreading of Innovation: State Adoptions of Energy and Climate Change Policy

The American states are engaged in a variety of policy efforts to mitigate climate change and alter energy usage. While a number of studies have considered the reasons for adoption of renewable energy and climate change policies, they typically consider only one policy in isolation. This study examines policy adoption of 14 energy and climate change programs in a pooled event history analysis. Our primary research questions consider average effects of horizontal policy diffusion, while also identifying factors that vary across policy type. We offer a method of testing whether predictors vary across policies and use this test to incorporate interactions by policy in the statistical analysis. Our results indicate that many of the primary drivers of adoption are political in nature, including state ideology, environmental interest group membership, and diffusion via ideologically similar neighbors. In addition, we find that given policy heterogeneity, a number of determinants vary by policy type, though differences are in magnitude rather than direction.     

The Politics of Climate Policy: Strategic Options for National Governments

This article summarises the results so far of an international investigation aimed at identifying political strategies that make it easier for national governments to take more effective action against climate change while avoiding significant political damage. The numerous strategic options identified included strategies involving unilateral action by governments, strategies of persuasion, damage limitation strategies, strategies that can be used in political exchange with other political actors, and strategies designed to improve the bargaining position of governments by altering the terms of political exchange. The article concludes with a shortlist of especially promising strategies.     

After the green gold rush: the construction of climate change as a market transition

Abstract

This paper examines the emergence of a representation of climate change amongst business and political elites as an axiomatic frame of long-term economic strategy. In this representation, the rationale for action on climate change is liberated from the premise of an exogenous physical threat, and replaced by incentives endogenous to the market in the form of opportunities in the so-called carbon economy. The relationship between climate science and action upon climate change has in this process become markedly different from common assumptions whereby science is either ignored or obfuscated, or followed faithfully as the evidence base for policy. Strikingly, the abandoning of climate ontology as irrelevant to corporate decision-making has enabled a large-scale investment of capital into the policies nominally designed to tackle climate change.     

State sovereignty,political legitimacy and regional institutionalism in the Asia-Pacific

Abstract

Regional institutions in the Asia-Pacific have been of limited efficacy. Asian members of organizations such as ASEAN and APEC have insisted that these institutions not infringe upon their sovereign rights. The basic norms, rules, structures and practices supporting these organizations have, to varying degrees, reflected this concern. A number of factors contribute to explaining this regional reluctance to create effective multilateral institutions. This paper argues that the single most important factor is the concern of most East Asian states with domestic political legitimacy. Drawing on the work of Muthiah Alagappa and Mohammed Ayoob, the paper demonstrates that a significant majority of the states of East Asia see themselves as actively engaged in the process of creating coherent nations out of the disparate ethnic, religious and political groups within the state. As a result, these states are reluctant to compromise their sovereignty to any outside actors. Indeed, the regional attitude towards multilateral institutions is that they should assist in the state-building process by enhancing the sovereignty of their members. As an exceptional case, Japan has encouraged regional institutionalism, but it has also been sensitive to the weaknesses of its neighbours, and has found non-institutional ways to promote its regional interests. The incentives to create effective regional structures increased after the Asian economic crisis, but Asian attempts to reform existing institutions or create new ones have been undermined by the issues connected to sovereignty. East Asian states recognize that they can best manage globalization and protect their sovereignty by creating and cooperating within effective regional institutions. However, their ability to create such structures is compromised by their collective uncertainty about their domestic political legitimacy. In the emerging international environment, being a legitimate sovereign state may be a necessary prerequisite to participating in successful regional organizations.     

In defense of the duty to assist: a response to critics on the viability of a Rawlsian approach to climate change

One test of the practical relevance of any theory of international justice will be to apply it to the case of global climate change. Several thinkers have already dismissed John Rawls’s Law of Peoples as a possible candidate for helping to manage this problem, arguing, among other things, that it demands too little, too late. This paper revisits and defends the Rawlsian framework as a viable approach to managing climate change. In particular, it argues that the duty to assist (the eighth principle of the Law of Peoples) may actually be an invaluable resource for dealing with the now inevitable consequences of global climate change.     

Connecting social and environmental policy in Australia: Collateral gains or collateral damage?

Climate change research relating to “co‐benefits” suggests that the facilitation of social‐welfare outcomes through environmental policy offers a powerful means of incentivising climate change action. Concerns about social‐welfare, however, are often used to undermine climate change policies, typically through political claims that low‐to‐middle‐income households should not shoulder the costs of greater policy alignment between social and environmental objectives. Integrating the social into the environmental can therefore, on the one hand, lead to “co‐benefits” as each agenda promotes the other in political discourse, or alternatively to collateral damage if the policy objectives are framed as incompatible. This article explores both scenarios through two case studies of energy policy in Australia. The findings show that social‐welfare concerns can be a powerful discursive tool with the potential to facilitate political consensus, but also that this potential is not being fully realised, primarily because environmental concerns suffer when attempts are made to integrate the two areas discursively.     

Stern Review 2.0? The Report of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate

Eight years after the launch of the Stern Review of the economics of climate change, a new major report on economic growth and climate change (Better Growth, Better Climate) has been published by a Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, chaired by Nicholas Stern. While this comprehensive review of recent evidence has some overlap with the original Stern Review, it focuses more on the short‐term costs and benefits of action needed to reduce carbon emissions in specific parts of the economy such as cities, energy and agriculture. Perhaps the most noted conclusion of the report is that policies which governments should be pursuing anyway, because they will reduce pollution, improve health, raise productivity and reduce congestion, will cut carbon emission by between 50 and 90 per cent of what is needed to get to a 2°C pathway. This is an important report that will have considerable influence, although it has had lower public visibility than the original Stern Review. However, it also points to the need for a better understanding of the politics of climate policy, and why the opportunities to adopt policies that have multiple long‐term public benefits do not get taken. While Better Growth, Better Climate does have a chapter on the political economy of change, the analysis is limited, and could be deepened by bringing in the growing literature on the politics of climate policy.     

State and Capital in Sweden: The Importance of Corporatist Arrangements

In what way does corporatist representation change the behaviour of participating organizations? The classical question is whether the interest organizations' representatives are captured or not. Sweden is one of the countries in which the class-based interest organizations are heavily represented in the central public administration. The importance of corporatist arrangement in this area in Sweden is due to the fact that the task of implementing government policy is largely given to semi-independent directorates. Since the early 1970s, the major business organization in Sweden has been strongly demanding cuts in public spending. As it is represented in some of the most important, and expanding, public agencies of the Swedish welfare state, it could be expected that their representatives would demand a decrease in the agencies' yearly budget proposals. During a ten-year period (1974–1983), there is no sign of such behaviour of the business organization's representatives in these corporatist institutions. On the contrary, business in Sweden can be said to have been more generous with the taxpayers' money than both Social Democratic and bourgeois governments have found possible. Assuming that both its general demand for cuts in public spending and its specific action in the corporatist institutions are rational, it is discussed how this seemingly contradictory behaviour of Swedish business can be explained. The starting point for the debate about corporatism is the organizations' increasing influence on the state. The Confederation's standpoint is that this influence has now reached such a level that there is need for a change On various occasions. representatives of other interest organizations have also emphasized the importance of keeping a clear-cut distinction between the area of political responsibility and the area of the organizations' responsibility. In political issues it is the politicians' duty to weigh up the different judgments and standpoints and to come to a common public interest. The interest organizations' task is to pursue their special interests. These interest organizations should not take part in decisions in the political sector. I f this were to happen the special interests would have too much influence on the political decisions.     

Just work it out amongst yourselves: the implications of the private mediation of religious freedom

In its much-heralded report of 2008, the Bouchard-Taylor Commission struck by the Quebec government divided the resolution of contests involving religion-based claims into two realms: those which are solved in the courts and before human rights tribunals and therefore enter into formal determinations based on ‘reasonable accommodation’ and those disputes which are settled in private, with the guiding principle being responsabilisation dans la sphère privée' or ‘concerted adjustment’. In the report it is clear that the Commission prefers the second alternative for the resolution of disputes or disagreements about such things as prayer space, kirpans in schoolyards, serving pork at maple sugar farms, and religious needs in employment contexts. In this article I argue that encouraging the private resolution of issues around religious freedom, particularly in a social, legal and political climate in which there is fear and anxiety about the religious other, is an alternative that renders already vulnerable groups and individuals even more vulnerable. This in turn contributes to a situation in which they risk being oppressed and disadvantaged in a society which promises equality. Such a situation can create tension which could easily have been avoided if clear guidelines based on a beginning place of citizen equality were publicly and clearly stated by legal and political institutions.