Assessing Climate Change: International Co-operation and Predictions of Environmental Change

Past scientific assessments of global climate change impacts have tended to give us information on global impacts. But scientists have been refining their predictions down to regional, national and local levels. Improved understanding of climate change impacts, and particularly more specific information on which countries are most vulnerable, will affect international co-operation. Presumably, countries that are most vulnerable to climate change will be more likely to join international efforts to address climate change. At least that is what one could logically hypothesise. Questions addressed include: Does 'vulnerability' to climate change matter for international co-operation? What might be the political impact of improved understanding of the effects of climate change on international environmental co-operation?     

Science and International Environmental Nonregimes: The Case of Arctic Haze

Dimitrov et al. argue that nonregimes are a worthy object of research attention that can contribute to international regime theory. Case studies, however, are still sparse. In this article, I examine Arctic haze, an issue area where a transnational environmental problem existed but no regime formed. Arctic haze was (re‐)discovered in 1971 but by 2000, the window of opportunity to form a regime had closed. What factors explain why an Arctic haze regime was not formed between 1971 and 2000? I claim science‐based factors play the dominant role. An analytical approach applicable to the science‐policy interface was employed. Using this approach, I conclude that the Arctic haze nonregime is best explained by the absence of scientifically documented and compelling transboundary consequences to ecosystems and humans. This is a product of the unique nature of the Arctic atmosphere.     

Signed but Not Ratified: Limits to U.S. Participation in International Environmental Agreements

Why does the United States sign environmental treaties but not ratify them? U.S. presidents have negotiated and signed several environmental treaties that ultimately could not obtain Senate ratification. This article considers two alternative explanations. First, presidents may face divided government and upcoming elections; elections can increase uncertainty regarding ratification, because they upset majorities and change congressional preferences on issues. Such factors may have caused “involuntary” defection from international environmental cooperation. Second, compensation and compromise on enabling legislation could satisfy enough senators and their constituents to allow the legislation's passage. Failure to secure ratification may be a result of the president's overestimating the potential for negotiating a policy package capable of creating sufficient support to obtain Senate ratification. I compare domestic constraints on U.S. participation in three international environmental negotiations—climate change, biodiversity, and chemicals—to assess the alternative explanations. The cases exemplify how domestic institutions affect international environmental cooperation.     

International institutions and the framing of domestic policies: The Kyoto Protocol and Canada's response to climate change

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol establishes an international institutional framework for domestic responses to climate change that links emission targets for developed countries to international market mechanisms. Although these flexible mechanisms allow developed countries some leeway in how they meet their commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, the protocol also establishes a normative framework that directs domestic policy responses along certain paths. Applying insights from sociological institutionalism and constructivism in international relations, this article argues first, that the climate change regime reflects and further institutionalizes the prevailing international normative structure in the environmental issue area, characterized as liberal environmentalism. Second, these norms, as embodied in the climate change regime, have enabled and constrained climate change policy development in Canada, one of the worlds largest emitters of greenhouse gases per capita. International norms can shape or redefine domestic interests, enable policies in conformity with those norms, and create normative pressures for change by linking with extant domestic and foreign policy norms. Uncovering this international institutional-domestic policy interaction resolves the paradox of Canada's promotion of commitments and mechanisms consistent with its domestic interests and institutional constraints, but eventual commitment to action well beyond what those constraints dictate. This commitment continues despite Kyoto's uncertain future. The findings also point to lacunae in the literature on regime compliance and effectiveness more broadly, especially its dominant rationalist variant.     

Effects of Exchange Rate Regime on IMF Program Participation

This article investigates the effect of a domestic policy choice, the exchange rate regime, on countries’ interaction with an international institution, their participation in International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending agreements. I hypothesize that the effect of the level of international reserves on a country's probability of participation in an IMF program depends on the exchange rate regime. A low level of international reserves threatens unfavorable economic and political outcomes only in countries that maintain a fixed exchange rate regime. The level of reserves may thus be a significant determinant of participation in IMF programs only for countries that maintain a fixed exchange rate regime. I use a dynamic univariate probit model of IMF program participation to assess empirically the effect of reserves in countries that maintain fixed, intermediate, and floating exchange rate regimes. The empirical results support my hypothesis: reserves have a significant effect only in countries that maintain a fixed exchange rate.     

The politics of decarbonization and the catalytic impact of subnational climate experiments

The Paris Agreement of 2015 marks a formal shift in global climate change governance from an international legal regime that distributes state commitments to solve a collective action problem to a catalytic mechanism to promote and facilitate transformative pathways to decarbonization. It does so through a system of nationally determined contributions, monitoring and ratcheting up of commitments, and recognition that the practice of climate governance already involved an array of actors and institutions at multiple scales. In this article, we develop a framework that focuses on the politics of decarbonization to explore policy pathways and mechanisms that can disrupt carbon lock-in through these diverse, decentralized responses. It identifies political mechanisms—normalization, capacity building, and coalition building—that contribute to the scaling and entrenchment of discrete decarbonization initiatives within or across jurisdictions, markets, and practices. The role for subnational (municipal, state/provincial) climate governance experiments in this new context is especially profound. Drawing on such cases, we illustrate the framework, demonstrate its utility, and show how its political analysis can provide insight into the relationship between climate governance experiments and the formal global response as well as the broader challenge of decarbonization.     

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.     

The effect of membership rules and voting schemes on the success of international climate agreements

We empirically test the role of membership rules and voting schemes for climate change coalitions with the STAbility of COalitions model (STACO). The model comprises twelve world regions and captures long-run effects of greenhouse gas accumulation. We apply three stability concepts that capture the notion of open membership and exclusive membership with majority and unanimity voting. We show that exclusive membership leads to superior outcomes than open membership and that unanimity voting is preferable to majority voting in welfare and environmental terms. Our results suggest restricting membership in future international environmental agreements and they provide a rationale for unanimity voting as applied in many international organizations.     

Critique of the International Law on Protection of the Outer Space Environment

Environmental concerns are an issue for the outer space legal regime. Human activities result in insurmountable amounts of debris, chemical effluents, and radioactive waste carried into the domain of space, which poses a serious threat to future generations and uses of space. Sophisticated technology and the amount of funds required to access space complicate the task of addressing orbital debris. To correct this anomaly, regulation of space activities with a view to making them environmentally sustainable is called for in this article. With this aim in mind, I critically analyze the existing international legal framework, examining its relevance in conserving the space environment. Discovering a slew of irregularities, I endeavor to review each legal instrument in the context of environmental conservation and evaluate their effectiveness. I conclude that the outer space legal regime is acutely ineffectual and reforms are an imperative. The research reveals a plethora of suggestions, which include, inter alia, amendment to Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty, harmonization of international environmental law and space law, and the establishment of an international regime for the removal, maintenance, and servicing of satellites. With such proposals in mind, the need to frame a new space policy or modify the existing framework is emphasized herein.     

Patterns of EU Energy Policy Outputs: Incrementalism or Punctuated Equilibrium?

Although macro-level analyses of EU policy outputs are common, few empirical studies have measured the long-run evolution of the Union’s energy policy sector. This article provides an overview of European energy legislation to show past sectoral developmental trends, current characteristics and potential future directions. During this period, EU energy policy has evolved sequentially to encompass multiple sectors, including coal, nuclear energy, oil and gas production, energy conservation, market harmonisation and climate change concerns. Moreover, by measuring the velocity of legislative output as an indicator of policy activity, the overall picture is one of gradual incremental growth centred broadly on several episodes of shallow, delayed action punctuated equilibrium that has resulted in an uneven mixture of national and supranational decision-making. Expansion is perhaps set to continue along a similar path as a common EU climate–energy policy emerges, although some constraints are evident.     

Climate Change Policy Implementation: A Cross-Sectional Analysis

Why would countries invest resources to protect the global atmosphere, a global common‐pool resource? After all, this is an open‐access resource with no restrictions on appropriating its benefits. Furthermore, why would they do so under the aegis of a weak global regime (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC) that has virtually no provisions for sanctioning noncompliance and when the largest contributor to the problem is not participating in the regime? This article examines why a number of countries have implemented the UNFCCC. I hypothesize that countries implement UNFCCC because they corner domestic environmental benefits, namely reduction in local pollution. In my empirical analysis of 127 countries, employing an ordinal logistic regression model, I find that local air pollution is associated with higher levels of implementation of the UNFCCC. Thus, I conclude that the incentives to implement a relatively weak global regime can be found in the domestic political economy.     

China’s “Radicalism at the Center”: Regime Legitimation through Climate Politics and Climate Governance

The article examines whether there is reciprocity between the legitimating effects of China’s regime at home and abroad and how global governance and legitimacy interact in the case of China. This is done through an analysis of Chinese climate politics and China’s engagement in international climate negotiations and governance, especially its behavior during and after the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009 and the Chinese regime’s efforts to legitimate this behavior. While China’s role in international climate governance was disputed at the Copenhagen Summit, China contributed constructively to brokering a deal with significant implications for a new climate governance architecture suiting China’s preferences and being aligned with China’s core interests. China defended the procedural logic of the current global climate governance framework and managed to contain institutional change. Based on Anthony Giddens’ proposition about “radicalism at the centre”, it is argued that China’s national and international discourse on and actions associated with climate change and the international negotiations about the new climate governance architecture seem to be able to reinforce each other and may well have a mutual legitimacy augmenting effect for the ‘radicals at the centre’ of the Chinese regime, provided that they ensure consequential logic through targeted reduction of GHG emissions and a “green transformation” of the economy.     

Autonomous Local Climate Change Policy: An Analysis of the Effect of Intergovernmental Relations Among Subnational Governments

Local governments have emerged as important players in climate change governance, both at home and on the international stage. Likewise, action by states and provinces has been increasingly highlighted, particularly as national actors have moved slowly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But to what extent do local governments act independently from state and provincial governments in the area of climate change mitigation? Using an explicit process tracing approach, the article tests two hypotheses regarding the influence of upper level subnational governments on local policy. In Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, a city that is a climate change leader, provincial government intervention cannot explain the results of climate change mitigation policy making. This suggests that local governments can exercise an important degree of autonomy over climate change policy, but also implies that where municipalities are less independently committed to climate action, active upper level government intervention will likely be needed.     

States on Steroids: The Intergovernmental Odyssey of American Climate Policy

Climate change has conventionally been framed as an issue that would be addressed by an international regime established through negotiation among nation‐states. The experience of policy development in the decade following the signing of the Kyoto Protocol indicates that climate change also needs to be examined as a challenge of multilevel governance. The increasingly central role of state governments in American climate policy formation squares with recent experience in other Western democracies that share authority across governmental levels. This paper examines the American experience, considering factors that have contributed to a state‐centric policy process and using that body of experience to assess competing strategic choices faced by individual states based on their mix of emission trends and policy adoption rates. In turn, the collective state experience allows for consideration of the varied political feasibility of competing climate policy tools that remain under active review in subnational, national, and international contexts. The paper concludes with a set of scenarios that explore different ways in which a state‐centric system may be integrated with expanding involvement at the national level.     

Political Science and Prediction: What's Next for U.S. Climate Change Policy?

This article analyzes how U.S. climate change politics and policy making are changing in the public, private and civil society sectors, and how such changes are likely to influence U.S. federal policies. It outlines the current status of U.S. climate change action and explores four overlapping pathways of policy change: (1) the strategic demonstration of the feasibility of climate change action; (2) the creation and expansion of markets; (3) policy diffusion and learning; and (4) the creation and promulgation of norms about the need for more aggressive climate change action. These four pathways seek to fruitfully draw from rationalist and constructivist approaches to policy analysis, without collapsing or confusing the different logics. Building on this analysis, it predicts that future federal U.S. climate policy will include six major components: (1) A national cap on GHG emissions; (2) A national market based cap‐and‐trade GHG emissions trading scheme; (3) Mandatory renewable energy portfolio standards; (4) Increased national product standards for energy efficiency; (5) Increased vehicle fleet energy efficiency standards; and (6) Increased federal incentives for research and development on energy efficiency issues and renewable energy development. In addition, expanding federal climate policy may bring about significant changes in U.S. foreign policy as U.S. international re‐engagement on climate change is likely to occur only after the development of more significant federal policy.     

Combating Climate Change in the UK: Challenges and Obstacles1

There is a curious disjunction between the Labour Government's international actions and its domestic policy. Although Tony Blair did much to promote the climate change agenda on the international stage, domestically, with carbon emissions rising again, the Government will fail to meet its target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 20% below 1990 levels by 2010. This article examines the weaknesses in the Labour Government's domestic record and assesses the significance of the recent transformation of climate change politics. Several obstacles to the design and delivery of more effective policies are identified, which can be categorised as either problems of ‘environmental politics’ or ‘environmental governance’. It is argued that the recent politicisation of climate change has overcome some of these obstacles ‐ albeit temporarily ‐ but whether the pressure for further policy measures can be sustained, with a long‐term impact on environmental governance, remains uncertain.     

The Political Economy of a Planetary Sunshade

Geoengineering proposals are increasingly acknowledged as possible responses to climate change because of the repeated failure of national decision makers to solve the collective action problem of allocating carbon emission reductions at the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Geoengineering is attractive, the possible moral hazard notwithstanding, because of differences in the economic effects of climate change across countries, which are organized as factions seeking to shift the burden of carbon reductions or to delay response. This article outlines the political economic advantages of a planetary sunshade to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth. Rather than adopt the more common game theoretic model to describe the relevant international relations, construction of the planetary sunshade is characterized as an auction in which a single spacefaring power completes construction of the megaproject as a global good, comparable to the willingness of the United States to provide the dollar as a global reserve currency, and then determines the average global temperature based upon financial or material contributions from other countries. The willingness to contribute is based upon calculations of preferred average global temperatures.     

Is There Now a Political Climate for Policy Change? Policy and Politics after the Stern Review

Climate change is fuelling a significant renaissance in the national environmental movement in the UK. The broad aim of this article is better to understand the extent to which the 2006 Stern Review on climate change marked a decisive turning point in the battle against climate change or just another missed opportunity. Labelled as the most comprehensive review of the economics of climate change ever produced, the Stern Review was commissioned by the Chancellor in the summer of 2005 as part of the G8 Gleneagles Dialogue on Climate Change. The main themes of and reactions to the Stern Review are analysed against the backdrop of changing domestic party politics. Then, the follow through in terms of new political and policy pronouncements is examined. It is concluded that finding a way to tie together domestic and international actions on climate change represents an enormously tricky political challenge for whoever succeeds Blair as prime minister.     

The EU as Promoter of Environmental Norms in the Doha Round

This article investigates the reasons why the EU tried to promote environmental norms in the Doha round. It argues that the EU's support of a ‘greener’ World Trade Organization stems from tensions between the rigidity of the domestic dynamics of positive integration in the EU and the increased bindingness of negative integration commitments undertaken under the WTO. Consensual decision-making procedures in the EU led societal groups to push for stringent food safety and environmental regulations in the EU, and made them very resistant to change. These dynamics of positive integration, however, produced rules that were inconsistent with negative integration commitments undertaken under the WTO, at a time when the creation of a quasi-judicial dispute settlement mechanism in the trade regime had greatly increased the bindingness of WTO rules. As a result of the twofold effect of domestic and international institutional constraints, EU decision-makers were subject to compelling incentives to try and strengthen legitimate exceptions from WTO rules and immunise European regulation against WTO legal challenges. Empirical evidence on how the EU shaped its trade-and-environment agenda in the run-up to the Doha Round in 2001, as well as how it negotiated in the subsequent period, lends support to the argument.     

Environmental Policy as Democratic Proclamation and Corporatist Implementation: A Comparative Study of Environmental Taxation in the Electricity Sector in the Nordic Countries as of 1994

The Nordic countries generally rank as one of the forerunners of environmental policies and figure in the front line with the most ambitious policy goals in international fora. However, since effective environmental action, for instance through environmental taxation, generally puts a burden on industry, a unilateral introduction of environmental measures by one or a few nations may seriously affect their industrial competitiveness, given an open and competitive economy. Given their persistent and often unilateral avant-garde environmental engagement, the paper discusses how the Nordic countries deal with this dilemma. Theoretically, the paper seeks an answer by recursion to Rokkan's famous distinction between functional and electoral/numerical politics. Empirically the paper finds support for the Rokkan perspective through a systematic analysis of Nordic environmental taxation policies, documenting that the two channels of policy making do indeed produce different results that are compatible with a dual-policy solution to the prisoners' dilemma of avant-garde environmental politics.