Search

Recent research suggests that public support for climate action can be increased by bundling environmental policy with social and economic programs – the Green New Deal being one of the most widely known iterations of this strategy. Yet, party cue theory suggests that public support for the policy will be shaped by the strong Democratic associations of the proposal. In a preregistered survey experiment conducted among 1,203 residents of the rural western United States, I find strong evidence that the phrase 'the Green New Deal' functions as a partisan cue, lowering support for a bundled climate policy among rural residents by 9.1 percentage points. This depressive effect is robust even when framing around region-specific climate impacts is added to the survey question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental policy advocates are increasingly proposing 'bundled' clean energy policies to combat climate change while also creating jobs and transforming the economy. While such strategies may broaden the appeal of climate policies, these broad constituencies create challenges for policy communicators – how do messages about different aspects of the policy, coming from different messenger groups, influence public support for clean energy policies? This study uses a modified conjoint survey experiment (n = 2145) to test how the interaction between message frames (addressing climate change vs. creating jobs) and sources (business, environmental, or labor groups) influenced policy support for clean energy policies. Results show that job creation frames from business or environmental groups were most effective. We find evidence that certain message/source combinations work across partisanship divides: messages that were effective for one partisan group did not backfire – and often also increased policy support – when presented to the other group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While existing literature points to a number of factors that shape subnational support for climate policy, the extant scholarship has struggled to illustrate a clear and convincing explanation for subnational support of climate policy efforts and whether that support is meaningful. By looking to the United States, where subnational actors have an important role in environmental policy development and implementation, we find that legislators' ideology and membership in the minority party determines sponsorship of climate bills. Specifically, liberal legislators with the fewest opportunities to signal efficacy to their constituents are the most likely to support subnational climate change policy efforts. Given that the individuals most likely to support climate policy efforts are those without capacity, many support efforts may be more symbolic than substantive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change has turned the Arctic simultaneously into an environmentally highly fragile space and a region offering manifold economic opportunities. The notion of 'Arctic Paradox' aptly captures the trade-off between environmental protection needs and economic prospects. We investigate how the European Union has positioned itself regarding this Paradox by asking to what extent its Arctic policy discourse integrates environmental concerns. Analysis involving the main strategies of EU institutions, and the EU's Arctic and major non-Arctic members finds three co-existing coalitions with differing visions of environmental policy integration in the Arctic. The aggregate EU discourse on the Arctic is currently 'green by omission', that is, by explicitly avoiding a clear stance on the trade-off embodied in the 'Arctic Paradox'. We attempt to explain this, and conclude by discussing the likelihood of the EU developing a genuinely environment-oriented Arctic policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate climate leadership and its relationship with state regulations are discussed. First, a typology defining corporate climate leadership is introduced and distinguished from the other strategic behaviours corporations may adopt in response to climate change. A conceptual framework to explore the mechanisms enabling corporate climate leadership within a given policy system is then presented. This framework is applied to two big Swiss food retailers, considered as typical of corporate climate leaders, firms that showed an early interest in climate protection, as a result of ecological values, third actors’ lobbying and particular market incentives. Most importantly, the two companies were set in motion by a regulatory framework that featured stringent policy goals associated with flexible instruments and economic sanctions. The importance of these findings for understanding the role of corporate leadership in polycentric climate governance is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which organisations saw their positions on two contentious issues reflected in the Irish climate law of 2015, and what role did advocacy coalitions play in the policy process? These questions are answered drawing theoretically from the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and by conducting a network analysis of survey data collected from the organisations involved in the national climate policy process. The study finds that several institutionally important or economically powerful organisations, particularly those involved in the agricultural sector, as well as the government parties saw their preferences reflected in the law. This resulted in legislation that excluded binding emission reductions targets, differentiating it from similar laws introduced in other European countries. Organisations in favour of stronger regulation formed a coalition to advocate for their positions, but they largely failed to get their way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ways in which climate adaptation is understood in the European Union is examined via three key policy documents: the Strategy on adaptation and the Green and White Papers that preceded it. Drawing on Poststructuralist Discourse Theory, light is shed on the implicit values and assumptions that underpin this recent policy initiative. The findings demonstrate a tension between the declared ambition to act on adaptation and implicit suggestions that nothing really has to change, and the challenge can be addressed by market and technological innovations, and by mainstreaming adaptation into existing sectoral policies. The policy discourse effectively serves to depoliticize choices societies make in response to climate change, presenting adaptation as a non-political issue. Insight into European adaptation discourse enables deeper understanding of recent policy developments and opens up possible entry points for critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss the implications of the Liberal Party majority in 2015 for Canadian climate policy. Topics covered include the failure of previous Canadian governments to address climate, factors that may help Canada develop a system of managing climate policy that is systematic and wide-ranging, and the impact of the petroleum industry on the development of climate policy.

The authors discuss environmental politics in the 2015 Danish general election. Topics covered include environmental and climate policies developed by the Danish governments, representation gained by the Danish Green Party during the elections in 1987, 1988 and 1990, and the state of environmental policy and politics after the 2015 election.

The climate change policy design of the Lee Myung-bak administration was the outcome of interest group politics around the greenhouse gas and energy target management scheme, carbon taxes, and the emission-trading scheme. Using qualitative methods, this research examines powerful stakeholders and their interests at play in Korea’s climate change policymaking processes. It also links the political economy of climate change policy to the legacy of the ‘developmental state’ and examines environmental developmentalism in the design of the three climate change policies. The Lee administration strongly promoted environmental developmentalism, which created a new growth engine in an environmental field, while bolstering manufacturing businesses and excluding the views of environmental non-governmental organisations from the target-management and the emission-trading schemes. The Lee administration also sought to facilitate pro-business measures such as low taxes, which led it to reject a carbon tax. Therefore, environmental developmentalism was central to the politics of the Lee administration’s climate change policy design. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International environmental negotiations such as the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP10) are state-dominated, and their outcomes are highly publicized. Less transparent is the role of non-state delegates who effect changes during negotiation processes through myriad strategies and relations. This article focuses on the influence of indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) delegates in official COP10 negotiations using collaborative event ethnography to identify and evaluate ‘moments of influence’ that have gone largely unnoticed in the literature on global environmental politics. Findings indicate that IPLC delegates influenced negotiations by enrolling, shaming, and reinforcing state actors. Such relational maneuvers and interventions may appear inconsequential, but their implications are potentially far-reaching. Recognizing moments of influence improves understandings of non-state influence, relational power, and the multiple ways diverse actors reach across networks to overcome the power asymmetries that continue to characterize global environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A successful carbon capture and storage (CCS) policy and programme is widely considered essential to curbing carbon dioxide emissions. What explains the strikingly different policy outcomes in two key European Union political heavyweights and coal economies, the UK and Germany? The UK has decided to contract two specific CCS projects, with explicit timelines for realisation; Germany has made no such decisions. From scrutiny of official documents and in-depth high-level interviews, it was found that the UK has more favourable structural capacity, including offshore storage capacity (which evokes less conflict) and significant oil-industry expertise, and thus an easier task. Moreover, this structural capacity has interacted with a solid political commitment to bring CCS forward in the UK, including specific, multistage funding and a high-level drive to develop CCS, especially after 2009. In Germany, by contrast, CCS has encountered increasing local and central opposition since 2009, with the Energiewende and renewables being accorded priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sub-state governments have emerged as important sites of climate policy innovation, but their capacity for action has rarely been examined. Although they are devolved regions within the same state, Scotland and Wales have varying degrees of constitutional competence. We conduct an inter- and intra-regional comparison to examine whether constitutional competence shapes the scale of ambition and achievement in climate policy outputs and outcomes. Focusing on emission reduction programmes and renewable energy, while there is a clear relationship between constitutional capacity and policy ambition, the impact of constitutional capacity is more evident in the capacity to deliver than in policy ambition. Other factors, such as civil society strength and the politics of territorial distinctiveness, also matter in shaping ambition, in spite of limitations in decision-making autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Links between national news outlets (Globe and Mail and National Post) and climate-change discourse are examined in order better to understand the cultural politics of Canadian involvement in climate governance. National news media use a narrow range of issue categories to interpret climate change to the public. Both news outlets also privilege national and international political spheres, with less attention to climate governance at the sub-national level. However, there are important differences between them. The Globe and Mail tends to focus on government responsibility, while the National Post tends to focus on climate science and the economic costs of addressing climate change. Four key periods (1999, 2002, 2006, and 2010) are examined in order to trace shifts in climate-change discourse. There has been a shift towards greater issue complexity over time, coupled with a growing polarisation of climate discourse across the two national news outlets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As cities develop climate-change policies, they are likely to engage with and produce new science and information. What influences the choices cities make about this engagement? Our aim is to understand the differences in the ways city governments structure their relationship to climate-change science and expertise, and the extent to which these choices reflect broader governance orientations towards climate change as a policy area. The climate-change policy processes of Delhi and Mexico City are used as case studies. The two cities have made different choices about the structure and formality of the science–policy interface, and demonstrate that policymakers’ choices about engaging scientific expertise are embedded in broader administrative and political systems. Examining the science–policy dynamics in urban climate-change policy suggests ways forward for future research, as there are likely to be political and policy consequences and trade-offs with different approaches to structuring the science–policy interface. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A key dimension of the debate about policy innovation is the extent to which new policies achieve significant and lasting effects on the problems they purport to address. However, little is known about such effects. We break new ground by investigating how far current evaluation practices in a policy system with relatively ambitious climate policies – the European Union – identify the most effective (carbon-reducing) policies. We find that a small number of policy instruments are projected to deliver the lion’s share of emission reductions. Setting aside the special case of emissions trading, these instruments are not particularly innovative. If significant practical and political obstacles can be addressed, more (detailed) evaluations could enhance the evidence base and also the political prospects for delivering deeper emissions cuts through to 2050. An evaluation perspective could also offer a very different way to consider policy innovation dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Norwegian climate policy has been marked by several shifts with regard to adopted targets and measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Three knowledge-based discourses – respectively a tax discourse, a quota discourse and a technology discourse – have been influential throughout. By tracing the development of Norwegian climate policy from 1989 until 2008, it is shown, however, that while significant in early phases of policymaking, the discourses lose influence in the phase when policy solutions are designed and implemented. Those ideas and ambitions that characterise the ruling discourses in Norwegian climate policy are not necessarily materialised in actual policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2010, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced the deferral of his flagship climate-change policy, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, after it twice failed to gain the support of the Australian Senate. The decision contributed to the curtailment of Rudd's premiership and confirmed climate change as one of the most toxic issues in Australian politics. Although deficits in policy design and structural obstacles caused by Australia's carbon-intensive economy were major obstacles for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, it could have passed into legislation had more effective political strategies been used to counter political opposition. A policy network framework is used to explore these political obstacles and how alternative political strategies may help to counter political obstacles to and public concern about new climate policies. In conclusion, the wider merits of policy network and political strategy approaches for the analysis of national climate politics are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1970s and 1980s, Japan was known as the leading innovator in environmental policy. Other OECD countries found much to emulate. Two decades later, Japan appears to have lost its innovative edge to other OECD countries. Why has Japan fallen from its position as the global leader? How should Japan regain its reputation? Possible causes of the rise and fall of Japanese environmental policy are examined by exploring its domestic policy subsystem, the international arena and the arena where domestic and foreign issues converge, the emerging space in which sub-national authorities have become increasingly recognised as direct contributors to global environmental strategies. Each of three approaches – the domestic/foreign divide, interaction and convergence – offers a partial answer to these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing interest in China's response to climate change, few studies address what is happening at the sub-national level. Hong Kong has implemented several mitigation and adaptation climate-related initiatives. An analytical framework combining multi-level governance with the concepts of institutionalisation and legitimisation is applied to Hong Kong's climate initiatives. Hong Kong's ability to devise a climate change strategy that is institutionalised and legitimated is found to be constrained by a range of climate policy-specific and broader socio-economic and political factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various insurance schemes are increasingly considered as part of a comprehensive set of responses aimed at adapting the world to future climate change. Insurance is believed to provide resources needed to rebuild societies following adverse effects of extreme weather events, and do so in a way that encourages preventive, risk-reducing action. After investigating the idea of climate insurance from a normative standpoint, it is argued that when understood conventionally - i.e. commercially - climate insurance is a highly unattractive idea. There are more defensible models of reactive adaptation that retain aspects of insurance, including, in particular, a model that is more reminiscent of a (global) social insurance model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing climate change mitigation policies are particularly concerned with the reconciliation of two seemingly conflicting aims: environmental protection and economic efficiency. The normative principles underlying these policies meanwhile focus on two central ideas: fair burden-sharing and agents' responsibility. However, both existing policy instruments and their supporting philosophical principles are highly problematic in terms of intergenerational justice and truly effective climate change mitigation. Three competing conceptions for allocating and distributing the burdens of climate change mitigation (cap-and-trade schemes, carbon emission taxes, and personal ecological space quotas) and their compatibility with principles of intra- and intergenerational justice are analysed and evaluated. None of the proposed instruments is able to satisfy the demands of effective mitigation and egalitarian justice on its own, which suggests that existing proposals for the distribution of emission rights and climate change-related costs need to be supported by a thicker account of intergenerational justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Willingness to pay to address environmental problems is influenced by partisanship in Australia. Ceteris paribus, the support base of environmental concerns is generally much stronger among Labor and Green supporters, postmaterialists, those who engage in eastern spiritual practices and professionals. Women are more likely than men to favour environmental protection over economic growth, to pay extra tax to protect the environment and to believe global warming will pose a serious threat during their lifetime. Support for renewable energy is stronger among younger Australians, suggesting demand may increase with generational replacement. Political leaders influence public concerns over global warming and other environmental issues across the partisan divide, yet while political elites remain divided over the implications of climatic change, the shift in public opinion and behaviour necessary to avert such problems is unlikely to occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses climate change policy in China. According to the author, the issue of climate change in China does not involve a great deal of conflict because of the accepted view among government, business leaders, and many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that climate commitment depends on the fulfillment of China's economic and social goals. Topics include an in-depth overview of Chinese nationalism and the author's hypothesis on why the dynamics of global politics is creating a political atmosphere in which the Chinese public remains loyal to the state's defense of autonomy when responding to climate change.

The article discusses environmental policy in Canada as influenced by the emergence of liberal-leaning, environmentally-concerned politicians. The article introduces the party system and parliamentary government of Canada, its Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the 2006 election that led to the resignation of Liberal party leader Paul Martin, and the rise of Stephane Dion to replace Martin. Dion's environmental leanings are said to have become prominent in the Liberal campaign. Canada's Conservative party leadership is noted for its influence on Governor-General Michaëlle Jean's decision to prorogue Canada's Parliament.

The ways in which Russian public discussion translates climate change into a policy problem that identifies the phenomenon and defines a course of action are examined in order to shed light on the underlying structures of belief, perception and appreciation that shape Russian conduct toward global climate policy. The discussion distinguishes between three frames: the mission, national interest and duty. The mission frame defines climate policy as a means to improve Russia's international image, while the national interest frame focuses on economic and political costs. Only the duty frame defines climate change as a problem that Russia must help solve. Despite these differences, a central premise of all three frames is the centuries-old idea of Russia as a Great Power with a special mission in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for co-ordinated international action to mitigate climate change makes it one of the most complex public policy problems of modern times. For the advanced democracies, public opinion is a key element in developing an appropriate policy response. Australian public opinion towards climate change and the public policies that have been proposed to deal with the problem, most notably the emissions trading scheme (ETS), are examined using national survey data collected in late 2008. The results show widespread public concern about climate change, and a majority of respondents support the introduction of an ETS. However, a significant minority of the public remains opposed. Most importantly, however, most people declare themselves willing to pay more for environmental protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory and analysis of regulation provides an understanding of climate change regulation and its limitations leading to the identification of political strategies to improve such regulation by orientating it more towards public interest objectives. Public interest and private interest theories of regulation are considered together with regime theory, which understands regulatory regimes as dynamic interactions of a variety of forces that can be altered by external pressure. One possible pressure is governmental action to increase regime transparency. UK and EU climate change regulation is used to consider whether increased transparency, in particular focused around a carbon price-based instrument with quantified emissions reductions, can shift the climate regime towards meeting the public interest. This runs up against difficulties of sociocultural plurality and the one-dimensional nature of the price mechanism. More successful strategy requires a price-based instrument coupled to transparent complementary policies and regulations that address sociocultural pluralities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological modernisation (EM), in both theory and practice, has much to commend it. Its main strengths lie in its promotion of win-win solutions to ecological risk and its utilisation of the very institutions of modernisation to foster industrial and ecological adaptation. EM is usefully conceptualised into its weak and strong forms, with distinctions also drawn between ecological modernisation and ecological restructuring, but even weak ecological modernisation may trigger ecological restructuring. Governments, particularly those governing energy-intensive economies, are increasingly caught up in this dynamic, to which they respond in different ways. A critical EM framework is used as a lens through which to consider Australia's climate policy, focusing on the sectoral politics that shape its modernisation-restructuring dynamic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]