Search

In 2002 and 2003 in the run-up to the war in Iraq, the U.S. and Europe experienced the most jarring deterioration in the transatlantic partnership since the Suez crisis of 1956. When attempting to diagnose the causes for the recent spate of ill will, the temptation is to look to the current inhabitants of elective office. For those who followed disputes over landmines, climate change, the International Criminal Court and other issues, it is clear problems go beyond George W. Bush, Jacques Chirac, and Gerhard Schroeder. The first section of the paper, through illustrative counter-factuals (What if Al Gore won the election? What if Europe had been bombed on September 11th?), examines the extent to which present difficulties are a product of contingent developments. The second section examines the deeper reasons for the divide. A number of authors have identified deeper sources by looking to differences in underlying material conditions and cultural values. However, these explanations typically are far too deterministic. Neither the end of the Cold War nor material differences in military capabilities determine a country?s choice of foreign policy approaches. Similarly, while values differences between the U.S. and Europe may be real, these should not obscure the commonalities of culture and interest that remain strong, particularly in light of vast differences between the democratic West and the authoritarian rest of the world. Section three makes the case that materialist and cultural arguments miss or minimize the the ways in which political distance itself may be the main cause of difficulties in the post-Cold War era. Political distance between governing elites is ultimately derived from differences in ?domestic? decision-making processes shape which interests and values exercise influence in political life. These internal institutions establish constraints on European and American decision-makers in international fora that may exacerbate differences between the two. The paper concludes by emphasizing that recent difficulties are as much a product of choice as they are driven by structural constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Doubts persist about the contribution of anthropgenic activity to the enhanced greenhouse effect, despite the fact there is no know precedent to the observed change in climate over the last half of the 20th century. This paper contends that the U.S. has adopted a precautionary approach to climate change, rather than apply a robust form of the precautionary principle. The U.S. government has adopted this policy because it has dobuts about the link between human activity and climate change, because of the economic cost of adopting a strong form of the precautionary principle, and because of the unequal obligations of greenhouse gas emission reductions between developing and developed countries. The paper contends that relying on mitigation, adaption, and further researchcarries the presumption that the climate system can absorb current greenhouse gas emission levels, and is itself a risky proposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural disasters have largely been absent from International Relations [IR] scholarship, despite the complex international interactions involved in the response to disasters. There has been little discussion of how natural disasters relate to security issues, even though they are exogenous shocks that disrupt the status quo, allowing sudden opportunities for displays of military strength and the exploitation of rivals' weaknesses during the crises. Natural disasters are arguably becoming more important as climate change, population growth, and rapid urbanization increase their potential consequences. This paper provides the platform for fresh debates about how natural disasters can be integrated into security studies. Natural disasters upset the status quo, allowing for the evaluation of the assumptions held by the prevailing theories of international politics when an exogenous crisis occurs in the international system. This paper identifies the scope within neorealism, neoclassical realism, neoliberalism, and constructivism for the integration of security studies and natural disasters. This discussion provides the theoretical foundation for future research into the implications of natural disasters for IR theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A somewhat unique feature of the global climate negotiations is that most governments allow representatives of civil society organizations to be part of their national delegation. It remains unclear, however, why states grant this access in the first place. While there are likely to be benefits from formally including civil society, there are also substantial costs stemming from constraints on sovereignty. In light of this tradeoff, the paper argues for a 'contagion' effect in order to explain this phenomenon. States, which are more central to the broader network of global governance, are more likely to be informed of and influenced by other states' actions and policies toward civil society. In turn, more central governments are likely to include civil society actors if their counterparts do so as well. This argument is tested with data on the participation of civil society organizations in national delegations to global climate negotiations between 1995 and 2005. To further uncover the underlying mechanisms, the paper also provides an analysis of survey data collected at the recent UNFCCC negotiations in Durban in 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The barriers to concerted political action on climate change mitigation are steep, especially in multilevel systems where power is diffused and authority contested. Yet action and mobilization - galvanising resources and people to participate actively - is possible, and in certain instances far reaching. This paper seeks to explain how mobilization occurs in complex multilevel systems. It compares two different polities - the United States and the European Union - to tease out the key features of multilevel systems and how they affect climate activism, mobilization and governance. Focusing particularly on climate activists - politically engaged participants - the paper analyses climate mobilization across three stages: awareness-building, alliance-building and network creation. It argues that successful mobilization is highly contingent on activists' ability to exploit - or at least navigate - multilevel institutional barriers. To capture this mobilization dynamic, the paper develops the notion of 'mobilization networks' - stakeholder networks able to transcend levels and institutional inertia and steer polities towards particular climate goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental migration is often presented as one of the gravest consequences of climate change, and is already a reality in many parts of the world. Yet the protection of these migrants has not been addressed in the international normative frameworks on migration. As a result, a growing number of scholars and advocacy groups have sought to create a special convention and/or ad hoc status for these migrants, while others contended that such a legal status was not the answer. As a result, the protection of environmental migrants is currently the subject of vigorous debates amongst scholars and policy-makers, and no clear solution is yet in sight. Research however has little considered the debates that surrounded the protection of those displaced within their countries (IDPs) in the 1990s. Both have sometimes been overlapping, especially regarding internal displacement for environmental reasons. Yet, the debate on IDPs has reached some significant success, especially with the adoption of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement in 1998, and the signature of the OAU Kampala Convention in 2009. This paper argues that lessons should be drawn from the 1990s debates on the protection of IDPs in order to inform the debate on environmental migration, as the political contexts and policy challenges were often similar. The paper identifies such lessons and assesses the opportunities and caveats of applying a similar approach of soft law to environmental migration - and what would be needed to achieve it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the health literature it is a well accepted proposition that, paradoxically, the two biggest threats to overall population health are poverty AND affluence. Each of these socio-economic extremes is associated with a well-defined list of health risks and diseases. Given this, population health researchers and advocates ought to be playing a greater role in the climate change debate than they have up to the present. There has been a deep hesitancy by political leaders to deal with climate change. This hesitancy is rooted, at least in part, in a belief that tackling the issue will require governments to impose a reduction in living standards on their electorates. This concern can only have been magnified even further given the present fragile state of the global economy. This paper argues that the climate change debate can be beneficially re-framed by taking population health impacts into account when we discuss changing living standards. A well-structured package of climate change policies has the potential to combat some of the most prevalent diseases of poverty and affluence that impact the developed industrial democracies. However, if poorly structured, a country's climate change policies might inadvertently increase illnesses associated with poverty, while having little or no impact on illnesses associated with affluence. Evidence to support this latter point is drawn from published research on policies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the health impacts of transportation in the developed industrial democracies. The paper shows that climate change represents something of a cross-roads for population health researchers and advocates. It undoubtedly presents serious challenges. However, it also offers members of the population health community an opportunity to see their concerns addressed as part of the central debates of society rather than as a marginal issue. Further research is required to ascertain why the population health community has been slow to take up this challenge and explore why the research they do produce has failed to have a greater impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the relationship between politics and CO2 emissions. Conventional studies focus almost exclusively on total emissions of green house gases, such as Carbon Dioxide. In this study we take a more disaggregated approach and investigate CO2 emissions from industries and from road traffic. Such a perspective reveals quite interesting differences in the explanatory power of political variables for policy outcomes. For instance, we find that neocorporatist arrangement have a positive impact on overall CO2 emissions but have the reverse impact when it comes to CO2 emissions from the industrial sector. The paper is structured to include variables from domestic politics and international relations in order to obtain a finer grained picture of the causal mechanisms. Doing this, we found that countries which established domestic environmental institutions to combat air pollution and/or participate in international treaties against air pollution reduce their CO2 emissions significantly more than other countries. Our focus contributes to a more appropriate picture and explanation of the relationship between politics and climate change in highly industrialized countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions many European countries have begun to develop adaptation strategies. However, developing and implementing these is not easy due to all kind of institutional complexities. Many of the current governance institutions are the product of times in which the climate issue was hardly of any importance. This paper deals with the question if our institutions are able to adapt to climate change. The paper presents a theoretical framework to assess the capacity of institutions to deal with climate adaption and applies it to adaptation strategies in four different European Countries: the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Finland and Sweden. It concludes that institutions in these countries provide the basic qualities to adapt. Using the theoretical framework, five institutional weaknesses have been identified which can cause tensions on the long term: 1) the lack of openness of the political system towards learning and variety; 2) the strong onesided reliance on scientific experts; 3) the tension between top down policy development and bottom-up implementation; 4) the institutionalized mistrust in the problem solving capacity of civil society and 5) the wickedness of reserving funding for the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negotiations to reach a post-Kyoto settlement at Copenhagen in December 2009 provide the opportunity to reinvigorate climate protection. This paper considers the potential for a 'second wave' of climate politics by comparing the divergent approaches of the EU and the USA. The underlying question raised is whether environmental and climate policy practice has been as divergent as policy rhetoric. The paper firstly situates trans-Atlantic divergence in the context of political cultures, with the EU's institutional history making it relatively comfortable with the practice of aspirational objectives, in contrast to US reluctance arising from an environmental policy tradition of precise and legalistic norm setting. Secondly, it critically reviews the capacity of ecological modernisation theory to resolve the tensions between economic and environmental orientations. The third part looks for evidence that ecological modernisation is actually occurring by investigating policy measures in the arena of 'technological forcing'. This label is applied to US 'technology forcing' as such, and to implementation in the EU of feed-in tariffs and an emissions trading scheme. Key commonalities identified are a preference for incremental improvements in the environmental performance of target firms and extremely limited capacity for initiating structural change within industry. Resistance from vested interests is a key explanation. However, the 'second wave' of climate politics will arguably be characterised by an understanding of the need for structural change, and the development of political strategies to overcome resistance from 'modernisation losers'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results from a content analytic study of evening news programs on energy and environmental news topics - 1,532 on NBC and 1,819 on CTV - from 1999 to 2009. The analysis reveals a focus on severe weather news in both countries, albeit with a somewhat greater focus on that topic in the US. There has been somewhat more extensive discussion of climate change in Canada, and the tone of that coverage has been more critical than comparable climate change coverage in the US. Granger causality tests reveal that coverage of climate change, pollution and related issues are strongly effected by - or, rather, dependent on - coverage of disasters and other weather events. In the concluding section, the paper discusses the implications of this strongly events-focused coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crisis of finance capitalism, accelerating climate change, near civil war in Pakistan-all of these recent events illustrate how poorly political science conceptualizes and models change and complexity in politics. Each also illustrates the increasingly problematic dichotomy between "domestic" and "international" politics, and questions the tenability of the traditional levels of analysis that form the foundation of international relations theory. This paper argues that the levels of analysis popularized by Waltz's "Man, the State, and War" are responsible for IR theory's inability to conceptualize change and complexity in international relations. By reifying distinctions between the individual, society, the state, and the international system, traditional levels of analysis are particularly prone to the ecological fallacy on the one hand, and fallacies of composition on the other. The paper advocates a different paradigm to understand change-that of computational social science. In contrast to theories of international relations that emphasize structures and equilibria, this interdisciplinary approach to understanding dynamic systems emphasizes relational ontologies and processes within systems. Complex systems theory's concept of emergence illuminates how small, substate-level actors can initiate change at the systemic level, while structural perturbations may initiate radical changes in state-level politics. Together with ideas from network theory and evolutionary game theory, complex systems theory can inform our understanding of the intricacies of and change in politics as diverse as interstate negotiations, global trade, political campaigns, and climate change. This illustrates the potential of computational social science to inform future political science scholarship and policy-making. This paper is prepared for delivery at the 2009 annual convention of the American Political Science Association, September 3-6, 2009, Toronto, Canada. Copyright by the American Political Science Association. The widespread growth of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the other electronic technologies that are shrinking the world offers considerable potential as a source of democracy. More accurately, by facilitating the continued proliferation of networks that know no boundaries, these technologies have introduced a horizontal dimension to the politics of the [domestic-foreign] Frontier. They enable like-minded people in distant places to converge, share perspectives, protest abuses, provide information, and mobilize resources-dynamics that seem bound to constrain the vertical structures that sustain governments, corporations, and any other hierarchical organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What factors lead to the promotion or dilution of a norm, and what determines the scope of a norm's exceptions? This paper examines two cases of normative change in international relations concerning the norm of territorial integrity and its evolution during the nineteen-seventies. In contrast to a single-case study approach, this paper compares processes in two regions providing variance in state practice and the robustness of the norm, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, in order to understand the role of norms in a larger context of multiple forces and their collective interactions. By comparing negotiations concerning the norm of territorial integrity during the period of détente and the Arab-Israeli wars, we can examine how the content of norms, and especially the scope of exceptions to a norm, are influenced by power differences and the formation of alliances willing to ensure compliance. In other words, norms are a consequence, as well as a cause, of change in the international system, especially in terms of the system's capacity to sanction. The implications for ongoing efforts in normative change such as those to prevent climate change are that any effective agreement must enable the system to restructure incentives through both coordination and the development of linkages so as to provide the material leverage necessary for inducing changes in state policies and individual behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops a methodology for estimating the risks and consequences of possible future increases in tropical cyclone intensities due to climate change that would allow policy makers to relatively quickly evaluate the cost of different mitigation strategies. The methodology simulates future tropical cyclones in East Asia by modifying the intensity of historical tropical cyclones. It then uses a Monte Carlo Simulation to obtain the expected economic loss for a certain area due to winds of a given strength. The methodology outlined has a range of applications, and the present paper shows as an example the calculation of the expected cost of mitigation of the adverse effects of climate change in Japan. The physical or first order economic damage of tropical cyclones is evident and well documented. However, it less clear whether an increase in the intensity of tropical cyclones and the subsequent economic consequences are likely to have human security implications. There are additional economic costs when sustained wind speeds are higher than 30 knots (55.56 km/h), a level that generally will lead to a precautionary cessation of many human activities. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, the paper calculates the potential economic costs for the year 2085 under a climate change scenario with a linear one-percent yearly increase in CO2. By using a spatial distribution of economic activity in Japan, it is possible to forecast which parts of the country are likely to experience the highest non-first order loss risk. This research methodology is particularly interesting in developing countries, such as the Philippines, or Haiti, countries with resource dependent livelihoods and much more vulnerable environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complexity of the issues in climate change and trade presents challenges not faced by other global problems. This paper examines the problem from the perspective of trade officials. It begins with a brief review of some of the overlapping challenges faced by trade policy specialists in the WTO and climate change negotiators. It then turns attention to the basic problems of definitions, particularly those arising from the classification of environmental goods and services (EGS). Ultimately, despite the amount of time spent thus far on thinking about tariff reductions in goods, non tariff barriers like standards and labeling laws may make a bigger contribution to the use or non use of environmental friendly products. Finally, the paper considers some of the issues stemming from border adjustment measures, especially from the perspective of developing states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post-Cold War era, climate change, landmines, debt relief and a number of other issues emerged to re-shape the agenda of decision-makers in the advanced industrialized world. The primary advocates of these normative issues are motivated not by their own material self-interests but broader notions of right and wrong. What is the primary logic that contributes to the domestic acceptance of these moral commitments? International relations scholars identify persuasion as the primary way in which states are ‘convinced’ that a norm-based policy is worth accepting. How should we characterize this process of persuasion? Is this the right term to describe the actions of transnational protest movements? Through a case study of the Jubilee 2000 campaign for developing country debt relief, I offer an account of persuasion based on strategic framing by advocates to get the attention of decision-makers. This paper emphasizes the rhetorical and framing strategies that are used to try to tip the political balance in support of normative agendas but ultimately ascribes these a different character than either coercion or Habermasian communicative action. Such strategic but not narrowly self-interested activity allows weak actors to leverage existing value traditions to build broader coalitions of political support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has studied the linkage between climate change and internal conflict, yet the evidence for the association has remained weak and contradictory. In this paper, I attempt to disentangle the mechanism by focusing on the effect of climate over internal migration. While some researchers have claimed that internal migration resulting from climate change may lead to violence, because of competition over resources between migrants and local communities, others have contended it. Although these scholars do not deny that environmental migration may locally lead to an increase in the frequency of conflict, they stress that the risk of conflict is also compounded by governance failure, autocratic institutions and intergroup inequalities. Drawing on this strand of literature, I argue that conflict is likely to result from environmentally-induced migration when the local ethnic group is marginalized by the central government. Relying on survey data about the direction and scale of internal displacement Kenya and Ethiopia, I provide one of the first empirical assessment of the linkage between environmental migration and violence using large-N analysis. Refining the analysis, I then assess if the association between environmentally-induced migration and conflict is conditional on the political marginalization of the local ethnic group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research paper which focuses on how interests and national institutions influence climate policies in different democracies. It defines climate polices as efforts to reduce a country's carbon emissions or develop clean energy technologies to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. It focuses on the impact of the demands of industry, and aggregate social welfare, on the governments' choices.

This paper addresses the question of when and why states use issue linkage as a bargaining strategy - changing the set of issues that characterize the bargaining agenda. It argues that a state is likely to do so: (1) if the current set of issues does not foster an exchange of concessions that could lead to agreement, and (2) if a state faces a costly alternative to agreement,and thus places significant value on reaching an agreement. Empirical rules for measuring these abstract concepts are presented, and an original large-N dataset of multilateral climate change conferences held from 2007- 2010 is constructed to test these hypotheses. I then illustrate the hypothesized e ects at work with a case analysis of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. I conclude by discussing the implications of these results for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research paper which focuses on the impact of climate change on poorer communities and indigenous populations who are already suffering due to globalization and the modern industrialized world's attack on natural resources, and on the indigenous cultures. It focuses on a capabilities approach to environmental justice by analyzing the capabilities of communities, affected by climate change.

As we approach the twenty-year anniversary of Keohane and Ostrom's Local Commons and Global Interdependence, I assess their agenda for collaboration between scholars working in the local and global domains. I use the case of global climate change-a challenge that intrinsically spans local to global collective action-to emphasize what scholars working at the intersection of these two domains have learned over the last two decades and what we might do next. Issues that were ripe twenty years ago-such as studying the effects of numbers of actors and their heterogeneity-have seen substantial progress. New topics for crossdomain research include a more careful look at how collective action affects technological innovation. They also include the study of how fragmented institutions affect collective action; fragmentation has grown as a research topic in both domains yet described with different terms of "polycentrism" and "regime complexes." This paper is part of a panel at APSA aimed at reviving the Keohane-Ostrom; I suggest that a shift to these new topics is as important as a revival of interest in collaboration in these two domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues of international cooperation are plagued by the possibility of freeriders; in the case of public goods, cooperative outcomes, although underprovided, may nevertheless be effected by a sufficiently motivated subset of relevant actors. Global common pool resources, on the other hand, are rival, and therefore lack of participation by all significant actors can undermine the ability of anyone to address the problem in question, as efforts to mitigate climate change suggest. Lessons from recent work on Flag-of-Convenience shipping suggest that changing the point of regulation to one involving a club good (like access to ports) rather than a common pool resource (such as protection of the ocean from pollution) can lead to more successful cooperation. This paper examines the conditions under which issues may be amenable to changing issue structure via point of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the policy of local governance and sustainable energy in the U.S. It offers information on the efforts of local governments to implement climate protection and energy efficiency measures. Moreover, it mentions ways on how urban areas contribute to climate change and rise of global carbon emissions.

This paper examines the effect of ambivalence towards climate change issues and the relationship to individual political and non-political behaviors. Previous studies of ambivalence have focused largely on how ambivalence structures mass attitudes on many salient issues, including social welfare and cultural issues. A new battery of questions in the 2008 CCAP focusing on citizen ambivalence on climate change issues is compared to measures of individual behaviors. The results indicate that there is clear evidence for value conflict among U.S. citizens on environmental issues. Importantly, there is evidence that ambivalence positively influences engaging in conservation and recycling, controlling for a range of attitudinal and demographic factors. I suggest that one cause for this relationship is that individuals respond to value conflict, which is psychologically discomforting, by seeking personal ways to deal with macro-level issues. Researchers should consider how political attitudes in other areas translate into social or other non-political behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High levels of observed city involvement in energy and climate initiatives indicate that freeriding has been much less of a barrier to local climate protection efforts than suggested by theories of collective action. This study investigates why local governments have adopted various energy and climate change policy instruments despite the non-excludability of climate benefits. This paper advances theories of institutional collective action (ICA), and diffusion of innovation by testing ICA based hypotheses that local officials are able to overcome collective action problems to the extent that the costs of these initiatives are minimized through policy network interactions, the extent to which climate action produces localized benefits or compliments local environmental, development or growth management efforts, and the extent to which energy and climate protection efforts generate selective benefits to elected and appointed local governments officials that advance their career interests depending on the existing configurations of political system institutions. Analysis of adoptions of the Climate Protection Agreements by Florida Cities indicates larger cities, highly educated populations, and district elections increase the likelihood of climate policy adoption. Moreover, economic development rather than growth management or environmental policy is linked to climate initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event data has been proven to be fruitful for the analysis of political interactions that follow the pattern 'who did what to whom and when'. Traditionally most often applied in international conflict studies and international relations, event data provides a wide set of variables and measurements that can also be applied to other research areas. Moreover, automated coding systems today allow for the coding of the data nearly in real time. This paper applies event data analysis to environmental policy and demonstrates how this method can be valuable for the study of environmental policymaking. In particular decision-making on global environmental problems such as climate change involves a complex set of actors with myriad interests, comprising both state and non-state actors on the international, national, regional and local level, as well as various forms of interactions between these actors. Event data analysis may uncover cooperation and conflict patterns between these actors and groups of actors that are concerned with climate change in different ways over time. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of high-profile individuals and policy reports have spurred alarmist claims that environmental change in general and climate change in particular will have enormous impacts on humanity. In a highly influential article, The Coming Anarchy, Robert D. Kaplan (1994) envisioned the core foreign-policy challenge for the twenty-first century as the 'political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and possibly, rising sea levels - developments that will prompt mass migration and, in turn, incite group conflicts'. More recently, a report from Christian Aid (2007: 2) claims that an estimated 1 billion people will be forced to leave their homes between now and 2050, which might 'de-stabilise whole regions where increasingly desperate populations compete for dwindling food and water'. Along the same lines, Thomas Homer-Dixon (2007) argues that 'climate change will help produce [..] insurgencies, genocide, guerrilla attacks, gang warfare, and global terrorism.' More dramatic still, a report to the Pentagon on implications of climate change for US national security sketches scenarios of epic proportions, including the risk of reverting to a Hobbesian state of nature whereby humanity would be engaged in 'constant battles for diminishing resources' (Schwartz & Randall, 2003: 16). A report by eleven retired US generals and admirals has added military authority to the issue, arguing that 'Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world' and that this 'presents significant national security challenges for the United States' (CNA, 2007: 1). The UK Treasury-commissioned Stern Review (2006) and the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) are generally more cautious in their references to conflict, but warn against potentially dire societal consequences of climate change.The issue of climate change and armed conflict is characterized by two paradoxes that have passed by largely unnoticed by the public debate. First, the many processes associated with global warming, which have truly started to appear only over the last fifteen years, have occurred during a time when we have witnessed a dramatic reduction in the frequency and severity of armed conflict. While we should not conclude about current and future links based on this simplistic comparison, the opposing trends nonetheless deserve some consideration.Second, as we show in this paper, the empirical foundation for a general relationship between resource scarcity and armed conflict is indicative at best, and numerous questions regarding the proposed causal association remain to be answered. Several single-case analyses suggest that resource scarcity contributes to outbreak of organized violence, though generally in interaction with exogenous conflict-promoting factors. The statistical literature, in contrast, has failed to converge on any significant and robust association between resource scarcity and civil war. While we cannot rule out the possibility of no general linkage, major limitations in data and research designs make such a conclusion premature. There is a substantial potential for improvement in the literature on the environment and conflict. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of what seem to be insurmountable differences on one issue after another such as immigration, global climate change, homeland security, and health care, confidence in conventional categories for capturing what is at stake and processes for negotiating agreement are eroding. Analytical formulations fail to adequately comprehend the entirety of differences that divide opposing parties and strategies for forging agreements fall short. The purpose of this paper is to explore what is meant by "ways of knowing" and how ways of knowing can assist in identifying the roots of contemporary conflict and difficulties in designing public policy that can produce effective action. We join numerous other scholars in moving beyond self interest as the fundamental motivator of political action, and beyond bounded rationality as the primary mode of reasoning. Ways of knowing is an inclusive and flexible concept that embraces many alternative formulations of political motivations and analysis styles. Advantages of this broadened conception include the possibility of more effective mechanisms for avoiding, transcending or bridging disagreements that threaten gridlock or that produce ineffective or damaging policies. To advance this argument, we first provide a practical description of what we mean by "ways of knowing," as it might be applied to analysis of policy issues. We then explore the various attempts to understand the multiple dimensions in ways of knowing, drawing on a broad literature from philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, physics, cognitive psychology, and other fields. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

California has enacted a diverse range of policies intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, perhaps the most ambitious approach to climate change of any government on the globe. This paper will describe the evolving California approach to climate change, considering the underlying factors that have prompted such unilateral collective action and the range of entrepreneurs and institutions that are engaged on this issue. But its primary focus is an early analysis of the viability of a single state attempting so much policy essentially on its own. This will explore the significant governance challenges that include the capacity for reconciling divergent views of competing entrepreneurs, coordination across multiple departments and agencies, and the prospects for working cooperatively across jurisdictional boundaries. This will provide an overview of some of the opportunities for and constraints on climate policy entrepreneurs as well as early indications of the viability of the California model for climate governance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the assumption that sub-federal initiatives in multi-level systems matter, this paper compares climate change initiatives in the European Union and in the United States. It starts by considering different options for comparing environmental policy in the European Union and the United States (section 2). The next chapters describe climate change policy, first, in the European Union and, second, in the United States (section 3) in greater detail. Based on a comparative analysis of climate policy in the two multi-level systems (section 4), the concluding section asks whether the combination of federal and sub-federal perspectives can provide some general insights and lead to a better understanding of complex multi-level systems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolution of American climate change policy from a set of individual state actions toward more of a regional approach that involves varying degrees of multi-state collaboration. It focuses in particular detail upon the challenge of setting up a regional cap-and-trade emissions control system for carbon, in the absence of active engagement by the federal government. This analysis examines the viability of regional strategies for climate policy and other areas of environmental policy and offers preliminary comparison between the American experience and that of other federal systems of governance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major challenge for the creators of international environmental agreements is how to design mechanisms that deter defection without deterring participation. The problem of global warming provides an interesting case in the study of international environmental cooperation: it presents a clear case of cross-national externalities where incentives to defect are high; it raises fundamental questions about economic growth and development; and there have been varying degrees of scientific uncertainty throughout the climate change regime's development. This paper seeks to advance our understanding of the relationship between institutional design, compliance, and ratification in international environmental affairs. I argue that differences in enforcement mechanisms from one treaty to the next have an important impact on states' decision to ratify international environmental agreements. Treaties that do not carry binding commitments will attract a large membership base, and the extent of compliant behavior will bear little relation to the decision to ratify. Treaties that carry quantified, legally-binding, commitments are much more likely to be enforced, and therefore states will be 'selective' about ratifying them. I test these arguments using a newly-compiled dataset on carbon dioxide emissions and ratification of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. The results yield strong support for my arguments. Although it is not yet possible to examine statistically the impact of these treaties on the extent of compliant behavior, the findings have important implications for future studies on that question, and for future institutional design in the international climate change regime. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which examined the use of political linkages to support scientific credibility in the science assessment process, through a comparison of the strategies of several organizations that produce scientific assessments of acid rain and climate change. Research design and method; Comparison of the strategies with an independent measure of organizational effectiveness derived from media treatments of science assessments; Ways to improve measurement of the effectiveness of scientific assessments.

The purpose of this research is to explore the dynamics of participation in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This work is based on the ideas of policy subsystems, interest groups and regime theory; and suggests an alternative framework for understanding group relations in international policy negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of climate change predict that global environmental conditions will deteriorate considerably during the 21 st century. What are the potential implications of this prediction for population migration? Climate change is an evolving phenomenon whose effects are not yet fully manifested. This paper seeks to gain insight into this question by studying the role of environmental change in human migration. Theoretical analysis suggests that in the face of environmental decline, people will decide to migrate from affected areas. The empirical analysis proceeds in two steps. The first step presents evidence from three case studies on migration in which environmental decline played a role in the population movement: internal migration in the United States during the 1930s, internal migration in Bangladesh (East Pakistan), and migration from Bangladesh to India since the 1950s. The second step of the empirical analysis conducts a large N statistical analysis of the role of the environment on population migrations in the 1990s. The results of the case studies indicate that the environment has been a factor in migration. The results from the large N suggest that environmental factors affect Human migration. The paper concludes by evaluating the implications of these findings for policy making, and for future research. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We hypothesize that changes in weather patterns in the United States over recent decades have combined to produce an important--and heretofore overlooked--phenomenon: daily weather has become more pleasant for a substantial majority of Americans since the climate change issue emerged in the public sphere. We investigate this hypothesis using daily weather data gathered from weather stations across the United States over the past four decades. We examine county-level data on how winter and summer weather conditions along with annual precipitation have changed over this period. We use these data to develop an index of weather pleasantness derived from previous research on how weather conditions affect population growth in the United States. We estimate that 84 percent of Americans currently live in counties that are experiencing more pleasant weather now than they did three decades ago. Spanning a range that includes much of the Mountain West, the Southwest, the South and the lower Midwest, the counties whose weather has improved the most are growing more rapidly and have younger populations than counties that have experienced poorer weather. Given previous research showing that the public relies on local weather to understand the problem of global warming, we anticipate that improvement in daily weather patterns may represent yet another challenge to raising Americans' interest in and concern about the consequences of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and how do elite messages shape mass opinion on international issues? Debate remains over whether the informational or partisan components of elite cues dominate. To help reconcile the relative influence of these mechanisms, we argue that their influence varies systematically across issues, depending on the baseline distribution of mass opinion on the issues themselves. Two characteristics of underlying opinion are crucial: the share of those not aligned with expert opinion, and the degree of partisan polarization. Where polarization is limited, information effects should dominate, but where issues are polarized, information intake should be limited by partisan attribution. We test these hypotheses using nine survey experiments across a range of issues, including the rise of China, climate change, international institutions, and the use of force. At one extreme, all messages, even those endorsed by generic or opposition experts, can shift opinion; at the other, only partisan-attributed messages matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on a study that examine the relationship between the institutional features of urban climate change planning and the resulting structure of the science-policy interface by focusing on climate change planning in Delhi and Mexico City. The study found that the institutional features of urban policy helps in constructing the science-policy interface in climate change planning.

Between 2008 and 2012 surveys of Americans indicated substantial variation in public views on the existence of global warming. During the period from 2008 to 2010 the number of Americans who felt that global warming was occurring dropped significantly. Then in 2011 and early 2012 acceptance of global warming began to rebound in the United States. This volatility in public opinion regarding global warming has drawn the attention of scholars who have attributed the shifts to a variety of factors including volatile economic conditions, increased political partisanship, media framing and variable weather conditions. In this study we dive deeper into the examination of the role that weather has played in producing the fluctuations in public belief that global warming is happening. Using results from 7 national surveys between 2008 and 2012 we find evidence that Americans regularly cite weather as a key determinant of their positions on the existence of global warming. We also find that actual weather conditions are related to both the likelihood that an individual would cite weather as a primary cause of their views on global warming and that overall acceptance of global warming is significantly affected by experiences with weather. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument that environmental degradation is an important driving force of migration has experienced a strong revival in the climate change context. While various studies predict large environmental migration flows due to climate change and other environmental stressors, the ex post empirical evidence for such migration is very patchy at best. We contribute to the emerging empirical literature in this field by focusing on the micro-level. We examine how and why different types of environmental conditions may lead to internal migration. The analysis relies on survey data for both migrants and non-migrants in 12 countries. The results suggest that while long-term environmental events, such as droughts, have no significant effect on internal migration, sudden-onset environmental events in the form of floods significantly increase the likelihood of migration. Furthermore, individual perceptions of negative environmental conditions can motivate people to move. We also find that people tend to respond to long-term environmental problems, such as environmental degradation, with adaptation, rather than migration. These findings indicate that different types of environmental problems - notably, natural hazards vs. gradual environmental degradation - can create different incentives for people to migrate or stay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expectation that global climate change increases the variability of extreme weather events has generated an extreme interest in investigating how these events may be tied to our understanding of international conflict. Although the destructiveness that comes in the wake of a serious natural disaster is unequivocal, what remains unclear is whether these events are causes of violent conflict. Despite the interest that natural disasters have recently received in the ecoviolence literature, the evidence that they are associated with armed conflict is mixed. Moreover, despite their strong influence on the integrity of a state's institutional capacity, a serious discussion of how the effects of natural disasters affect state capacity is missing from existing theories of the climate change-to-conflict debate. My study makes three contributions to this field of research. First, I begin by examining the conditional relationship that state capacity and natural disasters may share in elevating, or mitigating, the risk of armed conflict. Not only does this provide a closer consideration of the foundations of eco-violence hypothesis, specifically in regards to natural disasters, it also finally addresses the belief by scholars that state capacity may share a role in the climate change-to-conflict debate. Second, I draw a distinction that the risks for armed conflict produced by environmental factors are theoretically stronger at lower levels of organizational capacity. This motivates my testing for these relationships across interstate, intrastate, and substrate levels of analysis. Finally, I use dyad-month and country-month research designs, which represents a departure from existing studies on eco-shocks and armed conflict. These designs more accurately capture the relationship between the introduction of an eco-shock and the onset of violent conflict. I show that the risk of armed conflict is not systematic, but varies dramatically and is often contrary to theoretical expectations. Surprisingly, my results suggest that the contingency of natural disasters on state capacity is more of a theoretical belief than a statistical outcome [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the importance of identifying differences between environmentally induced and other forms of migratory flows to work for the protection of environmental refugees. It focuses on the security threats created by climate change for environmental refugees, and how these refugees may create potential security threats for the receiving societies.

The article offers information on the policy agenda's greenhouse gas (GHG) intensive countries in Canada and the U.S. It mentions that federal government focused on the risks of climate change. It states that sub-federal jurisdictions focused on enacting policies from emissions trading and carbon taxes to efficiency standards and renewable electricity fuel.

Despite many claims by high-ranking policy-makers and some scientists that climate change breeds violent conflict, the existing empirical literature has so far not been able to identify a systematic, causal relationship of this kind. This may either reflect de facto absence of such a relationship, or it may be the consequence of theoretical and methodological limitations of existing work. In this article we revisit the climate-conflict hypothesis along two lines. First, we concentrate on indirect effects of climatic conditions on conflict, whereas most of the existing literature focuses on direct effects. Specifically, we examine the causal pathway linking climatic conditions to economic growth and to armed conflict, and argue that the growth-conflict part of this pathway is contingent on the political system. Second, we employ a measure of climatic variability that has advantages over those used in the existing literature because it can presumably take into account the adaptation of production to persistent climatic changes. For the empirical analysis we use a global data set for 1980-2004 and design the testing strategy tightly in line with our theory. Our empirical analysis does not produce evidence for the claim that climate variability affects economic growth. However, we find some, albeit weak support for the hypothesis that non-democratic countries are more likely to experience civil conflict when economic conditions deteriorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and how do elite messages shape mass opinion on international issues? A largely divided literature has focused on two components of elite cues-information and partisan attribution-as rival alternatives. We argue instead for an interplay of influence that depends on the characteristics of mass opinion itself: distance from expert opinion and the degree of partisan polarization. Where the divide in partisan opinion is limited, information effects should outweigh attribution effects, but as issues areas appear increasingly divided on party lines, intake of information should be increasingly limited by attribution to particular parties, even to the exclusion of non-attributed (generic) expert opinion. In a series of survey experiments, we seek to map the boundaries of this interplay across a range of economic and security issue areas, including the rise of China, climate change, international institutions, and the use of military force. We find strong support for our hypothesis. At one extreme, all messages, even those from opposition experts, are effective in changing opinion; at the other, only partisan information matters, to the exclusion of generic messages. We also find suggestive evidence that in the limiting case of extremely polarized issue areas, outparty cues can outweigh inparty cues and drive respondents away from policy options they would be expected to support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses to what degree political cooperation on the issue of global climate change is shaped by network effects that result from bilateral and multilateral interactions between international actors. Applying a simulation investigation for empirical network analysis (called Siena) using political event data coded from international newswires from 2001 to 2009, the study finds strong statistical support for network effects in the international political dynamics on climate change. Observed reciprocity and transitivity effects can be seen as an opportunity for enhanced political cooperation on global climate change in the future since such effects of network closure are usually associated with higher level of collective action. On the other hand, the clearly manifesting recent dominance of the United States and China in the international politics of climate change could run against the goal of establishing an effective global climate regime after the Kyoto Protocol's expiration in 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the structural, natural and political conditions for formulating and implementing security policy in the Greenland-Iceland-Faroe Islands region. On this basis, the study recommends regional integration and cooperation in a North-Atlantic Security and Surveillance Organization. The region is structurally, naturally and politically characterized by three independent or to be independent microstates, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, thus, with very limited absolute resource while very large, strategically important air and sea spaces with Arctic or Subarctic climatic and geographic conditions. Climate change is 'very likely' to facilitate access to energy exploration and trans-Arctic shipping. Independence is the stated goal of the Faroe Islands and Greenland, which will put the region entirely under the sovereignty of microstates. The study identifies the public finance, administration and security policy challenges of very narrow tax bases for security policy expenses as ocean-going patrol vessels, surveillance aircraft and search and rescue helicopters and very small organizations with limited possibilities for specialization in areas as strategic and military assessments, intelligence, etc. How can these microstates exercise effective security policies? Icelandic, Faroese and Greenlandic existing security policies are presented. To address effects of climate change and future Faroese and Greenlandic independence, this study suggests a North-Atlantic Security and Surveillance Organization combining the broad security policy of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Iceland in the region to address the challenge of very limited capabilities while large responsibilities through joint deployment, maintenance, procurement and training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite many claims by high-ranking policy-makers and some scientists that climate change breeds violent conflict, the existing empirical literature has so far not been able to identify a systematic, causal relationship of this kind. This may either reflect de facto absence of such a relationship, or it may be the consequence of theoretical and methodological limitations of existing work. We revisit the climate-conflict issue along two lines. First, at the theoretical level we specify the mechanism through which climate change is likely to affect the risk of armed conflict. We focus on the causal chain linking climatic conditions, economic growth, and armed conflict, and also argue that the growth-conflict part of this chain is contingent on political system characteristics. Second, at the methodological level, we develop an approach that takes care of endogeneity problems in the climate-economy-conflict relationship. We test our theoretical argument on a global data set for 1950-2004. The results show that the climate change-conflict hypothesis rests on rather shaky empirical foundations: we do find some negative effects of climate change on economic growth, while stronger economic growth is associated with a lower probability of civil conflict. However, the climate change effect on growth is not robust to changes in climate indicators and samples. Our results also indicate that non-democratic countries are more likely to experience armed conflict when economic conditions deteriorate. Our results suggest that investing in climate-friendly economic growth and democracy can qualify as a no-regrets strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International negotiation analyses, also in the current climate change negotiations, often take positions of the involved governments as given. Although it is widely recognized that states do not behave as billiard balls in the international system, the determinants of negotiation positions are not yet clear. Whereas political economic studies underline economic interests of a state which determine its negotiation preference, pluralist scholars would suggest societal actors to explain the negotiation behaviour, in particular interest groups or the domestic audience. Apart from the economic and domestic interests of a state - determined by its economic situation and its domestic interest groups - the partisan preferences of governments might be useful in the explanation of a particular negotiation position (Hibbs, 1977). The influence of these factors might also be dependent on institutional factors such as the degree of democratization. We will investigate this question with a novel dataset on the current UNFCCC climate change negotiations in which data on the preferences of all participating governments were collected with the help of expert interviews with negotiation participants and heads of delegations. Moreover, information on the differing influence of key domestic players, also gathered in the interviews, will be used in multivariate data analyses to determine which players and factors are key to determining negotiation positions of states in climate change negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political processing of policy problems that span multiple policy areas is distinctive for American politics because the issues and their solutions crosscut the traditional bases for policymaking. We analyze the political processing of a dozen such problems. These include the thorny problems of the financial crisis, global climate change, health care, and immigration; the persistent problems of K-12 education, drug abuse, and food safety; and the looming problems associated with critical infrastructure, the obesity epidemic, ocean health, terrorism, and the national debt. Based on secondary accounts of the contours of these problems, we identify different patterns of policymaking that we label disintegrative, integrative, bureaucratic, and anemic policymaking. We discuss how the underlying political properties limit opportunities to fashion cohesive policies and the prospects for overcoming these limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]