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This paper discusses the strategies chosen by Norwegian-based environmental non-governmental organizations(ENGOs) and their international allies in the Climate Action Network (CAN) in seeking to influence Norway’s behaviour in the UN climate change negotiations. We focus on ENGO activities at the major negotiating sessions and find that the ENGOs for the most part chose not to try to affect negotiation outcomes through influencing the negotiators directly (i.e., lobbying). Instead, they used the negotiating sessions as opportunities to shape the domestic political agenda by transmitting information and arguments to the media. The aim was to indirectly influence Norway’s foreign policy and negotiating position by shaming its government into adopting policies preferred by the ENGOs, and framing the domestic climate policy debate in terms favourable to the NGO’s policies. We show how actions taken in the international and domestic political arenas were closely intertwined in this case, and argue that ENGO influence in international negotiations should be understood with such linkages taken into account. Specifically, we emphasise that the ENGOs’ability to threaten a government’s legitimacy and popular image, as well as their ability to shape domestic actor’s interpretations of international commitments, should be noted as potentially important vehicles of influence over foreign policy and thereby over negotiation outcomes.

In this paper, we seek to understand and explain how the EU has influenced the climate change policymaking processes in Norway and Germany, despite strong prior national preferences. We ask how the EU has affected the choice and design of climate policy instruments. Has the EU been a decisive factor in shaping policy responses, or has domestic politics mattered more? To address these questions empirically, we focus on the policy formulation of a particularly relevant and recently debated climate policy issue, namely, emissions trading. We focus on the objectives that national governments have sought to meet, examine the values and principles underlying those objectives, identify the means through which each country has attempted to achieve their desired goals, and go on to investigate how this process may have been influenced by the EU. We analyze the policymaking process for an emissions trading scheme in the EU, and discuss the processes through which emissions trading has been introduced as a policy instrument alternative in Norway and Germany. We examine the extent to which the EU appears to have influenced policy instrument choice in the two countries and suggest reasons for this.