Nationalist Backlash Against Foreign Climate Shaming

Should international pro-climate actors speak up against climate rogues, or do foreign critics risk igniting nationalist backlash against global environmental norms and institutions? We explore naming and shaming dynamics in global climate politics by fielding survey experiments to nationally representative samples in Brazil. Our results show that nationalism moderates public reactions to foreign climate shaming: individuals who are highly attached to their nation are more likely to reject international criticism than their lowly attached peers. Yet, we also find that nationalist publics express little support for virulent defiance against foreign critics. Our findings hold irrespective of the source of criticism and the nature of the critical message. These results sound a cautionary note on the belief that liberal internationalists should tread carefully so as not to unadvisedly unleash nationalist pushback. Foreign climate criticism may bump up against nationalist sentiment in climate rogues, but it will not necessarily fuel an all-out backlash against the global environmental regime.

Crime, Security, and Illegal Wildlife Trade: Political Ecologies of International Conservation

This article takes a political ecology approach to understanding the integration of conservation with security in tackling the illegal wildlife trade. It builds on political ecology debates on militarization by connecting it to the dynamics of global environmental politics, specifically the discursive and material support from donors, governments, and conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The combined effects of a highly competitive funding environment and security concerns of governments has produced a context in which NGOs strategically invoke the idea of the illegal wildlife trade as a security threat. For donors and governments, tackling the illegal wildlife trade is a means through which they can address security threats. However, this has material outcomes for marginalized peoples living with wildlife, including militarization, human rights abuses, enhanced surveillance, and law enforcement.

Indigenous Peoples and Multiscalar Environmental Governance: The Opening and Closure of Participatory Spaces

There has been an unprecedented inclusion of Indigenous peoples in environmental governance instruments like free, prior, and informed consent; reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) projects; climate adaptation initiatives; and environmental impact assessment. We draw on theories of participatory governance to show how locally implemented processes have been shaped by their interactions with invited, closed, and indigenous-led spaces at multiple scales. Empirically, our article is based on field research in Latin America, semistructured interviews, and a systematic literature review. We find four main barriers that have (re-)produced environmental injustices in environmental governance: first, a lack of influence over the institutional design of governance instruments; second, the exclusion of Indigenous peoples in the domestication of global instruments; third, policy incoherencies constraining the scope for decision-making; and fourth, weak cross-scale linkages between Indigenous-led spaces. This article helps to elucidate constraints of participatory spaces and identify leeway for transformation toward environmental justice.

The International Politics of Carbon Dioxide Removal: Pathways to Cooperative Global Governance

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C require that, in addition to unprecedented reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, between 100 and 1,000 metric gigatons of CO2 be removed from the atmosphere before 2100. Despite this, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is not yet firmly on national or global policy agendas. Owing to uncertainty about both technical potential and social license, it is unclear whether CDR on the required scale will even be feasible. This article asks what scholarship about the provision of global public goods can tell us about governing CDR. We identify four areas where new international cooperative efforts—likely performed by small clubs of motivated actors—could amplify existing CDR policy responses: development of CDR accounting and reporting methodologies, technological and prototype deployment for technically challenging CDR, development of incentives for CDR deployment, and work on governance and accountability mechanisms that respond to social justice impacts and social license concerns.

Using Earnings Calls to Understand the Political Behavior of Major Polluters

The role that private actors play in accelerating or preventing progressive climate policy and true decarbonization is a core research interest of global environmental politics. Yet scholars have struggled to measure the political behavior of multinational firms due to lack of transparency about their activities and inconsistency in reporting requirements across jurisdictions. In this research note, we present a new data source—firms’ earnings calls—that scholars might use to better understand the political behavior of major multinational polluters. To illustrate the value of earnings calls as a data source, we construct an original data set of all earnings calls made between 2005 and 2019 by major oil and gas firms. We then code these transcripts, demonstrating that although firms can be classified as more or less pro-climate, there is little evidence of the industry’s public acceptance of decarbonization. These unique data could permit researchers to explore important questions about climate politics, the evolution of private governance, and the relationship between policy and firms’ political behavior. Moreover, we suggest extensions of our approach, including other multinational industries that are amenable to this type of analysis.

Green Industrial Policy and the Global Transformation of Climate Politics

The rise of green industrial policy has injected purpose and competition into global environmental politics. Efforts to build green industry have raised the economic and geopolitical stakes of environmental issues as states seek to position their firms in global value chains and reshore strategic industries. This could help to generate the technologies and political momentum needed to accelerate global decarbonization. At the same time, these green interventions confront status quo interests and a variety of brown industrial policies. To help make sense of this new landscape, this introduction to the special issue defines green industrial policy and situates it within domestic political economy, social policy, and global geopolitics. We present six new studies that demonstrate and explore the global politics of green industrial policy. To illustrate the kinds of effects and implications of green industrial policy we are interested in exploring, we show how green industrial policy has transformed climate politics. Changes in state practice, ideas about the environment and economy, and technological cost declines came together to produce a new opportunistic and competitive climate politics. We then identify areas for further investigation as we call for a new climate politics research agenda, integrating green industrial policy more intentionally into studies of global environmental politics.

Energy and the Complexity of International Order

This article explores the role of states and industrial policy in shaping the historical coevolution of energy and international order. I explore how states, by narrowly self-interested pecuniary goals, the desire for geopolitical advantage, and concerns about the political ramifications of domestic economic structure, use industrial policy to encourage the development of energy-intensive transportation and agricultural systems. Over time, increasingly energy-intensive systems allowed an increasingly complex international order to develop, one characterized by significant differentiation and specialization organized over a geographically expansive area. This contemporary complex order is dependent on fossil fuels. I argue that states retain geopolitical and domestic political incentives to use green industrial policy to develop the technologies needed to transition away from this fossil fuel dependence, but industrial policy today faces greater challenges than it did in the past.

Green Industrial Policy After Paris: Renewable Energy Policy Measures and Climate Goals

Renewable energy (RE) will play a significant role in national climate mitigation strategies, including those put forth in the context of the Paris Agreement. This article examines the role of industrial policy in supporting renewables and how it compares to the use of other types of RE policies in both location and quantity around the world. On the basis of an original database of RE policy support measures developed for this analysis, the article illustrates which measures are most commonly being used around the world and what types of countries are using them. It highlights the use of a wide range of policy types, including many industrial policies, and a disparity in the use of industrial policies between smaller emitters and larger emitters, with important implications for which countries stand to benefit from the development of domestic RE industries and for our ability to achieve long-term climate goals.