Erick Lachapelle

Drivers of national climate policy

Patterns of national climate policy performance and their implications for the geopolitics of climate change are examined. An overview of levels of emissions performance across countries is first provided. Substantial changes in emissions trends over time are documented, notably with GHG emissions trajectories, which are shaped less and less by the developed/developing country divide. Various patterns of policy convergence and divergence in the types of policies states implement are then surveyed. Four broad types of explanation that may account for these trends are then explored: (1) variation in the institutional form of country-level governance regimes, (2) patterns of dependence on fossil fuel energy, (3) broad systemic differences among states (specifically in their population densities, carbon intensity, and per capita incomes, and (4) variations in the traditions of economic intervention by states. The article contributes to the growing body of work on comparative climate policy, and provides a first attempt at exploring the comparative politics of instrument choice. The analysis challenges the continued importance of a North–South divide for the future of climate policy, thus reinforcing a sense of the ‘new geopolitics’ of climate change. Some of the implications of the analysis for debates about the form of future international agreement on mitigation policy are also explored. Policy relevance The article contributes to the understanding of the variety of institutional conditions under which policy makers develop policy and thus the constraints and opportunities for the design of international agreements under these conditions.

Comparative Politics of Sub-Federal Cap-and-Trade: Implementing the Western Climate Initiative

Why have only two of the eleven original members of the Western Climate Initiative implemented a cap-and-trade system? This article compares the implementation of cap-and-trade in California and Quebec versus in New Mexico and British Columbia. Ideas around the reality of anthropogenic global warming and the legitimacy of cap-and-trade created favorable context in three jurisdictions, although institutions condition the expression of these ideas in the policy-making process. Since parliamentary institutions concentrate power, elite consensus is more important in Canada, while in the United States public opinion plays a more significant role. However, ideational factors shaped by political institutions do not explain differences in cap-and-trade implementation. Growth in shale gas production, welcomed in British Columbia and New Mexico but resisted by Quebec and marginal in California, further explain different outcomes. Ideas, mediated by institutions, are the necessary prerequisites for action, while material factors influence policy instrument choice.

The Distribution of Climate Change Public Opinion in Canada

While climate scientists have developed high resolution data sets on the distribution of climate risks, we still lack comparable data on the local distribution of public climate change opinions. This paper provides the first effort to estimate local climate and energy opinion variability outside the United States. Using a multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) approach, we estimate opinion in federal electoral districts and provinces. We demonstrate that a majority of the Canadian public consistently believes that climate change is happening. Belief in climate change’s causes varies geographically, with more people attributing it to human activity in urban as opposed to rural areas. Most prominently, we find majority support for carbon cap and trade policy in every province and district. By contrast, support for carbon taxation is more heterogeneous. Compared to the distribution of US climate opinions, Canadians believe climate change is happening at higher levels. This new opinion data set will support climate policy analysis and climate policy decision making at national, provincial and local levels.

Can policy actors learn from academic scientists

Results from an embedded survey experiment administered to practitioners who advise landowners on decontamination practices are analyzed. These professionals play a key role in the area of soil decontamination, an issue that science has made particularly tractable and which calls for new technologies and policy approaches. Powerful interests, however, work against the rapid deployment of these new technologies and approaches. Our survey experiment, designed to overcome major difficulties in the study of policy learning, shows that exposure to new scientific knowledge can positively influence the attitude of practitioners to new technologies, independently of other confounding forces. This finding suggests that learning from science provides a potential pathway toward increased use of environmentally beneficial soil decontamination methods. The results contribute to research on the politics of environmental protection, as well the literature on policy learning.

The political economy of decarbonisation: from green energy ‘race’ to green ‘division of labour’

ABSTRACT This paper aims to provide an addendum to the rapidly growing concept of a global ‘green energy race’ between major states. It argues that although this framing has been useful in underscoring important dynamics in the process of decarbonisation, its narrow focus on installed capacity obscures a much broader and more complex process at play. In particular, it overlooks the critical role played by states aggressively investing in R&D and export manufacturing in the renewable energy sector. The paper thus supplements the concept of a green ‘energy race’ with that of a green ‘global division of labour’, which sees the process of decarbonisation not exclusively as an effort by individual states to install renewables domestically, but rather as a collective and interdependent process by dozens of states, all striving in different ways to promote capital accumulation on their soil. The paper provides an overview of data covering innovation, manufacturing and deployment in the clean energy sector, and offers a theoretical analysis of the trends observed.

Policy learning, motivated scepticism, and the politics of shale gas development in British Columbia and Quebec

Abstract What is policy learning and how do we know when we observe it? This article develops an original way of operationalizing policy learning at the individual and subsystem level. First, it juxtaposes four types of opinion change at the individual level – opinion shifting; opinion softening; position-taking and opinion hardening. This last change, we argue is indicative of motivated scepticism, a non-learning process that we borrow from public opinion studies. Second, we identify factors associated with opinion change and argue that some of them indicate policy learning, while others point to motivated scepticism. Lastly, we examine learning and motivated scepticism against patterns of opinion convergence (the expected outcome of learning) and polarization (the expected outcome of motivated scepticism) at the subsystem level. We illustrate the use of this approach to study policy learning with the case of shale gas development in two Canadian provinces, British Columbia and Quebec. While, we find clear signs of individual learning and motivated scepticism in both provinces, we find that policy learning is more prevalent in Quebec than in British Columbia at the subsystem level.

Advocacy Coalitions, the Media, and Hydraulic Fracturing in the Canadian Provinces of British Columbia and Quebec

This chapter compares the politics of hydraulic fracturing in Quebec and British Columbia (BC), two provinces that best exemplify the east–west Canadian divide over shale gas development. While both provinces began authorizing hydraulically fractured wells between 2005 and 2007, BC has consistently supported the shale gas industry ever since, while Quebec abruptly adopted a moratorium in 2011. This chapter traces BC’s policy continuity to the stable coalition politics that endured throughout the period, while Quebec’s policy shift occurred in a period of coalition instability, during which government distanced itself from industry. This sudden change in coalition politics in Quebec coincides with a burst of negative media attention to shale gas development, which illustrates the role that the media can play in policy subsystems.

Morality, Ethics, and Globalization: Lessons from Kant, Hegel, Rawls, and Habermas

This chapter critically examines the separation of political theory from international theory and argues that a return to the former is essential if IR scholars are to help provide answers to the urgent moral and ethical questions facing world politics in an era of globalization. An examination of the political philosophies of Kant and Hegel demonstrates the importance of political theory for the analysis and practice of global politics today, while the tension between the universal and particular, emerging from Kantian morality and Hegelian ethics, is traced in the recent work of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas.

IS SUPPORT FOR INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE ACTION CONDITIONAL ON PERCEPTIONS OF RECIPROCITY? EVIDENCE FROM SURVEY EXPERIMENTS IN CANADA, THE US, NORWAY, AND SWEDEN

The challenges of collective action are presented by leaders in many industrialized countries as a major obstacle to effective action on climate change. Notably, the argument goes, a fair international solution must appropriately constrain large greenhouse gas emitters like China. This paper asks whether citizen support for multilateral climate policies also depends on whether other countries are seen to reciprocate. We analyze results from population-based survey experiments in the US, Canada, Norway, and Sweden, asking subjects whether they think their country should commit internationally to emission reductions. Randomly assigned sub-samples were presented with statements suggesting that China may or may not choose to cooperate, or alternatively making no mention of China. We find that reciprocity is important to respondents in the smaller Scandinavian countries but not in North America. These findings suggest that country size is more important than national traditions of multilateral cooperation in predicting support for unilateral climate action.