Rethinking Private Authorityexamines the role of non-state actors in global environmental politics, arguing that a fuller understanding of their role requires a new way of conceptualizing private ...authority. Jessica Green identifies two distinct forms of private authority--one in which states delegate authority to private actors, and another in which entrepreneurial actors generate their own rules, persuading others to adopt them.
Drawing on a wealth of empirical evidence spanning a century of environmental rule making, Green shows how the delegation of authority to private actors has played a small but consistent role in multilateral environmental agreements over the past fifty years, largely in the area of treaty implementation. This contrasts with entrepreneurial authority, where most private environmental rules have been created in the past two decades. Green traces how this dynamic and fast-growing form of private authority is becoming increasingly common in areas ranging from organic food to green building practices to sustainable tourism. She persuasively argues that the configuration of state preferences and the existing institutional landscape are paramount to explaining why private authority emerges and assumes the form that it does. In-depth cases on climate change provide evidence for her arguments.
Groundbreaking in scope,Rethinking Private Authoritydemonstrates that authority in world politics is diffused across multiple levels and diverse actors, and it offers a more complete picture of how private actors are helping to shape our response to today's most pressing environmental problems
Abstract
Carbon pricing has been hailed as an essential component of any sensible climate policy. Internalize the externalities, the logic goes, and polluters will change their behavior. The theory ...is elegant, but has carbon pricing worked in practice? Despite a voluminous literature on the topic, there are surprisingly few works that conduct an
ex-post
analysis, examining how carbon pricing has actually performed. This paper provides a meta-review of ex-post quantitative evaluations of carbon pricing policies around the world since 1990. Four findings stand out. First, though carbon pricing has dominated many political discussions of climate change, only 37 studies assess the actual effects of the policy on emissions reductions, and the vast majority of these are focused on Europe. Second, the majority of studies suggest that the aggregate reductions from carbon pricing on emissions are limited—generally between 0% and 2% per year. However, there is considerable variation across sectors. Third, in general, carbon taxes perform better than emissions trading schemes (ETSs). Finally, studies of the EU-ETS, the oldest ETS, indicate limited average annual reductions—ranging from 0% to 1.5% per annum. For comparison, the IPCC states that emissions must fall by 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 in order to limit warming to 1.5 °C—the goal set by the Paris Agreement (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018). Overall, the evidence indicates that carbon pricing has a limited impact on emissions.
The Paris Agreement created an institutionalized role for non-state actors through voluntary cooperation. Many international NGOs (INGOs) are particularly active in these “Paris partnerships,” often ...working with multinational corporations to reduce emissions and promote decarbonization. Though there is ample work on both the effectiveness of the Paris partnerships and on the role of INGOs in the global climate regime, much of this work focuses “outward” – on how INGOs contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation, or influence norms, discourse and policy. Yet, there is considerably less work that focuses “inward” – examining who INGOs work with in order to achieve their policy goals. This paper provides a descriptive analysis of key INGOs in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process, as a first step in a larger research agenda to understand the incentives and opportunities that drive INGO behavior. Specifically, it uses network analysis to identify the “climate establishment” – which I define as
the
insider INGOs working within the multilateral process and with large corporations to influence rulemaking, soft law and firm behavior
. Measures of network centrality demonstrate that two INGOs – WWF and the World Resources Institute – are by far, the most authoritative members of the climate establishment. They participate in the largest number of partnerships, and have “important” friends, as measured by eigenvector centrality. The data also indicate that the climate establishment sees carbon pricing as a key strategy, and it often cooperates with banks that are large funders of fossil fuel projects. The descriptive analysis of the climate establishment and its partners raises important questions for future research about why INGOs choose to partner with F100 companies, and how such cooperation might influence INGO behavior.
The institutions of global governance have changed dramatically in recent years. New organizational forms—including informal institutions, transgovernmental networks, and private transnational ...regulatory organizations (PTROs)—have expanded rapidly, while the growth of formal intergovernmental organizations has slowed. Organizational ecology provides an insightful framework for understanding these changing patterns of growth. Organizational ecology is primarily a structural theory, emphasizing the influence of institutional environments, especially their organizational density and resource availability, on organizational behavior and viability. To demonstrate the explanatory value of organizational ecology, we analyze the proliferation of PTROs compared with the relative stasis of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Continued growth of IGOs is constrained by crowding in their dense institutional environment, but PTROs benefit from organizational flexibility and low entry costs, which allow them to enter “niches” with limited resource competition. We probe the plausibility of our analysis by examining contemporary climate governance.
Abstract
Many scholars argue that regime complexes are nonhierarchical. However, if that is true, then how does authority function? This article argues that the conceptualization of regime complexes ...as largely devoid of hierarchy is mistaken. Instead, it offers a new definition of regime complexes: emergent patterns of authority among state and non-state actors, which vary in their degree of hierarchy. Hierarchy in regime complexes looks different from political scientists’ traditional conceptualization. It is systemic, emergent, and positional. I present two dimensions of variation in hierarchy: deference and autonomy. These dimensions provide both a conceptual and an empirical strategy for understanding how authority relations are constituted. Conceptually, they allow us to “see” hierarchy in regime complexes. Empirically, they provide transparent, replicable and variable measures, which have eluded much of the work to date. I use topic modeling coupled with network analysis to detect hierarchy in the regime complex for Antarctica. I demonstrate that the inclusion of non-state actors and their governance activities changes our understanding of the Antarctic regime complex. This approach reveals a hierarchical regime complex, where some non-state actors have considerable authority and are governing issues not regulated by formal rules.
The political utility of clubs hinges on their ability to provide excludable benefits to members. But in some cases of climate clubs, membership is not easily demarcated, and excludable benefits may ...be minimal. I argue that these governance initiatives—where membership is fluid and benefits are small—are more accurately defined as “pseudo-clubs.” Though they function differently than conventional clubs, “pseudo-clubs” can have considerable political utility. They can lay the foundations for emissions mitigation by solving technical problems associated with the measurement of GHGs. Moreover, since they have low entry costs and minimal sanctions, they can easily attract large numbers of users. With broad membership “pseudo-clubs” can help promote the uptake of standards, potentially solving coordination problems. However, since measurement is only a precursor to reduction, ultimately, incentives to measure will have to be coupled with rules to reduce emissions. Environmentally effective pseudo-clubs will eventually need the help of governments to shift from coordinating emissions
measurement
to cooperating on emissions
reduction
. Pseudo-clubs can serve as an initial building block toward meaningful climate action, but governments will have to finish the job.
Although a subset of political scientists has been studying climate change for decades, the mainstream of the discipline lags behind. Journals such as Global Environmental Politics and even Nature ...and Science have long published political science research on climate, yet major disciplinary journals tend to marginalize climate and environmental politics more broadly (Green and Hale 2017). This trend has been changing slowly (as evidenced by this symposium), but mainstream political science still has much catching up to do.
Less Talk, More Walk Green, Jessica F.
Daedalus (Cambridge, Mass.),
10/2020, Volume:
149, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
As climate scholars, it is our professional responsibility to engage in climate politics. First, we need to engage in radical scientific analysis: we must ask questions that get at the root of ...climate change. Second, we need to plant a flag: we must be explicit about what our findings indicate we should do. This should go further than laying out the options; we must indicate which among them is preferable and why. Third, we must engage broadly, both across disciplines and beyond the academy. Many will object to the notion of engaging publicly as advocates, but the climate crisis demands nothing less. Choosing not to have a view, in the name of preserving our expertise, is an abdication of our responsibility, as both scholars and teachers.
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