Suchergebnisse

The European Union (EU) is often seen as a global leader in environmental causes ranging from climate change to biodiversity. However, in the case of sustainable forest management the EU has had difficulties in exercising influence over the international negotiation process despite initial enthusiasm amongst its member states. This thesis attempts to explain this paradox by examining the extent of the EU's influence and by studying how that influence is shaped by interest-based, institutional-based and ideational-based considerations. By disaggregating influence into three different components, the explanatory framework highlights the ways influence can be enabled or constrained. The explanatory framework is applied to the case of international forest negotiations between 1995 and 2007. This complicated and complex case is divided into three sub-cases to improve analytical clarity. The first sub-case concerns the effort to build a legal binding instrument on global forest management. The second sub-case focuses on the issue of certification. The third sub-case concerns the drive to create a global fund for financing sustainable forest management. Each case sheds critical light on the subtle and complex factors shaping the EU's influence on process and outcomes. Examining data from participant interviews, textual analysis, and secondary accounts, analysis shows that the EU's influence varied in different sub-issues within the negotiations and that the factors acting on the EU's influence are more subtle than previously understood. The findings deepen our understanding of the EU's role in global policymaking and offer insights into how the EU may help restart global forest negotiations.

The idea of a stringent climate club, once the reserve of academic debates, is quickly gaining ground in international policy circles. This reflects dissatisfaction with the multilateral UNFCCC process, but also hope that a minilateral club could increase climate policy ambition, reinvigorate the Paris Agreement process, and make future emissions pledges stick. With the Biden Presidency renewing the US commitment toward climate action and the European Green Deal proposal for carbon border tariffs, some are advocating the creation of a transatlantic climate club. What could a club approach hope to achieve, and what do we know about its political feasibility and desirability? In this article, we seek conceptual clarification by establishing a typology of different club models; we inject a greater sense of political realism into current debates on the feasibility of these models; and we consider their legitimacy in the context of international climate cooperation. Key policy insights Knowledge gaps and confusion regarding the nature of climate clubs hold back debates about what intergovernmental clubs can contribute to international climate policy. Club design matters: existing club models vary in terms of the proposed size, purpose, operational principles, legal strength, and relationship to the UNFCCC. Clubs focused on normative commitments face low barriers to establishment. They lack legal strength but can help raise policy ambition. Clubs aimed at negotiating targets and measures can increase bargaining efficiency, but struggle to deal with equity and distributional conflicts. Clubs seeking to change incentives via club benefits and sanctions face the highest hurdles to implementation. Their promise to tackle free-riding remains untested and difficult to achieve. Climate clubs face an international legitimacy deficit. Any club proposal needs to consider how to add to, and not distract from, the multilateral climate regime.

The rise of authoritarian populism has disrupted the patterns of party competition in many Western societies. Related to this development, the current debates in the United States and European Union illustrate how empirical science on climate change may become intensely politicized, and all ambitious climate policies challenged in the contemporary political landscape. We set out an analytical framework with three ideal types of political strategies for opposing climate policies: climate science denialism, climate policy nationalism, and climate policy conservativism. Empirically, the article investigates populist resistance to ambitious climate change policy in the Nordic context, where countries have sought to assume global leadership in climate politics and have considerable public support for climate action. In an analysis of the evolving positions of populist parties in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden in recent elections, the article sheds light on the interconnection between populism and climate change policy.

AbstractHow can the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) be made more effective? This paper argues that in order to make the UNFCCC fit for purpose, there is a need to identify the specific institutional reforms that can create ripple effects to accelerate climate action across governance levels and relevant organisations. Longstanding calls to reform the UNFCCC have targeted inefficient procedures with the intent to promote effective outcomes and – after entry into force of the Paris Agreement – to transform the UNFCCC towards holding more implementation‐focused deliberations. Despite such calls, UNFCCC reform has been modest, at best. Central to the failure of reform proposals are vested interests with conflicts of interest that seek to obstruct climate action. Without addressing these elephants in the room, reform proposals will make modest contributions to overcoming key challenges. It is due time to start retargeting institutional reform from addressing procedural inefficiencies at the UNFCCC towards addressing vested interests. We propose a new research agenda to understand ways to undermine incumbent actors seeking to preserve business as usual and support new entrants that facilitate climate action through green spiralling. A reform process addressing vested interests could improve both procedural efficiency and implementation.

The rise of populism has disrupted established patterns of party competition in many Western societies. Related to this development, the current debates in the US and EU illustrate how empirical science on climate change may become intensively politicized, and all ambitious climate policies challenged, in the contemporary political landscape. This may take place notwithstanding the mounting evidence on the certainty of climate change and its disastrous consequences. This FIIA report investigates populist resistance to ambitious climate change policy in the Nordic context, where countries have sought to assume global leadership on climate politics and have considerable public support for climate action. In an analysis of the positions of authoritarian populist parties in Denmark, Finland and Sweden the report sheds light on how climate change is currently politicized. It also sets out an analytical framework of various political strategies for opposing ambitious climate policies: climate science denialism, climate policy nationalism and climate policy conservativism.