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"Both the Indian economy and the Indian population are growing at a brisk pace-but almost three hundred million Indians do not have electricity and over eight hundred million still use traditional biomass for their daily cooking needs. In this book, Johannes Urpelainen argues that India's extreme inequality and institutional shortcomings have pushed Indians to find private solutions to energy issues, from private borewells to diesel generators to rooftop solar panels. Yet such solutions are beyond the means of India's vast rural population, who struggle not just with energy access but with climate disruption, groundwater depletion, and pollution. Urpelainen describes India's environment, demographics and economy; explores how rapid population growth and economic development have brought the country to its current state of environmental degradation and energy poverty; and discusses policy solutions and possible future scenarios"--

"Emerging economies have fundamentally transformed global environmental politics. Led by China and India, they increasingly make or break international negotiations, which now require agreement among a large number of governments with widely varied preferences. Emerging economies-which still suffer from widespread poverty and frequently struggle with policy implementation-often feel that Western-led initiatives neglect their needs. What does the global environmental policy landscape look like in the age of a rising Global South? This book explains why emerging economies have come to dominate global environmental politics and examines the implications for international cooperation. Johannes Urpelainen shows that emerging economies continue to prioritize economic growth and often have limited institutional capacity to contain the environmental destruction that it causes. However, he argues, despite barriers to cooperation, innovative bargaining and institutional design offer a way forward. Bottom-up agreements that respect national sovereignty and invest in capacity building hold more promise than traditional top-down treaties with binding commitments. The book features detailed discussions of attempts to address hazardous chemicals, loss of biodiversity, and climate change; a comparative analysis of China and India; and case studies of nine emerging economies around the world. Global Environmental Politics is an essential, forward-looking overview of today's most pressing international issue."

International environmental cooperation is difficult because states disagree on burden sharing and have incentives to free ride. However, interested countries can promote future cooperation through unilateral action that induces technological change in and, thereby, shapes the preferences of foreign countries. How can the effectiveness of such unilateral action be improved? This article offers a game-theoretic analysis of the value of combining unilateral action with trade sanctions, or policies that force foreign exporters to comply with domestic environmental regulations. Trade sanctions can significantly improve the effectiveness of unilateral action, but only when (1) they induce clean technology adoption by exporters in targeted countries and (2) this reduces the cost of clean technology elsewhere in the economy through intersectoral technology spillovers.

In this article, I develop and evaluate a model of dynamic climate governance. The model is based on the premise that global warming is such a complex problem that present political realities do not allow an immediate solution to it. I propose that current mitigation activities should focus on building technological and political transformation potential to enable more ambitious climate cooperation in the future. Successful international climate cooperation could comprise a series of politically feasible "small wins" guided by a "big dream" of a comprehensive future climate regime. The analysis contributes to the emerging literature on the dynamics of climate governance by showing how coherence between multiple independent climate policies can be achieved, both across policymakers and over time. To illustrate how the model can be used, I apply it to technology agreements and North-South climate finance. Adapted from the source document.

International cooperation often requires costly policy adjustments. States may worry, however, that such adjustments weaken their outside options, and thus reduce their bargaining power. How does uncertainty about the effects of policy adjustments on outside options influence the depth of cooperation that states can achieve? My game-theoretic analysis shows that uncertainty about outside options is an obstacle to deep cooperation. If states agree on deep cooperation, they have to compensate vulnerable states with weak outside options for their losses. Under uncertainty, states that are not vulnerable have an incentive to falsely claim that they are vulnerable (i) to avoid a side payment or (ii) to obtain compensation for being vulnerable. The result holds even if the added value of deep cooperation would be large enough to fully compensate the losers. In equilibrium, the more vulnerable state sometimes offers a side payment to the less vulnerable one. More broadly, the analysis reveals a new international cooperation problem and provides a new rationale for costly signaling mechanisms and delegation to international organizations.

Two leaders engaged in international co-operation must each build trust by credibly signalling that they will not exploit the other by defecting at the implementation stage. Previous research does not reveal the difficulty and cost of such international reassurance. The role that costly adjustments by markets play in international reassurance is analysed, showing that fully efficient information revelation can be achieved when market actors under intense competitive pressures undergo sufficiently costly adjustments in expectation of international co-operation. 'Nice' leaders can reveal their true preferences simply by saying they intend to co-operate, because 'mean' leaders are unwilling to mislead market actors into undergoing futile costly adjustments. However, market imperfections prevent full information revelation unless market actors prefer international co-operation to the status quo.

The conventional wisdom emphasizes agency slack or bias as the central problem of international delegation. I show that the possibility of a unilateral influence contest is equally problematic. States can exert unilateral influence on autonomous international bureaucrats, either through rewards or through punishments, to pursue their particular interests. A costly contest results, so some states could refuse to delegate because they expect others to be too influential. The analysis has four counterintuitive empirical implications. First, international agreements often favor institutionally weak states that are disadvantaged in the unilateral influence contest. Second, states could limit the autonomy of an international organization even if this prompts bad policies. Third, a state can sometimes profitably exchange distributional concessions for autonomy. Finally, constraints on unilateral influence are possible only if a disadvantaged state can credibly commit to compensating an advantaged state for it. A central broader contribution of the analysis is to show how power politics influences the rational design of international institutions.