Suchergebnisse

Climate change, tropical deforestation, biodiversity loss, ozone, depletion, hazardous wastes, and ocean pollution are among the environmental issues that have bought national governments together in a common purpose. As they have worked to mitigate these global problems, national governments have developed a wide variety of environmental regime designs. They have created complex systems of global rules and institutions to enable and incentivize private and public actors to meet the challenges posed by global pollution. Why have national governments created different international rules and institutions to address global environmental issues? This work demonstrates that national governments have developed different institutional responses to global issues because the markets producing environmental pollution impose varying constraints and create varying opportunities for change

Historically, governments have adopted legalized, integrated, and global rules to govern oligopolistic industries, such as shipping, chemicals, and industrial production. By contrast, they have adopted nonbinding and unintegrated rules and institutions to govern competitive industries, such as energy, agriculture, and mining, at the national or subnational scale. Considering that competitive producers face greater barriers to political collective action, what explains the form of global governance across these sectors? This article demonstrates that oligopolistic producers are more intensively and extensively regulated than competitive markets because producers in oligopolistic industries can more cost-effectively alter markets to meet environmental goals. Therefore, despite their political influence, oligopolies are regularly called upon to initiate and sustain market transformation on a global scale. New qualitative evidence from two treaty regimes governing different types of markets supports this theory, as well as new quantitative data on the full range of global environmental treaty regimes since World War II.

Shared water has prompted some neighboring countries to form integrated regional institutions and rules. Other neighboring countries have maintained less cooperative policies in managing shared water. When do governments achieve integrated management of regional water? How do they overcome barriers to integrated cooperation? This article contends that the structure of interdependence, not the number of states bordering the water, encourages different international policies. It analyzes original panel data on the agreement histories of seventy-six rivers, lakes, and seas. It also examines the role of selective incentives in promoting mutual water management. Fundamentally, the number of states with access to the water does not determine the fate of water management. Strategies for overcoming divergent preferences can be applied across situations. The key is to provide selective incentives when states are asymmetrically interdependent in using the water, to alter national preferences. Selective incentives are particularly important when few states share the water.

AbstractThere have been growing calls for reform of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). How have governments met the demand for action on climate change despite the lagging pace of UNFCCC reform? New qualitative data demonstrate that the institutional, sectoral, and technical characteristics of multilateral institutions have guided government choices in managing climate change issues. Institutional resources and sectoral participation in multilateral institutions have enabled governments to handle climate change issues outside the UNFCCC, reducing the need to invest in its reform as demand for action has grown. These specialized institutions are able to mitigate political disputes and facilitate greater efficacy in handling specific issues such as financing and emissions mitigation. They have mandates that overlap with the cross‐cutting nature of climate change, requiring no new mandates, which mitigates political disputes in managing specific climate issues.

Hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking") is one of the most controversial energy production processes in the United States and globally. In democracies, maintaining energy policy on politically salient and controversial issues, such as the use of fracking, depends on popular support at local if not national levels. We therefore study the effectiveness of widely cited arguments about fracking in a representative sample of the United States. Consistent with framing theory, we find that arguments that emphasize the environmental costs of fracking drive down support, while arguments emphasizing job creation and energy security increase it. However, we also show that presenting competing information from pro-fracking and anti-fracking frames together neutralizes individual framing effects, albeit not for every combination of frames and counter-frames. Framing effects become stronger when arguments, particularly about water contamination, are congruent with respondents' pre-existing beliefs, which may lead to further polarization in the public debate. The exact kinds of arguments and how they are paired with one another do matter—a finding that is relevant for our understanding of public opinion on climate change and renewable energy policy more broadly.