“Virtual compliance to Kyoto by non-state actors and through domestic climatechange policies: A rationalist appraisal of the US’s untenable unilateralism”
IPS 204: Theories and Concepts in International Relations
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Andrew Nutter
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The Bush administration’s withdrawal from the process of Kyoto ratification on grounds
that they had “no interest”1 in pursuing such policy prompted many to claim Kyoto dead.
Instead, the protocol has been characterised by significant resilience and while its future
existence or success is by no means certain, there are now clear commitments by
governments, international organisations and firms, backed by a strengthening consensus
within the scientific community, to reduce the growth rate and eventually stabilise the
emissions of Green House Gases (GHG) at a non-threatening level. What is particularly
surprising about this picture is not that the US has decided to part ways with the
international effort, given the uncertainties and the looming costs it would have faced in
ratifying Kyoto. But both that there is a prevailing perception that the US acted “wrongly”,
and that international cooperation on the issue might be able to survive the loss of the
single largest emitter of GHGs. The first observation testifies to the rapid social
construction of global warming as an anthropogenic2 and controllable evil ever since the
policy seed of the issue was “internationally” planted at the Rio summit just ten years ago
(Liberatore 1995, Jones 2002). The latter tendency must be coupled with the observation
that much of the effort to combat global warming is being driven by non-state actors and
through domestic politics. Taking a speculative step, this paper argues that independently
of whether or not it was justifiable for the Bush government to withdraw from the protocol,
the US’s chosen unilateralism may be undermined by the deepening interdependence
between and within countries and the efforts of firms and foreign countries with regard to
climate change. The interdependence of modern society now prevents states from acting
in their own interests.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Whitman, March 27th 2001: “we have no interest
in implementing that treaty [Kyoto protocol]”
2
Anthropogenic: caused by human activity
1
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From an academic standpoint, the focus of international relations theories has been adept
at shifting with the times and trailing evolving areas of policy interest closely. As
environmental issues have grown in prominence after the end of the Cold War, so has the
intent of international relations scholars to explain and understand new environmental
security threats, international regimes that could coordinate international behaviour or the
genderisation of environmental politics, for example. This paper’s aim is to put two
dominant rationalist paradigms of International Relations to the test, namely neorealism
and neoliberalism, first on the need for international coordination to manage Global
Climate Change (GCC), and second, to reason the US’s peculiar behaviour. Although
Neoliberalism, and in particular regime theory, has emerged as the de-facto theoretical
framework for explaining the international response GCC, Neorealism has also evolved to
allow for cooperation and may be better suited to explain the US’s apparent unilateralism.
The second part of this paper will come to look at the nonstate forces that may undermine
the intentions of the state, and in particular, how there may be some form of “virtual
compliance” to the Kyoto protocol.
Rationalist perspectives, notably liberal institutionalism, can help explain why there was
the creation of an international regime, why the US refused to consider ratification of the
Kyoto protocol and perhaps even the consequence for Kyoto. They struggle however to
explain what some of the events that are occurring now: notably the pressures on US firms
to change their practices despite US government reluctance to support these international
regimes. Before delving into the theory, it is worth having an overview of the historical and
scientific context for global warming.
Global Warming, Regime Building and Kyoto: History and Context
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Ten years ago, few environmental concerns were as contentious within the scientific and
political communities as that of climate change. In a short space of time, consensus was
reached that climate change was occurring and that some of the change was
anthropogenic. The consequences of climate change are, however, still unclear given the
complexity of climate modelling and the interplay between natural “cyclical” and
anthropogenic global warming (See appendix). A rationalist appraisal of the GCC problem
nevertheless requires us to take a brief look at the science behind global warming and the
historical process of international regime building, ultimately leading up to the Kyoto
protocol, to support the necessary calculations of relative and absolute gains to states and
the international community. Although the science dates as far back as the early 60s
(Andresen 2002), the date widely attributed to climate change becoming a significant
political issue is 1988, with the Toronto Conference of the Atmosphere, along with a
statement to the US congress by NASA scientist James Hansen that “it is time to stop
waffling so much. We should say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse
effect is here” (quoted from Patterson). The claim was made even more plausible by the
freak weather patterns that were occurring at the time, with the biggest drought in the US
since the 1930s, and the six hottest years on record being in that decade. What was
perhaps more pivotal was that a void being left by the end of the Cold War was being filled
by environmental issues; the depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer, tropical
deforestation, loss of biological diversity and pollution of the oceans to name but a few.
The confirmation that the ozone hole was being created by the emission of
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), “dramatically demonstrated that human activities can indeed
affect the global atmosphere […]. Initially, public concern about global warming rode on
the coattails of the ozone issue.” (Bodansky p27 in Lutterbacher 2001).
Institution building
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Governments reacted to the tide of rising concern with three main initiatives3. First, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in late 1988 to
provide a clear statement of scientific consensus about climate change and its possible
impacts, as well as suggestions to counter the problem (Boehmer-Christiansen 1996).
Second, a series of international conferences created an arena for politicians to convene
and issue pronouncements and policy ideas. Third was a series of unilateral targets that
some countries set themselves to stabilise emissions of CO2 by the year 2000. With a
great deal of momentum, this political agenda led to the signing in Rio of the 1992 UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with the explicit goal of “stabilising
the concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere at a level that would
prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. There were no
binding targets, a condition negotiated by the US doubtful of the nature of scientific
knowledge and aware of costly compliance, only a commitment to voluntarily reduce CO2
emission to 1990 emission levels by 2000 for Annex I countries4. Although the convention
was only a procedural framework with only very general and diplomatically palatable
obligations (to all except the oil producing nations), it is important to note that it was a first
step in concretising the climate change regime by establishing a legal and institutional
framework for future meetings of the parties and the addition of more forceful protocols.
Indeed, representatives from over 160 countries met in Kyoto in December 1997 to
negotiate individual binding limits on emissions of six greenhouse gases. The protocol has
already been ratified by 97 countries and assuming Canada and Russia ratify early next
year, it will come into force and commit countries to target ranges of anything between a
3
See Bodansky 1995 for a complete review of the emerging climate change regime
Annex I countries are mainly industrialized countries. The argument being that developing countries could
not afford to reduce their emissions and that the vast majority of GHGs had been emitted by industrialized
countries over the previous fifty years.
4
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reduction of 8-percent for Europe to a 10-increase allowed for Iceland, to be achieved
between 2008 and 2012 and relative to emission levels in 1990.
Kyoto protocol mechanisms
Understanding the difficulty of meeting the emission proposals, the US insisted on
including a series of flexibility mechanisms into the protocol, the contention being that
market based mechanisms could increase economic efficiency in meeting targets and
allow for emission reductions to happen in the cheapest country. Briefly, the three
mechanisms are the International Emissions Trading (IET), Joint Implementation (JI) and
the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The IET is what is commonly known as the
“carbon market”, an arrangement for countries to sell and buy carbon permits to meet
targets at minimum cost and promote efficiency. JI and CDM are project-based
mechanisms, whereby Annex I countries can take credits for projects that reduce
emissions in non-Annex I countries (anything from planting forests to investing in
renewable sources of energy).
The international relations of global warming
With such titles as “the Greening of Machiavelli” by Brenton (1994), the majority of
international relations studies on global environmental politics reflect the discipline’s
legacy of taking a state-centric approach (Paterson 1996, Saurin 1996). It is also assumed
that the environmental problem can be retrofitted to existing paradigms of international
relations, rather than the paradigms changed to reflect new circumstances. The standard
approach being that global environmental protection is immensely difficult in a world where
the main political actors continue to be sovereign states. International regimes are needed
to coordinate state behaviour in the management of these “global commons” dilemmas;
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the atmosphere being the perfect model of an anarchic system in which coordination is
deemed essential.
The difficulty for neorealism to explaining the existing global warming institutional setup
has left the approach being outmoded by neoliberalism, with its explicit focus on
institutional regimes (Newell, Saurin 1996). However, the Kyoto protocol has made the
costs and benefits of action or inaction more explicit and given the choice of the Bush
government not to ratify Kyoto, recent turns in events appear to have a realist slant to
them. Can neorealism make a contribution to our understanding of international
cooperation on global climate change?
Neorealism
Classical realists consider cooperative outcomes to be elusive, an exception being the
transitory alliances that would serve to balance power among opposing blocs of states
(Morgenthau 1972). Neorealists maintain the assumptions of sovereign states, acting as
unitary actors in an anarchic world where the distribution of power in the system is the only
concern of states. As opposed to neoliberalists, neorealists are thus only concerned with
gains in relative power. Compared to classical realism, cooperation within the neorealist
literature is more likely and has revolved around “hegemonic stability theory” (Kindleberger
1973). This approach argues that cooperation is possible when a single actor with a
preponderance of power, or hegemon, is willing to use this power to coordinate behaviour.
A hegemon is distinguished from states which merely dominate by the recognition of its
power on those it controls, and the level of coordination is proportionate to the perception
of hegemonic power exerted on other states. Cooperation will thus be more probable
when one state is “powerful enough to maintain the essential rules governing interstate
relations, and willing to do so” (Keohane and Nye, 1977: 44).
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How does this translate to the climate change issue and what measure of power should
we be looking at? Rowlands (2001: p45) argues that above military and economic power is
the ability of actors to change global climate. Porter and Brown (1996: p14) argue that “in
every global environmental issue there is one state or a group of states whose cooperation
is so essential to a successful agreement for coping with the problem that it has the
potential to block strong international action”. This is an indirect way of suggesting that the
hegemon would aim to satisfy his interests, at least through the power of veto, and that a
cooperative regime is simply an “epiphenomenon” of these interests. Examples of this are
given by Mitchell (1994) with regard to the nations appearing likely to phase out ozonedepleting substances even before required by the Montreal protocol, or the International
Whaling Commission being labelled a “whaling club” in which “violations were rare
because the commission never set quotas below the levels of harvest desired by the
whaling nations”. By all accounts, the US was the dominant hegemon on the climate
change issue. It clearly had and still has military and economic primacy. It was responsible
for over a quarter of worldwide emissions (or 36-percent of Annex 1 country emissions5)
and had a large number of interests on the issue of climate change, be it through the effect
of action or inaction, with regard to agriculture, industry restructuring, energy dependency,
and its coastline amongst many. Furthermore, it was generally recognised by those
involved in climate negotiations that US participation was crucial (Patterson 1996).
Rowland (2001) thus labels the US “climate hegemon”, suggesting the prospects for
cooperation were high. However, according to neorealist theory, this also suggests that
the US’s interests in cooperation would be met and would result in gains of relative power
if cooperation was deemed successful, a fact not answered by the literature.
5
www.unfccc.com website
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One convenient means to simplify our analysis of the climate change negotiations is to
look at the alliances that demarcate the issue. Alliances are understood as being transitory
within the classical realist literature, as groups of states form blocs to balance power within
the negotiations. Five main alliances emerged. The Alliance of Small Island States
(AOSIS), those most threatened by global climate change calling for the most drastic
action, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), highlighting the
immediate economic cost of action and resisting controls on GHGs, the EU, although with
notable divisions amongst its rank, calling for large cuts in GHG emissions, the G77 of
“least developed countries” arguing for fair treatment in policy making, and finally the US.
It is argued that the OPEC block used a strategy of using a negotiating “veto” to block
action on climate change, a point going counter to the idea that only a hegemon could veto
proceedings. As it turns out, the OPEC block was informally told at one of the Conference
of the Parties meetings that this strategy would be subsequently ignored and that action
would be taken to combat climate change. AOSIS had little negotiating power and was
content with any attempt to reduce GHG emissions. EU and US interests clashed on a
number of occasions. A first clash that has been highlighted a number of times in the
literature was during the negations building up to the UNFCCC, the convention that
underpins all subsequent international climate change negotiations. The US opposed the
demands of mainly European states for a timetable for greenhouse gas emission
reductions, and strongly objected to demands for binding targets. The desire to have US
participation in the subsequent regime caused the EU to backtrack on their demands and
resulted in a non-binding policy for industrialised nations to not exceed 1990 emission
levels in 2000. A second example of US demands filtering through into policy came from
its demands that flexibility mechanisms and that the basket of targeted emissions be
raised to six, despite strong EU objections to their inclusion. Such incidents do indeed
suggest that the US was acting as a climate hegemon. However, as Rowlands (2001)
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points out, these Kyoto flexibility mechanisms are only to be used to meet specific targets,
the idea of binding targets having gone against the grain of US preferences during the
negotiations and thus putting into question hegemonic stability theory. I would argue that
this only happened because of changing state interests. Indeed, although the US was
against targets under the Bush senior administration, the tables were turned under the
Clinton administration and Bill Clinton, in the run-up to Kyoto expressed his desire that “the
Unites States […] commit to the binding and realistic target of returning to emissions of
1990 levels between 2008 and 2012”. When state interests changed a second time as
Bush junior took the helm, the targets were binding and the US effectively judged it in its
best interests to pull out of Kyoto, threatening the stability of the regime. Furthermore,
given the US’s belief that the Kyoto commitments would be costly to any state entering the
agreements, by ejecting itself from the regime and assuming Kyoto survives (something
neorealism allows for given mutual interests of the parties involved 6), the US would be
free-riding on the costly collective action of other states, thus guaranteeing an immediate
gain in absolute and relative power, exactly the premise of neorealism. Finally, should the
Kyoto protocol collapse (as it still might do if 55-percent of Annex 1 countries’ emissions
are not accounted for in the ratification process), hegemonic stability theory would come to
stand on higher ground. However, the more solid criticisms of neorealism and hegemonic
stability theory with regard to global climate change are more structural than anecdotal in
nature. The above argument for example defies the standard assumption that states
interests are defined and constant, unless the measure of power changes (Keohane
1989), to which there is no strong evidence that they did. More critical yet are Paterson’s
6
Works if understand that absence of hegemon only means success more unlikely. More strained relations.
Hegemon now Europe? P94 Paterson (1996) states “This is not to suggest that international cooperation
cannot continue as a hegemon’s power declines, since congruent interests of major powers may make it
possible for existing regimes to continues. It does, however, suggest that such continued cooperation will
become more strained”.
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(1996) arguments7 that creating a single measure of power resources is problematic (a
point also raised in Luterbacher 2001), that state interests with climate change are
fundamentally ambiguous and that the state is the sole actor, despite evidence that the
agenda setting stage of the international regime was solidly set by non-state actors (pp 98113).
Much of the above analysis is anecdotal evidence, fishing for facts to validate a
hypothesis. Since neorealism is rooted in a neopositivist epistemological approach, with
successive proponents aspiring to Waltz’s “philosophy of science values”, the theory
necessarily generates hypotheses which can be tested, but rarely strictly falsified. The
hypothesis even risks creating a line of enquiry that will create the facts needed to validate
or disprove the theory (Paterson 1996a), the process not being devoid of normative
influence. For example, my argument that the US could make absolute and even relative
gains if Kyoto proceeded without it, thus substantiating a neorealist hypothesis to reason
its actions, was based on one normative view of the state’s discount factor, or what
scholars more eloquently refer to as “the shadow of the future”. Had we made the
assumption that the US’s shadow was cast at dawn, the absolute and relative gain would
turn to at least a relative loss, as competing countries would be far better prepared, by
shifting to renewable forms of energy, to cope with the inevitable fall in supply of petroleum
as natural reserves are depleted, and the inevitably large rise in demand from developing
nations.
Whilst this paper concludes that hegemonic stability theory is only weekly supported by
the evidence of global cooperation on climate change, I take the liberty of making a
7
He also makes reference to the feasibility of cooperation without a clear hegemon in a neorealist paradigm.
This “cooperation under anarchy” developed by Snidal (1985) is a response to the apparent failure of
hegemonic stability theory, but as Patterson mentions, this approach “straddles neorealism and neoliberal
institutionalism” and is outside the scope of this essay. Besides, he makes a convincing series of arguments
that the theory is irrelevant to the question of global climate cooperation.
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perhaps normative claim that, at least at the systemic level of analysis, the more recent
event of the US dropping out of the Kyoto ratification process bodes well with neorealist
predictions. Moreover, should Kyoto collapse within the next year, the evidence would shift
to being more supportive of hegemonic stability theory.
Neoliberal institutionalism
This approach is still founded on the basis of states being the most important actors
operating in a fundamentally anarchic framework. In contrast to neorealism however,
institutions now matter and are not merely epiphenomena of balance of power struggles.
Thus while neorealism has been generally dismissed with regards to the study of global
environmental issues, institutionalist theories of IR have been a very important line of
thought in not only understanding the importance of institutions, but also prescribing policy
advice for international responses to environmental coordination problems and studying
regime efficacy. The argument is put forward that we are not solely considering formal
intergovernmental or cross national nongovernmental organisations in the traditional
sense (bureaucratic organisations with explicit rules), but also regimes as “sets of implicit
or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’
expectations converge in a given area of international relations” (Krasner, 1983:2)8.
Keohane (1989) makes a succinct synopsis of institutionalist thought by conceding to
neorealists that the condition of anarchy still holds, but that institutionalists start from the
premise that international agreements prevail and can have an effect on government
behaviour. Crucially, Keohane posits the assumption that states are still acting within a
Oran Young goes yet further in broadening the definition of institutions by stating that they are “social
practices consisting of easily recognized roles coupled with clusters of rules or conventions governing
relations between occupants of these roles” (Young, 1989:32). The delineation with constructivist thought
becomes blurred if we consider the possibility that Young’s picture of international relations becomes one of
states maximizing utility according to sets of rules. Outcomes then need to be analyzed purely in terms of the
evolving norms and ideas that affect these rules.
8
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rationalist framework, but to maximise absolute gains, not relative gains. This is indeed
acknowledged by game-theorists to make cooperation more likely. In the context of global
climate change, states are not concerned with military threats, solely absolute gains. To
summarise, Keohane defines institutions as “persistent and connected sets of rules
(formal or informal) that prescribe behavioural roles, constrain activity and shape
expectations”. They can affect state behaviour by affecting the flow of information, creating
an environment conducive to negotiation, having an ability to monitor compliance, make
commitments credible and alter the perceptions of international agreements.
With respect to global climate change, what was the role of institutions as organisations?
The cognitive development and agenda setting for climate change can be traced back to
the activities of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations
Environment Program (UNEP). The WMO was primarily an arena for transnational
scientific networks to pursue climate research, in existence for over a century. In addition
to this function, the WMO can be credited for the implementation of continuous
atmospheric CO2 measurements and the organisation of data that disproved theories of
global cooling at the Norwich meeting of 1975, the same data that later came to underpin
theories of global warming over the following 20 years. Andresen and Agrawala (2002)
point to UNEP as not having the scientific ties that the WMO benefited from, but can be
credited for “sharpening the policy relevance of climate research by focusing on societal
impacts of climate variability”. The result of the Villach meeting where the WMO and the
UNEP presented a five year assessment of climate change prompted the creation of the
more politicised IPCC in 1987-8 and created a “machinery to set the ball rolling in the
direction of coordinated international policy responses to climate change” (Andresen and
Agrawala 2002: 43). It is clear that international organisations were central to altering
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states perceptions of interest; that global warming was a political issue in need of an
international response. This, as pointed out by Paterson (1996b), is not the same as
suggesting state behaviour had been fundamentally changed, just that their information
sets had been altered. The Toronto Conference of the Atmosphere in 1988, indirectly
organised by the WMO, UNEP and a series of other groups, called for industrialised
countries to cut their CO2 emissions by 20-percent relative to 1988 levels by 2005, a
target “borrowed” from the ozone regime. As US State Department negotiator Daniel
Reifsnyder noted, the idea of “targets and timetables captured and riveted the public’s
imagination. It provided a simple litmus test of a country’s environmental commitment. It
required no painstaking feasibility analysis. It was political genius” (quoted from Andresen
and Agrawala 2001). International organisations had created a cognitive base, galvanised
public opinion and begun the act of agenda setting before states had even begun to join
the discussions and negotiate. From 1988 onwards, national governments took up the
initiative of forging political consensus on the issue of global warming and the voice and
influence of international organisations was somewhat lost. Negotiations nevertheless took
place under the auspices of the UN, in a framework that states knew well and which
facilitated and arguably accelerated the process of agreeing on a convention. Cooperation
was not easy, but institutions created an environment that eased the process.
As for institutions as norms and rules, a number of examples of unilateral policy action,
starting with Norway in 1990 adopting a stabilisation target for CO2 emissions by the year
2000, then Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark adopting goals of CO2 reductions,
begun to resonate through the international system. Differing interpretations exist for this,
the most salient being that of Patterson (1996b: p128). In this analysis, he suggests states
“were in a process of redefining” the purpose of policy action. Not a scientifically reasoned
target of CO2 abatement, but the process of abatement as a collective good. There was
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thus a dynamic of attempting to understand what “norms concerning global warming
mean”. There was also a strong sense of states gaining an identity as good global citizens
by pursuing emission reduction policies. Up till the formal interstate negotiations begun in
1991, it can thus be stated that norms and institutions played a part in influencing state
behaviour and generating subsequent negotiations. From 1991 to the creation of Kyoto in
1997, institutions played a less substantial although by no means negligible role of
streamlining negotiations by increasing the flow of information. I would also argue
institutions had a looming presence over the negotiations, especially from the norms that
had emerged from other successful institutions such as the ozone one, as an assurance
that a framework for compliance was feasible.
Can neoliberal institutionalism account for the US’s Houdiniesque escape from the Kyoto
protocol process, despite the strong norms suggesting it should act multilaterally, and can
it explain the apparently unforeseen survival of the protocol despite the loss of its most
important member? To answer the first question, we should remind ourselves of
Keohane’s (1989) assumption that states in an institutionalist paradigm act to maximise
absolute gains. Given the dependency of the American economy on energy, the debated
scientific basis for action, coupled with the balance of evidence suggesting that global
warming may not have such a terrible impact on the US economy9, the decision may no
longer seem so careless. In fact, the US policy has been one that ties in very well to
institutionalist thinking, notably that it has adopted a “no-regrets position, whereby only
action which has benefits for problems other than the greenhouse effect alone is
considered” (Newell 2000). This is clearly compatible with Keohane’s assumption of
rational behaviour aiming to maximise absolute gains. In fact, a more accurate description
9
The US is in the desirable position of being relatively immune to many of the potentially disastrous
consequences of global warming. As an example, a study in Nature in1990 by Adams et al. suggests crop
yields in the US may increase by 9% http://www.gcrio.org/USGCRP/sustain/wolfe.html
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is that the US government was minimising costs, preferring to break norms of
multilateralism and incite a potential international backlash than suffer the costs estimated
at up to 2.5-percent of gross domestic product for reducing CO2 emissions within the
Kyoto framework10 (and despite the existence of flexibility mechanisms).
The second question as to why the Kyoto protocol is as resilient as an institution is also
addressed in the neoliberal institutionalist model. Keohane and Nye (1977) suggest that
the networks of organisation in a state of interdependence will be “difficult either to
eradicate or drastically to rearrange”. Young corroborates this belief by stating that
“existing regimes or institutional arrangements often prove highly resistant even to
assaults spearheaded by one or more of the great powers”; The US is still a member of
the climate convention and has not made any explicit efforts to undermine Kyoto other
than by its lack of support. Besides, the international norms of environmental action and
the loss of US ratification may improve the chances of cooperation, especially given the
fact that Russia, should it ratify and in the absence of its American customer, will reduce
the cost of meeting the Kyoto requirements for all by flooding the emissions market with
so-called “hot-air”11. The punch of the climate change regime may be dented, but its
survival potentially guaranteed until the next round of emissions reductions around 2010.
Hence we can conclude that neoliberal institutionalism holds more explanatory power than
neorealism in understanding and explaining the international reaction to climate change.
Whilst the neorealist perspective struggled to accommodate the institution forming and
10
The loss in GDP, plus the funds used to purchase permits internationally, represents the total cost to the
economy. Over the period 2008 to 2012, the annual average total cost ranges from $77 billion (1992 dollars)
to $338 billion, depending on the level of carbon reductions and the recycling assumptions. This cost is
relative to a total economy of $7 trillion in 1996, growing to about $9.5 trillion in 2010, and about $11 trillion
in 2020 (1992 dollars). From Energy Information Administration study “Impacts of the Kyoto Protocol on
U.S. Energy Markets and Economic Activity”
11
the cost of carbon permits is expected to be far lower than initially estimated in the absence of the US,
allowing countries to cheaply “buy” themselves out of their commitments
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strong level of cooperation that was apparent, it does offer an alternative if not
incompatible answer to the US apparent unilateralism. Nevertheless, a number of
objections can be levelled over the deceptive comprehensiveness of the neoliberalist
model. The first of these is that there is no treatment of the influence of domestic politics
and nonstate actors. The accusation of deficiency can equally be aimed at neorealism and
I will argue that the two rationalist paradigms share these same weaknesses, but focus on
neoliberalism for parsimonious reasons. Furthermore, there is a strong and generally
accepted assumption, found in all the academic literature I have come across that I would
like to address. Since climate change is a global phenomenon, it is commonly argued that
the problem cannot be solved by one country alone; some form of international
cooperation is essential. What of the possibility of countries acting individually to fight
climate change, without coordinating their actions? What of the possibility that international
cooperation may be at a level other than a systemic one? For example, a constructivist
line of thought might propose the argument that international institutions have indeed
promulgated norms and ideas of behavior with regard to climate action not only to states
but to all levels of society. Similar to the idea that recycling household waste occurs at the
household level and addresses the global problem of resource depletion, we can likewise
argue that since households account for anything between 10 and 40-percent of a
country’s CO2 emission12, a culture of energy saving would reduce emissions significantly
without imposing any binding costs on the country. A number of countries already have
implemented stringent domestic climate change policies, despite international efforts to
spread the practice. The UK for example is phasing in a country wide carbon permit
trading market that already includes 6,000 large companies and is well on its way to
meeting its Kyoto target of reducing emissions by 8% by 2010 (the UK’s domestic policy is
International Energy Agency paper (2000) “Co2 Emission Trends And Reduction Opportunities In
Transport, Households And Commercial Sectors” by Lew Fulton, Fridtjof Unander, Lee Schipper and
Carmen Difiglio
12
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aiming for a 20% reduction); an impressive and by no means solitary effort to combat
climate change at the domestic level.
As a generalization, theorising about international environmental politics begins with an
environmental threat framed as a collective action problem. Institutionalist theory and
market failure literature then attempt to find the optimal cooperative or institutional
mechanisms to overcome the problem, without referring to the viability of the political
process underlying the arrangement. Putnam offers a convincing two-level metaphor to
describe the relationship between domestic and international politics “At the national level,
domestic groups pursue their interests by pressuring the government to adopt favourable
policies, and politicians seek power by constructing coalitions among those groups. At the
international level, national governments seek to maximise their own ability to satisfy
domestic pressures while minimising the adverse consequences of foreign developments.
Neither of the two games can be ignored by central decision-makers, so long as their
countries remain independent, yet sovereign” (Putnam 1988, 434). Sprinz and Weiß
(2001) point out with regard to the climate change regime and FCCC negotiations that
countries may not be willing to enter into agreements (voluntary defection) or may be
trapped in involuntary defection as domestic politics interfere with international aims.
Negotiators thus have “double edged diplomacy” as they can play the domestic and
international arenas off against one another and use these arenas to expand or reduce
their “win sets”; the range of domestically feasible international agreements. This was
particularly true of the climate change negotiations with the US sometimes accused of
legitimising its demands by playing the domestic politics card. Later, despite the Clinton
administration’s attempts to agree to the Kyoto protocol, the Byrd-Hagel Resolution was
unanimously passed through the Senate in 1997. It called for the US to mandate new
commitments for developing nations to limit or reduce GHG emissions, and not to accept a
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protocol that would result in serious harm to the economy. It effectively reduced the US
win-set to a negligible point, made it clear the Senate was unlikely to ratify Kyoto and
coincided well with the subsequent US withdrawal from the protocol.
The second element that falls outside the sphere neoliberal analysis of is that of non-state
actors. It is clear that there was a strong presence of Non-Governmental Organisations
(NGOs) throughout the climate change regime, but it is one thing to say they were there
and another to suggest they matter in a world of sovereign states. An NGO generally
refers to “any organisation that does not have a formal or legal status as a state or agent
of a state, or as a constituent sub-unit of a state such as a province or municipality”
(Raustiala 2001). Alongside NGOs, we must also concern ourselves with epistemic
communities of scientific experts, a fundamental piece of the climate change regime. It is
accepted that the main actors were environmental NGO are particularly influential, a
statement supported by the evidence surrounding the issue of ozone depletion. Friends of
the Earth and the Sierra Club started campaigns in the US that mobilised public opinion,
lobbying international conferences that were being organised by epistemic communities,
who themselves went on to directly influence government policy. For the climate change
regime, non-state actors were the main agenda setters for five years up until the interstate negotiations begun in 1991, arguably creating the norms and diffusing the
information within the regime structure and outside to the domestic environment. The
former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali commented to a gathering of NGOs
in 1994 “I want you to consider this [the UN] your home. […] Non-governmental
organisations are now considered full participants in international life”. And at the
birthplace meeting of Kyoto in 1997, there were an astounding 4000 NGO delegates,
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outnumbering the representatives of countries that were taking part. Answering the
question as to whether non-state actors are capable of changing state behaviour, Keck
and Sikkink (1998) demonstrate the efficacy of human rights activist networks in Argentina
and Mexico, and extend their claims to the power of non-state actors as a whole. Nonstate actors, they argue, are capable of influencing state behaviour on a number of levels
and do not just diffuse norms; they create them. Keck and Sikkink go as far as stating that
“nonstate actors undermine absolute claims to sovereignty”. The conclusion that non-state
actors have affected the outcomes of the climate change regime is reiterated by Raustiala
(2001) and Newell (2000).
To what extent do the phenomenon I have addressed above undermine the rationalist
predictions advanced by neorealism and neoliberalism? Can we imagine a scenario
whereby nonstate actors and other forces that transcend the traditional lines of state
frontiers compel a country to act in ways that are disjointed from the state’s control and
interests? I am ready to tentatively argue that the climate change institution, in the broad
sense of the term, as well as general shifts in corporate perception towards satiating
stakeholder value is already creating undercurrents that run counter to the policy
directions of certain states. In particular, this paper contends that the US position of
unilateralism is fragile, if not untenable.
The three interrelated mechanisms that I identify as sources of these undercurrents are
domestic politics, firms and the potential framework of Kyoto. At the domestic level, it is
clear that until recently, the fuel and energy lobbies yielded a great deal of power. The
largest was the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) which grouped many of the world’s largest
corporations and a majority of US energy companies. The GCC launched a negative
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advertising campaign in August 1997, just months before the Kyoto Conference, to
prevent the US from endorsing any agreement on climate change. Since then, however,
the GMC has lost it clout as a number of companies broke rank in quick succession (Ford,
BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Dupont, GM, Texaco, Daimler Chrysler…). Also at the domestic
level, US states are relatively free to pursue independent climate change policies13 and 19
states have developed “action plans” to combat GHG emissions14. Despite attempts to rule
the effort unconstitutional, California has been leading the pack with regulations imposing
a mandate for 10% of all light-duty vehicles offered for sale in 2003 to be zero-emission. A
federal plan to report GHGs voluntarily at first will be made mandatory if less than 60% of
emissions are unaccounted, and a number of bills are working their way through the
senate calling for legislature that supports engagement in the international negotiations on
climate change.
At the firm level, many of the companies that walked out of the GMC are now part of an
environmental lobby group called the Business Environmental Leadership Council and
have launched aggressive corporate climate change strategies. BP Amoco, for example,
plans to bring its carbon emissions to 10 percent below its 1990 level by 2010, exceeding
the Kyoto goal of roughly 5 percent for industrial countries. Dupont has one of the most
ambitious goals of any company, going far beyond that of Kyoto. It has already cut its
1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent and plans to reduce them by a total of 65
percent by 2010. On the supply side, BP Amoco and Shell are investing heavily in
renewable sources of energy. BP Amoco is now a leading manufacturer of solar cells.
Shell, already a major player in both wind and solar cells, is also investing heavily in
hydrogen and will likely open the world’s first chain of hydrogen stations in Iceland. If these
13
See http://www.energy.ca.gov/global_climate_change/summary.html for a summary of domestic climate
action plans
14
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are not just attempts to clean tarnished corporate images, why have companies made
such a striking volte-face? The norms of the climate change institution seem to have
seeped through to the firm level and made companies aware of the new environment they
are dealing with. Thus not only is climate change now an integral part of business risk, or
even the largest part of risk for the insurance industry for example 15, but companies are
beginning to recognize the inevitability of some form of extra carbon cost and a gradual
shift to renewables and hydrogen. Furthermore, large multinationals are being held
accountable to far more scrutiny by stakeholders and shareholders (customers,
employees, activist groups and the public) alike. Being “green” doesn’t even have mean
lower share value, as BP found to its great surprise that considerable net savings were
made by cutting on carbon emissions. We have also witnessed a growing number of
corporations adopting policies of self-regulation such as corporate codes of conduct, social
and environmental standards, and auditing and monitoring systems: Almost half of the
Fortune 500 are now compiling and issuing annual reports that describe not only their
financial performance but also details about their environmental and social behaviour.
Labelled "triple-bottom line reporting", this view rests on the belief that corporations owe
stakeholders an annual accounting of their environmental and social performance. These
emerging norms are even being legitimised by accounting firms that independently review
these non-financial reports. The UN has launched the laughter, UN Global Compact, a
framework to guide such efforts of corporate responsibility.
Finally, a more subtle mechanism is emerging at the international level. The restrictions on
CO2 emissions being imposed in Europe will affect multinationals operating there just as
much as it will local companies. Far from losing a competitive edge as claimed by the anti-
15
Franklin Nutter, president of Reinsurance Association of America, draws a direct link "The scientific
community's consensus is we're in a period of warming and weather variability. Climate change will affect
property and human lives."
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Kyoto lobbyists, US industry may lose business in Europe if it does not normalise and
accept the changing European environment. Some firms are rising to the challenge and a
carbon trading exchange is being launched in Chicago next year for voluntary trading of
emissions to better understand the principle and come to grips with the emerging
monitoring, verification, tracking and reporting requirements. Even more profound is the
potential effect of the Kyoto flexibility mechanisms. At its most potent, carbon trading
requirements could require that carbon emissions be accounted for along the whole chain
of supply of a good or produce. A car being sold in London may one day have to account
for all the carbon emissions that entered the fabrication process, with third party
certification at each step of the way. This means the entire supply chain of companies
needs to account for carbon emissions, a trend that upon reaching a certain critical mass,
affected companies will inevitably force all companies that wish to trade in Europe, or with
companies that trade in Europe, or even with the companies that trade with the companies
that trade in Europe, to account for and manage their carbon emissions to remain
competitive. Hence the assertion that there could be a “virtual” compliance to Kyoto; the
flexibility mechanisms first proposed by US negotiators ironically being the key to making
global climate change action a concerted worldwide effort. The process being so recent,
there has been scant academic attention to this hypothesis, a great deal however being
devoted to the rising concepts of global governance and the focus on “global civil society”
and “reconfiguration of institutions that inform corporate practices”
16
(Wapner 2001).
Keohane refers to global governance as the “analyses of how networks of states,
intergovernmental organisations and nongovernmental actors are responding to
environmental interdependence.”
Wapner refers to the CERES principles, similar in nature to the global compact, that specify “a set of
guidelines for corporate practices based on a code of conduct that would minimize corporate contributions to
environmental degradation”
16
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To conclude, I have posited the hypothesis that firms and domestic politics should be
appended to this list and that there exist elements of global governance that operate
through mechanisms that cannot be captured by traditional state centric theories of
international relations. This does not necessarily invalidate the evidence exposed by our
analysis of global climate change using neorealist and neoliberalist paradigms. The
conclusions we gathered are still valuable, notably that institutions, regimes and state
interests still have a part to play in such problems of global coordination. Our analysis did
nevertheless pick up on some shortfalls, the worst being the implicit assumption that
interstate cooperation is the only means to solve the collective problem of global warming.
Rather, a strengthening web of interdependency, linking firms, individuals, nonstate actors,
institutions and states, and governed by the norms and beliefs that these actors create
and disseminate, is producing forms of cooperation that can no longer be limited to being
strictly in the sphere of interstate relations. In the specific case of global climate change,
this paper has made that argument that structural elements of the Kyoto protocol, coupled
with changing corporate practices and domestic efforts to reduce carbon emissions, may
furtively undermine and even nullify the US state’s policies. Therefore, the US Kyoto
targets may yet be met, despite inaction and disinterest at the federal level: Kyoto will
become a “virtual reality” in the US. Lastly, neorealism and institutionalism, due to their
inability to see below the state level, will be unable to capture the intricacies of the
mechanisms we have described above, but we cannot rule out the possibility that they will
continue to offer valuable insights into the interstate coordination of the climate change
problem.
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Appendix I
Climate change science
A growing mass of scientific evidence has accumulated over the last decade or so pointing
to a rise in the global surface temperature of the Earth. Whilst our planet does undergo
periodic cycles of rising and falling temperature, cycles normally steered by natural events
such as volcano activity, the current consensus is that current global warming is
happening at a greater rate than ever before. If no action is taken, the Inter-Governmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the National Research Council (NRC) predict
increases in temperature in the ranges of 1-3.5C and 1.5-6C by 2100. There are two
questions that need to be answered. First, how is this increase in temperature likely to
affect the planet, its ecosystems and its inhabitants? Second, is human activity to blame
and, especially, which type of activity is to blame for the potentially rapid change in the
surface temperature?
The answer to the first question is simple: the effect of a large rise in temperature would
be catastrophic. Depending on the magnitude and the rate of the rise, models predict very
differing scenarios, notably when coupled to the fundamentally complex structure of
temperature transfers between oceans and continents. For the environment, a rapid
shifting of climatic zones towards the poles may destroy species that fail to keep up with
their ecosystems and the consequences on agriculture could be considerable. For the
climate, a damaging disequilibrium would hit convection patterns and cause more “freak”
events, which many commentators declare are already happening. The most damming
effect of rising temperatures though would undoubtedly be the rising sea level. The
combination of the melting ice caps and the increase in
the energy content of the water would swell the oceans
significantly and submerge all low level land. The IPCC
predicts a rise in the mean sea level of 15-95cm, without
overtly massive polar meltdowns (see figure 1, from
IPCC predictions). This is enough to engulf parts of
countries like the Maldives, Bangladesh, even Europe
for example and do some serious flooding damage.
Is human activity to blame? Scientific consensus points to an overwhelming yes in that
Greenhouse Gases (GHGS) released by human activity are to blame for the warming of
the planet. The earth is like a greenhouse in that the atmosphere is transparent to visible
radiation from the sun and is opaque to some of the reflected infrared radiation from the
earth, thus “trapping” the incident energy from the sun and raising the average
temperature (hypothetically -19C without this effect). Under normal circumstances, the
earth releases heat at the same rate at which it absorbs energy from the sun. However,
this balance is being destabilised by the steady release of GHGS from human economic
activity. While some particulates released by economic activity contribute to a cooling of
the atmosphere through cloud creation, carbon dioxide, CO2, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs),
methane (CH4) and nitrous dioxide (N2O) all increase the greenhouse effect. Furthermore,
CFCs damage the ozone layer, thus allowing more damaging UV radiation through the
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atmosphere. With industrialisation came the need to burn
fossil fuels for production and transportation, increasing the
concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by over a third
since 1800. Agriculture and other human activity has also
contributed to the release of other GHGS, but CO2 remains
the most important of these, contributing to an estimated
60% of all human induced greenhouse effects. The figure
above (The Economist November 2000) shows the
changes in CO2 concentration and temperature variations
in a historical perspective. Clearly, the predictions of the
IPCC and the NRG do not intuitively seem inappropriate
when such evidence is brought to light. Yet actions to
counter global warming are difficult because the mechanisms are so complicated. Unlike
the hole in the ozone, which shows a clear relationship between man-made CFC
emissions and a thinning ozone layer, the costs and benefits of curbing GHGS emissions
is much less clear cut. For one, global warming has a strong lag and the effects must be
decomposed between natural ones and human ones. Secondly and most importantly,
even with the vast quantity of scientific evidence pointing to serious consequences if
nothing is done about it, there is great uncertainty in the models used and the greenhouse
effect will only be detected once it has happened.
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