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CHAPTER SEVEN Conclusion The case studies of German, British, and American climate policy support the argument that material interests and relative power positions alone cannot explain the evolution of domestic and international climate policy. It is necessary to integrate normative debates with material forces to explain national responses to climate change. However, if international norms are to be analytically useful for explaining and predicting national behavior, then it is essential to evaluate the causal pathways through which norms are translated into and alter the domestic political process. The case studies suggest that scholars should focus their attention on the interplay among international normative debates, associated domestic normative debates, the material interests of affected actors, and the relative power positions of major states. The climate policy case studies focused on two normative debates that played critical roles in defining international and domestic climate policy. This chapter evaluates the forces affecting the domestic political salience of these norms and offers suggestions for further research in this area. The first normative debate centered on who should bear primary responsibility for reducing global GHG emissions. Should developed states be forced to act first because they are historically responsible for the vast majority of GHG emissions, or should all states bear a common responsibility to reduce emissions ? The second normative debate focused on the principles that would guide global emission reductions. Should individual states be held to a principle of national accountability, which would require every state to commit to a common domestic GHG emission reduction target, or should the principle of economic efficiency guide global emission reductions? Most environmental NGOs, developing countries, as well as most European states argued for a norm requiring national responsibility. The United States argued that the important point was to reduce global emissions, and that these emission reductions should be achieved wherever they were most costeffective . These normative debates were at the heart of the climate negotiations , and they were integrated to varying degrees into the domestic and foreign climate policy positions of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 219 220 THE FAILURES OF AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN CLIMATE POLICY Chapter 1 identified a set of four hypotheses that the literature on the effects of international norms on domestic political dialogue and policy suggests should influence the domestic salience of international norms. First, the greater the congruence between an international norm and domestic political norms, the greater will be the potential for the norm to be integrated into domestic political dialogue and achieve a high degree of political salience. Second, the greater the congruence between the domestic policy implications of the international norm and the material interests of influential actors, the more likely the norm will achieve political salience. Third, the stronger the perception that a norm serves the “general interests” of humanity and environmental protection rather than the pursuit of narrow selfinterest , the more likely that it will be perceived as legitimate by a broad coalition of interested actors. Finally, normative debates that are more public in nature and require domestic policy changes expand the number of relevant actors and create greater potential for private actors to force political actors to accept a norm regardless of their convictions related to the appropriateness of the norm. Combining these hypotheses produces a set of conditions that should dictate the likelihood that a nascent international norm will achieve significant domestic political salience. International norms that resonate with existing domestic political norms and which are also consistent with the material interests of significant domestic actors should rapidly achieve domestic salience. Cases in which the international norm does not resonate with existing domestic political norms and which would adversely affect significant domestic economic actors will be least likely to achieve domestic salience. The potential domestic salience of international norms where either the norm resonates with existing domestic norms but negatively affects domestic economic actors or where the norm does not resonate with existing domestic norms but positively affects the material interests of domestic economic actors is more difficult to predict. In these cases, the level of salience should be affected by the domestic political structure and the relative influence of important domestic actors. The broader perception of the legitimacy of the norm should also be critical to determining whether it will achieve domestic salience. The index of domestic norm salience presented in chapter 1 provides a mechanism to measure changes in international norm salience as well as evaluate the forces shaping norm...

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