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CHAPTER ONE Climate Policy and the Domestic Salience of International Norms
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CHAPTER ONE Climate Policy and the Domestic Salience of International Norms Climate change emerged as a major political issue in the late 1980s. As a recently identified environmental threat, the science was not well understood , and the economic consequences were uncertain. Scientists, political leaders, business executives, and the general public had to examine the threat, evaluate its potential economic and ecological implications, and develop strategies to respond both domestically and in cooperation with other states. The international and domestic responses to climate change present an important opportunity to analyze the process of problem definition and policy response in both a comparative and longitudinal context. By the late 1980s, even though every developed country acknowledged that climate change, at a minimum, required additional study and potentially demanded coordinated international action to address the threat, there was still significant variation in the domestic political responses and foreign policy positions adopted by the developed states. What explains this variation? The conventional answer to this question is that differences in national cost-benefit calculations of the domestic effects of climate change and the policies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions explain the variation. The potential economic effects of climate change, as well as the redistributive consequences of policies to address it, have heavily influenced both the international negotiations and the domestic policy debates. However, the rationalist material explanation does not appear to provide a sufficient explanation for the variation. Several states accepted emission reduction commitments that would be extremely difficult to achieve, and other states rejected commitments that would appear to be easy to meet. The larger normative context of the climate negotiations appears to have influenced the positions adopted by many states. The domestic and international deliberations produced contentious normative debates related to how political leaders should respond to the problem. The international and related domestic responses to climate change provide an important opportunity to explore the interrelated processes of international norm emergence and domestic political 1 2 THE FAILURES OF AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN CLIMATE POLICY responses to a new problem. To what extent did the debates over norms influence state interests and behavior, and conversely to what extent did domestic politics affect the emergence of international norms? Norms are defined as collective expectations about the proper behavior for a given actor.1 Most international relations scholars accept that norms exist, but there has been a growing debate surrounding the questions of when and how international norms affect state behavior. Materialist approaches to international relations theory have tended to treat norms as merely reflecting the interests and power positions of the dominant states. From this perspective , powerful states promote norms to justify and legitimate their preferred policies. It is the underlying pursuit of material interests that explains the process of norm selection and affirmation. The most powerful states create incentive structures that provide benefits for the affirmation of preferred norms and costs for norm violation. Thus, norms have no independent effect on national interests or behavior; they are tools utilized by the dominant states to pursue their interests. However, constructivist and liberal scholars have challenged the exclusive focus on material interests. They argue that actors do not define their interests exclusively in material terms, but rather they pursue a complex mix of interests that reflects normative as well as material foundations . Ideas matter. The social construction of the problem and the process of determining appropriate responses profoundly affect the formation, evolution, and pursuit of national preferences. The constructivist literature on international norms has tended to emphasize the role of persuasion and social learning among political leaders in the process of international norm emergence. However, recently several scholars have begun to focus on the relationship between domestic politics and international norms.2 Particularly in international environmental affairs, it is typically not sufficient for political leaders to be persuaded of the appropriateness of a norm for it to alter state behavior. Rather, the norm must become embedded in domestic political discourse and eventually be incorporated into the foreign and domestic policies of the state. National leaders play a vital role in this process, but in most cases the norm must be accepted by domestic political actors for it to significantly alter national behavior. This suggests that domestic institutional structures, political culture, and historically contingent choices will be critical intervening variables in the translation of international norms into domestic policy. International norm emergence is by definition a...