We model international negotiations on climate change. Leaders such as the European Union and the US can make proposals and influence veto players, including other countries and domestic lobbies, who must choose whether to accept or reject proposals. We explain why policy change has been minimal in this issue area, which veto-players receive the greatest and least attention and why leader actors wishing to see less progress are in such a strong bargaining position.

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This article brings together the relative gains argument and the analysis of global environmental problems such as ozone depletion and global climate change. We develop an n-actor relative gains model for the provision of nonexcludable goods. In order to derive testable hypotheses we also develop a comparable n-actor specification for excludable goods such as international trade and derive hypotheses concerning the expected level of cooperation by using comparative statics. The models suggest that there should be a higher level of cooperation on trade and ozone depletion than on global climate change. After reviewing alternative explanations we confirm the explanatory power of the model by demonstrating that we observe a much lower level of cooperation for the climate case than either of the other two cases. We thus conclude that the case of global warming falls within the empirical domain of neorealism and that power-based explanations cannot be ignored.

Usually the provision of international environmental public goods cannot be secured by a single state. Rather, a group of major powers has to pool its resources to provide structural leadership in order to achieve an effective regime. Such a group of pushers uses its structural power to achieve its goal. However, it faces two challenges. First, it may have to overcome the opposition of a group of laggards that desires less environmental protection and may try to counter the pushers' efforts. We hypothesise that the regime will be more effective to the extent to which the pushers predominate over the laggards in terms of structural power. Second, both groups may have to overcome a collective action problem with regard to dispensing costly side‐payments. We argue that social capital embedded in inter‐state networks may help the groups to overcome such collective action problems. Thus we argue that the regime will be more effective to the extent to which pushers are predominant and also have more social capital than laggards. Empirical results support our hypotheses.

Rational choice models are employed to explain both the formation of states' domestically derived negotiation positions on climate change and the dynamics of these international negotiations. This analysis leads to the identification of a number of promising political strategies: taking steps to enlarge the membership of environmental non-governmental organisations; assessing whether the resources of these organisations would be more effectively spent on campaign contributions rather than other activities; using organisations such as the World Bank to assist developing countries to strengthen civil society in these countries; stepping up information campaigns; re-balancing abatement costs between the EU and the US; and making abatement more efficient by introducing an international emissions cap and trade scheme.