Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics

Abstract

The Paris Agreement institutionalized decentralized and national approaches to climate change policy through Article 4 and the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) process. In this new context, what can be said about the prospects for a global carbon market, and how might that analysis benefit from a comparative political perspective? In this chapter, the authors argue that, given the shift to the NDC process and considering the history of carbon market linkage and diffusion, understanding the past and future of carbon markets requires an analysis of the variation in institutions and the political economies of countries. To illustrate this point, the authors unpack continuity and change in five cases: the European Union, China, Canada, South Korea, and Indonesia. The authors conclude that making sense of carbon markets requires an integrative view of the comparative institutional dynamics as well as the transnational processes of diffusion and learning that promotes policy ideas.