Domestic and international climate policies: complementarity or disparity?

Abstract

Climate change is a global crisis that requires countries to act on both domestic and international levels. This paper examines how climate policies in these two arenas are related and to what extent domestic and international climate ambitions are complementary or disparate. While scholarly work has begun to assess the variation in overall climate policy ambition, only a few studies to date have tried to explain whether internationally ambitious countries are ambitious at home and vice versa. According to the common view, countries that are more ambitious at home can also be expected to be more ambitious abroad. Many scholars, however, portray the relationship instead as disparate, whereby countries need to walk a tightrope between the demands of their domestic constituencies on the one hand and international pressures on the other, while preferring the former over the latter. This study uses quantitative methods and employs data from the OECD DAC dataset on climate finance to measure international climate ambitions. Overall, the present work makes two major contributions. First, it provides evidence that international climate financing ambition is complementary to domestic climate ambition. Second, the article identifies the conditional effect of domestic ambition—with regard to responsibility, vulnerability, carbon-intensive industry and economic capacity—on international climate ambition.

Specifying the Gap between Nations’ Outward-Looking and Domestic Climate Policies: A Call for Measures of Domestic Climate Policy Stringency

“…The poor parallel between domestic and international policies, as depicted in our indexes, corresponds to broader searches for external validity among domestic climate policy measures. While international agreement ratification is widely recognized as the best indicator of a nation's international environmental policy stringency [38,42,66], there is no such consensus, even in the NDCs of nations, of what constitutes a stringent domestic climate policy. Economists have highlighted the importance of a carbon tax or emissions trading system [67] and the centrality of "Green New Deal" government spending (see for example [68] on US and [69] on Europe).…”

“…Extending this reasoning, we argue that nations may be more willing to join international agreements after other leading nations have already "gotten out front" as a justification for the timing of a nation's signing and ratification as a component of the index. We use a range of environmental agreements to construct this variable from the 1980s and early 1990s, agreeing with [42] that a nation's foreign policy identity, with a few notable exceptions, changes slowly, even if national governments change more frequently. The Paris Agreement was excluded from our sample for two reasons.…”

A bibliometric-qualitative literature review of green finance gap and future research directions

“…Hence, research on the mechanisms of domestic and international climate finance policies are on the rise. For instance, some previous studies have investigated the influence of bureaucratic agencies on climate finance allocation (Peterson & Skovgaard, 2019), coastal adaption project design patterns and contributions (Kuhl et al, 2020), economic impacts of climate actions between countries (Román et al, 2019), climate mainstreaming (Bhandary, 2021), the complementarity or disparity between domestic and international climate policies (Peterson, 2021), the impact of self-regulation in the adoption of the Equator Principles (Contreras et al, 2019), and the moderating role of politics and the media in climate investment decisions (Bae et al, 2021;Pickering & Mitchell, 2017). It is observed that past studies have focused on the barriers, strategies, and the impact of climate finance at both domestic and international levels.…”

Monitoring of water resources and vegetation in the Helmand Basin using satellite image time-series and border hydro-political challenges

“…Climate change in border regions has also challenged the frame on territorial borders, which as opposed to the flow of goods and capital, climate change is considered an extraterritorial issue and cannot be managed by border laws and regulations. Therefore, the formation of a deep stream of knowledge in theories of international relations is necessary to solve the challenges of climate change (Benzi & Persoon, 2019) which in other words is addressed as one of the main issues of modern climate policy (Peterson, 2021). The core issue leading to border disputes between the neighboring countries is a lack of consensus on the prime cause (climate change or human intervention) of water depletion in border rivers, which is a main objective of this study.…”