Policy coalitions in the global greenhouse : contestation and collaboration in global climate change public policy
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2009
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It is more than 20 years since 1985, when world climate and atmospheric scientists first issued an authoritative warning of the danger of global warming. In 1988, scientists, environmentalists and politicians from 48 countries endorsed the Toronto Declaration to address global warming that called for a twenty percent worldwide reduction in CO emissions by the year 2005 leading to an eventual fifty percent reduction. Contestation and collaboration in the global climate change public policy process, involving a wide range of actors, has continued since then.
Two organisations were founded in 1989 by non-state actors on opposite sides of the climate policy debate. These were the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), which was established by a range of US business interests, and Climate Action Network (CAN) established by a range of environmental and scientific non-governmental organisations. The thesis documents, analyses and compares how each organisation was formed, organised and developed. It reviews how GCC and CAN enabled more effective national and transnational advocacy and how they fostered opposing policy coalitions on climate policy. The respective approaches are assessed, evaluated and contrasted as each sought to gain support for their opposing policy positions in the global climate change policy process.
The research uses a neo-Gramscian theoretical perspective and develops and applies an analytical framework focused on policy coalitions of state and non-state actors to investigate the role that non-state actors played in the global climate policy process. GCC and CAN played major roles within opposing policy coalitions that became particularly important in shaping the outcome of the global and national climate policy processes. The thesis focuses on the role of GCC and CAN and their associated policy coalitions in influencing the framing, developing, implementation and review of global climate policy. It examines the global climate change policy process through this analytical lens of contestation between policy coalitions from the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 to the first Meeting of the Parties of the ratified Kyoto Protocol in 2005.
The thesis assesses the analytical framework and concludes by identifying critical issues that the current global public policy processes have encountered in developing and implementing effective global climate change public policy.
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