Who drives climate-relevant policies in the rising powers?

ABSTRACT

The future of human life on our planet is influenced increasingly by what goes on in the rising powers. This paper provides a political economy analysis of the climate-relevant policies of China, India, Brazil and South Africa. It shows that alliances play a key role in driving such policies. However, most actors who support such policies have priorities other than climate change mitigation. Their support for such policies comes from concerns with securing energy, building competitive green industries, creating jobs or providing a basis for future public revenue. This insight is not just of analytical but also of political importance. It means that climate-relevant policies can draw on support from a wide constituency – not just those with green convictions. Such analysis provides the stepping-stone for understanding the political feasibility of low-carbon transformations.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate politics
• transformative allliance
• rising powers
• green transformation
• renewable energy
• China
• India
• Brazil
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

Valuable comments on an earlier draft were provided by Wen Shen and Stephen Spratt. Further useful suggestions were made by two anonymous referees.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Professor Hubert Schmitz is Emeritus Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.

Notes

1 This project was conceived in 2012 when the rising powers were just that: countries with increasing influence on the world due to their size and fast growth. A lot has changed since then. While China and India continue to grow fast (albeit at less spectacular rates), South Africa and Brazil have stagnated if not declined. Nevertheless, answering the question that drives this paper remains of great importance to the debate on who can accelerate transformations towards sustainability.

2 A longer version of this paper came out in the IDS series of Evidence Reports. https://www.ids.ac.uk/publications/ids-series-titles/ids-evidence-reports.

3 Different meanings of ‘green transformation’ and the significance of planetary boundaries are discussed in several chapters of Scoones et al. (2015).

4 In this paper, we use the terms coalition and alliance interchangeably. Leftwich (2009) suggests that ‘coalitions are best understood as the political solution to collective action problems’ (8) and defines them as ‘formal and informal groups which come together to achieve goals which they could not achieve on their own’ (14). In our definition, we also include actors that join forces and support (or oppose a policy without forming a group. The reason will become apparent in the course of the empirical sections.

5 Based on conversations with Professor Qi Ye, Director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Centre for Public Policy during Climate Change Conference, Chatham House, 3–4 November 2014.

6 And presumably, India’s wind turbine champion, the manufacturer Suzlon, has engaged less in Indian policy networks because it exports to other countries, thereby reducing its dependence on the Indian market and domestic policies. In contrast, in an earlier period when it was more dependent on the Indian market, Suzlon was very active in building an alliance of manufacturers and state banks to advance its commercial interests (Spratt et al. 2014).

7 The objectives of other stakeholders are discussed in Morris and Martin (2015).

8 Detailed research would probably show differences between countries and over time. Historically, environmental non-governmental organisations have had more influence in India than in China, but recently, their prospects of working with government have shrunk in India and increased in China (Chaturvedi and Schmitz 2015).

9 ‘Material’ includes both individual interests (for example, businesses concerned with profits or workers concerned with their jobs) and collective interests (for example, securing energy for a region). ‘Moral’ includes in particular the concern with safeguarding the sustainability of human life on our planet. But the latter could also be seen as a (long-term) material interest, so the dividing line between material and moral motives is not always clear.

10 The likelihood of this happening increases when new energy technologies become more economical.

11 The relevance of the institutional system is highlighted by Hochstetler and Kostka (2015: 90) in their analysis of why China’s advance in wind and solar power was much more rapid than that of Brazil. They argue that ‘the observed difference in renewable energy outcome is partly explained by variations in state-business relations in Brazil and China. Brazil’s public-private partnership model and China’s state-corporatist model are different approaches to aligning interests between the state and market players’.

12 Making such assessments dynamic would be essential because the stage in the energy transition plays a role. As countries increase the share of renewables in the energy mix, the issues change and the winner and loser constellations change (Lockwood 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the UK Department for International Development.