The political in the technical: understanding the influence of national political institutions on climate adaptation

ABSTRACT

A growing body of research shows that local and international institutions as well as party politics affect climate adaptation. Yet few studies have considered the role of political institutions at the national level. Comparative political institutional theory argues that a country's party system, executive-legislative arrangement, and electoral rules affect elected officials’ incentives and behaviour. This study utilizes this theory to explain how Chile's national elected officials responded to the country's extreme drought in 2010–2015. Results indicate that ideologically distinct alliances, a strong president, and legislators’ competing incentives to cater to different interests resulted in adaptive policy solutions that only partially addressed the shortcomings that drought exposed. The findings of this study show how politics can underlie technical decision-making on climate change, help to account for the continued inadequacies of Chilean water reform even in the face of new climate extremes, and demonstrate the utility of the comparative political institutional lens for explaining national strategies for climate adaptation. Applying this lens to other country cases and climatic events will advance knowledge on how differences in electoral incentives and policy processes systematically shape climate adaption policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Institutions
• politics
• climate adaptation
• drought

Acknowledgements

This research has benefitted greatly from Matthew Shugart's careful reviews; I thank him first and foremost. Second, I thank Robert, Hijmans, Ethan Scheiner, Mark Lubell, Brad Jones, Amber Boydstun, Forrest Fleischman, Carl Bauer, two anonymous reviewers, and the participants of the Adapting to Climate Change Workshop (2017), Adaptation Futures Conference (2018), and the UCD Political Science Research Workshop Series for their valuable input, as well as the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas at the University of California, Davis, through the Tinker Foundation, for supporting this research. Last but certainly not least, I thank the undergraduate research assistants who helped conduct and transcribe interviews – Cynthia Murillo, Vicky Ortega, and Jorge Eduardo Pesce Fernandez; the faculty and experts who supported fieldwork – Francisca Reyes, Guillermo Donoso, Carlos Ciappa Petrescu, Pablo Álvarez, David Altman, and Juan Luis García; and the interviewees who shared their time, expertise, and experiences with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Cory L. Struthers is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Department of Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and is based at the Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests involve extending and applying theories on comparative political institutions and electoral incentives to distributive policy-making, representation, and bureaucratic decision-making, focusing on climate change and the environment in particular. She received her PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Davis.

Notes

1 A fourth institutional feature that affects elected officials’ incentives and behaviour is federalism, or the degree of authorities decentralized or devolved to subnational governments. Chile is a unitary system; local governments have few decision-making powers (Taylor et al., 2014). Accordingly, I leave this factor aside.

2 Most records indicate that the climatological drought ended in 2015, but the effects of drought continued into 2016. For this reason, I include 2016 in the analysis.

3 Precipitation data from the Explorado Climático website, which has reliable rainfall accumulation across several hundred stations and years in Chile, is used to measure rainfall deficit for Figures 1 and 2(a). Station data is used to interpolate deficits across Chile and calculate annual relative rainfall deficit across the country. The straight horizontal line indicates average rainfall from 1960 to 2016. The dashed line is a simple moving average (n = 5).

4 There was a dip in activity in 2014, likely because of election season or because two water-related bills were passed in 2013, reducing the salience of the issue. Interestingly, elected officials pursued drought-related policy changes in 2008, which was a single dry year embedded in a long series of wet years (see moving function in Figure 1 for longer term trends).

5 In each district or region, a voter selects a candidate from a single list (open list), and a list wins both seats if its votes are double those of the second list, in which case both of the winning list's candidates are elected. Normally, however, the competition between lists is closer and thus each list wins one of the seats, which goes to the top vote-earning candidate in each list.

6 Importantly, alliances are nationally binding: parties that enter a pre-electoral coalition in one district cannot run separately in others (Navia, 2004).

7 It is important to note that unlike systems that encourage presidents to stray from their party, the Chilean president has incentives to pursue agendas aligned with the coalition's preferences. Party leaders within the coalition nominate their presidential candidate, and the fruits of office are shared among parties within the coalition through ‘cuoteo’, an informal agreement that cabinet positions are distributed in proportion with parties’ electoral success (Siavelis, 2016). The point here is not that the president will steer the legislature away from their coalition's general preferences, but that the President can ignore any cooperation across alliances.

8 Electoral rules were reformed in 2017.

9 Legislators could be breaking away from their alliance to either build a party reputation or a personal reputation. Whether they build a party or personal reputation is unresolved in the literature, and evidence from fieldwork suggests that either could be true. For instance, legislators remarked that parties run fiercely competitive campaigns against alliance members, and that legislators (either for their own electoral support or their party's) seek close ties with local mayors in order to secure a voter base (4, personal communication, 9–26; 6.32, personal communication, 9–14). Whichever is the case, what is most important to the research question in this study is that they have incentives to create a position distinct from their alliance.

10 The party bloc with the Congressional majority in Chile is oftentimes the same as the president. In the 2010–2013 term (Piñera), the right bloc had a slight majority of seats in the first chamber and a slight minority in the second chamber. In the 2014–2017 term (Bachelet) the New Majority had a clear majority in both the first and second chambers.

11 I included legislative activities on the proposals introduced from 2006 to 2010 because although many of these were dormant, they were advanced further during the drought. I searched for bills with keywords related to climate change and drought, but none were found. Excluded topics include maritime policy and international rulings.

12 Interviews are grouped and cited as follows: Letters (A-H) represent members of organizations or academics, numbers that start with 0–10 represent legislators, and numbers that start with 99 represent government officials. The date of each interview is noted in the citations (all within 2016). Most interviews were conducted in Spanish, but some were conducted in English. All translations are my own.

13 The remainder were Independents (9%), who often co-sponsor with members of the New Majority, and other small parties (6%).

14 In all figures, I include data from 2006 to 2010 for reference to legislative behaviour under normal conditions.

15 The two that did not pass were introduced at the end of President Bachelet's term in 2010 and, consistent with expectations, were not advanced in President Piñera's term.

16 In some instances, a partisan bill is one that is introduced by one member of a coalition and an independent.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas at the University of California, Davis through the Tinker Foundation.