States, coalitions, and the legalization of the global climate regime: negotiations on the post-2020 architecture

ABSTRACT

Why do some states and state coalitions, acting within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), support harder legalization of the global climate regime? In order to explain why, the effects of four causal factors are considered: climate vulnerability, the emission intensity of the national economy, a state’s power position, and socialization into climate norms. To identify the legalization positions of UNFCCC actors, an original content analysis is conducted of all the submission and meeting statements made at the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform during the years 2012–2015. Subsequently, a qualitative comparative analysis is carried out to find out which combinations of the causal factors offer a sufficient explanation for the analyzed outcome, leading to the identification of two causal pathways that lead states to endorse harder legalization of the climate regime.

KEYWORDS:

• United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
• climate regime
• legalization
• theories of international institutions
• content analysis
• qualitative comparative analysis

Acknowledgments

For very useful comments, I am grateful to two reviewers, the editor of Environmental Politics, the participants of the panel ‘The Governance of Climate Change’ at the 2016 ECPR General Conference, in particular Joost de Moor and Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, and Michal Parízek.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2017.1324754

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by research grant GA15-12533S ‘Member states in the WTO – preferences, compliance, and monitoring’, from the Czech Science Foundation (GA ČR).