Cheating on climate change? Australia's challenge to global warming norms

Abstract

The international governance of climate change was initially informed by two norms concerning who should take responsibility for mitigating climate change and how such mitigation should be pursued.1 Since the early 1990s, these norms have been contested by several states. In this article the author argues that such contestation is a product of the perceived incongruence between these norms and the domestic conditions of those states they seek to govern. Following an overview of the emergence and contestation of climate governance norms, the author elaborates on this relationship between international norms and domestic conditions. These theoretical assumptions are then explored in the context of Australia's response to international climate governance norms from the late 1980s to 2007. As the author demonstrates, the perceived incongruence of these norms with domestic conditions led Australia's foreign policy makers to contest the norms and focus on the construction of alternative governance processes by reframing the issue of climate change. Through a diversion of attention away from historical emissions to future emissions and possible technological mitigation options, climate governance was temporarily reconciled with Australia's domestic conditions. However, the author suggests that this came at the expense of international equity and long-term national sustainability.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr Ian Hall, Dr Juanita Elias, Professor Timothy Doyle and to the referees of the Australian Journal of International Affairs for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I also acknowledge comments made by participants of the 2007 Australasian Political Studies Association conference, at Monash University, where an earlier draft of this article was presented.

Notes

1. These normative debates have also been analysed by Matthew J. Hoffman and Loren Cass (see Hoffman 2005; Cass 2006).

2. Constructivist scholars of international relations have proposed numerous categories for distinguishing between the diverging streams of constructivism, including conventional, critical, modern and postmodern. However, differences within these approaches tend to emerge along epistemological lines rather than ontological lines; therefore, it makes sense to speak of a ‘constructivist ontology’ (as I do in this article), but not a ‘constructivist epistemology’ (see Hopf 1998: 181–5; Katzenstein et al. 1998: 645–7; Reus-Smit 2001: 222–5).

3. It is therefore beyond the scope of this article to engage in the ongoing debate about whether the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol are the most effective instruments for responding to the threat of climate change. Different perspectives in this debate can be found in Kellow (2006), Prins and Rayner (2007), Rayfuse and Scott (2007), Stephens (2008), Victor (2004) and Yamin (1998).

4. This conception of the domestic social structure is informed by the work of Bernstein (2001: 186), Kornprobst (2007) and Risse-Kappen (1994: 187, 208–9).

5. For an overview of the earlier phases of developmentalism, see Walker (1999a) and Wanna and Weller (2003).

6. For further discussion on the first environmental governance norm, see Christoff (2005b: 27–30). For further discussion on the second environmental governance norm, see Papadakis and Grant (2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hayley Stevenson

Hayley Stevenson recently completed a PhD in the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University. Her main research interests include international relations theory, international politics of climate change, and normative change within the international community. Her present research explores the diffusion and contestation of international norms of climate change governance