Does climate advocacy matter? The importance of competing interest groups for national climate policies

ABSTRACT

Climate politics and governance across the globe involve an increasing number of interest groups such as from business and civil society. Against this backdrop, it matters a great deal whether interest group mobilization is able to influence climate policy-making. First, there is an increasing number of climate policy supporters like nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and green businesses lobbying in favour of additional climate policies. Second, there is also strong mobilization of groups from energy-intensive and fossil fuel industries lobbying against potentially costly climate policies. In this paper, we investigate the potential effects of these mobilization patterns. More precisely, we ask whether there is any systematic effect of competing interest group mobilization on national climate policy production. To this end, we harness arguments from literatures on interest group mobilization and climate policy-making. Empirically, we exploit a comprehensive global dataset on the adoption of national climate laws and interest group mobilization (over 4,000 organizations) between 1997 and 2016. The results show that the increasing mobilization of climate policy supporters is positively related to national climate policy production. Climate policy opponents are able to weaken this effect, but are hardly able to block new climate laws. The results add to our understanding of climate politics focusing on the role of business organizations and NGOs. This is highly policy relevant for both analysts and practitioners given that the Paris Agreement relies heavily on national policy efforts.

Key policy insights

• The growing mobilization of climate policy supporters is positively related to the adoption of additional climate laws.

• The positive effect of climate policy supporters is weakened but rarely blocked by climate policy opponents, such as those from the fossil fuel industry.

• The effect of lobbying over climate policy needs to be assessed in its competitive context, that is by considering how political support and opposition on climate policy interact.

KEYWORDS:

• Interest groups
• NGOs
• business
• climate policy
• climate politics
• lobbying competition

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Professor Jan Beyers (University of Antwerp), the Research Foundation-Flanders (Odysseus Program, project number G.0908.09) and the European Research Council (ERC-2013-CoG 616702-iBias) for their financial contributions. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the INOGOV spring school (2018), the ECPR General Conference (2018), the Earth System Governance Conference (2018), the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) (2018), the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) (2019), and the MPSA Conference (2019). We thank the organizers and the discussants at these events, in particular Shan Zhou, Tomas Maltby and Michael Pregernig. We also thank the journal editors and three anonymous reviewers for their very constructive feedback and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 If not stated otherwise, we use the term NGOs in reference to nonprofit organizations, excluding business groups.

2 Fossil fuel industry groups come from the mining and extraction as well as the refining and processing of fossil fuels sectors. Groups from the electricity sector were included if they were not from the renewable energy sector. Additional groups belong to the energy-intensive manufacturing industries such as the food, paper and paper products, chemicals and chemical products, metals and nonmetallic mineral products, and transport sectors (U.S. EIA, 2016; IEA, 2016; see also Fredriksson et al., 2004; Cheon & Urpelainen, 2013; Hughes & Urpelainen, 2015).

3 To alleviate concerns about the downsides of including lagged dependent variables, we offer models without previous legislative experience in the Appendix. Our main results remain very similar.