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Abstract
Amid widespread inaction in the face of the looming threat of climate change, the leaders of nine nation-states have opted for a bold, seemingly anomalous, course of action by making national carbon neutrality pledges. Because prior research has focused on why states fail to curb emissions, there is a paucity of research on why some states take a different path by committing to drastic emission reductions. This research aims to help fill that gap. First, a content analysis of 252 newspaper articles reveals that New Zealand made the first pledge and eight other states have followed. Second, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis is used to compare political and social conditions in states with carbon neutral pledges to conditions in a randomly selected group of states without such pledges. Pledge states, compared to non-pledge states, have better governance scores on world indices, an abundant presence of global environmental NGOs, and smaller populations. Pledge states also have lower levels of income inequality (measured by Gini coefficients) than non-pledge states. I argue that these conditions (effective governance, abundant NGOs, small population sizes, and egalitarian class structures) facilitate collective action, and thus enabled some states to make carbon neutral pledges.
Acknowledgments
This research was not supported by a funding source. Appreciation is expressed to Thomas K. Rudel, Norah A. MacKendrick, and Steven R. Brechin for providing feedback, to Charles C. Ragin for assisting with the analysis, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. However, interpretations and any ambiguities in this article are sole responsibility of the author.
Notes
1. By corruption, I mean ‘the abuse of entrusted power for private gain’ (Transparency International Citation2015).
2. First, I searched two websites: the now archived United Nations Environment Programme’s (Citation2008) climate neutral network’s list of ‘participants’ (among states) and the Climate Action Tracker (Citation2011), a climate change watchdog group. I used these websites because these organizations catalog states’ climate change policies. Second, I searched for articles in the databases of ScienceDirect, PAIS, Academic Search Premier, and ProQuest Environmental Science Journals. I used the search terms ‘carbon neutral’ AND state*, ‘carbon neutral’ AND countr*, and ‘carbon neutral’ AND nation* and limited the search to articles that included these terms in the abstract and that were peer-reviewed. I used these databases because they would likely be among the first to report on the climate neutral issue for a scholarly audience.
3. The ‘Analysis’ function in the fsQCA software creates three solutions: complex, parsimonious, and intermediate. It also calculates two measures. Consistency measures the degree to which multiple cases will share the same combination of conditions and display the same outcome. There can be many subsets to every outcome, so this value may be quite small. In contrast, coverage represents the degree to which the outcome can be accounted for, or explained by, each condition and the combination of conditions (Ragin Citation2008; Ragin, Strand, and Rubinson Citation2008, 85–87).
4. I only describe the difference in means here to illustrate how unexpected this non-finding is. I did not use a difference in means tests approach because it would not have allowed me to look at the combinations of causally relevant factors or the degree of membership in a group. These are the benefits of using fsQCA.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Julia A. Flagg
Julia A. Flagg is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University.