The competitive federalist system facilitated state leadership and the diffusion of innovative policies that addressed climate change and energy issues in the absence of comprehensive federal action at the start of the twenty-first century. In a competitive federalist system state governments and their politicians challenge one another horizontally and the federal government vertically for legislative credit and functional authority on relevant policy issues. What drove state-level climate and clean energy leadership from 2001 to 2012? This dissertation develops three competitive federalism-based hypotheses for analysis: (H1) A national, bipartisan network of ambitious, entrepreneurial governors drove climate and clean energy policy innovation from 2001 to 2012; (H2) the State Energy Program Recovery Act resources reduced the policy adoption gap between early enactors and laggards in clean energy financing and regulation; (H3) and justification for climate and clean energy activities in the states shifted from environmental to economic rationales from 2001 to 2012 (Figure ES1). While competitive federalism theory has centered on both fiscal and ideological considerations driving innovation in the policy environment, the experience of climate change policymaking and clean energy actions at the state level during the period under consideration reveals a clear partisan divide in policymaking within this domain.

Empirical investigation into afforestation and bioenergy carbon finance projects in Tanzania, Uganda and Moldova demonstrates that effective projects—both in terms of sustainable development and the generation of genuine carbon credits—are more likely to result when the state is able to bring carbon finance initiatives into alignment with national development objectives. Amongst the countries investigated, the most important factor in such alignment was, paradoxically, commitment liberal economic reforms. Contrary to the expectation that the performance of projects under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) would be the same in states with similar administrative capacities, carbon finance projects were more effective in Uganda and Moldova than Tanzania. Commitment to liberal economic reforms in Uganda functions as an animating set of ideas that allows the state apparatus to work in a more purposeful manner and establish institutions and organizations which allow it to generate state power for low-carbon development. For CDM forest and bioenergy projects, the risk of unsustainability is mitigated by a land tenure system and investment regime that (i) offer opportunities for individual smallholders to engage directly with the carbon market and create incentives for domestic investors while (ii) also accommodating historical land governance practices. Genuine carbon credits were associated with project developers who possessed a latent organizational capacity for implementation and were motivated to pursue market opportunities—state forest agencies in Uganda and Moldova. However, the ability of the state to retain latent organizational capacity was restricted to sectors such as forestry that are less sophisticated technically; in the energy sector, such capacity was ceded to the private sector in Uganda and Moldova during structural adjustment. More skeptical of liberal economic policy, Tanzania has retained capacity in the energy sector; however, for the same reasons, it has not treated the CDM as a genuine opportunity. At current carbon prices, CDM projects investigated were effective when the state was able to play a developmental role in the economy. Whether commitment to liberal economic reforms can have similar developmental effects in other parts of the developing world is questionable—a different animating set of ideas may be important.

Empirical investigation into afforestation and bioenergy carbon finance projects in Tanzania, Uganda and Moldova demonstrates that effective projects—both in terms of sustainable development and the generation of genuine carbon credits—are more likely to result when the state is able to bring carbon finance initiatives into alignment with national development objectives. Amongst the countries investigated, the most important factor in such alignment was, paradoxically, commitment liberal economic reforms. Contrary to the expectation that the performance of projects under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) would be the same in states with similar administrative capacities, carbon finance projects were more effective in Uganda and Moldova than Tanzania. Commitment to liberal economic reforms in Uganda functions as an animating set of ideas that allows the state apparatus to work in a more purposeful manner and establish institutions and organizations which allow it to generate state power for low-carbon development. For CDM forest and bioenergy projects, the risk of unsustainability is mitigated by a land tenure system and investment regime that (i) offer opportunities for individual smallholders to engage directly with the carbon market and create incentives for domestic investors while (ii) also accommodating historical land governance practices. Genuine carbon credits were associated with project developers who possessed a latent organizational capacity for implementation and were motivated to pursue market opportunities—state forest agencies in Uganda and Moldova. However, the ability of the state to retain latent organizational capacity was restricted to sectors such as forestry that are less sophisticated technically; in the energy sector, such capacity was ceded to the private sector in Uganda and Moldova during structural adjustment. More skeptical of liberal economic policy, Tanzania has retained capacity in the energy sector; however, for the same reasons, it has not treated the CDM as a genuine opportunity. At current carbon prices, CDM projects investigated were effective when the state was able to play a developmental role in the economy. Whether commitment to liberal economic reforms can have similar developmental effects in other parts of the developing world is questionable—a different animating set of ideas may be important.

This paper studies the cost effectiveness of climate policy if there are technology externalities. For this purpose, we develop a forward-looking CGE model that captures empirical links between CO2 emissions associated with energy use, directed technical change and the economy. We find the cost-effective climate policy to include a combination of R&D subsidies and CO2 emission constraints, although R&D subsidies raise the shadow value of the CO2 constraint (i.e. CO2 price) because of a strong rebound effect from stimulating innovation. Furthermore, we find that CO2 constraints differentiated toward CO2-intensive sectors are more cost effective than constraints that generate uniform CO2 prices among sectors. Differentiated CO2 prices, through technical change and concomitant technology externalities, encourage growth in the non-CO2 intensive sectors and discourage growth in CO2-intensive sectors. Thus, it is cost effective to let the latter bear relatively more of the abatement burden. This result is robust to whether emission constraints, R&D subsidies or combinations of both are used to reduce CO2 emissions. / Abstract in HTML and technical report in PDF available on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change website (http://mit.edu/globalchange/www/).

Carbon offsetting has been an institutionalised response to climate change for over a decade. Over this period, climate change has become more severe and calls for climate justice have become increasingly insistent. Yet the normative controversies of carbon offsetting remain unresolved, as debates about the environmental quality, development impacts and ethical implications of carbon offsetting continue. This thesis explores the relationship between morality and carbon offsetting in three domains. First it provides an evaluation of the ethics of offsetting. Second it gives an account of the 'lay normativity' of the market, describing how carbon market actors interpret and act upon issues of moral concern. And third, it explains offsetting's moral economy. First, the thesis examines the moral rationales for and problems of offsetting in order to clarify the bases of criticisms levelled at offsets by researchers concerned about trends in neoliberal environmental governance. In evaluation of the ethics of offsetting, the PhD recognises some limited rationales, but mainly highlights widespread problems including lack of environmental integrity and failure to produce 'sustainable development'. The structure of the market is shown to create opportunities for malpractice and difficulties for reform. Second, building on work in cultural political economy, the research describes carbon offsetting's lay normativity. The account is based on interviews with over sixty carbon offset market actors including project developers, consultants, auditors, regulators, retailers and buyers in the UK, continental Europe, and in India. Findings show that the market is founded on ethical principles: offsetting is nothing without notions of environmental and developmental care. Critiques of, and reforms to, offsetting are also grounded in principled debate. But carbon market actors often use their power to further commercial interests that are not aligned with production of environmental or developmental value. And yet, even as rationales are ignored and problems are amplified, market actors maintain a discursive semblance of moral behaviour through forms of justification, story-telling and identity work. Third, the thesis explains how principles, profit and power combine to affect the governance of offsetting. It shows that the concentration of power among profit-seeking actors drives the production of offsetting's moral problems in the stages of project development, regulation and retail. Commercial interests in the politics of knowledge lead to manipulation of the discursive framings through which people come to understand offsets. Ethical narratives are deployed to sustain the market in states of dysfunction, enabling privileged groups to gain exchange value at the expense of climate protection and sustainable development. Through this explanatory work, the PhD contributes an original application of ideas about moral political economy to the case of climate change and carbon trading, demonstrating that powerful actors can shape culture and alter our perceptions of right and wrong.

In 2014, European heads of state selected new targets for the EU as part of the 2030 climate and energy framework. The targets will guide the ambition and nature of EU policy in this area until 2030 and are likely to have important implications for Europe’s transition to a low-carbon economy. The decision taken by the European Council was preceded by several years of vigorous interaction between interest groups, the European Commission and the member states. The outcome of this interaction set the agenda for EU climate and energy policy but the role of interest groups in climate and energy policy, especially relative to important economic ideas, is relatively under researched. By augmenting and applying the multiple streams approach developed by John Kingdon in the 1980s and using process-tracing techniques, this thesis contributes a detailed case study of this important instance of European interest representation. It is found that the complex and dynamic political context for the interaction made planning and executing advocacy campaigns challenging for all actors. The debate about the 2030 framework is shown to hinge on the idea of technology-neutrality and its status on the policymaking agenda. A number of policy coalitions are observed with a wide range of characteristics, some novel. Several attempts at ‘policy entrepreneurship’ by interest groups are recorded but most were disrupted by the confused and fast-changing political situation. It is shown that a combination of spill-over between policy windows, framing and coalition building activity served to push the idea of technology neutrality up the agenda. The multiple streams approach is shown to be broadly applicable to the research context and aims but greater agency over policy windows than originally assumed must be granted to actors and the possibility for successful policy entrepreneurship to yield unintended policy outcomes allowed for.

The global carbon cycle is a central part of the climate system which forms a direct link between human activity and climate change. This thesis presents my contribution to the field of research into the global carbon cycle with complex numerical models and its use to inform climate mitigation policy. Firstly, I present work I led to build, configure and apply the Hadley Centre Earth System Model, HadGEM2-ES, that successfully delivered the CMIP5 simulations. Then I present work that led to the design of the next generation of coupled carbon cycle intercomparison experiments. The aim of these experiments is to understand and quantify future centuryscale changes in land and ocean carbon storage and fluxes and their impact on climate projections. A set of ESM simulations was devised, with a common protocol, which all participating modelling centres should follow. A theoretical framework is commonly used to quantify carbon cycle feedbacks. I played an active role in its recommended use and definitions of terms. A feedback analysis I performed of future carbon cycle projections formed a central component of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report. This is the first time that that the IPCC carbon cycle chapter had a section devoted to the feedbacks and future projections from coupled carbon cycle ESMs. Finally, I present three specific applications of my research and their relevance to climate mitigation policy. 1) I was the first to define the concept of committed ecosystem changes and demonstrate that ecosystems may continue to respond for many years or decades after climate is stabilised, leading to the recommendation that such committed change should be included in definitions of dangerous climate change. 2) I performed the first Earth System model analysis of the carbon emissions reductions required to follow the RCP pathways leading to the IPCC AR5 statement that, “For RCP2.6, an average 50% emission reduction is required by 2050 relative to 1990 levels”. 3) My research on carbon cycle feedbacks, especially the response of the carbon cycle to low CO2 pathways, found that models predict significant weakening, or even potential reversal, of natural carbon sinks in response to removal of CO2, which potentially hinders the effectiveness of the negative emissions. My research presented in this thesis has been influential in setting international research priorities in this field. It continues to inform global negotiations on climate mitigation policy.

The potential of utilizing boreal forests for carbon storage has gained momentum, a recognition reflected in both the Paris Agreement and science. Research on the consequences of climate policy on sustainable forest management delineate, rather inadequately, the complexities of policy-human-environment interactions. These studies are limited in terms of integrating various land user with different values sharing the same forest resource, such as indigenous peoples. This paper uses a semi-quantitative Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) approach to capture interdisciplinary knowledge by comparing different scenarios regarding forest management strategies and power regimes, driven by the Paris Agreement or Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Given these scenarios, this paper aims to analyze the possible effects on quality of winter grazing grounds for reindeer relative to forest biomass yield. The findings of this study confirm that a scenario with more intensively managed forest is most likely to harm terrestrial and arboreal lichen availability, which is the basis for sustainable winter grazing for reindeer. The study also suggests that more indigenous influence would enhance the sustainability of reindeer herding. Based on these results and given this era of industrially intensified forest management, now partly justified by climate change mitigation, it can be argued that the livelihood of Sami herders is vulnerable due to multiple direct and indirect climate stressors. The results are discussed to explore possible policy implementations, as well as environmental decision making.   Keywords: climate policy, climate mitigation, boreal forests, indigenous herding, power regimes

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(経済学) / 甲第23448号 / 経博第646号 / 新制||経||299(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院経済学研究科経済学専攻 / (主査)教授 諸富 徹, 教授 岡 敏弘, 准教授 長谷川 誠, 特定准教授 Rudolph Sven / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Economics / Kyoto University / DFAM

Energy-economy models are important tools used by policy-makers and researchers to design effective climate policy. However, there has been limited research that compares models against consistent characteristics to understand their impacts on climate policy projections. This can make it difficult for policy-makers to identify suitable models for their specific policy questions and develop effective climate policies. A web-based survey of energy-economy model users and developers in Canada’s public, private, and non-profit sectors (n=14) was conducted to systematically compare seventeen models against a framework of seven characteristics: technology characteristics, micro-, and macro-economic characteristics, policy representations, treatment of uncertainty, high-resolution spatial and temporal representations, and data transparency. It was found that for the most part, models represent technology, micro-, and macro-economic characteristics according to the classic typology of bottom-up, top-down, and hybrid models. However, our findings show that several modelling evolutions have occurred. Some top-down models can explicitly represent technologies and some bottom-up models incorporate microeconomic characteristics. Models differ in the types of policies they can simulate, sometimes underrepresenting performance regulations, government procurement, and research and development programs. All models incorporate at least one type of uncertainty analysis, models infrequently have high-resolution spatial and/or temporal representations, and most models lack publicly accessible methodological documents. Implications for researchers and policy-makers that use energy-economy models and/or develop policies are discussed. / Graduate