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Climate change is an issue rife with economic risk. The physical impacts of global warming, allowed to intensify by halting international climate cooperation, threaten climate-vulnerable industries and communities. Global transitions away from fossil fuels endanger carbon-intensive economic assets. Whereas climate change is often framed as an issue of global collective action and public goods provision, I instead conceptualize it as one of economic risk and decline. How do workers, voters, and governments perceive and manage mounting "climate risks"? How do they cope with losses stemming from realizations of such risks? I interrogate these questions in reference to the political and economic divisions that exist within and across many of the world's most fossil fuel-intensive and ecologically vulnerable countries. The first two papers of the dissertation consider how ethnoracial divisions within states shape perceptions of climate risks and responses to their realization. In the first, I argue that the ascriptive makeup of an industry serves as a heuristic for evaluating its access to state subsidies and ability to weather climate change and decarbonization. Survey experiments on representative U.S. samples indicate that minority Americans see greater downside risk in industries that hire large numbers of Black workers, expecting those industries to be denied government support as climate risks manifest. Conversely, minorities see less risk in industries that mainly employ white workers, believing those industries to have more benefactors in government. In the second paper, I study how migrants, who have long featured prominently in fossil fuel workforces, politically assimilate amid industrial booms and busts. Whereas scholars often contend that industrial decay aggravates ethnocultural animosities and compounds existing group loyalties, I argue that the starkest intergroup divides can emerge in periods of growth, not decline. When an industry is growing, economic optimism and resources flow across ethnic groups concentrated in that industry, bolstering migrants’ confidence in the ability of coethnics to safeguard their welfare and suppressing investments in political assimilation. Gains from concentration in the industry dissipate amid decline, leading migrants to forge ties with outside groups promising access to political rents previously out of reach. I find support for this theory in the case of the early twentieth century U.S. coal industry. The third paper of the dissertation, coauthored with Richard Clark, explores why some international organizations have retrofit themselves to address climate change despite the intransigence of powerful member states on the issue. We link these pro-climate turns to bureaucrats' socialization in climate-vulnerable countries. As bureaucrats rotate between countries and are promoted, climate concerns then diffuse outwards and upwards, gradually sharpening the climate focus of the institution despite the skepticism of powerful principal states. We find support for this argument in the case of the International Monetary Fund, drawing on original data on bureaucrat career paths and Fund attention to climate change.

Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation proposes a theoretical framework of attitude change under threatening conditions based on parallel updating. More specifically, I focus on public preferences for policies to address terrorist attacks, pandemics, climate change and natural disasters in periods when these threats are elevated. I test my argument with four original survey experiments, which include eleven interventions and draw on a nationally diverse sample of a total of 9,110 American citizens. These interventions identify the effects of factual information, partisan cues, incidental emotions, ideological and non-ideological framing, and memory priming. Evidence from these experiments provides consistent support that public opinion updating exhibits five characteristics. First, citizens change their views by a small amount. Second, citizens’ opinions move in the direction of information. Third, attitude change occurs regardless of political predispositions and individual attributes. Fourth, exposure to information about a specific policy area does not impact preferences for policies unrelated to this area. The only exception to this rule is when the treatment is emotionally strong. Finally, attitude- and identity-based cross pressures may introduce only minimal bias in the manner citizens update their opinions. These conclusions strongly challenge theories of public opinion which argue that individual differences in more-or-less enduring political and psychological characteristics can lead to political polarization. Although the persuasive techniques studied here are not equally potent in changing political views, the findings invite cautious optimism about the capacity of citizens to update opinions in a reasonable and accurate manner, even when the circumstances are unfavorable. Finally, the results suggest that the roots of polarization should be searched for more directly, notably in the increasingly fragmented political, social, and media environments.

In the first essay of this dissertation, I argue that much of the observed variation in national climate change mitigation levels can be explained by a combination of national interests and the strategic constraints of the collective action problem. Specifically, the interactions between state costs and benefits and state size, a proxy for invulnerability to free-riding, strongly predict observed variation in national yearly emissions. I derive this hypothesis and connect it to extant literature with a theoretical framework that interrelates state climate change mitigation interests, preferences, behaviors, and outcomes. I test the hypothesis by predicting the difference between real emissions changes and a novel estimate for counterfactual emissions changes. The theoretical framework and the counterfactual estimation methodology developed in this paper will facilitate future work on climate mitigation politics, from both international and domestic politics approaches. In the second essay, I analyze the design of major climate change mitigation treaties, and outline how reliance on collective reciprocity undermines their ability to enforce participation and compliance. Collective reciprocity is limited in its ability to induce high cost actions among large numbers of states. I demonstrate this challenge with an empirical approach that first estimates treaty participation and then estimates compliance by comparing signatory emissions to a synthetic control that weights for both treatment propensity and pre-treatment trends. I find no evidence of success in climate treaties thus far, underlining the tensions in collective reciprocity designs and indicating the need for an alternative approach. In the third essay, I develop a novel institutional theory of long-term environmental good provision, particularly forest conservation. Long-term goods, or those for which payoffs are delayed or spread over time, are more likely to be provided by states with long-term institutions, or those with low discount rates and inter-temporal commitment mechanisms. Leveraging recent institutional theories, I argue that party institutionalization lengthens institutional time horizons while constraints on the executive allows inter-temporal commitment. Both features therefore predict long-term environmental good provision. Environmental goods are frequently long term because feedback from ecological systems creates tipping points or vicious cycles, meaning that current actions may be costless today but contribute to significant damage in future periods. Understanding the implications of the inter-temporal nature of many environmental goods is especially important because a large share of environmental goods, such as forest conservation, are not explained by traditional approaches which focus on public goods models for symmetric and non-excludable goods. I test my theory with cross-national time-series data on forest coverage, demonstrating that forest protection is not predicted by public goods theory but is well predicted by long-term institutions.

This is a dissertation about human separatism. Human separatism is the social imaginary according to which Humanity should aim to use technology to “separate” itself from nature. It is incoherent and self-undermining. But it has also proven persistent and resilient, and appears to be intensifying in the face of fears about phenomena like climate change. In chapter 1 I unpack three distinct conceptions of “separation” that I argue have prevailed at different times in European philosophical and cultural history. The first is ontological, or related to being; the second is epistemological, or related to knowing; and the third is “nomological”, or related to law-making and laws. These correspond roughly to Ancient thought (in Plato and Augustine), Early Modern thought (in Bacon and Descartes) and Modern thought (in Kant and the contemporary “Ecomodernists”), respectively. I also offer some reasons for concluding that the concept of separation is in general incoherent. In chapter 2 I reflect upon why this imaginary has proven so difficult to overcome. Specifically, following existential psychology, I propose that it is a perverse manifestation of terrors that are central to the human condition. In particular it is a manifestation of the fears we have as human beings about our limited agency and our mortality or finitude. These fears are powerful enough to override rational thinking. Insofar as fantasies about separation from nature provide a salve for them, these fantasies persist over time. Insofar as fears of death and mortality are more and more front-and-centre for us as individuals and collectives, these fantasies become ever-more resilient to critique, and continue to intensify. In chapter 3 I consider some challenges that emerge when we attempt to gather resources for imaginative alternatives to separatism. I consider the ideas that we might either (a) invent a new story from whole cloth, or (b) appropriate the stories and theories of other cultures and attempting to graft them onto our own. I reject these approaches, and explore some resources from critical ecofeminism as intellectual tools to understand them, and develop some design parameters for alternative approaches. In chapter 4, I explore the narratives of some First Nations Australian cosmologies as they speak to the relationship between human beings and the natural world in the work of the First Nations writers Mary Graham and Tyson Yunkaporta. I then consider what might be involved in presenting some of these same insights in terms that adhere to the design parameters I set out in chapter 3. I propose that the genre of narrative tragedy is a powerful place to do some of this work. To flesh out this claim, I offer a series of detailed reflections on narrative tragedy, drawing on the work of Julian Young, and suggest that tragic narratives offer a powerful place for metabolizing existential anxieties, for coming to terms with ecological reality, and for encouraging and engaging in dialogue about imaginative alternative futures.

Notre recherche a consisté à poser la politique internationale du climat comme une politique publique et à montrer quelles étaient les dynamiques et les acteurs étant intervenus dans sa construction. Nous nous sommes en particulier attelé à mettre en exergue l'univers de sens ( "référentiel") à partir duquel les dispositifs de cette politique ont été élaborés, ainsi que la manière dont la dynamique d'opposition des intérêts propre aux négociations internationales s'y articulait. / Doctorat en sciences politiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

<p>Les contestations normatives relatives à la nature des transferts financiers Nord-Sud visant l’adaptation au changement climatique et à ses relations avec l’aide publique au développement (APD) se sont considérablement accentuées depuis 2009 lorsque les pays développés se sont conjointement engagés à fournir des ressources «nouvelles et supplémentaires » à hauteur de 30 milliards de dollars pour la période 2010-2012 et à mobiliser collectivement 100 milliards de dollars par an d’ici à 2020, en les répartissant de manière « équilibrée » entre l’atténuation et l’adaptation dans les pays en développement. Mouvements de solidarité internationale, organisations non gouvernementales de protection de l’environnement, représentants des pays en développement, et parfois institutions multilatérales de développement :nombreux sont les acteurs qui appellent à la mise en place d’un financement international de l’adaptation qui existerait séparément de l’aide, en représentant une forme de « compensation » liée à la responsabilité disproportionnée des pays développés dans l’occurrence du changement climatique.<p><p>Notre thèse se construit à partir d’un constat :celui de la déconnexion entre une hypothèse largement répandue dans la littérature académique (i.e. l’existence d’un financement international de l’adaptation qui serait distinct de l’APD – et original sous divers aspects) et la réalité observable (i.e. l’existence d’un tel financement ne se vérifie pas dans les faits). Comment expliquer cette déconnexion ?Telle est précisément la question que nous tentons d’élucider dans le présent document. Nous formulons l’hypothèse selon laquelle les discours opposant le financement international de l’adaptation et l’aide au développement sont le produit d’une vision particulière de ce que devrait être l’APD. L’ambition de notre recherche est dès lors de caractériser cette vision normative de l’aide et d’examiner ses manifestations dans une série de débats récurrents qui traversent la question du financement international de l’adaptation. Nous mettons en évidence le fait que ces discours renouvellent une vision de l’aide entre États souverains destinée à répondre aux injustices internationales et à alimenter un transfert de ressources régulier entre pays riches et pays pauvres. / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished