National political pressure groups and the stability of international environmental agreements
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National political pressure groups and the stability of international environmental agreements Achim Hagen1 · Juan‑Carlos Altamirano‑Cabrera2 · Hans‑Peter Weikard3 Accepted: 20 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper examines the effects of political pressure groups (lobbies) on transboundary emissions of individual countries and on the stability of international environmental agreements to reduce emissions. We consider two types of lobbies, industry and environmentalists, and we allow for asymmetric countries to consider differences in lobby strengths to study strategic international spillovers of national lobby activities. In our model, lobby groups in countries that are non-signatories to the agreement will impact abatement of the lobby’s home country only. In contrast, lobby activities in signatory countries have spillover effects on the abatement decisions of other member countries. As lobby strength impacts abatement, it will, in turn, impact the incentives to participate in the agreement. We find that lobby activities from both lobby groups, industry and environmentalists, can have the potential to facilitate international cooperation to abate global pollution. This, however, depends on the distribution of lobby activities across countries and on whether green lobby groups have a national or international focus. Keywords Interest groups · Coalition theory · Environmental policy making · International environmental agreements · Political economy JEL Classification C72 · D72 · D78 · H41 · Q28 · Q54
1 Introduction Recent events in the international climate policy arena have once more illustrated the fact that national political actors (e.g. lobby groups and voters) are able to affect environmental policy-making, both at the national and the international level. Examples include not only young climate activists pushing their governments to adopt more stringent greenhouse gas abatement measures, as recently described by Marris (2019), but also successful lobbies of * Hans‑Peter Weikard hans‑[email protected] 1
Resource Economics Group, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Berlin School of Economics, Berlin, Germany
2
Economics Center, World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, USA
3
Section Economics, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands
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industries as indicated by the fact that many of the countries with the largest fuel subsidies are among the oil-producing countries (Sovacool 2017; Chepeliev and van der Mensbrugghe 2020).1 In light of these observations, it is an important next step to understand the role of lobbies for the formation and stability of international environmental agreements (IEAs). As yet the topic has hardly been addressed in the game theoretic IEA literature with the notable exception of Marchiori et al. (2017). So far, the literature has convincingly argued that strong free-rider incentives prevent international environmental agreements from being effective (e.g. Hoel 1992; Carraro and Siniscalco 1993; Barr
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