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Climate Change: Challenging Democracy, Challenging Parties

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Climate Change: Challenging Democracy, Challenging Parties &OLPDWHFKDQJH&KDOOHQJLQJ GHPRFUDFLHVFKDOOHQJLQJSDUWLHV 6RQGUH%nWVWUDQG Dissertation for the degree of philosophiae doctor (PhD) at the University of Bergen Dissertation date: Acknowledgements The work on the dissertation has been challenging at times, and some people must be acknowledged for their support. First of all, I will thank my supervisor, Professor Kristin Strømsnes at the Department of Comparative Politics for supporting me during the whole dissertation process. Many of my colleagues at the department have contributed to the final outcome, by comments, proposals and criticism. I thank all the participants at the PhD seminars at Solstrand, and the researchers working on the Climate Crossroads project, for valuable input, and among the others, I would highlight the comments from the excellent academic staff at the Department of Comparative Politics; Lars Svåsand, Per Selle, Elisabeth Ivarsflaten and Jan Oskar Engene. In addition, I will thank friends and family for supporting my work. Bergen, June 1, 2015 Sondre Båtstrand 2 Abstract Climate change: Challenging democracy, challenging parties. Climate change has emerged as the most prominent contemporary environmental issue, and poses several challenges to democratic processes. Democracies are struggling to integrate climate concern, and political parties attempt to shape the issue of climate change according to their existing policies and established conflict dimensions. The dissertation investigates climate politics, and seeks to understand what kind of political issue climate change is, and how democracies and political parties respond to climate change as a global environmental threat. Three different hypotheses are presented on how the issue of climate change relates to the dominating cleavages in politics, between state and market, and between environmental protection and economic growth. In order to do so, a framework for categorization is developed. The empirical analyses point to climate change as a multidimensional issue rather than being a leftist issue. The dissertation is based on four articles: Essay 1: Climate politics: Freedom, coercion and limits to democracy. A version in Norwegian has been accepted for publication in Berdinesen and Torjussen (eds.): Klimaetikk. Oslo; Dreyer forlag, forthcoming. Essay 2: Giving content to new politics. From broad hypothesis to empirical analysis using Norwegian manifesto data on climate change. Published in Party Politics, 2014, 20 (6): 930-939. Essay 3: Coalitions, consensus and climate change. Climate policy in Norwegian coalition agreements 1989-2013. Earlier versions in Norwegian were published in Norsk statsvitenskapelig tidsskrift, 2013, 29 (2): 159-165, and in Eide, Elgesem, Gloppen and Rakner (eds.): Klima, medier og politikk. Oslo; Abstrakt forlag, 2014, 101-118. Essay 4: More than Markets: A Comparative Study of Nine Conservative Parties on Climate Change. Accepted for publication in Politics & Policy, 2015, 43 (4). 3 Table of contents Introduction p. 5 Essay 1: Climate politics: Freedom, coercion and limits to democracy p. 59 Essay 2: Giving content to new politics. From broad hypothesis to empirical analysis using Norwegian manifesto data on climate change p. 101 Essay 3: Coalitions, consensus and climate change. Climate policy in Norwegian coalition agreements 1989-2013 p. 123 Essay 4: More than Markets: A Comparative Study of Nine Conservative Parties on Climate Change p. 147 4 INTRODUCTION Climate change has received increasing political attention over the past 50 years (Hulme 2009, 61-63), while at the same time, “in the past 50 years, the fraction of atmospheric CO2 increased from 40 % to 45 %” (Lin 2014, 62). Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to grow steadily, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide (WMO 2014, 2), even though the Kyoto Protocol commits the states to “reducing their overall emissions of such gases by at least 5 per cent below 1990 levels in the commitment period 2008 to 2012” (UN 1998, 3). The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference decided on containing global temperature rise to 2 °C compared to the pre-industrial period (UN 2010, 5), which would imply a maximum CO2 concentration of 450 parts per million in the atmosphere, but as noted by Bala (2013, 1472): “At the current rate of CO2 emissions, we could reach the 450 ppm target as early as 2035”. There is almost a consensus on the causes of climate change as well as the need to curb emissions, but so far, the necessary political actions have not been implemented, even though the knowledge of the massive impact climate change is expected to have on eco systems and human societies (IPCC 2014). Germanwatch illustrates the lack of political action in their Climate Change Performance Index in which “the first three places remain unoccupied to remind countries of how much still remains to be done to successfully prevent the dangerous impacts of climate change” (Burck, Marten and Bals 2014, 4). “The global-average near-surface temperature for 2014 was comparable to the warmest years in the 165-year instrumental record”, notes the World Meteorological Organization (WMO 2015, 4). The political systems seem unable to mitigate climate change, and in this dissertation I am going to investigate what kind of political issue climate change represents, and why democracies are struggling to agree on effective climate measures. Climate change differs from traditional, localized environmental problems, and represents a challenge to the established political parties, and even to democracy itself. A premise for the dissertation is that climate politics has failed, and hence it is of great importance to improve the understanding of the issue. Much of the empirical work in the dissertation is on Norway, yet another country that has failed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions significantly (State of the Environment Norway 2015). When confronted with a new issue, political parties have several strategies to choose between. They may ignore the issue, but with sufficient popular concern, ignorance is to be replaced by three strategies: Either they will actively oppose the need for political solutions, 5 find solutions in line with their established political agenda, or change their existing policies to solve the new problem. In the literature (Aardal 1993; Giddens 2009), there is an expectation that the parties will seek solutions within the frameworks of their established policies; hence socialists will promote state-centred solutions while neoliberals will emphasize market based solutions. Following from politics being dominated by conflicts between state and market solutions, it is expected that the left/right dimension will absorb new issues, including climate change. One alternative approach is that climate change will strengthen an independent environmental dimension, based on the conflict between ecological protection and economic growth. In this view, environmental issues are at the core of New Politics, as opposed to the Old Politics of economic issues and the traditional left/right dimension. If the established parties are not able to incorporate the new issues or New Politics in a manner satisfactory to the voters, entrepreneurial parties would be expected to emerge and to manifest a new cleavage. All political parties represent poles in cleavages, and the Green Parties and other New Left parties attempt to manifest the green pole of a dimension from ecological protection to economic growth, the New Politics, while older parties may intend to keep conflicts over the environment and the climate within their preferred cleavages from Old Politics. Another possibility is to see climate change as a global issue more relevant to a cleavage based on globalization than an environmental cleavage, and hence to expect climate change to be treated differently than other environmental issues. To investigate how political parties react in response to the phenomenon of climate change in nature and the societal phenomenon of growing popular concern for the climate, the focus is turned to the concrete political measures the political parties propose in their electoral manifestos, and in the next instance, how these proposals are reflected in coalition agreements. A significant contribution to the literature is the categorization scheme for (climate) measures on the dimensions of Old Politics and New Politics to shed light on how the parties integrate climate concerns. To some political scientists, all environmental measures are considered New Politics, and others use attitudes towards nuclear energy as the sole indicator of New Politics. I find it necessary to deepen the approach and to look closer into what kind of political measures the parties propose to differentiate between climate measures that are leftist and rightist on the two dimensions of Old Politics and New Politics. By studying electoral manifestos, relatively little are revealed on how the parties prioritize climate politics after the election, so the two articles on electoral manifestos (essays 6 2 and 4) are supplemented by an article on coalition agreements, studying explicitly the link between electoral manifestos and coalition agreements (essay 3). To find out more about how climate change as an issue is integrated within politics or challenging politics, an article is written on the relationship between climate change and democracy, the hindrances against democratic actions on the issue, and possible alternatives to democratic actions (essay 1). The international
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