Research

Working Papers:

Collective Reciprocity and the Failure of Climate Change Mitigation Treaties, Draft, under review

Climate change mitigation treaties have failed to induce emissions reductions in participating states. To explain this, I introduce a novel distinction to reciprocity theory, which forms the foundation of mitigation agreements negotiated thus far. These agreements rely on what I call “collective reciprocity,” in which the impact of reciprocal defection cannot be limited to the initial defector. This form of reciprocity is weaker than what I call “club reciprocity,” in which reciprocal defections occur through the denial of club goods and thus narrowly target the initial defector. While collective reciprocity is sharply limited in the depth or breadth of treaties it can sustain, climate change mitigation requires cooperation that is both deep and broad. I demonstrate the empirical failure of mitigation treaties with a generalized synthetic control. This method compares the emissions trajectories of participating states to a weighted average of non-participant trajectories.

Climate National Interest: Explaining Variation in Unilateral Climate Change Mitigation, Draft

I argue that states pursue coherent climate national interests, which have received little theoretical or empirical attention in climate politics research. National climate change mitigation levels are the product of the costs/benefits of climate change action and state size, an indicator of invulnerability to free-riding. I derive this theory and connect it to the extant literature on climate politics with a framework that interrelates state climate change mitigation interests, preferences, behaviors, and outcomes. I validate my model of climate national interests 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 article can facilitate future work on climate mitigation politics, from both international and domestic politics approaches.

Climate Finance as a Principal-Agent Problem

Climate finance constitutes a principal-agent problem in which funder states and recipient states must cooperate on mitigation projects despite diverging information and interests. This paper develops a novel theory of the tension between donor and recipient preferences over which of three possible counterfactual investments are replaced by green financing (brown, green, and none). While donor states prefer financing to replace brown investments, recipient states seek financing to replace green investments or no investment. Democracy, corruption, and project attributes also predict heterogeneity in this funder-recipient divide. I test these hypotheses on a cross-sectional time series of outcomes from projects funded by the Clean Development Mechanism. This work generates both practical recommendations for the rapidly growing use of climate finance and theoretical opportunities for future research on climate finance as a cooperation dilemma in international relations.

Political Cleavages from Climate Change

In this article, I develop a theoretical framework treating environmental politics as contestation over abatement policy. This contestation is defined by cleavages of varying location and structure, predicted by the interaction of abatement’s supply excludability and benefit symmetry. I apply this framework to climate change, predicting distinct cleavages defining the contestation over mitigation and adaptation at both the domestic and international levels. This framework integrates current and past research on climate and the environment, clarifying the relationships between a) climate politics and general environmental politics, b) climate politics at the international and domestic levels, and c) alternative climate abatement strategies.

Environmentalism as Long-Term Good Provision: Evidence from Forest Conservation, Draft

This article develops 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.

Work in Progress:

Lobbying Implications of Property-Based Chemical Regulation
with Kinnari M. Shah

The Effect of Polarity on International Regimes: Implications for Climate Change Mitigation