Resource exchange, political strategy and the new politics of climate change

Introduction It has become almost obligatory in recent decades for international conferences to begin with plenary declarations by national leaders about their country’s commitment to achieving a low-carbon economy. Despite this, progress towards largescale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions remains faltering in most countries. Some of the reasons for this relate to the inherent uncertainties of predictive environmental science, while others are indicative of technology and economic constraints (IPCC 2007; Stern 2007). The most intractable problems, however, appear to be political: most leaders are concerned about environmental change and have introduced emissions-reduction measures of some description. But they are also aware that climate-related policies which seriously disturb established economic and social practices are likely to trigger resistance from business groups, electorates, parliaments or even their own parties that may lead to irreversible damage to their party and their own political careers (Compston and Bailey 2008). Faced with this predicament, most national climate programmes have erred towards concrete short-term and aspirational long-term targets, the use of market-based measures to encourage clean technologies, and calls for more international cooperation, but the singular avoidance or dilution of measures that might lead to serious losses of political capital for the government. Optimists might suggest that mounting scientific and public anxiety about climate change will combine with growing policy experience to corrode political obstacles to more ambitious climate policy without the need for a major rethink of political tactics. Governments may even be able to enhance their political capital if they can establish a strong constituency of support for climate policy through appeals to public and business self-interests and altruistic concerns, or even through questioning some of the conventional assumptions of capitalism. A more likely situation is that entrenched interests will not be dislodged easily, that current approaches will face diminishing returns as ʼno-regrets’ options dwindle, and that new forms of climate politics will be needed to manage tensions between the demands of consumer capitalism and global environmental change (Boykoff 2009; Giddens 2009; Giddens et al. 2009; Hale 2010). The systemic nature of the climate challenge suggests that such a new politics would need to move beyond narrow debates on the selection and design of policy instruments whose relationships with the structural causes of climate change are often haphazard towards greater innovation in how governments gain the support or acceptance of potential veto groups, or at least counter their capacity to inflict political damage on the government (Boykoff 2009; Bulkeley and Newell 2010). In this chapter we review some of the relational and systemic challenges involved in creating such a new politics of climate change. We begin by reviewing the current literature on the topic, where we argue that analysis needs to move beyond descriptive-theoretical and critical accounts of existing climate politics, and beyond visionary but abstract calls for new social and economic values, to engage more explicitly with the ‘day-to-day’ practicalities of reforming institutional structures and processes. We then examine how perspectives based on resource exchanges within climate-policy networks may assist in identifying political strategies to limit the political risks of strengthening climate policy, and outline a series of resulting strategies. We conclude by offering conclusions on the utility of resource exchange as a lens for defining new political strategies for climate policy.