Environmental Politics in Developing Countries and Marginalized Societies

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The most pressing environmental problem facing the world today is climate change caused by the emission of greenhouse gases. With their increasing economic size and energy consumption, emerging economies in the developing world are now the largest emitters of carbon dioxide, with for instance, China (largest emitting country) and India (third largest) together accounting for 36 per cent of the global emissions in 2015. At the same time, developing countries and marginal societies often suffer the most from climate and environmental changes. E.g., recent studies show that long-term exposure to air pollution in Northern China reduces life expectancy by 6-7 years.

Given the importance of climate and environmental changes for the world population living in developing countries and marginalized societies, we need an urgent understanding of the micro-foundations of political action and inaction on environmental policymaking, as well as the sources of backlash against pro-environmental efforts, in emerging economies. Despite recent research efforts, there are still important questions unanswered: how do climate change and environmental degradation affect people in developing countries and marginalized societies, and what are the political responses of citizens to these changes? How do political institutions, features of political competition, and policymaking processes that are unique to developing countries structure policy responses on the environment? Through what mechanisms do developing country governments formulate and implement environmental and climate change regulations?

This panel brings together four papers at the research frontier of climate and environmental change politics in developing countries and marginalized societies. They focus on different actors ranging from local governments and firms, to voters and community environmental leaders and indigenous rights activists. They use different research methods such as case studies and ethnographic investigations, analysis of firm-level government regulatory actions, historical event analyses, and large-scale survey experiments.

The first two papers study the politics of policy preferences and policy implementation. Focusing on India, Gaikwad, Nellis, and Wilkinson explain why political action to combat air and water pollution and to implement pro-environmental policy initiatives is minimal. Their theoretical focus is on the structure of political competition in developing democracies. They conduct a large-scale survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of citizens and find that voters routinely fail to vote to enact environmental policies whose benefits will be experienced primarily by ethnic out-groups. Focusing on China, Deng et al. show that even with stringent environmental regulations, the implementation is far from universal. They demonstrate that facing pressures from the central government to clean up the environment, local governments are more likely to target firms with high fixed asset intensity, knowing that these firms are much less likely to relocate. However, because high fixed intensity firms enjoy strong market power, local governments compensate them by offering better environmental ratings, which are often linked to preferential government treatments.

The next two papers study the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation on communities in developing countries and marginalized societies, as well as backlash that emerge against pro-environmental efforts. Mahdavi examines how indigenous communities respond politically to acute environmental changes in the Arctic. This paper draws on administrative, ethnographic, and satellite data on direct exposure to climate change, community-level adaptive responses, and individual-level participation in an array of community governance activities. When communities and activists respond to climate change and agitate for pro-environment policies, they often face backlash. This backlash can be particularly insidious in developing countries, where legal protections and the rule of law are routinely compromised. Mildenberger offers the first meso-scale analysis of the logic of violence against environmental justice activists. The paper exploits an individual-level data set on 2,139 environmental justice conflicts in the Global South, especially in Latin America. This unique dataset allows the author to causally identify the effect of violence against environmental justice activists by exploiting conditionally-as-of random variation in violent attack outcomes, that is, by comparing conflicts where indigenous leaders were assassinated against conflicts where these leaders were the targets of unsuccessful assassination attempts.

Taken together, the four papers introduce new theoretical and empirical lines of inquiry to explain features of the politics of climate and environmental changes that are unique to developing countries and marginalized societies.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 12: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Chair

• Vally Koubi ETH Zurich

Discussant

• Michael Aklin University of Pittsburgh

Individual Presentations

• The Determinants of Popular Support for Environmental Policy in India - Nikhar Gaikwad, Columbia University; Gareth Nellis, University of California, San Diego; Steven I. Wilkinson, Yale University

• The Politics of Environmental Regulatory Actions in China - Qing Deng, Pennsylvania State University; Zijie Shao, Sun Yat-Sen University; Xiaojun Li, University of British Columbia; Xun Cao, Penn State University

• The Causal Effects of Violence Against Environmental Justice Activists - Matto Mildenberger, University of California Santa Barbara

• Does Climate Change Impact Civic Engagement? Lessons from the Indigenous Arctic - Paasha Mahdavi, University of California, Santa Barbara