Doubling Down: Climate Politics in Times of Global Economic Crises

• In Event: International Politics and the Environment

Abstract

Political scientists have always defined global economic crises as turning points for environmental policy. From the 1970s until the 1990s, economic crises were largely seen as opportunities to roll back the hard-won environmental progress. More recently, scholars and activists defined the recession as an opportunity for “green growth” and to “build back better.” In this paper, we examine the notion of global economic crises as turning points for climate policies. Based on a novel dataset of climate-related spending of G20 economies during the 2007-2008 Great Recession and the 2020-2021 Covid-19 pandemic, we show that countries generally failed to use economic crises to accelerate investments in decarbonization. Some “green leaders,” including Germany, the EU, and South Korea, devoted a considerable share of their spending to reducing emissions in response to the Great Recession. The same countries again led in climate-related investments during the Covid-19 pandemic. Economies that lagged in terms of emissions-reducing spending in 2007-8, such as Australia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and India, also lagged in 2020-1. We argue that global economic crises impose new structural imperatives that prevented them from accelerating climate-related investments and show that governments use their constrained choices as opportunities to ‘double down’ on pre-existing policy priorities. This explains the large and relatively stable cross-national variation in spending priorities. Empirically, these findings suggest that economic crises do not serve as exogenous shocks that upend existing political coalitions around decarbonization. Theoretically, we identify new sources of path dependence even during periods of global economic instability.

Authors

• Jonas M. Nahm, Johns Hopkins University

• Nils Kupzok, Columbia University

• Vegard Tørstad, University of Oslo