Civil society and domestic politics in international relations: Lessons from global climate governance

Abstract

The creation of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), seemed to place climate norm front and center in terms of global governance. Yet it was not until Paris in 2015 that 195 countries finally reached an agreement on further cooperation. The Paris Agreement opened a new phase in global climate governance by replacing the top-down manner of centrally imposed targets and timetables of the Kyoto Protocol, with the institutionalization of a voluntary, decentralized bottom-up “Pledge and Review” system. Thus, understanding how each Party state responds to climate norms and why it responds such ways is essential to further facilitate global collective efforts to curb global warming. Furthermore, as states are composed of many different actors with possibly conflicting interests, this requires the investigation of their domestic decision-making processes and the influences of domestic constituencies and politics. In order for the processes initiated by the Paris Agreement to make a further significant difference to global climate change, this paper advocates the application of “socialization processes.” It argues that the international community has been socialized into accepting global climate norms, and that facilitating further socialization can help the operation of the pledge and review system by encouraging each Party to comply. It then turns to domestic factors and their impact on the implementation of global norms, further arguing that the socialization of elite bureaucrats is insufficient to deter deviation from the norm; rather, socialization of empowered domestic constituencies is required. © 2018 by De La Salle University.