National interests and coalition positions on climate change: A text-based analysis
| Date | 01 January 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512120953530 |
| Author | Paula Castro |
| Published date | 01 January 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512120953530
International Political Science Review
2021, Vol. 42(1) 95 –113
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512120953530
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National interests and coalition
positions on climate change:
A text-based analysis
Paula Castro
University of Zurich and Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Abstract
Coalitions play a central role in the international negotiations under the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change. By getting together, countries join resources in defending their interests
and positions. But building coalitions may come at a cost. Coalition positions are a result of compromise
between their members, and thus the increase in bargaining power may come at a price if the preferences of
their members are heterogeneous. Relying on automatic text analysis of written position papers submitted
to the negotiations, I analyze the extent to which coalitions represent the preferences of their members and
discuss whether this contributes to disproportionate policy responses at the international level. I focus on
a recently formed coalition: the Like-Minded Developing Countries, a large and heterogeneous group that
brings together emerging, oil-dependent and poor developing countries.
Keywords
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, domestic politics, coalitions, international
negotiations, text analysis, two-level game
Introduction
International negotiations are well known as a two-level bargaining game between the domestic
stakeholders that influence a country’s international position, and the international level in which
this country defends its position, typically while negotiating with other countries with potentially
different domestic interests (Putnam, 1988). However, particularly in multilateral negotiations,
there is a third bargaining level that has so far hardly been understood as such: country coalitions.
Coalitions, defined as sets ‘of parties who coordinate explicitly among themselves and defend
the same position’ (Odell, 2013: 386), play a central role in multilateral negotiations by fulfilling
two main goals. First, they reduce complexity by lowering the number of relevant actors and by
highlighting common interests and positions. Second, they increase their members’ negotiating
Corresponding author:
Paula Castro, Center for Energy and Environment, School of Management and Law, Zurich University of Applied
Sciences, Bahnhofplatz 12, Winterthur, 8400, Switzerland.
Email: paula.castro@zhaw.ch
953530IPS0010.1177/0192512120953530International Political Science ReviewCastro
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
96 International Political Science Review 42(1)
power and influence by allowing them to pool resources and expertise and to show strength in
numbers (Dupont, 1996).
However, coalition positions are themselves the result of compromise between their members.
In the words of Starkey et al. (2005: 40), coalition formation leads to a ‘negotiation within a nego-
tiation’. Coalitions can thus be regarded as a third level to be added to Putnam’s well-known
model. The increase in bargaining power that coalitions offer may come at a price for individual
members, because joining a coalition may mean accepting a more restrictive set of alternative
negotiation outcomes acceptable to all coalition partners. This risk is larger for coalitions whose
members have heterogeneous preferences, or for coalitions with tighter rules.
Despite the very relevant role that coalitions play in multilateral negotiations, most scholarship
on coalitions focuses on describing the aggregate positions adopted by these groups, their strate-
gies, and their success in influencing multilateral negotiations. Very little research has looked into
how coalitions work as an intermediate bargaining level between the domestic interests of parties
and the multilateral arena.
In this article, I draw on the public policy literature on disproportionate policy responses to shed
light on this aspect of coalitions. Disproportionate policy responses are those with a lack of fit
between their costs and benefits or their means and ends, implying policy over- or under-reactions
(Maor et al., 2017). This literature has discussed whether disproportionate policy responses are
unintentional results of differing risk preferences of policymakers, cognitive biases, mispercep-
tions or disproportionate information (Maor, 2014), or rather the result of strategic political calcu-
lations that, depending on the circumstances, emphasize policy effectiveness over costs or risks, or
vice versa (Maor, 2018; Maor et al., 2017).
In line with past research on coalitions in multilateral negotiations, I argue that when a coalition
brings together a heterogeneous group of countries, different preferences will make it difficult to
achieve common positions, and those positions may well be dominated by the powerful in the
group (Narlikar, 2003: 16; Narlikar and Tussie, 2004). The result will likely be coalition positions
that fail to adequately represent the preferences of some of the weaker members. For these weaker
members, then, the position adopted by the coalition amounts to policy under-reaction and ‘pro-
vides net utility . . . which is smaller than the one that would have been obtained had a different’
position been adopted (Maor et al., 2017: 599).
Climate policy may be particularly prone to policy over- and under-reactions due to the psy-
chological and socio-cultural factors influencing perceptions of climate change, to the uncertainty
about climate change impacts (Tosun et al., 2017) and to the large range of stakeholders that may
be strongly affected by climate change and climate policy. These disproportionate policy responses
are carried over to the international level, namely in the form of international agreements that
have so far not been sufficient to achieve the overall objective of maintaining climate change
below dangerous levels (Maor et al., 2017). The United Nations Environment Programme’s
(UNEP, 2019) emissions gap report provides a clear indication of the level of climate policy
under-reaction currently existing globally. The argument in this article suggests that heterogene-
ous coalitions may help to transmit those disproportionate policy responses from the domestic to
the international level.
This article thus aims at improving our knowledge about the connections between domestic
climate politics and the international level, by analyzing the extent to which coalitions are able to
represent the priorities and preferences of their members, and discussing whether this contributes
to disproportionate policy responses at the international level. It is conceived as a complementary
piece to Tosun and Rinscheid (n.d.), who explore the ways in which domestic and international
factors affect countries’ decisions to participate in international initiatives on climate change.
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