The Clean Energy Ministerial: Motivation for and policy consequences of membership
| Published date | 01 January 2021 |
| Author | Adrian Rinscheid,Jale Tosun |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512120942303 |
| Date | 01 January 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512120942303
International Political Science Review
2021, Vol. 42(1) 114 –129
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512120942303
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The Clean Energy Ministerial:
Motivation for and policy
consequences of membership
Jale Tosun
Heidelberg University, Germany
Adrian Rinscheid
University of St.Gallen, Switzerland
Abstract
What motivated national governments to join the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), a climate club founded in
2010? And to what extent have the club members participated in policy initiatives developed by the CEM?
Our analysis shows that combinations of (a) the expected benefits of club membership and (b) the leadership
of the USA induced the governments of Australia, Brazil, Canada, China and the United Arab Emirates
(UAE) to join the CEM. The importance of these two factors varied across countries. Participation levels in
the CEM’s policy initiatives varied over time. While this variation happened in a ‘proportionate’ manner for
Australia, Canada and China, we observed singular instances of ‘disproportionate’ changes in levels of policy
effort for the UAE and Brazil. Overall, our findings suggest that climate clubs constrain the behaviour of its
members by discouraging them from engaging in sustained policy under-reactions.
Keywords
Clean energy technology, climate clubs, disproportionate policy responses, economic gains, leadership,
policy outputs
Introduction
Climate change mitigation requires jurisdictions around the world to participate in solving a collec-
tive action problem by means of a swift and sustained reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emis-
sions. Policy under-reactions where national governments enact insufficiently ambitious policies
(Maor et al., 2017: 599) pose a serious threat to mitigating climate change. Therefore, international
co-operation on climate change has sought to establish long-term incentives for facilitating more
Corresponding author:
Jale Tosun, Institute of Political Science and Heidelberg Center for the Environment, Heidelberg University, Bergheimer
Straße 58, Heidelberg, 69115, Germany.
Email: jale.tosun@ipw.uni-heidelberg.de
942303IPS0010.1177/0192512120942303International Political Science ReviewTosun and Rinscheid
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
Tosun and Rinscheid 115
‘proportionate’ policy responses. While the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC) remains the major framework for international co-operation on climate change,
the institutional landscape has undergone a process of differentiation in recent years. For example,
we are witnessing the creation of ‘climate clubs’, which consist of a relatively small group of coun-
tries that engage in co-ordinated international climate action beyond the UNFCCC (Falkner, 2016;
Hovi et al., 2016).
In this study, we concentrate on the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), a climate club seeking to
promote a global energy transition away from carbon-intensive technologies and infrastructure and
towards technologies for ‘clean energy’. At the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the
UNFCCC, in 2009, the US Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, announced that he would host the first
CEM in 2010, bringing together relevant ministers from a small number of countries invited to
participate. In contrast to other climate clubs (e.g. the Renewables Club, which was established in
2013 but never became operational), the CEM is a ‘successful’ organization in the sense that it has
developed and implemented a number of concrete policy measures (Yu, 2019). An example is the
CEM’s Electric Vehicles (EV) Initiative; its decarbonization activities range from a pilot project to
establish a global network of 100 EV-friendly cities to the annual publication of the Global EV
Outlook, an influential compendium of EV policies and markets.1 Another indication of the organi-
zation’s success is that its secretariat was transferred from the US Department of Energy (DoE) to
the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2016 in order to strengthen the IEA’s activities related to
clean energy technologies (Sanchez and Sivaram, 2017: 125).
Since the CEM represents an additional international organization working on climate governance,
we assume that membership entails costs (see Van de Graaf, 2013). Therefore, the first research ques-
tion concerns the reasons that motivated the relevant national ministers to join the CEM. The second
research question reflects both a specific institutional feature of the CEM as well as the thematic focus
of this special issue, which is on the politics of (dis)proportionate climate policy. The CEM pursues a
bottom-up and opt-in approach, whereby national ministers interested in furthering an idea on the
transition of energy systems are encouraged to form a partnership with other ministers and proceed
without any need for reaching common agreements (Yu, 2019: 15). In light of this institutional design,
we investigate the development of members’ participation in policy initiatives over time: did countries
maintain, reduce or even increase their respective policy effort over time? We consider extreme
changes in the participation level as policy under-reactions or over-reactions, respectively.
Our analysis comprises five CEM member states that varied in respect of their capacities for
energy transition and their contributions to GHG emissions at the time of accession: Australia,
Brazil, Canada, China and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). We show that the expected benefits of
membership and the leadership of the USA explain accession to the CEM. Furthermore, our analy-
sis reveals that the members’ participation in policy initiatives varied over time yet was mostly in
line with what the pertinent literature would consider ‘proportionate’ (see Maor, 2017). We
observed exceptions for Brazil and the UAE, where instances of both policy under-reaction and
over-reaction occurred during the observation period.
The article is structured as follows. First, we provide background information on the CEM and
set out our theoretical argument. Subsequently, we explain the rationale for our case selection and
clarify our methodological approach, before turning to the empirical analysis, which proceeds in
two steps. We then discuss our findings and offer some concluding remarks.
The Clean Energy Ministerial: goals and design
A climate club is a group of international actors (most commonly nation states) that ‘starts with
fewer members than the UNFCCC’ and ‘aims to co-operate on one or more climate change-related
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