Norm glocalization: United Nations’ climate change norms and India

In the negotiations on a new international agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), states had also been negotiating normative expectations for climate mitigation efforts by developing countries since 2005. These norms, expecting mitigation efforts in general and in forestry in particular, had then been operationalized in voluntary governance concepts, such as ‘Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions’ (NAMAs) and ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation’ (REDD+) from 2007 onwards. Subsequently, developing countries have increasingly adopted mitigation efforts, without being legally obligated to do so. But why and how have nation-states (in the Global South) engaged with these international norms (on climate change) both internationally and domestically? In order to explain such dynamics, I propose a new theoretical framework: norm glocalization. This approach allows to analyze the interaction of proactive external (e.g., foreign governments) and domestic actors (i.e., Indian government), for explaining outcomes. It enables explanations of changing glocalized norm interpretations by the domestic government, which are influenced by both external and domestic actors. The concept includes several norm glocalization phases that explain the interactions of domestic with external actors at the international and domestic level, ranging from contestation over international norm reshaping to domestic action formulation and implementation. Lastly, the framework incorporates scientific realist insights, enabling comprehensive explanations of outcomes based on multiple interacting mechanisms under facilitating or hampering conditions. I apply this framework to the case of India from 2005 through 2019. India has been the third largest greenhouse gas emitter since 2006, and had rejected domestically financed mitigation efforts until 2007 when this began to change. This raises the research question of why and how India has changed its engagement with the developing country climate mitigation norm and the carbon forestry norm. I answer this question by applying process tracing and qualitative content analysis of primary and secondary sources, including 70 expert interviews conducted in India. This contains explanations of India’s shift from contestation towards the international reshaping of norms, ensuring that international funding would be provided. I subsequently explain further shifts at the domestic level towards a glocalized norm interpretation: In the 2008 ‘National Action Plan on Climate Change’, the Indian government adopted domestically financed actions that promote economic development and have co-benefits for climate mitigation, while not aiming to reduce emission-intensive activities. This glocalized norm interpretation subsequently informed India’s mitigation target in 2009, and its ‘Nationally Determined Contributions’ under the Paris Agreement in 2015. It also guided the Indian governments formulation and implementation of climate-related forestry actions. Overall, I find that India’s climate policy-making has been strongly linked to developments in international climate negotiations. The main factors shaping India’s mitigation approach were international pressure, lesson drawing from external and domestic sources, as well as domestic actors’ aspirations for achieving international recognition, strategic foreign policy interests, and sufficient carbon space

Max Weber in the tropics: How global climate politics facilitates the bureaucratization of forestry in Indonesia

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is one of the most advanced global climate governance arrangements and we show that it contributes to the buildup of autonomous capacities and reliable procedures in areas of rather limited statehood. These partially unintended effects can be conceptualized as an increasing rational–legal bureaucratization, which has been initiated through both external and domestic actors as we illuminate in the case of Indonesia's forestry sector in the period from 2007 until 2017. Our finding is that a bureaucratization of a new kind is increasingly strengthened in Indonesia's forest despite enduring patterns of neopatrimonialism, emerging signs of new public management approaches, and the strengthening of functional equivalents such as community‐based forest management. We thus claim that Max Weber's perspective on the prospects and problems of rational–legal bureaucratization is still valuable, even when travelling to the tropics

The Reconfiguration of Public Authority in Developing Countries

In recent years, several scholars of world politics have observed a relocation of authority in different issue areas of global policy-making. This development appears to be particularly evident in the field of global climate politics where a number of authors have highlighted the gradual loss of authority by national governments and the emergence of new spheres of authority dominated by actors other than the nation-state. In fact, due to the existence of a regulatory gap in this policy domain, various new governance arrangements have emerged which work simultaneously at different levels (some top-down and others bottom-up) to cope with the problem of climate change. However, despite several broader descriptions and mapping exercises, we have little systematic knowledge about their workings, let alone their impact on political-administrative systems. Given these shortcomings, in this paper we explore how (and how far) different types of globally operating governance arrangements have caused changes in the distribution of authority within national governments and their public administration. We will focus on two stylized governance arrangements: one that operates bottom-up (i.e. Transnational City Networks, TCNs) and another that operates top-down (i.e. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, REDD+). Departing from our hypotheses that the former is likely to lead to more decentralization and the latter to more centralization of environmental policy making, we will present some preliminary findings from our case studies in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa

Tracking uncertainties in the causal chain from human activities to climate

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95537/1/grl25489.pd

REDD+ and the State: New Forest Politics in Costa Rica, Vietnam and Indonesia

The objective of the paper is to shed some light on one aspect of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) that so far has only indirectly been at the centre of the debate, the interplay between public institutions and REDD+ practices. The paper, therefore, analyses the evolvement of REDD+ in Costa Rica, Indonesia and Vietnam asking the following three interrelated questions: 1/What have states done to make REDD+ work and have public institutions set-up the necessary infrastructure? 2/Have states changed their practice in the forest sector due to REDD+ leading to a positive outcome? 3/Has the involvement of states with REDD+ led to a strengthening of state institutions (or of civil society) as guardians of the forest? Our argument is that the infrastructure forq2 REDD+ has largely been set up by public administrations and that the reach and ambition but also the capacities of the state have increased in different degrees across our case studies. We also see some first instances that REDD+ has empowered new actor coalitions, has brought in new ideas and has led to a diffusion of new and often better practices in some instances. Finally, we claim that in a few cases also some unintended consequences are visible, as REDD+ has led to reforms within public institutions (e.g. in Indonesia), while in others it has rarely changed the business as usual dynamics in the forestry sector (e.g. mostly in Vietnam and Costa Rica)