Disciplinary Norms and the Failure of US Constructivism

Abstract

The Failures of American and European Climate Policy: International Norms, Domestic Politics, and Unachievable Commitments. By Loren R. Cass Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 273 pp., $70.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7914-6855-0), $22.95 paper (ISBN13: 978-0-7914-6856-2). In The Failures of American and European Climate Policy , Loren Cass attempts to achieve two goals. First, he provides an historically organized account of the development of climate policy in the United States and the European Union (in particular the United Kingdom and Germany). Second, he attempts to use this history to illustrate the usefulness of constructivist IR theory for explaining broad patterns of climate change politics and to advance debates within constructivism—in particular regarding the embedding of norms in national policy. The central aim of The Failures of American and European Climate Policy is to provide a means for measuring the political salience of norms concerning responses to climate change in the countries studied. In the introductory chapter, Cass outlines a typology that distinguishes the degree of the political salience of norms, ranging from “irrelevance” to “taken for granted” (pp. 9–10). The rest of the book shows how these norms developed—from the early framing of climate change as a political issue in the mid-1980s through the Marrakech Accords of 2001 (which first contained the detailed rules that were the basis for the Kyoto Protocol). The Failures of American and European Climate Policy has many strong qualities. Cass’ attempt to combine an empirical analysis with a new theoretical framework is laudable. His argument is also exceptionally well structured and clearly written. For the novice to climate politics, the …