Abstract
This paper examines the effects of political pressure groups (lobbies) on transboundary emissions of individual countries and on the stability of international environmental agreements to reduce emissions. We consider two types of lobbies, industry and environmentalists, and we allow for asymmetric countries to consider differences in lobby strengths to study strategic international spillovers of national lobby activities. In our model, lobby groups in countries that are non-signatories to the agreement will impact abatement of the lobby’s home country only. In contrast, lobby activities in signatory countries have spillover effects on the abatement decisions of other member countries. As lobby strength impacts abatement, it will, in turn, impact the incentives to participate in the agreement. We find that lobby activities from both lobby groups, industry and environmentalists, can have the potential to facilitate international cooperation to abate global pollution. This, however, depends on the distribution of lobby activities across countries and on whether green lobby groups have a national or international focus.
Highlights
Recent events in the international climate policy arena have once more illustrated the fact that national political actors are able to affect environmental policy-making, both at the national and the international level
In line with results by Finus and McGinty (2019), we find possibly large stable international environmental agreements (IEAs) when lobby strength is sufficiently different between IEA members
As the focus and the novelty of this paper is the analysis of the impact of lobbying on international environmental policy making, we employ, for ease of comparison, a global pollution game that is standard in the literature and has been used frequently (e.g. Barrett 1994; Asheim and Holtsmark 2009; Alvarado-Quesada and Weikard 2017)
Summary
Recent events in the international climate policy arena have once more illustrated the fact that national political actors (e.g. lobby groups and voters) are able to affect environmental policy-making, both at the national and the international level. In this paper we consider the stability of IEAs when governments’ choices of domestic environmental policies and their decisions at the international negotiation table are impacted by electoral processes and lobby groups. Altamirano-Cabrera et al (2007) have studied the impact of lobby groups on the stability of climate agreements in an empirically calibrated simulation model They find that lobby contributions may help to stabilise IEAs, the additional greenhouse gas abatement is marginal. Marchiori et al (2017) find that a strong industry lobby may increase the incentives of the government to participate in an agreement This result is driven by the assumption that the government can commit to a stricter abatement policy by joining the IEA before lobby groups can announce prospective contributions.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
