Non-state governance and climate policy: the fossil fuel divestment movement

Abstract

This article charts the evolution of the divestment movement, a transnational advocacy network that uses a range of strategies to shame, pressure, facilitate, and encourage investors in general, and large institutional investors in particular, to relinquish their holdings of fossil fuel stocks in favour of climate-friendly alternatives. It describes the movement's central characteristics and the strategies it employs, it maps its basic architecture and the potential role it plays in the broader climate change regime complex, and shows how it represents a novel form of private investor-targeted climate change governance, operating primarily through symbolic political action and as a norm entrepreneur. Given the potential importance of the movement, the model it may provide for other forms of private governance, and the paucity of analysis of its implications for climate change mitigation, this article addresses an important descriptive and analytical gap in the climate policy literature.Policy relevanceThe early success and rapid growth of the divestment movement suggests it may play a significant role within the broader sphere of climate change policy. This article shows how the movement has used the aggregation, packaging, and dissemination of scientific fact and moral argument, and local and international campaigning, direct action, lobbying, and knowledge construction to steer the actions of investors. More broadly it demonstrates how shaming, persuasion, and empowerment can be used as strategies to bring about economic and political change and to catalyse the ‘energy revolution’ that many see as the essence of effective climate change mitigation. In so doing, the article indicates how climate policy can be advanced by novel forms of private governance, and (so its proponents would argue) how more might be achieved by unconventional means and leveraging the private sector than governments have managed by conventional means in some two decades.