Populism talks: contemporary drivers of the decline in global climate change cooperation

Abstract

The issue of climate change has been annually negotiated at the international level under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for well over 25 years. Yet, and despite this quarter century of continuous, and robust negotiation, international climate change negotiations not only have repeatedly fallen short in reaching a comprehensive climate change agreement but have also worsened in their cooperative progress. What explains the ever-increasing gap between routine negotiation over climate change agreements and nation-states’ (in)abilities to reach effective and timely agreements on climate change? To answer this question, I posit that the recent global rise of populism has adversely influenced states’ abilities to reach international climate change agreements. To test this proposition, I first apply a Structural Topic Model to UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COPs) speeches from the 16th COPs to the 25th COPs, as made by high-level country representatives. After extracting 25 topics from the speeches, I evaluate whether populist heads-of-state influence certain countries to negotiate over climate change in unique manners. I then pair this automated text analysis with qualitative case studies and a quantitative analysis of actual policy outcomes (i.e., annual changes in CO2 emissions and renewable energy consumption). In each respect, I find that in most cases populist leaders express and exhibit less supportive stances towards climate change cooperation in favor of greater anti-elitism, isolationism, and sovereignty-reinforcing stances, priorities, and policy outcomes. However, I find that the presence of right-wing populist leaders does not affect countries’ level of CO2 emissions, whereas the presence of right-wing populist leaders is associated with a decrease in a country’s renewable energy consumption as a percentage of total energy consumption. I also found that right-wing populist leaders lack in the implementation of effective environmental policies that will benefit the country in the long run.