Ideas and transnational climate change governance: how environmental beliefs shape REDD+ projects

Both scholars and policymakers working on transnational climate change governance (TCG) have largely sidestepped long-running ideological debates within environmentalism. This thesis brings the issue into the spotlight by investigating how “environmental beliefs”, which I define as actors’ normative and causal ideas about dealing with environmental challenges, affect TCG. Specifically, I focus on projects associated with “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries” (REDD+) as a subset of TCG. I examine how environmental beliefs affect who partners together to create a REDD+ project and how they are designed and implemented. I conduct a nested analysis, involving a large-N logistic regression analysis of an originally coded database of REDD+ projects and their developers and five case studies of projects in Colombia and Peru. The quantitative analysis demonstrates an independently important relationship between the environmental beliefs of project developers, operationalised through Clapp and Dauvergne (2005, 2011)’s “environmental worldviews”, and emphasis on different aspects of REDD+ project design. Qualitative evidence from the case studies corroborates these findings and, with process tracing, I distil specific mechanisms through which environmental beliefs affect REDD+ projects. I show that project developers prefer to partner with those who share similar environmental beliefs and emphasise project aspects that resonate with their beliefs during project design and implementation. These findings show that environmental beliefs are not epiphenomenal and are likely generalisable to other types of TCG with relevance for the broader study of International Relations (IR). They imply that scholars and policymakers should pay greater attention to environmental beliefs; which ones are included (or not) by governance structures will likely tangibly impact their design and operation. Both scholars and policymakers working on transnational climate change governance (TCG) have largely sidestepped long-running ideological debates within environmentalism. This thesis brings the issue into the spotlight by investigating how “environmental beliefs”, which I define as actors’ normative and causal ideas about dealing with environmental challenges, affect TCG. Specifically, I focus on projects associated with “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries” (REDD+) as a subset of TCG. I examine how environmental beliefs affect who partners together to create a REDD+ project and how they are designed and implemented. I conduct a nested analysis, involving a large-N logistic regression analysis of an originally coded database of REDD+ projects and their developers and five case studies of projects in Colombia and Peru. The quantitative analysis demonstrates an independently important relationship between the environmental beliefs of project developers, operationalised through Clapp and Dauvergne (2005, 2011)’s “environmental worldviews”, and emphasis on different aspects of REDD+ project design. Qualitative evidence from the case studies corroborates these findings and, with process tracing, I distil specific mechanisms through which environmental beliefs affect REDD+ projects. I show that project developers prefer to partner with those who share similar environmental beliefs and emphasise project aspects that resonate with their beliefs during project design and implementation. These findings show that environmental beliefs are not epiphenomenal and are likely generalisable to other types of TCG with relevance for the broader study of International Relations (IR). They imply that scholars and policymakers should pay greater attention to environmental beliefs; which ones are included (or not) by governance structures will likely tangibly impact their design and operation.

Keywords: climate change
environmental beliefs
transnational governance
REDD+
Advisor: Hale, T