Climate Club Research Program

My intended research topic for a doctoral dissertation is climate clubs. I define a climate club as a group of ambitious political and economic actors (not limited to state governments but including local governments, firms, NGOs, international organizations, etc.) which produces non-rivarly and exclusive “club goods” in return for their collective efforts to climate change response. Among various scholars who study this topic, I build on the literature on voluntary environmental program (VEP) initiated by Potoski and Prakash (2013) who emphasized the provision of public good (in their studies, mostly “reputational effects”) for successful VEPs. Yet, I also resonate with those who stand on the tradition of “climate change as collective action problem” such as Nordhaus (2015) who stresses out the ability of climate clubs to penalize free-riding by their non-members. Both literature point to the fact that climate clubs will only thrive when the benefits of joining (i.e. club goods) exceed the costs of not joining (i.e. penalty for non-members).

Here are some useful articles & books which talk about climate clubs:

  • Bagozzi, Benjamin E. 2015. “The Multifaceted Nature of Global Climate Change Negotiations.” Review of International Organization 10: 439-64.
  • Barrett, Scott. 2003. Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty Making. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Buchanan, James M. 1965. “An Economic Theory of clubs.” Economica 32, no.125 (Feb): 1-14.
  • Das, Kasturi. 2015. “Climate Clubs: Carrots, Sticks and More.” Economic & Political Weekly 50, no.34 (Aug): 24-7.
  • Hovi, Jon, Detlef F. Sprinz, Håkon Sælen and Arild Underdal. 2016. “Climate Change Mitigation: A Role for Climate Clubs?” Palgrave Communications 2: 1-7.
  • Keohane, Nathaniel, Annie Petsonk and Alex Hanafi. 2015. “Toward a Club of Carbon Markets.” Climatic Change. doi: 10.1007/s10584-015-1506-z.
  • Nolden, Colin and Michele Stua. 2017. “Climate Club and Their relevance within the Paris Agreement.” Chap 3 in From the Paris Agreement to a Low-Carbon Bretton Woods. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.
  • Nordhaus, William. 2015. “Climate Clubs: Overcoming Free-riding in International Climate Policy.” American Economic Review 105, no.4 (Apr): 1339-70.
  • Ockwell, David, Ambuj Sagar and Heleen de Coninck. 2015. “Collaborative Research and Development (R&D) for Climate Technology Transfer and Uptake in Developing Countries: Towards a Needs Driven Approach.” Climatic Change. doi: 10.1007/s10584-014-1123-2.
  • Olson, Mancur Jr. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Pigou, Arthur C. 1920. The Economics of Welfare. London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.
  • Potoski, Matthew and Aseem Prakash. 2004. “Regulatory Convergence in Non-governmnetal Regimes.” Journal of Politics 66, no.3 (Aug): 885-905.
  • Potoski, Matthew and Aseem Prakash, 2009. Voluntary Programs: A Club Theory Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Potoski, Matthew. 2015. “Green Clubs in Building Block Climate Change Regimes.” Climatic Change. doi: 10.1007/s10584-015-1517-9.
  • Prakash, Aseem and Matthew Potoski. 2006. “Racing to the Bottom? Globalization, Environmental Governance, and ISO 14001.” American Journal of Political Science 50, no.2 (Apr): 347-61.
  • Prakash, Aseem and Matthew Potoski. 2007. “Collective action theory through voluntary environmental programs: A club theory perspective.” The Policy Studies Journal 35, no.4 (Dec): 773-92.
  • Ranson, Matthew and Robert Stavins. 2015. “Linkage of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Systems: Learning from Experience.”Climate Policy. doi:10.1080/14693062.2014.997658.
  • Rosen, Amanda M. 2015. “The Wrong Solution at the Right Time: The Failure of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change.”Politics & Policy 43, no.1 (Feb): 30-58.
  • Sabel, Charles F. and David G. Victor. 2015. “Governing Global Problems under Uncertainty: Making Bottom-up Climate Policy work.” Climatic Change. doi:10.1007/s10584-015-1507-y.
  • Sprinz, Detlef and Tapani Vaahtoranta. 1994. “The Interest-based Explanation of International Environmental Policy.” International Organization 48, no.1 (Winter): 77-105.
  • Sprinz, Detlef and Håkon Sælen, Arild Underdal and Jon Hovi. 2018. “The Effectiveness of Climate Clubs under Donald Trump.” Climate Policy, doi: 10.1080/14693062.2017.1410090.
  • Stavins, Robert. 1998. “What Can We Learn from the Grand Policy Experiment? Lessons from SO2 Allowance Trading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no,3 (Summer): 69-88.