| Review of: |
The Failures of American and European Climate Policy: International Norms, Domestic Politics, and Unachievable Commitments by Loren R. Cass
State University of New York Press, Albany, 2006
Pages: 273. $70.00 |
| Reviewed By: |
Matthew Paterson |
| Reviewed in: |
International Studies Review |
| Date accepted online: |
10/04/2008 |
| Published in print: |
Volume 09, Issue 02, Pages 301-303 |
Disciplinary Norms and the Failure of US Constructivism
In The Failures of American and European Climate Policy, Loren Cass attempts to achieve two goals. First, he provides an historically organized account of the development of climate policy in the United States and the European Union (in particular the United Kingdom and Germany). Second, he attempts to use this history to illustrate the usefulness of constructivist IR theory for explaining broad patterns of climate change politics and to advance debates within constructivism-in particular regarding the embedding of norms in national policy.
The central aim of The Failures of American and European Climate Policy is to provide a means for measuring the political salience of norms concerning responses to climate change in the countries studied. In the introductory chapter, Cass outlines a typology that distinguishes the degree of the political salience of norms, ranging from "irrelevance" to "taken for granted" (pp. 9-10). The rest of the book shows how these norms developed-from the early framing of climate change as a political issue in the mid-1980s through the Marrakech Accords of 2001 (which first contained the detailed rules that were the basis for the Kyoto Protocol).
The Failures of American and European Climate Policy has many strong qualities. Cass' attempt to combine an empirical analysis with a new theoretical framework is laudable. His argument is also exceptionally well structured and clearly written. For the novice to climate politics, the book provides a good overarching account of developments in climate policy in three of the most prominent countries in international climate politics. Similarly, for those new to constructivism, the book provides a well organized empirical study that will help develop their understanding of this approach. For devotees of constructivism, the clarity of Cass' presentation will help demonstrate the constructivist case and advance constructivist theory, particularly through its focus on identifying different levels of norm salience.
However, readers who are not novices to either climate politics or constructivism, and who are not devotees of this approach, are likely to find The Failures of American and European Climate Policy rather disappointing. This disappointment is the result of a number of specific weaknesses. First, the historical organization of the book makes for rather repetitious reading. For example, we hear about the EU's ALTENER program, or the kohlenpfennig in Germany, in virtually every chapter. In numerous other cases, the chronological structure forces Cass to repeat himself.
Second, the empirical research relies on newspaper articles for the vast majority of its evidence. Cass makes little or no use of official documents, NGO commentaries, interviews with key participants, or the substantial secondary literature that has been written about this issue. Even the literature that is cited in the bibliography (for example, Bodansky 1993; Rowlands 1994; O'Riordan and Jäger 1996; Paterson 1996; Collier and Lofstedt 1997) is used only sparingly. This neglect of other available sources and the literature results in a discussion that merely skims the surface rather than provides a rich analysis of the events discussed. At times, this superficiality simply betrays a weak understanding of the issues involved-such as Cass' false contrast between tax credits and market mechanisms (p. 77). At other times, Cass anachronistically reads later debates into earlier periods-as in his mistaken suggestion (p. 117) that emissions trading was proposed in 1994 as part of what became the Berlin Mandate, even though no such proposal was made until 1996. Especially when added to the weakness of the chronological structure, this uneven treatment of the history makes for a descriptive narrative with much important material left out. For example, Cass' account of the key debates regarding transport in the United Kingdom (pp. 105-106) leaves out details that were crucial to debates in the early to mid-1990s-in particular, the importance of massive anti-road building protests and official reports accepting the futility of road building as a way to alleviate congestion. As a result, the role that the scaling back of the road program in 1994-1997 played in changing the context for British climate policy in later years is absent from the discussion (p. 135). Similarly, at the international level, throughout the debate between 1994 and 1997, the nuanced difference between "Joint Implementation" and "Activities Implemented Jointly," which was crucial to articulating the different obligations of industrialized and developing countries, is entirely missed.
Third, The Failures of American and European Climate Policy seems heavily constrained by Cass' decision to promote a constructivist agenda unreflectively. In particular, it is highly constrained by disciplinary norms prevalent in North American international relations that proscribe the stages through which research should proceed: elaboration of a theoretical framework, identification of a gap in the literature, and empirical research that seeks to verify or falsify the hypotheses generated. This approach can occasionally work as a book, but in this case it makes, to be candid, for a dull and frustrating read. For one thing, Cass does not rigorously enough elaborate where, within his typology of norm salience, each state fits at various points in time. He does this at the end of Chapter Two, but thereafter he stops. Moreover, the theoretical framework and focus of Cass' discussion mask the fact that the book is, for the most part, a descriptive history of climate politics in the three countries. Indeed, the theoretical pretensions actually prevent Cass from writing this history really well. Likewise, the history itself includes many examples that contradict the constructivist argument, or at least suggest the utility of other approaches. For example, the vast majority of the normative framings and reframings that Cass discusses are economic in character. Does this suggest something about overriding politico-economic pressures on states? Cass does not interrogate his framework to address questions like this, even though other constructivists, such as Steven Bernstein (2001), explicitly acknowledge this dimension to global environmental politics. Finally, the rigid application of the framework forces Cass to reduce the richness of the debates about how to respond to climate change to simplistic dichotomies, such as "should individual states be held to a principle of national accountability ...or should the principle of economic efficiency guide global emission reductions" (p. 17). These dichotomies may be useful for generating and applying typologies, but they mask a great deal of the subtlety in debates about climate politics.
These criticisms are as much directed at the disciplinary norms to which students in the United States in particular are generally subjected as at Cass himself or at The Failures of American and European Climate Policy. Forms of research that start with climate politics as the problématique around which theory is to be developed, or that critically reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of a particular theoretical approach (rather than formulaically promoting it), are not encouraged. This disciplinary norm is a shame. The work that Cass carries out in The Failures of American and European Climate Policy could have been put to much more interesting and fruitful use.
