The Interaction of Domestic and International Factors in Understanding the Adoption of Carbon Pricing Policies

Policy process and international relations theory are often seen as separate theoretical fields. To some extent, scholars within these fields study the same type of processes, yet on different levels, and with limited interaction. We argue that to understand national policy-making regarding issues with significant international components, we need to develop a theoretical framework that more clearly takes account of how international and domestic mechanisms interact. In this paper, we develop such a framework, building on the Advocacy Coalition Framework, but also utilizing other policy process theories as well as policy diffusion theories, to study the adoption of carbon pricing policies, including carbon taxes and emission trading schemes. The framework includes three mechanisms that, through the strategies employed by different actors, can result in policy change: (1) ideational change, (2) learning and, (3) changes to the relative power of actors. We suggest that a focus on how subsystems overlap with other subsystems, vertically (capturing other issue areas) and horizontally (capturing other political levels), enables us to study the relative importance of different influences on policy change, including international and domestic, and for the case of carbon pricing also environmental and economic. The framework will be used to construct several hypotheses that can be tested on empirical cases of polities adopting carbon pricing policies.