Competing Interest Groups in a Changing Climate

Organized interests play a crucial role in sustainable energy and climate politics where an increasingly polycentric and bottom-up pattern of governance invites diverse groups from business and civil society to become involved alongside state actors. Against this backdrop, gaining a better understanding of the influence of interest groups in national climate policy making is highly relevant. On the one hand, interest groups and private sector action can help to enhance national climate action and to push states to ratchet up the ambition of their climate policies. On the other hand, we see strong mobilization of groups against potentially costly climate regulations targeting energy-intensive industry and fossil fuel producers. The existence of such competing interest groups begs the question about their impact on national climate legislation. In this paper, we argue that the influence of climate policy supporter groups such as renewable energy industries and environmental NGOs depends on the strength of opposing groups such as fossil fuel producers and energy-intensive industries and vice versa. We test our arguments using data from the Global Climate Legislation Study, which identifies patterns of national climate legislation in 94 countries from 1997 to 2015. We compare this to interest group mobilization in these countries during this period, for which we rely on an extensive dataset of interest group mobilization at climate conferences (over 8,000 organizations). This way we provide a unique quantitative empirical test for the influence of interest groups on national climate legislation.