International Organizations and Domestic Climate Change Policy Networks in Germany, Japan, Finland, Australia and Sweden

This paper connects World Society Theory with policy network analysis to answer the following question: When and how do global norms on climate change mitigations spread into the domestic policy domain. The emphasis of World Society Theory is on how national policies are guided by global norms set by international institutions - such as the UN and international NGOs - and by comparisons to other countries. When making policies and designing institutions, countries take into account international treaties, various country rankings, organizational models from other countries, as well as norms on what is culturally appropriate. The world society literature has shown that tight integration of a country into world society results in ambitious environmental policy. For example, the more international treaties a country participates in and the more international NGOs are present, the more likely it will engage in environmental protection. However, due to its macro focus and country-level datasets, it usually fails to account for the exact mechanisms through which world society institutions affect political processes at the national level. To overcome these shortcomings, this paper analyzes the connection between international organizations and domestic organizations in the climate change policy networks in five countries: Germany, Japan, Finland, Australia and Sweden. The data was collected between 2012 and 2015. To estimate the effect of the ties with international actors on domestic actors, we conduct a two-step regression analysis. At the first step, for each country cases, the effect of the connection with international actors on the formation of domestic actors’ belief is regressed, controlling the effect of the interaction among the domestic actors with the use of a network autocorrelation model. At the second step, the estimated effect of the international actors in each country is set as dependent variable, while egocentric network properties of the international actors as well as their attributes serves as independent variables. Through this operationalization, we can identify the condition when international actors exert more influence on domestic actors. The results show that international organizations can influence the beliefs of domestic actors (1) when the beliefs concern technical aspects of the policy in question rather than fundamental policy core beliefs; (2) when international actors are connected to domestic NGOs and business actors rather than Governmental agencies or scientific institutions; and (3) when international actors have more homophilous ties rather than heterophilious ones. Our result suggest that what matters for the degree of influence for international actors is not just the simple number of connections between international and domestic organizations, but rather, to which national organizations they are connected to.