The two preceding chapters have shown that attitudes, economic structure, and wealth are insufficient, if not problematic, explanations of variations in environmental performance among advanced industrial democracies. This chapter and the next one discuss a crucial factor that mediates between structural or cultural characteristics of countries and national environmental performance: the institutional context. This chapter investigates the influence of institutions linking economic and policy actors and their impact on environmental policy. The subsequent chapter investigates the influence of more traditional political institutions on the ability of countries to provide environmental protection. As with other explanations of environmental politics, studies examining whether institutions matter do not deal with environmental outcomes in a direct manner. Doing so allows us to evaluate competing explanations more systematically.

Garrett and Lange (1996) provide an extensive theoretical treatment of the role that domestic institutions play in mediating exogenous changes in actors' preferences over economic policy. In seeking to explain the specific ways that “institutions matter,” they suggest that both the organization of socioeconomic interests (e.g., structure of trade unions and employer groups) and the formal political institutions of a country (e.g., electoral laws, separation of political powers) can strongly influence how nations adjust to a changing configuration of economic preferences.

Although their argument is developed around exogenous changes in the economy brought on by globalization, the model is general enough to be a useful way to conceptualize understanding how countries adjust to influences like the growth of environmental concern since the late 1960s.