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The influence of lobbying on climate policies; or, why the world might fail13

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

John C. V. Pezzey
John C. V. Pezzey*
Affiliation:
Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. Tel: +61 2 6125 4143. Email: jack.pezzey@anu.edu.au
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Extract

How can the malign and growing influence of lobbying on global climate policies be checked? In this short piece I link some wide-ranging suggestions for academic research by environment and development economists that is needed to further this aim, with the key idea in Acemoglu and Robinson's (2012) Why Nations Fail. Their book argues strongly that sustained, very long-term economic growth through national industrial revolutions requires ‘inclusive institutions’ that distribute political power broadly over a nation's economic, class and geographical sectors. This is because long-term growth needs technical innovations, which cause creative destruction (structural adjustment) of existing technologies, which in turn harms the interests of existing elites. If elites are too powerful, they will block new technologies, so as to keep their powers to extract rents from the rest of society, and the nation will then fail (to grow sustainably).

Type
Forum
Information
Environment and Development Economics , Volume 19 , Issue 3: Special Issue of Environment and Development Economics: Looking Back and Moving Forward , June 2014 , pp. 329 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

13

The author thanks Paul Burke, Richard Damania, Tristan Edis, Clive Hamilton, Dieter Helm, Axel Michaelowa, Deborah Peterson, Mike Raupach, Will Steffen and Gert Svendsen for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.

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