3 The Role of Norms for US Foreign Climate Policy
In: Cultural Dynamics of Climate Change and the Environment in Northern AmericaAbstract
This chapter analyses the role which domestic and international norms and their respective socialisation processes play in the determination of a state’s foreign policy. It therefore focuses on the empirical case of US foreign climate policy from its start in 1972 up until 2005. After developing a theoretical framework based on the concept of social constructivism in political science, the analysis is carried out over two distinct periods of time, each time period representing a new phase of international climate negotiations.
The results of the analysis are twofold: Firstly, norms within climate policy work as determinants and thus define how much a government can manoeuvre on any given theme. Socialisation processes, meanwhile, are able to push a government slightly in one direction or another. Additionally, a predominance of domestic norms with a stronger domestic socialisation can be observed in the case of US foreign climate policy—albeit, particularly since the 1990s, the phenomenon of a polarised domestic response to climate policy is immediately observable. To sum up the findings: this chapter uses the results of the foreign policy analysis as a framework for creating a norm-stage-model that looks to map formations and back-formations of climate norms onto other democracies.