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Book Reviews

Kauffman, Craig M. 2017. Grassroots Global Governance: Local Watershed Management
Experiments and the Evolution of Sustainable Development. Oxford, ROYAUME-UNI: Presse universitaire d'Oxford.

Reviewed by Tabitha M. Benney
University of Utah and

Stacy D. VanDeveer
University of Massachusetts Boston
Craig M. Kauffman’s Grassroots Global Governance is an exceptionally good book,
and an excellent example of the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical value to be
gained in “global” environmental politics research by taking local and national
contexts and dynamics – indeed comparative politics – seriously.

The book emerges from a coherent, complexe, and nuanced comparative
and international research agenda, grounded equally in detailed local ﬁeldwork
and multiple streams of global environmental politics scholarship. In equal
measure, it contributes to and beneﬁts from a growing body of environmental
politics work on Ecuador, in Latin America, and across the developing world, comme
well as much research on global governance. The book’s goals, structure,
méthodes, and theoretical and conceptual content are quite ambitious, earning
it a place among the best books in the growing subﬁeld of comparative environ-
mental politics (par exemple., by Pamela Martin, Paul Steinberg, Tammy L. Lewis, et
Kathryn Hochtstetler).

Kauffman did extensive ﬁeldwork over many years, and the book demon-
strates the value of doing so. It is exactly this pairing of place-based, national,
and regional expertise common in comparative politics and regional studies
with the theories and concepts from international relations and research on
transboundary politics that yields some of the richest research. Par conséquent, Grass-
roots Global Governance combines several streams of theoretical and conceptual
international relations and comparative politics research, including research on
networks and network-based organizations, mobilization, public sector and
civil society capacity building, stakeholder participation, knowledge construc-
tion and framing, and policy and organizational experimentation. These streams
are well integrated in Kauffman’s theory of grassroots global governance. Like-
wise, they are well demonstrated in his empirical research, which ﬁnds contes-
tation between the local and global, and institutional and agent-centered
outcomes around water management, public and civil society institutions, et
various groups of actors.

De même, Kauffman’s book seamlessly accounts for interacting global
governance structures that accumulate in environmental cases. Pour y parvenir

Politique environnementale mondiale 18:3, Août 2018
© 2018 par le Massachusetts Institute of Technology

157

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158 (cid:129) Book Reviews

he uses an innovative approach called “nodal” governance theory to show how
ideas and resources transfer through a network. Kauffman demonstrates how
the interaction of stakeholders can lead to a learning process that affects the
dynamic and interactive process of normative and institutional development
at both local and international levels. This approach illustrates how socio-
economic problems unfold in developing societies. Global governance struc-
tures around complex issues like poverty, human health, deforestation, et
climate change are all more holistically understood and actions to address these
problems are better speciﬁed though the resulting research.

The work is persuasive in its examination of the diffusion of ideas and
practices from global to local over time; the local adaptations of global norms,
ideas, and practices; and the subsequent altering and reshaping of the global via
engagement with local agents and social institutions. By tracing these important
interactions, Kauffman shows some of the ways that Ecuadorian civil society
and local communities are able to shape—or indigenize—global governance
ideas and institutions, rather than just being passive recipients of them.

While this book provides powerful examples of grassroots actors agency,
Kauffman’s framework should be applied to other important cases to see when
and how it is replicated. As we have seen in the literature on grassroots move-
ments for some time (Brysk 1996), such movements may have a variety of case-
by-case characteristics that make it difﬁcult to generalize to other issue areas.
Par exemple, grassroots movements are easily hijacked by egocentric or weak
leadership. They may also fall prey to the classic collective action problem
(Olson 1965), which sometimes make them less successful at maintaining the
necessary momentum to reach a truly consequential tipping point. Most impor-
tantly, as Kauffman points out, grassroots movements are characteristically
reﬂective of local ideas and identities, and many translations of languages
and practices go into building such processes at the grassroots level. Sub-
sequently, in local populations where large parts of society have been historically
held back and degraded, we may not ﬁnd an exact parallel to the indigenous
communities of Ecuador.

Malgré cela, perhaps the most important implication of Kauffman’s work
is that the endless either/or debates around top-down versus bottom-up politics
are quite stale in comparison to this work’s more dynamic, nuanced, and em-
pirically informed theorizing of ongoing and dynamic relationships between
interconnected locally and globally framed actors and institutions. This study
can and should be replicated in other countries and across other environmental
and non-environmental areas of politics and policymaking.

Kauffman also demonstrates that political science—and social science re-
search more broadly—has much to teach some of the often technocratic and
closed environmental management literatures. Integrated water management
research and practice is certainly one of these rather insulated communities,
and it would beneﬁt greatly from paying close attention to Kauffman’s theoriz-
ing and empirical research. In short, research such as this serves to expand our

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Cary Y. Hendrickson

(cid:129) 159

theoretical and empirical understanding of critically important, complex issues
in environmental politics, but it also serves to improve the lives of critical stake-
holders who have largely been excluded from the equation for some time.

Les références

Brysk, Alison. 1996. Turning Weakness into Strength: The Internationalization of Indian

Rights. Latin American Perspectives 23 (2): 38–57.

Olson, Mancur. 1965. Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups.

Cambridge MA: Presse universitaire de Harvard.

Cramton, Pierre, David J.C. MacKay, Axel Ockenfels, and Steven Stoft, éd.. 2017. Global
Carbon Pricing: The Path to Climate Cooperation. Cambridge MA: La presse du MIT.

Reviewed by Cary Y. Hendrickson
University of Rome La Sapienza
The editors of Global Carbon Pricing argue that only “a reciprocal, common cli-
mate commitment” (p. xiii) will overcome the failure of the Paris Agreement’s
“pledge-and-review” approach and make the global climate goal attainable.
They suggest that we need to change the game and focus on global carbon
pricing to facilitate cooperation. Climate change is a classic tragedy of the com-
mons, where self-interested actors are unwilling to cooperate because they
believe others will also fail to cooperate. The editors are conﬁdent that a recip-
rocal common commitment can be agreed if a global carbon price is estab-
léché, and that under the resulting cooperation “national self-interests will
realign with the public good” (p. xiii).

Global carbon pricing has been widely debated in scholarly work on global
environmental governance, and this book adds to a chorus of economists pro-
moting market-based approaches to solve environmental problems. What is
novel is that global carbon pricing, as framed here, will foster common, pas
individual, commitments in climate negotiations. Countries agree upon a global
price and levy charges against the use of fossil fuels however they see ﬁt, as long
as the national average reaches the global price. Revenues generated are kept in
each country, and a portion of charges levied are collected in a common pot to
be distributed to less developed countries to offset the cost of mitigation and
adaptation measures.

The book draws on and contributes to the literature on climate policy and
climate economics. The twelve essays are divided into two sections: ﬁrst, the gap
between what is needed to mitigate climate change and what individual coun-
tries are currently willing to do is introduced, along with the concept of climate
cooperation. The second section begins with an explanation of global carbon
pricing and how it builds trust and reciprocity, is ﬂexible enough to cost less,
and fosters cooperation and reciprocal commitment). Souvent, carbon pricing is

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160 (cid:129) Book Reviews

justiﬁed by pointing to ﬂaws in the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement, tel que
the lack of penalties or sanctions. The ﬁnal chapters focus on the importance of
setting minimum carbon prices and deal with issues of climate justice and fair-
ness. The ﬁnal chapter further explains why the current “pledge-and-review”
approach is doomed to fail.

Determining a global carbon price, and attaining a common commitment
to one, are lofty ambitions, which some authors openly acknowledge as limi-
tations of this alternate model. Of concern, cependant, are some missing (et
familiar) issues. The question of whether carbon pricing as a major mitigation
instrument can be compatible (and politically feasible) with common but dif-
ferentiated responsibilities, especially in less developed countries, is not sufﬁ-
ciently addressed. The establishment of a “Green Fund formula” designed “to
please all of those whose support is needed” (p. 235) is not adequately ex-
plained in terms of how it would work in practice; would it ﬁnance offsetting
programs, similar to REDD+, or would it focus on investing in hard or soft tech-
nologies for, say, carbon removal? How much would each country contribute
and who would regulate the process? Where along the value chain would costs
be considered?

Although some authors are conﬁdent that economic incentives will over-
come the free-rider problem because countries will “take charge of their climate
commitments rather than engage in carbon freeriding” (p. 213), explaining how
the failure to attain legally binding commitments in previous agreements will be
solved at the negotiating table for carbon pricing (and who will be present) est
overlooked. The book does an excellent job of criticizing Kyoto (and Paris), dans-
stead of, par exemple, explaining how a “universal price signal to reduce the
consumption of fossil fuels” (p. 97) will be stronger than existing schemes,
or how the authors will deal with contradictory policies such as fossil fuel
subsidies.

For readers not well versed in ongoing debates about global environmen-
tal governance and climate economics, some chapters are difﬁcult to follow. Dans
a volume that characterizes the failure of climate negotiations as overlooking
“everything we know about human cooperation” (p. xi), wider perspectives
are notably missing. Par exemple, critical literatures on the commodiﬁcation
of nature, common pool resource management, the technopolitics of relying
on market-based approaches to deal with climate change, and sociological or
anthropological perspectives on their operation could have helped strengthen
the “I will if you will” approach supported by the editors. These could, peut-être,
have addressed some of the weaknesses, like the feasibility of technological
ﬁxes to address the social drivers of climate change and a lack of discussion
of the inherent power inequalities in negotiating a global carbon price.

D'une part, the book is likely to be worthwhile to those looking
for market-based alternatives to the existing global environmental governance
regime, and it offers an interesting proposition and preview of what a global
carbon pricing scheme might look like. On the other hand, simultaneously

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fostering cooperation and commitment through a market-based approach
seems too easy a ﬁx to overcome the global governance issues in dealing with
climate change experienced in the last quarter century.

Qing Li

(cid:129) 161

Skjærseth, Jon Birger, Per Ove Eikeland, Lars H. Gulbrandsen, and Torbjørg Jevnaker.
2016. Linking EU Climate and Energy Policies—Decision-making, Implementation and Reform.
Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Reviewed by Qing Li
Free University of Berlin

An ambitious climate and energy policy (known colloquially as 20-20-20)
was set unanimously by EU leaders in 2007/2008 and enacted into law in
2009. The four authors of this book are committed to exploring the causes
and consequences of what they see as “a combined climate and energy policy
package that departed signiﬁcantly from the status quo” (p. 25). The inadequacy
in traditional theories of EU integration, policymaking, and implementation
to explain this outcome is obvious. The authors therefore opted to include
negotiation theory on issue linkage to develop an integrated framework for
analyse. Perhaps the most noteworthy strength of this book is causes and
effects of process and outcome of the EU climate and energy policy package
comparatively.

According to negotiation theory, EU climate policy would “reﬂect the
position of the least ambitious actor when unanimity is required” (p. 3). Ce
outcome, cependant, was not reﬂected in reality. The inconsistency prompted
Skjærseth et al. to propose three compelling answers—with the help of an
issue-linkage perspective—to explain how this was possible: combining differ-
ent issues into a package; compensating “losers” by adding issues such as side
payments; and creating synergies by which policies for climate objectives could
also reduce air pollution and create new green jobs. What’s more, they dis-
tinguish between functional and political linkages to reveal how the EU has
been able to adopt increasingly ambitious climate policies by linking energy
issues and policies. Political linkage is deﬁned by whether climate and energy
policies are initiated, recommended, and adopted concurrently by the same set
of policymakers.

The researchers apply two complementary approaches to explain why and
how such policies developed in the ﬁrst place: Liberal Intergovernmentalism
(LI) and Multi-Level Governance (MLG). From an LI perspective, the initiation
and adoption of climate and energy policies would be expected to “reﬂect the
interests, preferences and actions of the member states and their intergovern-
mental bargaining” (p. 3). MLG is the dispersion of authority across multiple
levels of political governance. Over the last several decades, authority has moved
away from traditional national governments in Europe not just to the supra-
national level within the EU, but also to subnational levels (par exemple., regional assemblies

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162 (cid:129) Book Reviews

and local authorities). The latter approach may “explain the initiation and adop-
tion of EU climate and energy policies as a result of complex bargaining at mul-
tiple governance levels that include EU institutions, non-state actors and member
state governments” (p. 4). The authors explore two main approaches to explain
variation in implementation. The ﬁrst centers on degree of “ﬁt” between EU
requirements and the national status quo; the second focuses on the relationship
between EU and domestic politics. The reform phase of policies can also be analyzed
from the abovementioned explanatory perspectives.

The authors selected four countries (Allemagne, the Netherlands, Norway,
and Poland) to ensure the richness and deepness of empirical analysis. These
countries are confronted with a range of different challenges and opportunities
with respect to decarbonizing their economies because of their signiﬁcant vari-
ation in energy mix and import dependency. The analysis focuses on the direc-
tive reforming the EU emissions trading system (EU ETS), the Effort-Sharing
Decision (ESD), the Renewable Energy Directive (RED), and the Carbon
Capture and Storage (CCS) Directive. The authors examine two climate policies
for the transport sector—the car emissions regulation and the Fuel Quality
Directive (FQD)—for a subset of countries.

The authors extracted empirically testable propositions from various
theoretical perspectives and examined them with a combination of methodolog-
ical techniques (including pattern-matching, process tracing and explanation-
bâtiment). They collected qualitative data from multiple sources, including energy
statistics, ofﬁcial papers, secondary literature, and semistructured interviews.

Linking EU Climate and Energy Policies should be read by all who are inter-
ested in climate and energy policy and governance. There are some limitations
to the study, as its authors acknowledge: it is widely accepted that transforming
energy systems will always be “a matter of incremental change” (p. 7); donc,
assessing future implementation is difﬁcult.

Shortcomings aside, this volume contributes in several ways to the ﬁeld of
international and comparative climate politics. It illustrates the arduousness of
pursuing climate and environmental objectives continuously, as is evident from
how the implementation experiences of the EU package have affected national
positions on new long-term policies. The authors simultaneously embed cli-
mate and energy policy in an intricate European political context, noting that
“variation in domestic politics has proved more potent in explaining variation
in implementation than ‘ﬁt’ and adaptation pressure” (p. 235). They remind us
that the current status of new 2030 EU targets and policies “indicates that they
are not likely to trigger any fundamental transformation of the energy system
by 2030” (p. 236).

This ambitious project, in effect, covers a nuanced set of public policy
implications. In initiation and negotiation, “the package managed to combine
policies that underscored the opportunities for synergies rather than trade-offs:
all the objectives could be realized” (p. 247). De plus, the authors of this book
found it useful to differentiate between conditions that promote package solutions

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Qing Li

(cid:129) 163

and package trouble. In terms of policy implementation and reform, an intriguing
observation is “how difference in access to domestic decision making for renew-
able energy interests between Poland and Germany have contributed to produce
different ambitions and support systems for renewables in electricity production”
(p. 248). Last but not least, the policy cycle approach used throughout the book
demonstrates how issue-linkages and policy packages may have different effects
on different phases that may help or hamper subsequent policy progress.

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