Power in the public sphere: The battles between oil companies and environmental groups in the United Nations climate change negotiations, 1991--2003

The conundrum of international climate regulation is that it exists. Global climate change has issue characteristics that pose major challenges to supporters of international climate protection, including the global scale of the causes and consequences of climate change, the complexity of climate science, and the economic importance of fossil fuels. In explaining the trajectory of international climate regulation, most analysts focus on the "high politics" of inter-state negotiations or on the role of science in facilitating international cooperation. My goal instead is to situate the UN climate negotiations in a broader environmental politics that focuses on the institutional terrain and political economy underlying both the high politics of inter-state negotiations and science-based international environmental governance. I examine the climate change negotiations as a terrain of struggle on which civil society groups, market actors, and states compete to define the problems of and solutions to global environmental change, within and across national boundaries.; I frame my argument using Habermas' theory of the public sphere. Habermas defines the public sphere as a deliberative arena that creates public opinion about the common good. For Habermas, the public sphere embodies two challenges. First, it presents a challenge to state authority. It is a mechanism by which critical public opinion is created as a check on state policies. Second, the public sphere presents a challenge to private interests. Arguments in the public sphere must be justified in terms of the common good and cannot simply reflect the particular interests of powerful actors. I argue that the UN climate negotiations function as a public sphere and, in the years leading to the negotiation of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, provided environmental supporters of climate regulation with an institutional terrain on which they were able to challenge powerful oil industry groups. After the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, shifting relationships between the oil industry and environmental community changed the nature of the UN climate negotiations in ways that undermined the environmental community's power in the public sphere.; The empirical basis of the dissertation is a comparison of oil company and environmental group involvement in the international climate negotiations over a fifteen year period from 1988 to 2003. My research is based on case study analyses of six organizations. I trace the evolution of the climate policies of three oil companies (British Petroleum, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and ExxonMobil) and three environmental NGOs (Environmental Defense, Greenpeace, and the loose coalition of climate justice NGOs). These organizations represent the spectrum of oil companies and environmental NGOs involved in the climate debates and thus serve to trace the broad contours of the climate battles between the oil industry and the environmental advocacy community.