| Current conventional wisdom assumes that, because they have worldwide consequences, ozone depletion and climate change must naturally and inevitably be 'global' political issues requiring broad participation in efforts toward solutions. In fact, however, in terms of participation, there were no 'global' environmental problems prior to 1987. In December of 1986, only 25 states attended the first round of the ozone protocol negotiations. In contrast, in February of 1991, over 100 states attended the first negotiation for a climate change convention. Broad participation was not a natural or inevitable requirement for confronting global environmental problems; rather universal participation came to be required over time.; I thus began with a simple puzzle: why would the US, or any other state for that matter, call for universally attended negotiations to address climate change? Why did environmental problems go 'global'? In the course of this dissertation I demonstrate that the US commitment to universal participation, an inefficient and ineffective choice according to rationalist approaches, resulted from neither the intrinsic characteristics of the climate change issue, nor strategic behavior on the part of the US. Instead, climate change went 'global' through specific processes of social construction. The US committed to universal participation in the climate change negotiations because through the emergence of a norm, universal participation had become not only the appropriate way to address global environmental problems, but the only conceivable way to do so.; In this research, I utilize both case study analysis and agent-based modeling techniques drawn from complexity theory to examine how a norm for universal participation emerged in the ozone depletion negotiations. I further demonstrate how this norm came to influence US (and other states') perceptions of climate change as well as its behavior in the climate change negotiations. This research contributes to our understanding of the ozone depletion and climate change regimes as well as general processes of global governance. |
