Environmental Ministries as Climate Policy Drivers: Comparing Brazil and India

• Author: Solveig Aamodt
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1070496518791221
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Environmental Ministries

as Climate Policy

Drivers: Comparing

Brazil and India

Solveig Aamodt

1

Abstract

With the 2015 Paris Agreement, global climate governance increasingly depends on

domestic climate policy ambitions, also in large developing countries such as Brazil

and India, which are prominent representatives for developing countries in the inter-

national climate negotiations. Although the environmental policy literature expects

ministries of environment to be important drivers of domestic climate policy, studies

find that the climate policy ambitions of the Brazilian and Indian environmental

ministries differ considerably. With a long-term analytical approach building on his-

torical institutionalism, this article analyses and compares the climate policy roles of

the Brazilian and Indian ministries of environment. The comparative analysis finds

that three factors in particular influence the environmental ministries’ climate policy

ambitions: first, the historical view of environmental policy as a domestic or an

international issue; second, the ministry’s formal role in international climate nego-

tiations; and third, the subsequent development of institutional climate logics.

Keywords

climate policy, Brazil, India, environmental ministries, historical institutionalism,

institutional logics, policy analysis

Global climate governance increasingly depends on domestic climate policy and

action. The success of the 2015 Paris Agreement depends on countries, especially

all countries with high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, adopting and imple-

menting ambitious nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to mitigate

Journal of Environment &

Development

2018, Vol. 27(4) 355–381

!The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/1070496518791221

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CICERO Center for International Climate Research, Oslo, Norway

Corresponding Author:

Solveig Aamodt, CICERO Center for International Climate Research, Pb. 1129 Blindern, 0318 Oslo,

Norway.

Email: solveig.aamodt@cicero.oslo.no

climate change (Cle

´menc¸ on, 2016; Dimitrov, 2016; Rajamani, 2016). The envir-

onmental policy literature expects environmental ministries to be drivers of such

domestic climate policy ambitions (Alkin & Urpelainen, 2014; Underdal, 2000).

Brazil and India are two of the world’s largest GHG emitters and are prominent

representatives for developing countries in negotiations under the United

Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC; Cle

´menc¸ on,

2016; Kasa, Gullberg, & Heggelund, 2008). Although both Brazil and India have

adopted comprehensive and economy-wide climate policies, studies show that

the climate policy ambitions of their environmental ministries vary considerably.

Brazil’s environmental ministry was a crucial driver behind the country’s

increased mitigation of GHG emissions from 2005 onward (Carvalho, 2010;

Hochstetler & Viola, 2012), whereas India’s environmental ministry has been

a barrier to, rather than a driver for, more ambitious climate policies (Aamodt &

Stensdal, 2017; Atteridge, Shrivastava, Pahuja, & Upadhyay, 2012; Isaksen &

Stokke, 2014; Joshi, 2013). What can explain this puzzling dif‌ference in envir-

onmental ministries’ climate policy ambitions?

This article addresses the dif‌ference in ambition by analyzing and comparing

the Brazilian and Indian environmental ministries’ roles in climate policy

making, particularly focusing on how the ministries’ intragovernmental

roles and institutional climate logics have shaped their domestic climate policy

ambitions. The article contributes to the emerging f‌ield of comparative environ-

mental politics that seeks to ‘‘engage in a cumulative conversation across

borders’’ to understand the complexity of ‘‘domestic forces shaping global envir-

onmental outcomes’’ (Steinberg & VanDeveer, 2012, pp. 67). If actors

and institutions that drive Brazilian and Indian climate policy processes are

better understood, the UNFCCC process’s dynamics and possible global miti-

gation trajectories under the Paris Agreement will be better understood

(Cle

´menc¸ on, 2016; Dimitrov, 2016; Upadhyaya, Fridahl, Linne

´r, & Roma

´n,

2018). Although environmental ministries are regarded as central actors in

domestic climate policy development, their climate policy ambitions have been

given scant attention in the climate policy literature, and this article contributes

to f‌illing that gap.

Several scholars have analyzed Brazilian and Indian climate policy making in

the past decade, f‌inding that the environmental ministries have had important

roles in climate policy development (e.g., Burrier, 2016; Dubash, 2009;

Hochstetler & Viola, 2012; Isaksen & Stokke, 2014; Tankha & Rauken, 2015;

Viola & Franchini, 2012), but few studies compare the roles of environmental

ministries in the two countries, as this article does. In a recent article,

Upadhyaya et al. (2018) compare Brazilian, Indian, and South African policy

processes on Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions

1

and point to the envir-

onmental ministries’ institutional capacities as crucial for the countries’ ‘‘engage-

ment with international climate policy frameworks’’ (p. 19), but their analysis

does not aim to explain these ministries’ climate policy ambitions.

356 Journal of Environment & Development 27(4)