Outstanding article on global climate change policies wins international award

An article raising questions about global climate action and the risk that policies might actually benefit polluting firms has led to an international award for Dr Federica Genovese from the Department of Government.

The article entitled “Market Responses to Global Governance: International Climate Cooperation and Europe’s Carbon Trading” was awarded the David P. Baron Award for best article published in the journal Business and Politics in 2021.

In a blog published about the findings of the article, Dr Genovese said: ”One of the many crises the world faces today is the climate emergency. Greenhouse gas emissions are destabilizing the global climate, and mitigating this change requires ambitious economic plans to which polluters need to comply. The costs of implementing such policies will bear especially on private firms. Consequently, these are usually expected to fight back and lobby against climate policy coordination.

“So why is then that in recent years some companies have been supportive of international climate agreements? Is this behavior due to pretentious attitudes (the so-called `green-washing’ behavior)? Is it because of good-faith change among polluters? In this article I propose an alternate, more active hypothesis for why some high-pollution firms may be supportive of global climate action, focusing on the active role that firms have at diluting domestic policy and then ripping off actual material profits from this.”

Over the past 20 years, Business and Politics has established itself as the premier journal for cutting-edge research on the relationship between private firms and public governance institutions.