Climate Obstruction and Foreign Policy in Comparative Perspective

Climate obstruction broadly refers to campaigns and other policy actions led by well-organized and financed networks of corporate and other actors who have actively sought to prevent global and/or national action on climate change over the past four decades (Brulle & Dunlap, 2021). In this project, we jointly work with a definition of climate obstruction as the intentional denying, slowing or blocking of policy or action on climate change that is commensurate with the current scientific consensus of what is necessary to avoid dangerous human-caused interference with the climate system. Efforts deployed by climate obstruction actors have delayed ambitious climate action using organized mainstream and social media campaigns, lobbying, funding politicians and political campaigns, and disseminating climate-delaying discourses and practices (Lamb et al., 2020) across all levels of social aggregation, i.e. local, national, regional and global. In turn, these campaigns often shape public debates, which can affect political support and collective mobilization to mitigate climate change and adapt to it. However, to date, most of the research on climate obstruction has focused on countries in the Global North, especially the United States.

Because the international political economy and the nation-state are critical in creating the conditions and the arenas, which have shaped the emergence of climate obstruction in the Global North, research in and on the Global South is needed on how in-country or domestic actors (including the state administrations, corporations, think tanks, public relations firms etc.) respond to the global and transnational networks, are funded by them, and begin implementing activities related to lobbying, disinformation, and dissemination of nonscientific views on climate change. Moreover, Latin American regionalisms have in the past been characterised by, among other things, a relative openness to new issues and its intergovernmental and interpresidential character. This justifies the expectation that political-ideological changes in the presidencies have an impact (both positive and negative) on the climate policy agenda of regional organisations.