The Ultimate Collective Problem: Why National Security Can’t Solve Global Climate Change

Abstract

Despite high adaptive capacity, national climate change legislation in the industrialized world has been varied in its application and success. Many governments and scholars cite national security as grounds for climate change mitigation, despite the indirect threat that climate change poses to traditional security activities. The particular contribution of this thesis will be to discuss the viability of securitization as a strategy for creating a political coalition strong enough to bypass resistant domestic actors (particularly the energy industry) and pass meaningful climate change legislation; whether securitization gives a government enough support, from enough actors, to mitigate climate change. Robyn Eckersley and Peter Christoff’s work on the influence of domestic actors, national discourses, and strategies of capital accumulation on climate change policy development will form the foundation of this thesis. Particular focus will be placed on critical energy infrastructure in both of the case study countries due to its characteristics as a national security priority, its importance to the growth of the economy, and the part that this infrastructure plays in both causing and adapting to climate change. This thesis is attempting to discover the institutions and ideas that may enable a state to tackle one of the biggest and most complex common goods issues in history. In particular, can the invocation of security, as it is proposed in much of the securitization literature, elevate climate change to such a vital position in politics that ‘veto players’ lose their ability to veto? If veto players are more amenable to mitigation when climate change is presented as a security threat, then a more aggressively securitized policy may be called for.