This article examines potential interest group opposition to green industrial policies through the lens of state investment in China’s coal power sector. Using a novel data set on financial investments in Chinese coal power plants, we show that state actors have controlling stakes in the majority of nominally private coal plants. Importantly, the majority of such plants have investments from multiple levels of government. Green industrial policies could therefore face resistance from economic coalitions within the state, as state-owned coal plants and government agencies object to policies that harm their financial interests. Theoretically, this implies the need for a conceptualization of state capacity that allows for the ability to overcome internal opposition. Empirically, we highlight a predicament for the Chinese state: it has set ambitious goals to decarbonize but also has a vested interest in ensuring the profitability of the world’s largest coal-fired power generation fleet.

The Paris Agreement is in trouble. Here we assess the potential for climate leaders to bring the global climate regime back on track by developing a strategic understanding of followership. In other words, leaders need to know how to encourage other actors to follow them. We develop a typology of follower types—Enthusiasts, Pliables, Reluctants, and Hard Nuts—distinguished based on motivation and capacity. We identify the scope for a participation cascade based on the distribution of follower types. We argue that achieving a participation cascade may be more likely if leaders appreciate three insights from theories of collective action. First, break down the climate mitigation problem into smaller, more manageable challenges, such as sectoral approaches. Second, prioritize major emitters and areas with high mitigation potential and politically feasible action. Finally, emphasize benefits to potential followers. Together, the strategies can help reduce the number of Hard Nut cases by making the cost/benefit calculus more attractive to prospective followers.

International environmental cooperation is difficult because states disagree on burden sharing and have incentives to free ride. However, interested countries can promote future cooperation through unilateral action that induces technological change in and, thereby, shapes the preferences of foreign countries. How can the effectiveness of such unilateral action be improved? This article offers a game-theoretic analysis of the value of combining unilateral action with trade sanctions, or policies that force foreign exporters to comply with domestic environmental regulations. Trade sanctions can significantly improve the effectiveness of unilateral action, but only when (1) they induce clean technology adoption by exporters in targeted countries and (2) this reduces the cost of clean technology elsewhere in the economy through intersectoral technology spillovers.

The consequences of global warming are uncertain and possibly irreversible. In this article, I investigate the value of early mitigation action given these uncertainties and irreversibilities. I complement standard economic techniques with a political analysis: in the model, an incumbent government may be replaced through elections or other means by another policymaker with very different preferences. I find that if a green policymaker (very concerned about global warming) is probably replaced by a brown policymaker (mildly concerned about global warming), the case for early mitigation action is even stronger than otherwise. Thus, if environmentally aware governments will gain power in major emitter countries, they have particularly strong incentives to negotiate a global climate treaty when they expect that their successor may be less interested in climate cooperation. Similarly, concerns about the preferences of future policymakers could motivate environmentally aware local policymakers to impose increasingly stringent climate policies.

The surge of local climate policy is a puzzling political-economic phenomenon. Why have local policy-makers, incapable of mitigating global warming through individual emissions reductions, adopted ambitious policies while national governments refrain from action? I construct a game-theoretic model of two-level climate policy with incomplete information over political benefits. In equilibrium, the government selects a lax national regulation, and local policy-makers with private information on high local benefits choose more ambitious policies despite incentives to free ride. The analysis also suggests that even though local policy-makers prefer not to reveal information to the government, they must do so to pursue short-term political gains. Counterintuitively, new information can lead to more ambitious national regulation even if the government learns that the local political benefits are likely lower than expected. As an empirical application, I study the evolution of climate policies in the United States.