Most governments emphasize the need for reciprocal (“give and take”) international commitments in global climate policy. Nonetheless, existing public opinion polls indicate strong support by individual citizens for unilateral climate policies as well. This raises the question of whether...

Powerful political actors in the international system quite frequently adopt unilateral policies whose implications extend beyond their respective borders. Examples include financial market regulation as well as taxation, trade and environmental policies. They do so to avoid lowest...

Valid and reliable measurement of countries' climate policy performance is important both for policy-making and analytical purposes. The authors contribute to this end by introducing a new dataset that offers such information for up to 172 countries for the time period 1996–2008. Their Climate...

A survey-embedded experiment implemented around the time of the 2014 annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (N ≈ 1200) examined whether such summits are able to increase citizens' awareness of climate problems. This study finds that...

Press conferences are an important element of a government's communication strategy at climate change summits. From a theoretical perspective, press conferences should serve two main functions: exerting pressure in negotiations and informing the public. These functions correspond to two logics...

Within less than three decades, climate change has developed from a rather obscure scientific topic into a key item on the global political agenda. It has also attracted strong attention in many areas of scientific research, including the social sciences. Social scientists, and notably...

Despite the shift from multilateral negotiations on legally binding mitigation commitments to the decentralized nonbinding Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) approach in global climate policy, governments and other stakeholders continue to insist that fairness principles guide...