A Unifying Theory of Foreign Intervention in Domestic Climate Policy

Strategic interventions among nations are likely to differ across the portfolio of possible climate change policies, including mitigation, adaptation, and solar geoengineering. With this in mind, we propose a theory of climate policy-motivated foreign intervention to study different forms of international climate governance in the presence of power imbalance. Foreign countries have at least three options to intervene in another country’s domestic climate policy: a) agreements with extraction, b) agreements with transfers, and c) agreements with sanctions. We distill the fundamental properties of different climate-policy options into a simple parameterization and examine the incentives and preferences for each type of foreign intervention. We find that the preference for the type of intervention depends critically on the policy externality of different domestic climate policies.