Decoupling reconsidered: Does world society integration influence the relationship between the environment and economic development?

This study advances scholarship on environment and development by examining whether nations more embedded in the pro-environmental world society are more or less likely to experience a relative decoupling between economic development and carbon emissions over time. The authors calculate a network centrality measure using national-level membership data on environmental international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and then employ the measure to create four subsamples of nations that are relatively more or less integrated in the environmental world society. The authors use interactions between measures of economic development and time in two-way fixed effects models to estimate the potentially changing effects of development on carbon emissions for the four subsamples of nations from 1970 to 2009. Results indicate that nations that are the most embedded in the environmental world society experienced a moderate decrease through time in the effect of development on carbon emissions, while the effect of development on emissions increased through time in the most peripheral nations.

A worldwide analysis of stranded fossil fuel assets' impact on power plants' CO2 emissions.

Will power plants emit less or more CO2 in anticipation of stronger climate policies that would strand fossil fuel reserves? Here, using a worldwide data source on individual power plants' CO2 emissions and the value of countries' at-risk fossil fuel assets, we show that between 2009 and 2018, plants emitted more CO2 in countries where more assets would be devalued under a 1.5 °C scenario, which we theorize is due to these countries' regulatory leniency and plants' vested interest in long-term fossil fuel contracts. Although the extra amount of carbon emitted each year trigged by imperiled assets is relatively small, it would exhaust a sizable portion of the electricity sector's remaining carbon budget when added up over time. This is especially true in the U.S. and Russia where up to 16% and 12% of their budgets, respectively, could be spent within ten years due solely to the stranded asset effect.

Disproportionality in Power Plants' Carbon Emissions: A Cross-National Study.

Past research on the disproportionality of pollution suggests a small subset of a sector's facilities often produces the lion's share of toxic emissions. Here we extend this idea to the world's electricity sectors by calculating national-level disproportionality Gini coefficients for plant-level carbon emissions in 161 nations based on data from 19,941 fossil-fuel burning power plants. We also evaluate if disproportionalities in plant-level emissions are associated with increased national carbon emissions from fossil-fuel based electricity production, while accounting for other well-established human drivers of greenhouse gas emissions. Results suggest that one potential pathway to decreasing nations' greenhouse gas emissions could involve reducing disproportionality among fossil-fuel power plants by targeting those plants in the upper end of the distribution that burn fuels more inefficiently to produce electricity.

Abortion Liberalization in World Society, 1960-2009.

Controversy sets abortion apart from other issues studied by world society theorists, who consider the tendency for policies institutionalized at the global level to diffuse across very different countries. The authors conduct an event history analysis of the spread (however limited) of abortion liberalization policies from 1960 to 2009. After identifying three dominant frames (a women's rights frame, a medical frame, and a religious, natural family frame), the authors find that indicators of a scientific, medical frame show consistent association with liberalization of policies specifying acceptable grounds for abortion. Women's leadership roles have a stronger and more consistent liberalizing effect than do countries' links to a global women's rights discourse. Somewhat different patterns emerge around the likelihood of adopting an additional policy, controlling for first policy adoption. Even as support for women's autonomy has grown globally, with respect to abortion liberalization, persistent, powerful frames compete at the global level, preventing robust policy diffusion.

When Do Laws Matter? National Minimum-Age-of-Marriage Laws, Child Rights, and Adolescent Fertility, 1989-2007.

Using the case of adolescent fertility, we ask the questions of whether and when national laws have an effect on outcomes above and beyond the effects of international law and global organizing. To answer these questions, we utilize a fixed-effect time-series regression model to analyze the impact of minimum-age-of-marriage laws in 115 poor- and middle-income countries from 1989 to 2007. We find that countries with strict laws setting the minimum age of marriage at 18 experienced the most dramatic decline in rates of adolescent fertility. Trends in countries that set this age at 18 but allowed exceptions (for example, marriage with parental consent) were indistinguishable from countries that had no such minimum-age-of-marriage law. Thus, policies that adhere strictly to global norms are more likely to elicit desired outcomes. The article concludes with a discussion of what national law means in a diffuse global system where multiple actors and institutions make the independent effect of law difficult to identify.