Fifteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Considering the urgent need of well-designed policies to reduce global warming, this paper analyzes the interaction of transnational private authority and public policies designed to reduce GHG emissions and, if any, to highlight the synergistic effects between public and private initiatives, which would be translated into a reduction in GHG emissions greater than the sum of the reductions caused by private and public governance acting independently. The goal is to examine GHG emissions outcomes vis-à-vis the interaction between national policies (carbon tax and ETS), enacted in some of the companies’ jurisdictional operations worldwide, and the adoption of transnational initiatives by mining companies to improve their sustainability performance, among them the affiliation to International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) affiliation. We aim to answer the following questions: 1- Do enacted national policies (carbon tax and ETS) interact with transnational initiatives driven by private actors, in a complementary, competitive, or coexistent way? 2- If complementary, is there any synergistic effect in GHG emissions reduction? Hypotheses are built upon the claim that pressures from globalization, non-governmental organizations and other independent organizations encouraged responsible corporate and governmental behavior suggesting complementarity between public and private initiatives with possible synergistic effects.