ABSTRACT
In the context of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and the establishment of several conventions related to the environment, industrialized countries accepted the notion of common but differentiated responsibilities when it comes to managing environmental change. Historically industrialized countries are disproportionately responsible for global environmental problems, but for the sake of future generations these problems can only be solved if developing countries are included within environmental solutions. As developing countries have few incentives to participate, ways to persuade them include financial concessions and technical assistance in the form of environmental aid that pays for the “full incremental costs” incurred by developing countries in their domestic policies that solve global environmental problems. These costs can be defined as the costs a country incurs in taking actions that generate global environmental benefits and that exceed what the country would otherwise do if guided purely by national self-interest (Kaul and Le Goulven 2003: 349). But once it comes to concrete policies and financial contributions needed to involve developing countries in protection measures, industrialized countries do not share an equal financial burden. The chapter is therefore guided by this question: Why do industrialized
OECD countries not share an equal financial burden when it comes to tackling global environmental change, now an important aspect of foreign policy (Harris 2001a, 2007)? Explanations for unequal burden sharing behavior can be found on the basis of different foreign policies and on the basis of the theoretical and empirical literature which has guided the discussion on traditional aid policies. As environmental aid is often simply a subcategory of official aid, the relevant aid and foreign policy literature will be briefly reviewed before an empirical section draws a detailed empirical account of bi-and multilateral financial flows to the environment, referred to as environmental aid. It will be shown that environmental aid burdens are indeed unequally shared. The remainder of this chapter, therefore, offers explanations that take into account different foreign policies and a multivariate regression analysis for bilateral environmental aid. In particular, this analysis considers the causal variables Power, Interests and Ideas from the 3 × 3 matrix introduced by Barkdull and Harris in Chapter 2 of this book
(see Table 2.1). In fact, the variance is best explained by single foreign policies and a set of influential variables from the matrix including power-and interestbased indicators, as well as economic, norm-driven and partisan indicators.
International aid, foreign policy, and the environment
