ABSTRACT
The global effort to mitigate climate change requires substantial input from democracies and non-democracies alike. Environmental policy scholars have been paying increasing attention to environmental policymaking and implementation in authoritarian countries, uncovering a distinctive pattern coined ‘authoritarian environmentalism’, with China as the leading example. In this chapter, the authors first review the propositions of the authoritarian environmentalism literature, then turn their attention to two empirical cases: Singapore and Russia. While Singapore’s environmental policymaking demonstrates a clear pattern of relatively low output and high efficacy, Russia’s trajectory features high output and low efficacy. We argue that not all non-democracies fit the authoritarian environmentalism pattern. Future research is needed to understand the factors contributing to distinctive patterns of environmental policymaking in non-democracies.
