Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reform

Abstract

Interactions between International Cooperative Institutions.The More, the Merrier?cleo verkuijl and harro van asselt IntroductionThere is increasing recognition that fossil fuel subsidy reform (FFSR) can contribute to a host of environmental, social, and economic objectives, and thereby contribute to achieving both the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change (e.g. Jakob et al. 2015;Jewell et al. 2018; UNEP 2018). However, at several hundred billion dollars a year (OECD 2018), fossil fuel subsidies persist in both developed and developing economies.While past research has sought to address this puzzle through the lens of domestic politicspointing to challenges to reform such as popular opposition, vested interests, interest groups, path dependency, and capacity and data gaps (e.g. Victor 2009; Inchauste and Victor 2017)international cooperation can also play an important role in promoting, or impeding, FFSR (Smith and Urpelainen 2017; Skovgaard and van Asselt 2018). For instance, while international institutions can adopt new rules, catalyze international commitments, enhance states' accountability, and facilitate information-sharing and capacity-building, there is also a risk that they will struggle to move beyond rhetoric, promote weak, vague, or otherwise inadequate norms, or be perceived to favour certain approaches over others. Where more than one international institution is active at the same time, the door is open for cooperation, as well as competition and conflict between different institutions. This raises questions regarding the institutional coherence of international FFSR governance (see also Chapter 2).In this chapter, we consider how various international institutions are approaching FFSR governance. First, we briefly introduce the rationale for FFSR (Section 5.2). Next, we discuss the international FFSR governance architecture, with a view to analyzing institutional coherence at the meso level (Section 5.3). This includes the possible emergence of a core norm of FFSR, membership distribution, and the governance functions carried out by the various international institutions active in