Against all odds: mobilization for large-scale collective action in the case of climate change

The development of modern human society brought with it new and complicated problems – controlling epidemics and pandemics in an increasingly interconnected world; the challenges brought about by cross-country migration; antibiotic resistance; and climate change, one of the most complicated of all major problems facing society today. These are all large-scale collective action problems (LSCAPs). At the same time, the very existence of certain policy areas remains puzzling. Although extensive scholarly attention has been paid to the successes and failures of providing collective and public goods, limited to no attention has been paid to the point of emergence of a collective action problem. We assume that there is a group that recognizes a collective good as such, and the need for providing it. However, the point of recognizing the good as such is missing from existing theoretical accounts. Essentially, how is a collective action group formed? How is a collective good recognized as such? How do entire policy areas emerge out of little to no pre-existing policy or legislation, depending on the subject matter, to provide these goods? How does that process of mass-mobilization look like? What brings about (mobilization for) major policy change? This work uses the example of (international) climate change policy to analyze how climate change transformed from a primarily scientific issue to a policy area of international concern. The findings indicate that some aspects of the emergence of large-scale cooperation on climate change could simply be explained by elements found in classic collective action theory. This dissertation also finds that, although the rational-choice based approach may explain a fair bit when considering the characteristics or level of ambition of early climate change policy, when focusing on its emergence as a policy issue on its own right, however, the rational-choice explanation may be expanded by behavioral factors.