Decarbonizing Dictatorship: Explaining Climate Action in Nondemocracies

Why do some countries governed by authoritarian regimes take greater steps to combat climate change than others? Existing research tends to suggest that autocratic elites provide fewer public goods than their counterparts in democracies and use fossil fuel rents to maintain power through repression and co-optation. As a result, scholars argue that authoritarianism tends toward climate obstruction. However, few consider how the politics of climate change varies among nondemocracies themselves. In this dissertation, I take one of the first steps toward explaining climate action in nondemocracies by highlighting variation in the incentives and capabilities related to decarbonization. I argue that key differences in the authoritarian practices and economic governance models that elites use to maintain political stability lead to stronger or weaker incentives and capabilities for climate action. On the one hand, I illustrate how fossil fuel wealth supports repression and co-optation in authoritarian regimes, undermining climate action. On the other hand, I show that centralized renewable energy is more consistent with legitimation and contributes to decarbonization in nondemocracies. Finally, I examine variation in climate laws and policies themselves and uncover systematic differences in the kinds of instruments they use to reduce emissions in different sectors of the economy.