UC Santa Barbara

Whether your primary concern is saving the planet, promoting economic equality, or even understanding organized groups’ decisions, you may have wondered what motivates groups to form coalitions. The stronger the coalition advocating for addressing climate change or creating well-paid union jobs, the logic goes, the more pressure governments will face to pass policies that advance these objectives. I argue that during times when governments cannot pass climate policy due to legislative gridlock, environmentalists have a greater incentive to make policy concessions to organized labor to increase their political resources for current or future policy negotiations. Environmentalists’ concessions are more likely to win labor’s support when they mitigate the uncertainty characteristic of climate policy’s economic impacts.

I demonstrate this theory through comparative and longitudinal case studies of four states in the American West which have been climate policy pioneers. Whereas labor federations have advocated for substantial climate policies alongside environmental groups in Washington and Colorado, Oregon and California have not witnessed comparable coalitions despite their similar political and economic characteristics. I draw my data from elite interviews, primary and secondary sources, and legislators’ environmental voting scores from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) covering roughly the past two decades.