1. Stephen Gill and David Law, “Global Hegemony and the Structural Power of Capital,” in Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, ed. Stephen Gill (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 102.

2. Among the many works on this subject, see Richard P. Appelbaum and Jeffrey Henderson, “The Hinge of History: Turbulence and Transformation in the World Economy,”Competition and Change 1, no. 1 (1995): 1-12; Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1995); Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Robert Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Vintage Books, 1991); Vivien Schmidt, “The New World Order, Incorporated: The Rise of Business and the Decline of the Nation-State,”Daedalus 124, no. 2 (1995): 75-106; and Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

3. Bob Jessop, “Post-Fordism and the State,” in Post-Fordism, ed. Ash Amin (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994): 251. This “hollowing out” of the national state has also been accompanied by a growing role for local and regional state institutions. See Margit Mayer, “Post-Fordist City Politics,” pp. 316-37 in Post-Fordism, ed. Ash Amin.

4. Barnet and Cavanagh, Global Dreams, 19.

5. Strange, The Retreat of the State, 14.

6. See Ricardo Grinspun and Maxwell A. Cameron, eds., The Political Economy of North American Free Trade (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993); and Craig N. Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994).

7. These types should be seen as analytical abstractions which emphasize the essential orientation of international institutions; any specific international institution will, of course, have both enabling and regulatory characteristics.

8. See Peter M. Haas, Robert O. Keohane, and Marc A. Levy, eds., Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); Stephan Haggard and Beth A. Simmons, “Theories of International Regimes,”International Organization 41 (Summer 1987): 491-517; Andrew Hurrell and Benedict Kingsbury, eds., The International Politics of the Environment: Actors, Interests, and Institutions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Ian H. Rowlands, The Politics of Global Atmospheric Change (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995); John Vogler and Mark F. Imber, eds., The Environment and International Relations (London: Routledge, 1996); and Oran R. Young, International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

9. The deficiencies of the state-centered approach in international relations have been noted by Robert W. Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method,” in Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, ed. Stephen Gill (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 49-66; Stephen Gill, “Gramsci and Global Politics: Towards a Post-Hegemonic Research Agenda,” in Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, ed. Stephen Gill: 1-18; Matthew Paterson, “IR Theory: Neorealism, Neoinstitutionalism and the Climate Change Convention,” in The Environment and International Relations, ed. John Vogler and Mark F. Imber (London: Routledge, 1996); and Susan Strange, States and Markets: An Introduction to International Political Economy (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

10. See Robert W. Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations”; Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Gill, ed. Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations.

11. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).

12. Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations,” 62.

13. Kees Van der Pijl, “Ruling Classes, Hegemony, and the State System,”International Journal of Political Economy 19 (1989): 10.

14. Ibid., 12.

15. Gill refers to this process as “transnationalization.” Stephen Gill and David Law, “Global Hegemony and the Structural Power of Capital,” in Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, ed. Stephen Gill (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 93-124.

16. Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations,” 64.

17. See Robert W. Cox, “Global Perestroika,” in Socialist Register 1992, eds. Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch (London: Merlin Press, 1992); Robert W. Cox, Production, Power and World Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

18. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order, 253.

19. Ibid., 254.

20. Peter Burnham, “Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and the International Order,”Capital and Class 45 (1991): 73-93.

21. See Carl Boggs, Gramsci's Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1976); Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci's Politics (London: Hutchinson, 1987); and Giuseppe Vacca, “Intellectuals and the Marxist Theory of the State,” in Approaches to Gramsci, ed. Anne Showstack Sassoon (London: Writers and Readers, 1982): 37-69.

22. See C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State: How Policy Is Made in America (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990); and Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969).

23. See Fred Block, Revising State Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Claus Offe, “Theses on the Theory of the State,” in Contradictions of the Welfare State, ed. John Keane (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984); and Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1978).

24. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977); Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984); and Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978).

25. See Clyde W. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); and Martin Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

26. Martin Shaw, “Civil Society and Global Politics: Beyond a Social Movements Approach,”Millennium 23, no. 3 (1994): 650.

27. Ibid., 650.

28. M. J. Peterson, “Transnational Activity, International Society and World Politics,”Millenium 21, no. 3 (1992): 371-88.

29. Paul Wapner, “Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics,”World Politics 47 (April, 1995): 311-40.

30. Shaw, “Civil Society and Global Politics,” 648. Cox argues that the state and civil society are so interpenetrated that any distinction is not very useful. See Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,”Millenium 10, no. 2 (1981): 126-55.

31. See Enrique Larana, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R. Gusfield, eds. New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). For a critical account, see Alan Scott, Ideology and the New Social Movements (London: Routledge, 1990).

32. On the role of epistemic communities in international negotiations, see Peter M. Haas, “Banning Chlorofluorocarbons: Epistemic Community Efforts to Protect Stratospheric Ozone,”International Organization 46, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 193-212.

33. See Leo Panitch, “Globalization and the State,” in Socialist Register 1994: Between Globalism and Nationalism, eds. Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch (London: Merlin Press, 1994); Sam Pooley, “The State Rules, OK? The Continuing Political Economy of Nation-States,”Capital and Class 43 (Spring 1991): 65-82; and Schmidt, “The New World Order, Incorporated.”

34. See Martin Carnoy, “Multinationals in the Changing World Economy: Whither the Nation-State?” in The New Global Economy in the Information Age, eds. M. Carnoy, M. Castells, S. Cohen, and F. Cardoso (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993): 45-96; Sol Picciotto, “The Internationalization of the State,”Capital and Class 43 (Spring 1991): 43-63; Christos Pitelis, “Beyond the Nation-State? The Transnational Firm and the Nation-State,”Capital and Class 43 (Spring 1991): 131-52; and Pooley, “The State Rules, OK?”

35. Gill and Law, “Global Hegemony and the Structural Power of Capital.”

36. Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1996).

37. Picciotto, “The Internationalization of the State.”

38. See, for example, Edwin Epstein, The Corporation in American Politics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969); Barry M. Mitnick, “Political Contestability,” in Corporate Political Agency, ed. Barry M. Mitnick (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993): 11-66; Lee E. Preston and James E. Post, Private Management and Public Policy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975); and David J. Vogel, “The Study of Business and Politics,”California Management Review 38, no. 3 (1996): 146-65.

39. See Jane Kelsey, Economic Fundamentalism: The New Zealand Experiment (Auckland: Auckland University Press/Pluto Press, 1995).

40. See Ernst B. Haas, When Knowledge Is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); and Karen T. Litfin, Ozone Discourses: Science and Politics in Global Environmental Cooperation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). The discursive approach is closely related to the recent developments in policy studies and regime theory that emphasize the importance of consensus within “epistemic communities,” or of belief systems within advocacy coalitions in driving policy. See, for example, Haas, “Banning Chlorofluorocarbons”; and Paul A. Sabatier, “An Advocacy Coalition Framework of Policy Change and the Role of Policy-Oriented Learning Therein,”Policy Sciences 21 (1988): 129-68. This literature, however, tends to neglect an analysis of how discourse is shaped by powerful interests.

41. Maarten A. Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995): 59.

42. See Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).

43. This research is based on a series of interviews with representatives of industry associations, corporations, U.S. government agencies, and environmental organizations, as well as extensive analysis of documentary and secondary materials.

44. See Matthias Finger, “NGOs and Transformation: Beyond Social Movement Theory,” in Environmental NGOs in World Politics, ed. Thomas Princen and Matthias Finger (New York: Routledge, 1994): 48-66; and Ans Kolk, Forests in International Environmental Politics (Atlanta: International Books, 1997).

45. This view is advocated in Stephan Schmidheiny, Changing Course (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

46. For a detailed account of the Rio negotiations, see Irving M. Mintzer and J. Amber Leonard, eds., Negotiating Climate Change: The Inside Story of the Rio Convention (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 45-74; and Alan D. Hecht and Dennis Tirpak, “Framework Agreement on Climate Change: A Scientific and Policy History,”Climatic Change 29 (1995): 371-402.

47. The fate of a 1991 proposal for a combination energy/carbon tax in the European Union provides another example of business exerting influence in an international forum to prevent an agreement. The tax would have increased electricity prices by about 20 percent but was defeated after strong lobbying by European industry associations representing utilities, oil companies, chemicals, and industrial energy users. See Tony Ikwue and Jim Skea, “Business and the Genesis of the European Carbon Tax Proposal,”Business Strategy and the Environment 3, no. 2 (1994): 1-10.

48. Schmidheiny, Changing Course, 24.

49. David Abramson, in The Oil Daily (24 February 1997): 1.

50. Larry Makinson, The Price of Admission: Campaign Spending in the 1994 Elections (Washington, DC: Center for Responsive Politics, 1995).

51. Ross Gelbspan, The Heat Is On (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997).

52. George E. Brown, “Environmental Science under Siege: Fringe Science and the 104th Congress,” a report to the Democratic Caucus of the Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives, 23 October 1996.

53. Interview with Jennifer Morgan. The car and oil companies refused to sign onto the Majority Report to the President by the Policy Dialogue Advisory Committee to Recommend Options for Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Personal Motor Vehicles, October 1995.

54. The poorer countries of the Southern Hemisphere do not want to see their growth constrained by higher energy prices and tend to be more concerned with local environmental issues such as desertification. See Paterson, “IR Theory.”

55. Earth Negotiations Bulletin 12, no. 27 (11 March 1996): 19.

56. IPCC, Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Geneva: United Nations and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

57. The IPCC process cannot, of course, be considered entirely objective and free of politics. See Sonja A. Boehmer-Christiansen, “The International Research Enterprise and Global Environmental Change,” in The Environment and International Relations, ed. John Vogler and Mark F. Imber (London: Routledge, 1996): 170-92; and Paterson, “IR Theory.”

58. For a more detailed discussion of the industry associations, see David L. Levy, “Business and International Environmental Treaties: Ozone Depletion and Climate Change,”California Management Review 39, no. 3 (1997): 54-71.

59. Timothy E. Wirth, Statement by Timothy E. Wirth, Under Secretary for Global Affairs, on Behalf of the United States of America, at Convention on Climate Change, Second Conference of the Parties, July 17 (Geneva: United States Mission, Office of Public Affairs, 1996).

60. On 24 June 1997, ten CEOs of transnational corporations, mostly members of the WBCSD, met with fifteen high-level representatives of government, including three heads of state, the secretary general of the UN, the administrator of UNDP, and the UN under secretary general responsible for presiding over the UN Commission on Sustainable Development to establish terms of reference for business sector participation in the policy-setting process of the UN and partnering in the uses of UN development assistance funds (source: letter from David Korten, http://iisd1.iisd.ca/pcdf).

61. Newell emphasizes how the centrality of cheap energy to the process of capital accumulation reinforces the structural power of the oil and coal industries. Peter Newell, The International Politics of Global Warming: A Non Governmental Account (Ph.D. thesis, University of Keele, England, 1997). For a comprehensive historical account of the strategic importance of oil, see Daniel Yergin, The Prize (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

62. Mark Mansley and The Delphi Group, Long Term Financial Risks to the Carbon Fuel Industry from Climate Change (London: The Delphi Group, 1995).

63. WEFA Group and H. Zinder & Associates, A Review of the Economic Impacts of AOSIS-Type Proposals to Limit Carbon Dioxide Emissions (prepared for Global Climate Coalition) (Eddystone, PA: WEFA Group, 1996).

64. See Korten, When Corporations Rule the World; Schmidt, “The New World Order, Incorporated.”

65. Phyllis Bennis, Calling the Shots (New York: Interlink Publishing, 1996).

66. JUSCANZ comprises Japan, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand.

67. Lester Brown et al., State of the World 1996 (Washington, DC: Norton/Worldwatch Institute, 1996).

68. Sonja A. Boehmer-Christiansen, “Britain and the International Panel on Climate Change: The Impacts of Scientific Advice on Global Warming Part II: The Domestic Story of the British Response to Climate Change,”Environmental Politics 4, no. 2 (1995): 175-96.

69. Michael Grubb, “The Greenhouse Effect: Negotiating Targets,”International Affairs 66, no. 1 (1990): 67-89.

70. Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse.

71. Andrew Rowell, Green Backlash: Global Subversion of the Environmental Movement (London: Routledge, 1996).

72. Consumers Union, Captive Kids: A Report on Commercial Pressures on Kids at School (New York: Consumers Union, 1995).

73. Ibid., 45.

74. Ibid., 14.

75. Ozone Action, Distorting the Debate: A Case Study of Corporate Greenwashing (Washington, DC: Ozone Action, 1996).

76. Global Climate Coalition press release, 9 February 1995.

77. David W. Montgomery and Charles River Associates, Toward an Economically Rational Response to the Berlin Mandate, prepared on behalf of GCC (Washington, DC: Charles River Associates, July 1995); and WEFA Group and H. Zinder & Associates, A Review of the Economic Impacts of AOSIS-Type Proposals to Limit Carbon Dioxide Emissions.

78. R. J. Eaton, “Global Warming: Industry's Response,”Washington Post (17 July 1997): A19.

79. Accu-Weather, Changing Weather: Facts and Fallacies about Climate Change and Weather Extremes (State College, PA: Accu-Weather, Inc., 1994).

80. See Gelbspan, The Heat Is On; and Brown, “Environmental Science under Siege.”

81. ECO Newsletter, COP-2, Geneva, Issue No. 1 (8 July 1996). The authors responded that the changes were part of the normal peer review process.

82. Frederick Seitz, “A Major Deception on `Global Warming,' ”The Wall Street Journal (6 June 1996): A16.

83. William Stevens, “U.N. Climate Report Was Improperly Altered, Underplaying Uncertainties, Critics Say,”The New York Times (17 June 1996): B6.

84. “Statement by Timothy E. Wirth, Under Secretary for Global Affairs.”

85. Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse.

86. Stuart L. Hart and Gautam Ahuja, “Does It Pay to Be Green?”Business Strategy and the Environment 5 (1994): 30-7; Michael V. Russo and Paul A. Fouts, “A Resource-Based Perspective on Corporate Environmental Performance and Profitability,”Academy of Management Journal 40, no. 3 (1997): 534; and Bruce Smart, Beyond Compliance (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 1992). This “win-win” scenario has been challenged as an ideological construction that lacks convincing empirical support. See David L. Levy, “The Environmental Practices and Performance of Transnational Corporations,”Transnational Corporations 4, no. 1 (1995): 44-68; and Levy, “Environmental Management as Political Sustainability,”Organization and Environment 10, no. 2 (1997): 126-47.

87. See Frances Cairncross, Costing the Earth (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1991); and Schmidheiny, Changing Course.

88. Daniel J. Dudek, Emission Budgets: Creating Rewards, Lowering Costs and Ensuring Results (New York: Environmental Defense Fund, 1996).

89. Climate Change Action Plan (Washington, DC: U.S. White House, 1993).

90. Climate Wise Pamphlet (DOE/EE-0071, EPA 230-K-95-003) (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Energy, March 1996).

91. IPCC, Second Assessment Report, Working Group III, Summary for Policy Makers, 2.

92. Ibid., 22.

93. In those cases in which business has supported international environmental regulation, such as the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, this is due more to strategic positioning relative to competitors and national regulatory agencies than to any generalized preference for international action. See Richard E. Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Levy, “Business and International Environmental Treaties”; and Rowlands, The Politics of Global Atmospheric Change. Even then, capital relies primarily on national channels of influence. See Kathleen A. Getz, “Selecting Corporate Political Tactics,” in Corporate Political Agency, ed. Barry M. Mitnick (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993): 242-73.

94. See Hirst and Thompson, Globalization in Question.

Capital Contests: National and Transnational Channels of Corporate Influence on the Climate Change Negotiations

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