Employer associations: Climate change,power and politics

Abstract

How employer associations deploy their power resources to frame and pursue members’ interests in the making of public policy is of marked importance in many economies. This is strikingly so in Australia where employer associations have, over a 30-year period, shaped a critically important industrial relations policy space – climate change. In exploring this issue, in this article the authors combine studies from industrial relations and political science to show that, despite suggestions of employer association decline, these organisations exert influence over policymaking in both ‘noisy’ and ‘quiet’ ways. These forms of influence can be understood as linked to specific sources of power – structural, associational, institutional, societal – as employer associations define and pursue members’ interests.