Climate Security in States’Strategic Planning: the Case of Russia and Norway

Abstract

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues on the world political agenda, with the largest economies setting carbon neutrality targets for 2050–2070. States’ positions in the world climate politics are largely determined by their ‘environmental power’, which has ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ aspects reflected in either promoting or intentionally decelerating the pace of climate change mitigation policies worldwide. In the literature, a widely acknowledged opinion can be found that the states which traditionally specialize in fossil fuels exports, having ‘negative environmental power’, are prone to adopt less ambitious climate policies than the energy-importing ones. This can be disproven by a number of empirical cases, one of which is that of Russia and Norway. We hypothesize that the key factor which influences the states’ climate policy ambition is the level of climate change securitization and the place which climate change occupies within the hierarchy of threats of the national security system. Having conducted quantitative content analysis of 726 strategic, doctrinal and conceptual documents and plans on the subject of security-related words, we have found that Russian and Norwegian hierarchies of threats coincide in all aspects but climate which is more securitized than foreign policy in Norway. Moreover, almost all analyzed spheres except for the military, law, state governance and foreign policy are more highly securitized in Norway. We further constructed a graph representing the dynamics of climate change securitization in climate-related documents which indicates that securitization fell during major political and economic events and crises and rose in the times of significant developments on the world climate agenda. We conclude that the subjective assessment of climate-related challenges and threats is one of the key factors that determine states’ climate policy ambition. However, this assessment is directly affected by objective factors which define the place climate change will occupy within the hierarchy of threats of the national security system. In the case of Russia and Norway, the principal of such factors is the respective states’ position within the structure of international relations.