Abstract
With climate change and environmental problems becoming arguably the biggest threat facing humanity, a compelling need has emerged for both public and private environmental regulation. Groups directly affected by these regulations are heavily involved in the policy making, turning the environmental policy into a fertile ground for special interests politics or simply lobbying. This thesis aims at studying the competition between lobbies around environmental policy and its impacts on social welfare. We therefore provide three theoretical chapters, each adopting a quite different approach to model the interactions between green and industrial lobbies. The first chapter is motivated by the growing evidence that lobbies, and in particular environmental groups, are investing in public persuasion (i.e., indirect lobbying), to influence the environmental awareness of the general public, which is considered very important in the environmental policy making in democracies. We therefore develop a micro-founded model to study the impact of direct (i.e., providing political contributions to policy-makers) and indirect lobbying on the stringency of the environmental policy. Our results show a more aggressive behavior in the public persuasion competition for the green lobby. Moreover, an increase in the power of the green lobby always results in a more stringent environmental policy while the opposite does not always hold for the industrial lobby. The second chapter attempts to link both realms of environmental regulation: private and public politics, considering a green NGO and a polluting firm competing on these two levels. We particularly analyse the fundraising strategies of the green NGO, modeled as a private politics competition between the firm and the NGO, in order to finance its public politics/lobbying expenditures. Our results show that the intensity of competition in the public politics between the two lobbies depend on the relationship between the curvatures of the damage and the benefit functions from polluting emissions. However, in the private politics competition, the NGO always shows a more aggressive behavior. Moreover, the environmental policy becomes always more stringent as the NGO becomes more efficient in collecting funds. Finally, the third chapter investigates whether the competition between green and industrial lobbies is profitable from a social welfare perspective. To do so, we develop a reciprocal-market model with two countries, linked by trade and transboundary pollution. Green and industrial lobbies compete over the stringency of the environmental policy by directly lobbing the policy maker in each country. Our results show that allowing national and/or international lobbying could be Pareto-improving, under certain conditions on the strengths of the lobbies. This result is of particular interest since it shows that competition between lobbies can mimic the effect of International or Regional Environmental Agreements (IEA and REA),especially in a context where environmental policy coordination among sovereign countries is becoming increasingly difficult.