Collaborative Research: The Effects of Organizational, World-System, and World Society Factors on Power Plants' Emissions

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

This project examines the effects of different international relationships on electric power plant CO2 emission rates and levels, by assessing how global and national social factors combine with the organizational characteristics of individual power plants to shape emission outcomes, and investigates how the conjoint effects of organizational and global factors on plants? carbon emissions may vary by the national regulatory systems that mediate them. This project addresses three research questions: Which sets of organizational, world-system, and world society structures determine fossil fuel power plants' CO2 emission rates? Which sets of these structures cause plants' emission rates to improve over time but their emission levels to worsen? And to what extent can the effects of organizational and global factors on plants' emission outcomes be explained by the regulatory systems of plants' host nations? To answer these questions, this project will use newly released data compiled by the Center for Global Development on the carbon emissions and structural characteristics of over 20,000 power plants throughout the world. It will employ multi-level regression techniques in conjunction with novel fuzzy set analytic (fsQCA) methods that can identify which combinations of factors are associated with an outcome. Consistent with the literature on structural configurations, we hypothesize that plants with high CO2 emission rates and levels share certain combinations of organizational, world-system, and world society structures and the effectiveness of national environmental policies will depend on plants' structural profiles. This project seeks to provide new information on the structural sources of CO2 emissions, and it will advance world-systems, world society, and organizational research on the environment that to date have been typically treated as competing rather than complementary perspectives. This project's findings will help to develop a sector-based strategy to mitigating CO2 emissions, and findings should help determine the standards met by power plants around the world. Findings may also be of interest to the electricity industry, as it may become possible to target future regulatory initiatives at specific subsets of power plants. Finally, project results could support industry initiatives to optimize self-regulation and environmental performance of member facilities. The project also includes training for a graduate student research assistant.