Dr. Llewelyn Hughes is Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University (ANU). His research focuses on the international and comparative political economy of energy markets, and the political economy of climate change. Dr. Hughes is author of Globalizing Oil: Firms and Oil Market Governance in France, Japan, and the United States, published by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Hughes received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and holds a Masters degree from the Graduate School of Law and Politics at the University of Tokyo. Prior to his current position Dr. Hughes was affiliated with the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington D.C., and with the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is trained as a simultaneous and consecutive interpreter in the Japanese language, and is a citizen of Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain.
Award Information
This project focuses on business-government relations and the politics of climate change. I am interested in answering two questions: i) how do differences in the characteristics of industries and firms shape the types of support they seek from national governments in Japan and elsewhere; ii) how does this influence the types of strategies governments adopt in promoting green growth? Answering these questions matters both for policy and theory. In policy terms, the amount of money spent by the Japanese, U.S., Chinese, South Korea, and other governments on mitigating climate change is enormous. These policies are designed not only to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic increases in temperature, but also to promote growth, employment, and industrial competitiveness. Managing the climate, in other words, is a form of industrial policy. The question of how governments and firms are negotiating policies in order to capture the benefits of green growth, given a range of domestic and international constraints, is therefore crucial for the ability of governments and firms in the advanced industrialized states to increase growth and profits. In terms of theory, the most common approach used to account for the interests of industries and firms holds that forms of political organization (industry versus sector), as well as the strategies firms adopt towards government regulation (protection versus liberalization), are determined by underlying factor endowments, such as relative levels of capital and labor. Yet the politics of climate change show this approach is too abstract to capture the interests and strategies of business and governments, because it ignores the new constraints and opportunities facing firms, and does not distinguish between the policy instruments available to governments. To take one example, industry demands for government support are likely to be affected not only by relative levels of capital and labor, for example, but also by the ways in which production has been restructured globally. I intend to explore these question through a cross-national, cross-sectoral study of green growth strategies. This choice reflects variation in the internationalization and fragmentation of supply chains on the one hand, and the ongoing importance of national governments as the locus of firms' lobbying activities, on the other. I tentatively intend to focus on the auto, solar, and wind-power industries because they have different values across the degree of industry internationalization and fragmentation. Cross-nationally, the study focuses on green growth strategies in Japan and Germany, with an out of sample study of industry strategies in the United States. Japan and Germany are useful comparative cases because they have firms that are active in the industries under consideration, governments of both countries are active in the green growth area, and both markets are comparatively close in size in terms of GDP. The United States is a useful extension because it allows me to examine how differences in market size interact with industry characteristics to affect industry strategies.