Legitimacy, Institutional Inertia, and Climate Change

The increasing impact of climate change on the environment has led to more efforts, programs and global actions to control these changes. In the meantime, some obstacles hinder the effectiveness of environmental measures and policies. Part of these obstacles is related to institutional inertia. In this chapter, the effects of legitimacy, as one of the mechanisms that create institutional inertia, on environmental performance have been investigated. The legitimacy of the state is an issue that has received less attention in climate change discussions. In this chapter, using a regression model, the effect of government legitimacy on environmental performance has been investigated based on the data of 171 countries. The results show that there is a direct relationship between state legitimacy and environmental performance. The results also showed that, if the state legitimacy is low or it is facing a crisis of legitimacy, this issue creates institutional inertia in the field of environmental policy. In turn, this issue will worsen the environmental performance.