Political Regime and Governance on climate Change. Evidence from the Western Balkan Economies

The political environment plays a crucial role in steering societies to address the challenges posed by global warming and contributing to global initiatives toward a resilient and environmentally sustainable future. Political regimes in different places in the democracy-authoritarianism spectrum show varying degrees of effort to reduce their nation's respective carbon emissions. This paper aims to determine the role of political regimes along with governance dimensions in climate change mitigation. The analysis uses the V-Dem database and the World Governance Indicators (WGI) to conceptualise and measure each country's political system and its institutional quality of governance, respectively. The empirical model uses a panel database of the variables of interest for the years 1998-2022 regarding the Western Balkan (WB) economies. The target group of countries sparks our interest due to their significant challenges, such as widespread pollution, political regime changes, and severe governance problems. Furthermore, integrating the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, which suggests a complex relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability, the analysis provides evidence that the relationship between CO₂ emissions and GDP per capita follows a quadratic trend, suggesting that as GDP per capita increases, the associated CO₂ emissions may not change linearly but instead follow a parabolic pattern. WB countries also share the ambition of EU accession and hold the EU candidate status. To the extent these states manage to overcome their institutional issues, they will be in the position to implement the EU environmental acquis efficiently, which will amount to a critical step in the region's environmental health. Policymakers and scholars of the field will benefit from this paper since it determines the impact of political systems precisely matched with empirical results to derive conclusive answers regarding the political systems and climate change debate.