1.1 Introduction

The impacts of climate change are complex, manifold, and cascading. Scientific research has unequivocally demonstrated that changes in the climate have been driven by human activity – including industrialization, changing land use, and the movement of people around the planet. The warming caused by humans is already having visible effects. The earth is getting hotter, resulting in more frequent and/or intense extreme weather events, including heatwaves, hurricanes, and cyclones; rainfall patterns are changing, resulting in unprecedented flooding in some places and prolonged droughts in others; sea levels are rising; oceans are acidifying; glaciers and ice sheets are melting; and deserts are spreading.

These changes brought about by humans have a devastating impact not only on the natural world and its biodiversity but also on the quality of human life. They have effects on crop growth and marine ecosystems, leading to food insecurity; they push people to leave their homes and communities; and they cause devastating damage to infrastructure, including housing and transport. Climatic changes have also created less visible impacts: They shape the contours of human health, including mental health, and they threaten countless communities’ cultural identities, heritage, and spiritual connection to their environment. The resources that countries devote to recovering from climate change losses and damages – rebuilding after extreme weather events and transforming the way they do things – mean that they have less money available to invest in education, health, and development more generally.

The 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which assesses the impacts of climate change and reviews vulnerabilities, capacities, and limits of natural and human systems to adapt, was referred to as an “atlas of human suffering” by UN Secretary-General António Guterres (United Nations 2022). The IPCC report suggests that between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people across West, Central, and East Africa, South Asia, Central and South America, Small Island Developing States (SIDS), and the Arctic are considered highly vulnerable to climate change. The report also makes clear that responding to climate change impacts will be increasingly difficult or even impossible as global warming progresses. The current rise in temperature of 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels has already caused losses and damages to both nature and people despite efforts to adapt. Near-term action limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius would reduce future losses and damages but would not be able to eliminate them all. Every small increase in warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius will result in an increased risk of severe impacts, and some risks will be irreversible and existential.

The changing climate is an issue of global significance with far-reaching consequences for the life chances of populations around the world. We have long known that there are serious distributional impacts of climate change internationally: Poor countries will suffer, and are already suffering, the bulk of the damages (Mendelsohn et al. Reference Mendelsohn, Dinar and Williams2006). There have been moves within the international climate change regime to address these injustices. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), established in 1992, and then the Kyoto Protocol placed responsibility for addressing climate change on the shoulders of the industrialized world. Developed states that have historically benefitted from processes of industrialization have contributed significantly to global stocks of greenhouse gases (GHGs). However, the Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, recognizes that many developing countries are now becoming major contributors to climate change as well. China has become the largest contemporary single emitter of GHGs; Brazil, India, and Indonesia have also become significant emitters.

While the first decade of the UN climate regime was devoted almost entirely to discussions about the mitigation – or reduction – of GHG emissions, it became clear in the 2000s that efforts would not go far enough or quickly enough to prevent certain climate change-related consequences. Some countries began to push for another stream of work within the climate regime to address adaptation. Climate change adaptation refers to the alteration of behaviors, systems, and – in some cases – ways of life in order to protect humans, economies, and the environment from the impacts of climate change. Policy and scientific understanding of adaptation measures have advanced significantly over the last fifteen years. Yet in the early 2010s, it became apparent that there would be limits to adaptation, resulting in wide-ranging losses. The idea that there would be impacts of climate change that could not be either adapted to or prevented began to receive greater attention within the UNFCCC process.

Known as “Loss and Damage” within the UNFCCC, the topic has proven to be highly contentious.Footnote ¹ In many ways, the loss and damage issue has become a crucible for the mistrust that has emerged between and within developed and developing countries within the UNFCCC, particularly since the failure to reach a broad-based agreement at the fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen in 2009. Despite the widely celebrated adoption of the Paris Agreement, the legacy of a persistent gridlock which increasingly characterized the Kyoto-to-Paris period, and which frequently led to lowest common denominator solutions, has echoes in the politics of loss and damage within the UNFCCC (Hale et al. Reference Hale, Held and Young2013). For many years developed countries were reluctant to engage on loss and damage, particularly given its association among some stakeholders and audiences with the idea that compensation is an appropriate solution. Even with the establishment of bodies to address the loss and damage issue at the global level, including the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage and its Executive Committee (WIM ExCom) and other bodies such as the Task Force on Displacement, the levels of ambition to meet the challenges of loss and damage from climate change were low and progress was slow. With the establishment of the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage (SNLD) in 2019 and the establishment of a Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage in 2023, this has shifted. There is now a pressing need for these institutions to understand how states frame loss and damage and what their needs are in order to effectively manage climate risks and address loss and damage.

It is important to take stock of the growing efforts at the local, national, and regional levels to address the threat that loss and damage poses. This book focuses on these national actors, decision-making processes, and outcomes, with international developments as a crucial backdrop. Together, the following chapters seek to understand the commonalities and the differences in the adoption of domestic policies and programs to address climate change loss and damage: What makes a certain country take a particular path of action? Each of the chapters employs a common theoretical framework that provides leverage in addressing this question but which also accommodates the complexity and diversity across our cases.

Our focus in this book is on the national level – a governance scale we see as critical in allowing human societies to effectively navigate the loss and damage that climate change is already causing. While most political scientists and legal scholars who have studied loss and damage have done so with a focus on international political dynamics and governance processes, we follow Harrison and Sundstrom (Reference Harrison and Sundstrom2010, p. 2) in noting that decisions about whether or not to enact international agreements and to adopt national policies are “in the end domestic political decisions, taking in the context of homegrown interests, national discourses, and domestic political institutions.”

By focusing on loss and damage policymaking at the national level, we seek to contribute not only to the now vibrant literature on loss and damage but also to the emerging field of comparative climate change governance and policymaking. In Reference Victor2011, Victor criticized the existing literature on climate governance for “black boxing” national policymaking processes. Yet over the last decade, we have seen the emergence of a vibrant set of scholarly debates about the role of domestic actors, processes, and institutions in shaping policy outcomes at the national level. Stokes (Reference Stokes2016, p. 960) notes that while climate change is often seen as a global collective action problem, “it is also a distributional challenge with implications for domestic politics.” Dubash (Reference Dubash2021, p. 1) suggests that since the adoption of the Paris Agreement “climate politics has become at least as much about understanding dynamics within nations as it is understanding the interaction between nations” (emphasis in the original).

Recent work in political science has centered the role of domestic institutions, actors, and political contexts in analyses of climate mitigation-related policies. Scholars have advanced explanations for why some countries undertake serious national action to reduce GHG emissions while others do nothing or very little. When explaining policy adoption, development, and implementation, scholars have examined the effects of a wide variety of factors, including, for example, the effects of regime type (Chesler et al. Reference Chesler, Javeline, Peh and Scogin2023); electoral institutions and backlash to climate policies (Finnegan Reference Finnegan2022; Stokes Reference Stokes2016); state capacity (Averchenkova et al. Reference Averchenkova, Fankhauser and Finnegan2021; Meckling & Nahm Reference Meckling and Nahm2018, Reference Meckling and Nahm2022); the design of decision-making structures and institutions (Dubash Reference Dubash2021; Mildenberger Reference Mildenberger2020, Reference Mildenberger2021); dynamics between the state, business interests, and/or labor organizations (Finnegan Reference Finnegan2022; Hochstetler & Kostka Reference Hochstetler and Kostka2015; Mildenberger Reference Mildenberger2020); the spread of global anti-fossil fuel norms (Green Reference Green2018); the long temporal horizons of climate policymaking (Finnegan Reference Finnegan2022); and the interplay between governance and climate change litigation (Setzer & Vanhala Reference Setzer and Vanhala2019). What ties much of this work together is its dominant focus on the policy and politics of decarbonization (for exceptions see Eriksen et al. Reference Eriksen, Nightingale and Eakin2015; Javeline Reference Javeline2014; Vanhala et al. Reference Vanhala, Robertson and Calliari2021).

Our research surveys the key explanations for climate policy outcomes in the area of climate change mitigation and then turns attention to an empirically grounded study of loss and damage governance at the national level. We find that some countries have been more proactive in engaging with the loss and damage issue than others and some efforts have been more promising. By identifying where there has been engagement and successes, this book hopes to map existing policy practices and act as a blueprint for how to build on those achievements. Yet in prioritizing an empirically driven approach we heed calls to modulate the development of ahistorical, one-size-fits-all accounts of “best practice” that fail to be attuned to country-specific contexts (Dubash Reference Dubash2021; Konisky Reference Konisky2023). By advancing our understanding of what works and what does not in specific places at certain times, we seek to indicate a route to more effective governance of climate change loss and damage that is widely applicable but also non-prescriptive.

1.2 What Is Climate Change Loss and Damage?

The term “climate change loss and damage” originated in the UN climate negotiations to refer broadly to the negative impacts of climate change that occur when there have been insufficient or unsuccessful efforts to prevent or adapt to planetary warming. Yet this simple definition masks the complexity and ambiguity around the issue of what loss and damage is, in political, material, technical, embodied, and affective forms. In this introductory chapter, we map the international landscape within which the concept of loss and damage emerged. Our focus for the remainder of the book, however, is squarely on the domestic politics of loss and damage.

Political contestation has to date prevented the adoption of an official definition of what “loss and damage” signifies under the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. However, a growing informal consensus has emerged around what the term means (and does not mean), with some of these understandings also being legally embedded into international law. Loss and damage is understood to result from climate change-associated extreme weather events, like heatwaves, storm surges, cyclones, and droughts, and slow onset events, including sea-level rise, desertification, and rising temperatures. A distinction is also made between two types of negative impacts that can materialize: economic losses (e.g., loss of infrastructure, agricultural productivity, or impacts on the tourism sector) and what have been coined “noneconomic losses” (NELs). NELs are losses of those things that are not commonly traded in markets but bear high relevance for those affected, for example, the loss of life, the loss of biodiversity, and the loss of cultural heritage.

In terms of approaches for responding to loss and damage, Article 8 of the Paris Agreement enshrines “the importance of averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage and the role of sustainable development in reducing the risk of loss and damage.” The article thus draws attention to three key sets of actions that need to be carried out to respond comprehensively to loss and damage: mitigation, to ensure impacts are avoided in the first place; adaptation, to minimize impacts once they materialize; and implementation of measures to address residual impacts. Paragraph 8(4) articulates a “non-exhaustive” list of areas for cooperation among Parties (those states that have signed up to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement): early warning systems; emergency preparedness; slow onset events; events that may involve irreversible and permanent loss and damage; comprehensive risk assessment and management; risk insurance facilities, climate risk pooling and other insurance solutions; NELs; and resilience of communities, livelihoods, and ecosystems. At the same time, the decision accompanying the Paris Agreement clarifies that Article 8 does not involve or provide a basis for any compensation claim and thus excludes compensatory measures from the suite of responses for dealing with unavoided or unavoidable loss and damage.

The ambiguity-by-design around what the problem is and how it can be tackled has prompted political research to interrogate the different meanings that stakeholders involved in the UNFCCC process – including states, academics, and practitioners – attach to loss and damage. For instance, Boyd et al. (Reference Boyd, James, Jones, Young and Otto2017) identified four distinct framings ranging from loss and damage: (a) essentially equivalent to adaptation; (b) a case for comprehensive risk management; (c) something beyond adaptation; and (d) an existential and irreversible threat. While these framings are not mutually exclusive, they each suggest a different response to loss and damage. The closer to (a), the more prevention is emphasized and the more existing institutions focusing on mitigation and adaptation are seen as adequate to deal with loss and damage. The closer to (d), the more emphasis is placed on international liability and compensation, irreversibility of ex post loss, and the necessity of new institutional arrangements separate from adaptation and mitigation.

Vanhala and Hestbaek (Reference Vanhala and Hestbaek2016) have traced the use of two competing framings in UNFCCC negotiations over time – one calling for liability and compensation and the other emphasizing risk management and insurance – and how they were eventually replaced by the broader term “loss and damage.” They show how the emergence of this overarching umbrella frame allowed parties to attach different meanings to loss and damage and ultimately facilitated the adoption of the WIM in 2013. However, the underlying conflict between the two original framings has not yet been resolved, a point also raised by Calliari (Reference Calliari2016) in her discourse analysis of Parties’ positions up to the adoption of the Paris Agreement.

In parallel – and increasingly in support of the negotiations – the scientific community has provided mounting evidence of climate change impacts and risks, including the way they are leading to irreversible and existential impacts on vulnerable communities across the globe (Mechler et al. Reference Mechler, Singh, Ebi and Revi2020). The IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C crystallized emerging scientific consensus by assessing for the first time the evidence relating to loss and damage as residual risk (IPCC 2022b). It also introduced in its glossary a distinction between “Loss and Damage” to refer to the political debate under the UNFCCC following the establishment of the WIM in 2013 and “losses and damages” to indicate “harm from (observed) impacts and (projected) risks” (IPCC 2022a, p. 170) which “can be economic or noneconomic” (IPCC 2022a, p. 171).

The 2022 IPCC Working Group II contribution to AR6 represented a new and deeper level of engagement with the concept. For the first time, the expression “losses and damages” made it into the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), which is the document that is negotiated line by line by governments to synthetize the most politically relevant conclusions of the report (Hartz Reference Hartz2023). The inclusion of language on “losses and damages” was not uncontroversial: The US delegation, for instance, sought to replace the term “losses and damages” with the term “impacts” (Farand & Galey Reference Farand and Galey2022). The SPM importantly notes that climate change, through the interaction of hazards (i.e., physical events, such as a cyclone or rising sea levels), exposure (the fact that a receptor – an individual, a household, a community, an ecosystem, etc. – is located where the hazardous event takes place), and vulnerability (the characteristics of the receptor that makes it susceptible to harm), generates impacts and risks that can surpass limits to adaptation and result in losses and damages. It thus makes clear that adjusting to climate change and its effects is not always an option for human and natural systems and that losses and damages are already materializing and will do so increasingly in the future.

The concept of “limits to adaptation” is key to understanding loss and damage. The IPCC (2014, p. 907) defines “limits to adaptation” as those points at which “an actor’s objectives (or system needs) cannot be secured from intolerable risks through adaptive actions.” It further distinguishes between hard limits, where no adaptive actions are possible to avoid intolerable risks, and soft limits, where options might exist but are not available. The IPCC AR6 provides evidence of limits to adaptation being observed for terrestrial and aquatic species and ecosystems and for some human systems in SIDS and mountain regions. It indicates that as warming increases, limits will be reached in more systems, including coastal communities, and in regard to water security, agricultural production, and human health (Pörtner et al. Reference Pörtner, Roberts, Adams, Zaiton Ibrahim, Pörtner, Roberts, Tignor and Rama2022).

The IPCC also notes that barriers to accessing financial capital and the limited effectiveness or quality of institutions, governance, and policies are the most significant factors in human systems that constrain adaptation and thus drive higher levels of loss and damage. Loss and damage is not comprehensively addressed by current financial, governance, and institutional arrangements, particularly in vulnerable developing countries. A desire to advance understanding of how and why governance at the national level can be enhanced to better grapple with existing and forthcoming challenges related to climate change loss and damage is one of the core motivations underpinning this book.

1.3 A Political Science of Climate Change Loss and Damage and the “National Turn”

While many of the questions about loss and damage are scientific in nature – where climate change risks are likely to materialize, for example, or their link to anthropogenic warming – there are also pressing questions of direct relevance to the discipline of political science. These include questions about political, social, and economic behavior; about the institutions that facilitate or act as a barrier to desirable behaviors; and about the norms that shape these institutions. There are also questions around why some people, livelihoods, seas, territories, infrastructures, and ecosystems are protected whereas others are sacrificed or overlooked; why some responses to losses are seen as more urgent than others; and how we can account for variations in the amount, nature, and sources of finance and other resources to respond to loss and damage.

While scholars in geography, anthropology, economics, and the interdisciplinary environmental social sciences have begun to turn their attention to loss and damage, the field of political science has only recently started to engage with this novel area of climate research. Yet the discipline’s various potential contributions are crucial to a fuller and more nuanced understanding of a complex issue. Questions about how best to address climate change loss and damage are fundamentally political: They imply distributional outcomes and derive from decision-making processes. Climate change policy in this area will shape what kinds of domestic resources, institutions, and identities are implicated in the ways in which climate hazards are anticipated, navigated, and recovered from (or not). Scholars have already noted that climate change adaptation – far from being a neutral, technical, and managerial process – is based on contestation of what counts as “adaptive” for different groups, implies differentiated outcomes in terms of vulnerability and adaptive capacity, and is shaped by social identity (Barnett et al. Reference Barnett, Graham, Quinn, Adger and Butler2021; Eriksen et al. Reference Eriksen, Nightingale and Eakin2015; Javeline Reference Javeline2014). We suggest that these considerations – about distributive politics, institutions, and identities – are equally applicable in the loss and damage realm.

To date, the contributions of political scientists (and those in cognate fields) to the study of loss and damage governance have focused on philosophical foundations and on the international climate regime (McNamara & Jackson Reference McNamara and Jackson2019). This makes sense given the importance of international cooperation in addressing the issue of climate change generally and the global justice dimensions raised by the issue of loss and damage specifically. Existing research has documented the reluctance of rich countries to include loss and damage within the UNFCCC and noted that their efforts to ensure governance in this area is as “thin” as possible, with emerging bodies having limited mandates and budgets (Vanhala Reference Vanhala2023; Vanhala & Hestbaek Reference Vanhala and Hestbaek2016). Yet research on how domestic policymakers are navigating the politics of climate hazards, the limits to adaptation, and the resulting loss and damage is beginning to emerge. Research has already shown how ideas of loss and damage vary contextually and across scales of governance (Vanhala et al. Reference Vanhala, Robertson and Calliari2021), yet the reasons for this variation and its consequences have only just begun to be explored. We contend that the relative lacuna of political science research on loss and damage politics, policymaking, and governance represents a barrier to understanding and explaining the varying responses to climate change loss and damage. Enhancing our understanding will play a pivotal role in supporting policymakers to develop and implement more effective and legitimate policies on loss and damage.

Our understanding of how individual countries are grappling with policymaking to address climate change-related loss and damage at the national level remains much less developed (but for exceptions see Calliari & Vanhala Reference Calliari and Vanhala2022; Thomas & Benjamin Reference Thomas and Benjamin2018a, Reference Thomas and Benjamin2018b, Reference Thomas and Benjamin2020; Vanhala et al. Reference Vanhala, Robertson and Calliari2021; Wewerinke-Singh & Salili Reference Wewerinke-Singh and Salili2020). This book is part of a growing series of efforts that we have coined the “national turn” in research on loss and damage governance (Calliari & Vanhala Reference Calliari and Vanhala2022; Vanhala et al. Reference Vanhala, Robertson and Calliari2021). This term is not meant to suggest a lesser role for international, regional, and local actors or for a turn of analytical attention away from the international level. Rather, it is a call for expanding our horizons in terms of engagement with loss and damage governance as a phenomenon.

There are at least two reasons to focus on what is happening at the national level. First, the very nature of the Paris Agreement has put the nation state at the heart of action on climate change. As numerous scholars have observed, the way in which the Paris Agreement was structured – through a bottom-up pledge and review approach of Nationally Determined Contributions (Keohane & Oppenheimer Reference Keohane and Oppenheimer2016) – has bolstered the role of national governments in undertaking climate action. This is also true in the area of loss and damage governance at the UN level. In recent years, there have been efforts to establish national-level loss and damage focal points – representatives that would bridge national efforts and global governance. The negotiations at COP28 in 2023 operationalized the SNLD, a new body which is intended to provide technical assistance to countries. The discussions at COP27 also established and COP28 operationalized new funding arrangements, including a fund, for climate change loss and damage for the first time within the regime. The ability of countries to engage with these bodies, processes, and sources of finance will require effective national institutions with sufficient relevant knowledge and capacity.

Second, as many impacts of climate change are faced by people and ecosystems at the local level, a more granular scale of analysis is needed to understand how policymakers are grappling with these issues “on the ground.” Many of the effects of climate change are context specific, and the most immediate impacts are necessarily tackled locally, with costs borne by individual households, businesses, and local and national governments and often without support from international institutions. There are a growing number of calls for a “science of loss” that can support decision-makers to develop policies to address loss and damage in their particular context (Barnett et al. Reference Barnett, Tschakert, Head and Adger2016). Tschakert et al. (Reference Tschakert, Ellis, Anderson, Kelly and Obeng2019, p. 58) describe what a “situated and socially engaged science of loss arising from climate change” might look like: “[It] takes people’s lived experiences with risk and harm as its fundamental starting point. It foregrounds what losses occur, where and how, which of these losses matter most to people and why, and whether or not such losses are considered acceptable and potentially reversible.” Tschakert et al. (Reference Tschakert, Ellis, Anderson, Kelly and Obeng2019) also helpfully identify the risks of epistemological injustices in research on loss and damage, noting that some types of loss and damage can be more easily identified, measured, and potentially monetized while other important losses are often overlooked. Our objective with this book is to begin to articulate the pressure on national policymakers to deal with the loss and damage their country faces and the importance of the local context in understanding why policymaking succeeds or fails.

To address our overarching research question, the following case study chapters map the political, institutional, and ideational terrain within each country we explore. Our approach is self-consciously iterative and exploratory given the very nascent stages of this research agenda. First, we ascertain whether climate change loss and damage has been conceived of as a policy problem (explicitly or implicitly) in that country. If it has, we examine how policies or programs on climate change loss and damage have been put into place. If the country does not yet have loss and damage policies, we look at the dynamics behind efforts to develop them and why they failed, were abandoned, or failed to emerge in the first place. Second, we explain the differing outcomes of the policymaking process by looking at four factors: the country’s climate risk profile; its international engagement; its national institutional dynamics; the role of different types of ideas, including science, norms, and identities. Throughout the book, the international politics of loss and damage acts as an important backdrop. For many countries, loss and damage has pertained mainly to the international climate negotiations and implementation activities. In all our case studies, we interrogate the direction and degree of ongoing engagement between international developments and national politics, policies, and programs. In this way, we develop a rich and complex picture of how national loss and damage policymaking shapes and is shaped by both international and domestic structures, dynamics, and ideas.

1.4 Our Cases

This book delves into seven original empirical case studies to explain why and how some countries pursue the establishment of loss and damage policies and programs more proactively and explicitly than others. Our case study countries are in the Global South. We focus primarily on developing countries for two reasons. First, we think it is important to address the epistemic injustice that currently exists in our understanding of climate policy processes. We believe there is a need for a deeper understanding of how loss and damage is conceptualized, managed, and responded to (or not) by policymakers in the countries that are most severely impacted by climate change. For instance, the Caribbean islands are grappling with higher-intensity hurricanes, more frequent droughts, and hotter temperatures. Low-lying nations like Tuvalu and Bangladesh are faced with several impacts of sea-level rise, including saltwater intrusion, coastal erosion, flooding, and inundation. Changing rainfall patterns, soil erosion, and extensive dry periods are hitting landlocked Ethiopia’s agricultural sector hard, contributing to changing migration patterns and threatening food security. Glacial retreat and desertification are lived realities in Peru and Chile, together with extreme events like floods, landslides, heatwaves, and droughts. Our cases thus cover a broad range of climate hazards and span a diversity of countries, from low-lying territories to mountainous nations.

Second, we want our case selection to reflect the prominent role several developing country coalitions have played in advancing the loss and damage agenda within the international climate negotiations. The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has been central in advocating for loss and damage solutions since the very inception of the UNFCCC. In this book, we focus on three of its members from the Caribbean and the Pacific regions: Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, and Tuvalu. Tackling loss and damage has also become a pressing issue for the least developed countries (LDCs), and we focus on three countries in this category across the African and the Asia-Pacific regions: Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Tuvalu (which has both SIDS and LDC status). Finally, and building on the work by Calliari and Ryder (Reference Calliari and Ryder2023), we note an increasing interest and engagement with loss and damage by a wider group of developing countries located in particular in the Latin American region. We draw attention to the emerging role of the Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean (AILAC) in loss and damage negotiations and focus on two of its members: Peru and Chile.

The countries in this book also represent different levels of socioeconomic development and thus have varying levels of capacity to respond to climate change. Antigua and Barbuda and The Bahamas are SIDS, which the UN recognizes as a distinct group of developing countries for the unique social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities they face given their small population size, remote geography, distance from international markets, and high reliance on natural resources (United Nations n.d.-a). Ethiopia and Bangladesh are part of the LDCs, a group of low-income countries that confront severe structural impediments to sustainable development, have low levels of human assets, and are highly vulnerable to economic and environmental shocks (United Nations n.d.-b). At the other end of the spectrum, Peru is an emerging economy, classified by the World Bank as an upper middle-income country, and Chile is a high-income economy (World Bank Group n.d.).

Studying loss and damage policymaking in SIDS represents to some extent an obvious choice. SIDS provide a “most likely case” for engagement with national loss and damage policymaking: They are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, have already faced significant loss and damage, and have been heavily engaged with global policy development on the issue. While SIDS have undoubtedly led the charge at the international level on loss and damage, LDCs soon became one of their strongest allies. Yet not all of them – and landlocked Ethiopia is an example – fit the classic mold of a country grappling with loss and damage, at least as historically framed around the impacts of sea-level rise and the threat of coastal erosion. This provides us with an opportunity to investigate the factors that have underpinned the shift to greater emphasis on adaptation and loss and damage in recent years. Finally, although AILAC is a relative newcomer to the loss and damage scene, it has become increasingly vocal in climate negotiations around matters relating to the SNLD and to funding arrangements for loss and damage. As such, AILAC members like Peru and Chile can help us better understand whether the growing emphasis on loss and damage at the international level has infused national governance and to what extent.

1.5 Our Findings: Key Themes

Our cases show that climate policymaking has grown in important respects across the developing world. Yet they clearly demonstrate the diversity of levels of engagement and approaches when it comes to responding to climate change losses and damages. We also find that existing explanations for the take-up of climate policy cannot be straightforwardly applied to understand the variation in engagement. Here we briefly touch on several key findings and the ways in which they advance our understanding of climate policy more generally. A key contribution we put forward is that the realm of ideas – both scientific knowledge and expertise and normative values related to the sets of behaviors and activities that are deemed appropriate for particular identities – plays a significant role in shaping engagement with loss and damage policymaking.

1.6 Plan of the Book

To allow for sufficient depth and richness within each case study, we use an overarching theoretical framework that allows not only for a deep analysis of the focus country but also for cross-cutting and comparative insights to emerge. Using this framework, each chapter looks at potential drivers of policy innovation and adoption as well as barriers to policy development. These include: (a) the nature of climate risks and impacts in each jurisdiction; (b) the role of international influence on domestic politics; (c) the institutions operating within each country; and (d) the ideational landscape in the country, including the role of science and knowledge, identity politics, and normative principles.

Chapter 2 gives a detailed overview of our theoretical framework. The chapter argues that existing theory about climate policy adoption has been overly focused on mitigation policies and centered on countries in the Global North. The chapter suggests an alternative approach focused on the outcome of interest – loss and damage policy development – requires a deep contextual understanding of a state’s climate policy engagement more generally, as well as a consideration of key factors such as the country’s levels of engagement with relevant international organizations working in the realm of loss and damage, the national institutional context, and the availability of policy-relevant knowledge. The chapter explains the abductive methodological approach which moves between existing theoretical propositions and data gathered through an analysis of law and policy and more than seventy-five interviews with stakeholders. Finally, the chapter highlights the epistemic value of our approach, which has involved partnering with researchers in the Global South to co-develop, undertake, and write up the research.

The first three empirical chapters explore SIDS, beginning in Chapter 3 with the paradigmatic case of Tuvalu by Elisa Calliari. In Tuvalu, the concept of loss and damage was introduced in official documentation in 2012 and yet has not been explicitly distinguished from policies and programs on adaptation. This chapter demonstrates that managing loss and damage constitutes a complex governance system with competencies and responsibilities diffused across different national actors and multiple governance scales. In Tuvalu the way loss and damage is being conceptualized by policymakers is closely tied to issues related to national sovereignty, a sense of place, human mobility, infrastructure investment, sovereignty, and the protection of the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone. The chapter finds that from the perspective of national stakeholders loss and damage requires a response at the regional and international levels. It also shows how ideas matter when devising responses to loss and damage: Sovereignty is framed not only in its physical dimension (e.g., authority over a territory) but also in a more immaterial way (e.g., maritime boundaries can be identified irrespective of the impacts of climate change on shorelines).

In Chapter 4, Lisa Vanhala and Michai Robertson explore knowledge politics on the frontlines of loss and damage in their research on Antigua and Barbuda. Antigua and Barbuda is one of the few countries that have legislation that specifically refers to “climate change loss and damage.” The country played a critical role in chairing AOSIS at COP27, which saw a major breakthrough in reaching agreement to establish a loss and damage fund. This chapter traces the role of international influences and national institutions in shaping loss and damage policies in Antigua and Barbuda and – drawing on research in science and technology studies – also sheds light on the role of knowledge and ideas in shaping levels of awareness of the impacts of climate change, and loss and damage, among policymakers. In doing so, the chapter reveals the knowledge politics that play out between different institutions and levels of governance in the country. It argues that there are conflicting incentives for deepening understanding of loss and damage in Antigua and Barbuda: Better understanding of future scenarios allows for better development planning but also highlights to large investors (often from the Global North) the scale and likelihood of climate risks which can then have the effect of raising fears about stranded assets and capital flight.

In Chapter 5, Lisa Vanhala, Adelle Thomas, and Latonya Williams examine climate change loss and damage politics in The Bahamas. The Bahamas was a world leader in terms of thinking about climate change impacts when it adopted a national policy on climate change adaptation back in 2005. This chapter shows that despite these pioneering efforts The Bahamas has subsequently focused on relatively conservative programs concerned with climate change mitigation rather than adaptation or loss and damage. In the late 2010s, the country experienced several storms, most notably Hurricane Dorian in 2019, which the authors suggest has had the effect of institutional disruption. The loss and damage associated with these weather events led to the establishment of the Ministry of Disaster Preparedness, Management and Reconstruction; the strengthening of the legal framework for environmental protection; and growing resonance among civil society organizations of the implications of climate change for their humanitarian and nature preservation work. The chapter finds that growing awareness among the political elite and the absence or presence of political will to confront emergent loss and damage were seen as critical among key stakeholders.

The next two empirical chapters explore the politics of loss and damage policy in two LDCs. In Chapter 6, Lisa Vanhala, Selam Kidane Abebe, and Asaye Ketema explore several paradoxes in the history of Ethiopia’s climate change policy development and locate the growing political awareness of the implications of climate change loss and damage. Often held up as a model of sustainable development despite its status as an LDC, Ethiopia has been known for its ambition to become a green economy leader. We argue that the trajectory and emphasis of global climate governance and commitment to a green economic development model shaped early domestic priorities in climate policy development. We also show that political awareness of loss and damage has increased as the government has navigated the consequences of climate change including droughts, floods, and landslides, and with the growing prominence of loss and damage within the UN. The chapter also finds that potential novel opportunities to draw on international sources of climate finance have been a driver of growing policy engagement. Finance is seen as critical for facilitating domestic climate change policy objectives, including building climate resilience, addressing displacement, and coping with losses across sectors including agriculture, transport, infrastructure, and economic development. We demonstrate that Ethiopia has played a role in highlighting the plight of landlocked countries in the face of loss and damage, thereby challenging a narrow international framing of loss and damage as an issue for SIDS.

In Chapter 7, Douwe van Schie, Md Fahad Hossain, and Nusrat Naushin look at a country, Bangladesh, that has extensive experience of climate-related disasters. Bangladesh has been a critical voice within the UNFCCC negotiations in highlighting the plight of the LDCs in the face of repeated and worsening climate disasters. Within this group of country case studies, Bangladesh is among the leaders in terms of incorporating considerations of loss and damage in policymaking across ministries. The case of Bangladesh highlights how the costs of climate change are currently borne by the national government, the private sector, and the affected households. Existing policies tend to focus on addressing economic losses and to overlook the significant NELs and climate-related internal displacement. Civil society organizations have played an important role in centering the loss and damage agenda and highlighting linkages between the domestic and international levels. They have also strongly advocated for developing a national compensation mechanism, but efforts on this have stalled in part because of differing views on whether the responsibility should lie at the national level. In contrast to the other case studies presented here, the chapter shows how Bangladesh has developed a relatively sophisticated collection of data on loss and damage as a result of its long experience with and high vulnerability to climate-related events. However, this data is collected in a piecemeal way and held in a siloed fashion, which means it is less useful for discussions within the relevant international forums.

In the next two chapters, Elisa Calliari and Monserrat Madariaga Gómez de Cuenca turn to two Latin American countries: Peru and Chile. Peru’s particular vulnerability to climate change is often stressed by the country within climate change negotiations. Yet it has not yet developed any explicit national policy on loss and damage. Chapter 8 identifies two key factors that contribute to Peru’s limited engagement: identity and policymaking politics. With respect to identity, the chapter argues that loss and damage is perceived as being inconsistent with Peru’s status as an upper middle-income country. National actors frame loss and damage as “money for the poor” and thus something concerning SIDS and LDCs. Engaging with the issue of compensation is also seen as potentially leading to liability claims and litigation against the government. The chapter also finds that Peru’s extractivist development and economic model limits the discussion and uptake of bold climate-related policies. With respect to politics, loss and damage is seen as a highly contentious issue. There is no reference to loss and damage in the country’s framework law because the proposal came from a minority left-wing party. The lack of support for loss and damage from civil society organizations further marginalized the topic during the policymaking process.

The cases of Peru and Chile together offer a paired comparison of emerging upper middle-income countries in Latin America. The study of Chile by Monserrat Madariaga Gómez de Cuenca in Chapter 9 tracks how the government has gone from a quiescent to a leadership role on loss and damage in the international negotiations after the country held the presidency of COP in 2019. This chapter shows the top-down way in which the topic has been brought into domestic politics and the ways in which, under certain conditions, international engagement can drive policymaking and, under other conditions, it can hinder the development of national responses. The chapter also reveals that the centralized institutional landscape and relative weakness of the Ministry of the Environment operates as a barrier to the development of more effective loss and damage governance. A key finding from this chapter is that the strong commitment to a development model prioritizing economic growth and extractivist industries leads to tensions within the processes that emphasize the negative impacts of climate change.

Chapter 10, the concluding chapter, draws together the insights from across the empirical case studies showcasing the diversity of outcomes on national policy action on loss and damage. The chapter identifies patterns across the case studies in terms of how policymakers and other stakeholders are approaching policy development, adoption, and innovation. The chapter finds that while all the countries in the study are experiencing climate-related impacts it is Antigua and Barbuda, Tuvalu, and Bangladesh that have moved the furthest in terms of policy development and innovation (though all face constraints and barriers as well). The chapter suggests that Ethiopia and The Bahamas have been slower to engage with the issue at the national level. The cases of the Latin American emerging economies, Peru and Chile, show the trajectory of two countries that have been relatively quiet on the issue at the international level but where policymakers have begun to understand the relevance of loss and damage for national policymaking.

This chapter identifies key cross-cutting findings including: a relative lack of attention to slow onset events in policy attention; an individual-level mechanism whereby civil servants from developing countries who are involved in loss and damage politics at the international level play a shuttling role by bringing knowledge, norms, and policy innovations between the UNFCCC and the national level; the centrality of financial incentives from international funds in focusing policy attention and driving policy development and a key role for ideational politics, including knowledge politics and ideological commitments to certain understandings of the “appropriate” national identity in relation to the concept of loss and damage and to development paradigms in accounting for policy engagement. The final section outlines a future research agenda on the “national turn” in the study of loss and damage governance.