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Building on the growing body of literature on barriers to adaptation to climate change, this chapter focuses on ‘lock-ins’ as a particular conceptual approach to understanding path dependencies and rigidities in policy processes with a particular relevance to the field. The central research questions are, first, how can lock-ins be conceptualised, what indicators might identify them, and how can they be detected and described? Second, we seek to understand the emergence of lock-ins in climate adaptation policies by reference to central mechanisms originating from: (1) knowledge, discourses, and expertise; (2) physical infrastructures; (3) institutions and past policy tools; and (4) actors and their respective mental frames. Third, in cases where they are considered harmful, how can lock-ins be overcome or abated? It is the central thrust of this chapter to advance an in-depth and conceptually rich explanatory approach to climate adaptation governance and its obstacles. Empirical material, including evidence from pre-existing studies, will support the argumentation essentially by way of illustration.
Climate change governance is in a state of enormous flux. New and more dynamic forms of governing are appearing around the international climate regime centred on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). They appear to be emerging spontaneously from the bottom up, producing a more dispersed pattern of governing, which Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom famously described as 'polycentric'. This book brings together contributions from some of the world's foremost experts to provide the first systematic test of the ability of polycentric thinking to explain and enhance societal attempts to govern climate change. It is ideal for researchers in public policy, international relations, environmental science, environmental management, politics, law and public administration. It will also be useful on advanced courses in climate policy and governance, and for practitioners seeking incisive summaries of developments in particular sub-areas and sectors. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The 2015 Paris Agreement signals a new approach to global climate governance, in not only following a “pledge-and-review” approach to national action, but also in supporting climate action by non-state actors. This chapter examines how far this new approach can be deemed to be experimentalist by focusing on four elements drawn from the global experimentalist governance literature, namely: the setting of framework goals and metrics in an open, participatory process involving a broad group of stakeholders; decentralised implementation; distributed monitoring and reporting; and ongoing evaluation and revision of the goals and metrics in the light of experience. It concludes that the post-Paris climate governance architecture does display some of these elements. However, it suggests that this may mean either that climate governance eventually starts to resemble global experimentalist governance, or that the latter represents a type of lowest-common-denominator governance, where the outcomes are largely dependent on what nation states and non-state actors are willing to pledge. This finding calls for more attention to be paid to: the potential and underlying premises of the post-Paris model; power dynamics; the prevailing ontology (top-down or bottom-up); and the role of coordination.
The European Union (EU) has emerged as a leading governing body in the international struggle to govern climate change. The transformation that has occurred in its policies and institutions has profoundly affected climate change politics at the international level and within its 27 Member States. But how has this been achieved when the EU comprises so many levels of governance, when political leadership in Europe is so dispersed and the policy choices are especially difficult? Drawing on a variety of detailed case studies spanning the interlinked challenges of mitigation and adaptation, this volume offers an unrivalled account of how different actors wrestled with the complex governance dilemmas associated with climate policy making. Opening up the EU's inner workings to non-specialists, it provides a perspective on the way that the EU governs, as well as exploring its ability to maintain a leading position in international climate change politics.
By
Andrew Jordan, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom,
Dave Huitema, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands,
Harro van Asselt, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Introduction: climate change enters the political mainstream
In recent years, climate change has shifted from being a marginal political issue to one that has – depending on one's point of view – potentially transformative and/or calamitous consequences for virtually all policy areas. The change in its political status has been remarkably rapid but also substantial. So when the global economy slipped into a deep recession in the late 2000s, climate change remained alongside economic growth, employment and crime as a key political issue in the majority of industrialised states. As part of this political transformation, new actors have entered the debate. Whereas before, climate change had mainly preoccupied environmental ministries and their associated policy networks, it now attracts the sustained attention of political core executives: prime ministers, presidents and their inner cabinets. Since 2005, climate change has been a standing item at all G8 summits, and has been regularly debated at United Nations (UN) General Assembly sessions and in countless European Council meetings comprising the Heads of State of the European Union (EU). The issue of climate change has, in short, entered the political mainstream.
Having struggled for years to persuade politicians to take the issue seriously, environmental actors are now finding themselves under intense pressure to deliver policy solutions that are sufficiently coordinated with their counterparts in ‘non-’ environmental sectors such as energy, transport and agriculture.
By
Andrew Jordan, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom,
Dave Huitema, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands,
Harro van Asselt, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands,
Tim Rayner, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom,
Frans Berkhout, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
[I]f you study the history of political decisions about the environment … you find that there are no New Jerusalems at the end of [the] road …. Each political decision implants a choice into our system of social values; this imperceptibly changes the system of values, and this in turn affects the next choice
(Ashby 1978: 78).
Introduction
In his 1978 book, Reconciling Man with the Environment, Eric Ashby sought to address what he considered to be one of the most critical issues of his time: the protection of the environment. He believed that by continually making difficult policy choices and confronting the associated dilemmas, humans would gradually arrive at a fuller understanding of their environment and thus a more anticipatory approach to managing it. This reconciliation, he contended, would be achieved not by ‘heroic long-term megadecisions’ but by ‘the cumulative effect of wise medium-term microdecisions, each … clarifying the shape of the decision that needs to follow’ (Ashby 1978: 87).
Ashby was one of those rare individuals in public life who somehow managed to combine a lifelong career as a scientist (he was, among other things, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society), with equally important roles in policy making. This sensitised him to the realpolitik of decision making.