Calibrating climate change policies: the causes and consequences of sustained under-reaction

ABSTRACT

We apply insights from the recent literature on disproportionate policy reactions to the case of climate change policy-making. We show when and why climate change exhibits features of a sustained under-reaction: Governments may react to concerns about climate change not through substantive change but by efforts to manage blame strategically. As long as they can avoid blame for potential negative policy outcomes policy-makers can act to deny problems, or implement only small-scale or symbolic reforms. While this pattern may change as climate change problems worsen and public recognition of the issue and what can be done about it alters, opportunities to manage blame will still exist. Governments will only revert to more substantive interventions when attempts to fatalistically frame the problem as unavoidable fail in the face of increased public visibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Disproportionate policy-making
• climate change
• policy failure
• policy bubbles
• blame avoidance

Acknowledgement

Achim Kemmerling would like to thank the support by the European Union’s 7th Framework Project GR:EEN – Europe in a multipolar world and by the Thyssen Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Michael Howlett is Burnaby Mountain Chair in the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University and Yong Pung How Chair Professor in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He specializes in public policy analysis, political economy, and resource and environmental policy. His articles have been published in numerous professional journals in Canada, the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Australia and New Zealand. He is the current chair of Research Committee 30 (Comparative Public Policy) of the International Political Science Association and sits on the organizing committee of the International Conference on Public Policy.

Achim Kemmerling is Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Department of Public Policy, Central European University Budapest where he teaches courses on methodology, political economy and development. He has published in academic journals of various disciplines (e.g. World Development, Journal of Common Market Studies, Public Choice) on issues of tax policy, social and labor market policies, and fiscal federalism. His monograph Taxing the Working Poor (Edward Elgar 2009) deals with the political and economic tradeoffs between redistribution and job incentives for poor workers. He has worked as a consultant to the German Parliament, the German Society for Technical Cooperation (former GTZ, now GIZ), the Open Society Foundation and the European Investment Bank. Currently, he is writing on a book about the notion of human progress.

ORCID

Michael Howlett http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4689-740X

Achim Kemmerling http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1001-4102

Notes

1. This is where problems of collective action become a ‘theme’ in legitimizing the unavoidability of problem. This is not to say that problems of collective are not real, but that they can be arguments for governments to become either inactive, or choose certain types of action, say mitigation over adaption. Sometimes they become strategic weapons even in those cases where they seem to have the least bite. For instance, it is remarkable that dominant countries such as the U.S. would refer to fears about economic competition, even though this type of country should face least problems in overcoming international problems of collective action according to classic regime theory (but see Roberts 2011).