Conference Agenda

This panel intends to engage the global environmental governance scholarship to discuss and debate on climate action policy discourses in Asia and the Southeast, while drawing lessons from international practices to better understand how those policies could be adapted in the Southeast Asian context.

The core research orientation integrates conceptual, explanatory, and prescriptive research to identify policy design lessons for accelerating effective decarbonisation and just transition pathways. The panel would involve both theoretical and empirical papers examining policy trajectories in addressing environmental and sustainability challenges, including climate adaptation or mitigation pathways at global, regional, and local geo-political settings.

We are also interested in papers that explores policy learning around technological innovations in climate adaptation or decarbonisation pathways. Similarly, we encourage studies employing comparative analysis or case-study approach to draw lessons on why some policies emerge resilient or durable in the long-term while some dies out before achieving any outcome.

The panel deliberations will feed into an ongoing collaborative research program spearheaded at the [Program’s name removed for anonymous review process], a policy think-tank housed at the [Affiliation removed for anonymous review process]. [Program’s name removed for anonymous review process]’s mission comprises strengthening policy design capacity in Southeast Asia to provide a deliberative arena and analytical insights through which countries in the South may realize their sustainability objectives, while facilitating greater interaction of ASEAN and Asian voices within global and transnational sustainability processes.

The roadmap towards a low-carbon climate resilient economy requires urgent action equipped with drastic and bold policy changes. Carbon pricing is a dominant policy instrument used by governments to generate economic incentives towards cleaner low emission technologies, while facilitating market innovation through private sector involvement.

Our paper aims to compare and analyse the policy trajectories of carbon pricing tools in diverse geo-political settings, considering both successful and failed cases. The paper would examine what factors entrenches certain policies to failed outcomes or a durable policy regime. What are the enabling factors or policy triggers, if any, that ensures a stable pathway towards effective, targeted outcomes? What are the roles of state, non-state actors and emerging market opportunities in facilitating durable pathways? The findings would inform prescriptive policy design toolkits to ensure durability of emission reduction policies and on a broader scale other climate policies.

The need to rapidly ratchet-up policy ambition for tackling sustainability transitions seems at odds with public policy literature’s assumption that policy change generally is incremental. Paradigmatic policy change, if it does occur, is driven by high-level ideational change like that from Keynesianism to Monetarism in the 1970s/80s. Yet, recent studies have argued that pathways to paradigmatic policy change need not be top-down per se but can be bottom-up, stemming from small policy design changes that create sufficient feedback in the policy mix and thus ‘escalate’ to paradigmatic policy change. While this important conceptual debate has only just started, further questions emerge: How capable are policymakers to intentionally design such ‘virtuous’ policy feedback loops that lead to paradigmatic change? Research on policy learning focuses on individual policies and mostly black-boxes the interplay of policies in a mix. In addition, learning about technological innovation and the feedback it produces, while crucial for sustainability transitions, is not systematically addressed in the literature. This paper aims to present a research agenda that tackles these issues by bringing together public policy literature on policy change, policy learning literature as well as technology and innovation studies on policy design. The aim is to understand how policymakers tackle a dually complex design challenge: (a) designing policies that positively affect technological change in accordance with long-term socio-technical transitions while (b) also designing policies in such a way that they cater for the complexities of interplay in complex policy mixes and are capable to create ‘virtuous’ policy feedback loops. Understanding how policymakers deal with these design challenges allows us to better appraise realistic policy pathways that are effective while not getting ‘stuck’ in politics or backlash.

From climate change to the biodiversity crisis, the global environmental challenges we face require transformational change in environmental public policy. Recent policy studies scholarship suggests one way forward: the possibility for certain policy designs to trigger political processes that encourage the adoption of more ambitious policies in the future. We explore the potential for design-induced “upward” environmental policy change in the context of global forest conservation. To do so, we characterize five “on-the-ground” environmental forestry regulations---annual allowable cut requirements, clear-cutting allowances, road building restrictions, riparian buffer zone requirements, and reforestation requirements---for eight national and subnational jurisdictions spanning Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand. To enable comparability across regulations, jurisdictions, and time, we use an analytical framework that consistently characterizes each policy’s “setting” and level of “prescriptiveness”. We track each regulation for the 2007-2022 period, permitting a systematic view of policy change across 120 jurisdiction-years. Next, we draw on historical institutional analysis to examine key drivers of policy change, paying special attention to the ways in which earlier policy characteristics may have encouraged change, and compare drivers across regulation types and jurisdictions. This study contributes a framework for analysing how policy design may unlock positive environmental policy trajectories, with concrete policy implications for forest conservation.

Cities worldwide have emerged as critical actors in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to climate change. However recent years have witnessed social and economic crises brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and increasing climate disasters; the impacts of these crises have been most notable in cities and large towns, where ~57% of people live and ~80% of economic activity is based. Given predictions of increasing economic pressures across the globe due to climate change and conflict over scarce resources, a key question is whether cities will continue to lead the way in climate action.

To address this question, here we present a global analysis of the impact of Covid-19 on cities’ climate actions and climate finance. Covid-19 has had a truly global impact, causing the deaths of almost 7 million people and a 3.4% decline in global GDP in 2020. As such, it may be considered one of the main crises of our times. We use self-reported data, provided by ~500 cities around the world to the CDP disclosure platform. Specifically, cities were asked to report the effect of Covid-19 on their climate actions and available climate finance, thus providing insights into how the pandemic has affected cities’ climate action pathways.

More crucially, we ask - what factors influence the ‘durability’ of cities’ commitments to climate action given Covid-19? Using multilevel regressions in which we control for Covid-19 impacts (proxied by mortality; changes in economic activity), we examine which city- and national-level factors influence whether cities report an ‘increase’, ‘no change’ or a ‘decrease’ in climate action and climate finance.

We find that a majority (79%) of cities report no change or increased climate action, while 64% report no change or increased availability of climate finance due to Covid-19. Statistical tests confirm that climate action and available finance are correlated. More durable climate actions and finance are found in cities with higher pre-Covid19 levels of commitment: collaboration with business on sustainability issues, membership of international climate networks, and a greater number of greenhouse gas targets (pre-Covid-19) correlate with more durable commitments (i.e. ‘no change’ or an ‘increase’ in climate action and climate finance). These findings highlight tangible actions that cities can take to increase the resilience of their climate commitments to shocks and economic crises, and show a way forward for cities to continue to lead the way in climate action.