Climate Change Governance

Climate change governance poses
difficult challenges for contemporary
political/administrative systems. These systems evolved to
handle other sorts of problems and must now be adapted to
handle emerging issues of climate change mitigation and
adaptation. This paper examines long-term climate
governance, particularly in relation to overcoming
"institutional inertia" that hampers the
development of an effective and timely response. It argues
that when the influence of groups that fear adverse
consequences of mitigation policies is combined with
scientific uncertainty, the complexity of reaching global
agreements, and long time frames, the natural tendency is
for governments to delay action, to seek to avoid
antagonizing influential groups, and to adopt less ambitious
climate programs. Conflicts of power and interest are
inevitable in relation to climate change policy. To address
climate change means altering the way things are being done
today - especially in terms of production and consumption
practices in key sectors such as energy, agriculture, and
transportation. But some of the most powerful groups in
society have done well from existing arrangements, and they
are cautious about disturbing the status quo. Climate change
governance requires governments to take an active role in
bringing about shifts in interest perceptions so that stable
societal majorities in favor of deploying an active
mitigation and adaptation policy regime can be maintained.
Measures to help effect such change include: building
coalitions for change, buying off opponents, establishing
new centers of economic power, creating new institutional
actors, adjusting legal rights and responsibilities, and
changing ideas and accepted norms and expectations.