The missing link: exploring the potential of national climate institutions
While much thinking has gone into mechanisms for global collaboration on climate change, national governance is under-studied. Could it be the missing link in accelerating transitions to low-carbon, climate resilient futures?
Talking about institutions might sound like a “snoozefest”, Navroz Dubash said at the beginning of a seminar he gave earlier this month, but those listening to his arguments around why national institutions could be key to spurring climate action found that, in this case, it was anything but.
Dubash is professor of public and international affairs and the High Meadow Environmental Institute (HMEI) at Princeton University, who counts 25 years’ experience as a researcher and policy advisor on climate and energy issues, including to the Indian government, and serving on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, among his credentials.
In an HMEI seminar titled ‘The missing link in spurring climate action? A spotlight on national climate institutions’, Dubash argued that solving ‘collective action problems’ – in this case climate change – may not lie in global negotiations and processes, but in the establishment of specialist domestic institutions that he believes can drive lasting change, even if they are power and resource ‘weak’.
He set the scene. The ‘top down’ approach to tackling climate change, he said, revolves around the Conference of Parties (COP) where government representatives and other stakeholders gather to negotiate and agree on an objective – such as the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
Such objectives become the benchmark for collective progress. Capacity and funding support mechanisms are put in place, countries set national goals and actions (their ‘nationally-determined contributions’ under the Paris Agreement), and baked in reporting and transparency processes highlight the emissions gaps between what countries have promised and what science says is required to meet the targets.
Conversely, the ‘bottom up’ approach is can be developed based around things that matter to people and therefore drive the political conversation and political ambition in respective countries. For example, in the Philippines, people’s experience of climate change is framed around the typhoons that can wreck rice crops and cause inflation as a result; in India, Delhi’s air quality was shown to be ‘poor’ or worse for 155 days of 2024, making that a major concern for residents; and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, only 21% of its population – 1% in rural areas – have access to electricity, making its energy considerations very different to countries that are infrastructure rich.
What’s important, Dubash said, is using the domestic context – “these kinds of narratives around daily realities” – to drive policy frameworks and national plans and pathways. And, crucially, he believes that national climate institutions can help to bridge these two areas.
“The global remains important because of collective action,” he said. “But we can’t [tackle climate change] because of global pressures alone.
“I argue that [countries] will ramp it up mostly because they have found the keys to unlocking this particular puzzle” – by which he means the bottom up approach connecting domestic narratives, political mobilisation, policy frameworks, and institutions, law and regulation.
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The domestic context
As implementation issues come to the fore, national institutions have a greater role to play, Dubash said. They are “no silver bullet”, but in his opinion they haven’t been suitably explored or recognised as a catalyst for change.
Where national climate institutions do exist, they have tended to come about as a result of a number of pressures and domestic context drivers.
Traditionally, national climate politics have been influenced by international politics, business interests and civil society and social movements, and then refracted through political institutions, interaction with international processes, and bureaucratic patterns and processes.
Dubash provided context to last two of these levers. India’s interaction with international processes on climate change, for example, has at times been fractious given that its leaders argue it has only recently become a high emitter of greenhouse gases compared to long-developed countries and that global expectations threaten to hold it back just as it becomes a major world economy. It may therefore decide to take its cues not from the wider international community, but from China, which is in a similar position.
On bureaucratic patterns and processes, Dubash gave the example of the UK, which has an independent regulatory state, built in the 1990s and early 2000s, and China, in which ‘national leading groups’ convene high level representatives “to figure out what to do next”.
As a result of these kinds of pressures, filters and systems, countries are putting in place “lasting political climate institutions”, shaped by ideas and interests, which Dubash said further shape politics and then outcomes.
Two main models: mission-centric and opportunistic
In his research, he has identified different types of institution: those like in the UK which are strategic and mission-centric, and those like in India which are what he calls “opportunistic” or “embedded”.
He explained that the UK “has been a complete frontrunner in this space”, creating institutions and laws that have been copied all over the world, from Ireland to Germany, Nigeria to New Zealand.
All the academic literature pointed to Germany doing this first on account of its proportional representation voting system giving smaller parties like the Greens access to governance mechanisms, unlike in the UK, that has two main political parties under ‘first past the post’.
But the German Transport Department was close to the country’s auto industry at the time, Dubash said, while in the UK “in the absence, notably, of any pushback on climate science, the Tories and the Labour Party converged on the climate agenda and created the Climate Change Act” in 2008.
Its focus is on emissions and mitigation “not that ‘messy soup’ of other objectives”, five-yearly carbon budgets are set under it, and its linchpin is the Climate Change Committee (CCC), an independent advisory body.
The CCC, he said, became “extraordinarily important”. It has a “rock solid” analytical reputation that means that both industry and groups like Friends of the Earth reference its reports, meaning it acts as a “rachet against [government] backsliding”.
The responsible department in the UK was initially the Department of Energy and Climate Change, subsequently the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), and is now the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
Dubash said of the rename from the Department of Energy and Climate Change to BEIS that: “Environmentalists got really upset that this was basically going to be a capture by the business interests but interestingly, it led to a parallel narrative. From an emission-centric story, it became a story about how jobs could be created and how industrial strategy could be developed. It opened up the space for climate policy, and it’s an example of how institutions shape the direction in which policy and politics go.”
Overall, the institutional mechanism produced under, and following, the 2008 Climate Change Act created a “positive feedback loop” whereby, for example, the BEIS-supported push towards wind development in the North Sea supported jobs creation, improving access for the wind industry which could lobby more effectively for incentives, which led to more jobs and growing political popularity for wind power.
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Conversely, India’s example is not strategic and mission-centric, but opportunistic and embedded. Climate change is not on the political agenda as a standalone item and frequently ranks outside the top 10 most important issues for Indian citizens in opinion polls. Therefore, it is “embedded in the political conversation through things like impacts on crop yields, floods, linkage with air pollution, potential for job creation etc” or what Dubash called “co-benefits”.
As a result of pressure at international summits and following China’s lead, in 2008, India launched its National Action Plan on Climate Change, outlining eight missions to address climate change concerns and promote sustainable development. It “didn’t create new bodies like in the UK”, Dubash explained, but “layered responsibilities on top”. For example, a special cell on climate change opened within the Prime Minister’s Office and while the Ministry of Environment and Forests became the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, there “wasn’t much more capacity added”.
What resulted was an “opportunistic approach” where certain missions, such as the solar energy mission, took off. (India’s target now is to achieve 500 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030, with 280 gigawatts coming from solar power).
“Enterprising bureaucrats in these missions saw their opportunity to really create something, win bureaucratic favour, and get more resources for their ministry. Other missions did very little so it was idiosyncratic, and that’s why I call it opportunistic,” Dubash said. “It really created an opportunity structure for those who were able to take advantage.”
However, there is in this system “very limited strategic direction”, with various efforts at setting up advisory councils lacking adequate staff resource or analytical capacity, and that means “no big picture direction-setting, no carbon budget, and very limited coordination” because that is handled by the environment ministry, which is under-budgeted and relatively low in the government department hierarchy.
“It didn’t drive that kind of simplistic, unilateral change, but it did create these pockets and spaces for opportunities and for positive feedback,” said Dubash.
Read more: UK’s Net Zero Council relaunched with ‘broader range of voices’
The second axis: political polarisation
What Dubash and his research colleagues argue is that there are is a limited variety of climate governance models in the world and that it is “useful to think about these along two axes”. The first, as he’d already discussed, is whether the model is a mission-centric one that focuses on emissions, like in the UK, or an embedded or opportunistic model where the focus is on things like air quality and jobs creation, like in India. The second axis is whether political polarisation is low or high.
The UK and India both have low political polarisation, in the UK (and in countries like Germany and more recently, China) because strategic climate institutions have been built off the back of political agreement about addressing climate change, and in India “because it’s below the radar. Nobody is trying to make it about climate change. If you did, it would become an argument about equity… but it’s one of co-benefits: how do you get development and climate without compromising on either”.
Dubash pointed out that China shifted from a co-benefit model, particularly in relation to air pollution, to a mission-centric one “as the Chinese political narrative shifted to this idea of ecological civilisation and a much larger industrial shift with climate and low carbon development and technology as part of that”.
Then, you have cases like Australia and the US, that have at various times pushed for mitigation-focused climate institutions and laws but which haven’t had the political agreement to make them last.
In Australia, for example, a carbon pricing scheme – the Clean Energy Act – was passed in 2011 and came into effect the following year under then Labor prime minister Julia Gillard, but was repealed within six months when conservative Tony Abbott took office.
And then there are the countries that fall under the ‘unstable sectoral institutions’ bracket, where co-benefits are the driver but political polarisation is high. These are countries such as South Africa, which is dominated by coal politics, and Brazil, which is dominated by forest politics, and there has been a “shifting back and forth between different administrations who create and then unravel rules and regulations”.
Going back to the US, Dubash noted multiple past efforts to pass a ‘cap and trade bill’ that would have “required the US to say ‘Yes, we think climate is important. Yes, we’re willing to commit to a decadal timeframe to reducing emissions’ and ‘Yes, we’re willing to produce a price on carbon that has economic costs’.
“But the politics didn’t support it so you basically sloshed around [unstable climate institutions and high polarisation] for a decade or so until in the Biden administration – they changed the conversation. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which for example packages healthcare and labels it climate and inflation reduction is “narrative building to figure out the art of the politically possible,” Dubash explained.
“I would argue that under the IRA, the US actually moved into this opportunistic space where there was space to move things along – carbon dioxide removal, electric vehicles, those sectors where they could build a political constituency – and what we have now, perhaps, is a shift in the last 50 or so days [since president Trump returned to office] where you’re back in a world of conflicted energy politics between fossil fuel, renewable energy promotion etc.”
Dubash said it is worth speculating whether this situation might have been different if the US had invested in modest institutions to try and build a constituency slowly, instead of going for the ‘big bang’ carbon price structure in the face of unfavourable politics.
“Others know this country much better [than me, so] maybe nothing would have changed, but in other countries, that sort of dynamic has helped.”
For Dubash, the pushing of either mitigation or embedded narratives is really important: “Build climate institutions that match national politics and national context, not in a way that tries to transcend political support,” he advised.
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The main lesson? Be nimble and creative
So, what can be learnt from all this? One key point from Dubash is that even weak institutions can drive change in a slow or indirect way – such as in the case of India’s solar mission or Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation. These are “analogous things… that allow progress to be made, positive feedback loops to develop, and institutional beach heads to be established that shift politics over time”.
His overarching message is that action on climate change will only really be driven at the national level. In summing up, he said: “I feel that national political shifts, backed by narratives and institutions, are really the primary driver of change in country after country. Global cooperation is important, but it’s at this point an enabling part of the story, and I don’t think we’re going to see it being the main driver of change.
“Narrative shifts, like we’ve seen with co-benefits, like we saw with the IRA, can bring new political agreements and enable progress, and national institutions, even weak ones, can enable this kind of ratchet mechanism and provide a way of keeping motion going when you don’t have political agreement about a ‘big bang’.
“All of this points to the importance of states and state capacity, but not necessarily in a crude way where you have to set very big, ambitious targets and big machinery, but nimble and creative and flexible opportunities to accelerate that cycle between politics and institutions is what will drive national action, and I argue, ultimately help us address this problem.”
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About Mia Hunt
Mia is a journalist and editor with a background in covering commercial property, having been market reports and supplements editor at trade title Property Week and deputy editor of Shopping Centre magazine, now known as Retail Destination. She has also undertaken freelance work for several publications including the preview magazine of international trade show, MAPIC, and TES Global (formerly the Times Educational Supplement) and has produced a white paper on energy efficiency in business for E.ON. Between 2014 and 2016, she was a member of the Revo Customer Experience Committee and an ACE Awards judge. Mia graduated from Kingston University with a first-class degree in journalism and was part of the team that produced The River newspaper, which won Publication of the Year at the Guardian Student Media Awards in 2010.
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