During this public lecture, University of Bath Global Chair Professor Benjamin Cashore will discuss climate policy, and promising, but under-researched thermostatic systems.
The event is open to Bath staff and students, as well as members of the public, and refreshments will be served after the lecture.
This event is free, but you must sign up for a ticket to attend.
About Professor Benjamin Cashore
Professor Cashore is a Professor of Public Management at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Director of the Institute for Environment & Sustainability (IES) at NUS' Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
He is renowned for his work in environmental governance and public policy, pioneering research on multi-level governance and the legitimacy of non-state market-driven (NSMD) global governance. His current research corresponds closely with Bath’s strategic research pillar of Sustainability, centring on the development of “Thermostatic Institutions" - with a strong emphasis on climate action and biodiversity conservation.
Professor Cashore is giving this lecture as a part of the University Global Chair programme. He will be hosted by Dr Yixian Sun - from the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, and a member of both the Institute of Sustainability and Climate Change (ISCC) and the Centre for Development Studies
Abstract
Read the abstract for Professor Cashore's lecture: Climate Policy Thermostats: The Planet's Last Hope?
Why is it that despite 35 years of climate policy experiments across multiple levels of governance, the planet is hurtling towards catastrophic warming? I argue that one uninterrogated explanation is the lack of attention to building analytical policy capacities necessary for imagining policies that have yet to be deployed and anticipating futures that have yet to occur.
The result is that limited attention has been placed on researching, and learning from, highly promising thermostatic systems. Thermostatic systems are worthy of sustained attention because they institutionalize simultaneous processes of change and durability by first achieving, and then maintaining, policy objectives. They operate much like a house’s thermostat, maintaining a pre-established internal objective by automatically triggering adjustments as external conditions change.
This requires advancing two analytical distinctions. First, climate must be treated as a Type 4 (Prioritization) problem in contrast to the Type 3 (Compromise), Type 2 (Optimization) and Type 1 (Commons) conceptions that have dominated three decades of policy innovations. Second, Type 3 work on path dependency must disentangle those policy elements that must change in order to maintain policy objectives.
I apply these distinctions to identify several design insights that emerge from interrogating several cases of policy thermostats in non-climate domains. This leads me to identify the urgent need to build national climate policy thermostats capable of overcoming two key gaps in extant approaches to climate policy: weak compliance mechanisms under the Paris Accord, and bottom-up climate innovations that, at the aggregate, have been found to be insufficient for achieving a 1.5/2°C world.
I conclude by identifying the urgent need to develop a research agenda on thermostatic institutions capable of helping the world avert the most catastrophic effects of a warming planet.