Global warming and reducing greenhouse gas emissions are, by definition, a global challenge. But in a world of sovereign states where much of the critical policymaking must occur at the state level, Canada’s record to date in the climate change domain is somewhere between weak and abysmal.
A business-as-usual, ‘muddling through’ approach to policymaking in this area is an almost certain guarantee of failure.
A national, public policy-oriented Commission of Inquiry on climate change, reporting to the Prime Minister and including at least one prominent climate scientist, but otherwise comprising respected public and community leaders sensitive to various regional and sectoral concerns, would draw on a venerable Canadian tradition for addressing vexing and contentious policy issues (which I have surveyed in a recent book on Public Inquiries). Beyond the first year of addressing Canada’s 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan, such a Commission would focus increasingly on Canada’s longer term 2050 net carbon neutrality commitments.
A recent multi-authored study identified three core climate governance challenges: policy coordination across and within governments, building consensus, and strategy development. In the climate change context, institutional challenges are also compounded by several critical factors.
First, while climate science has made impressive advances over the past several decades, much uncertainty remains over the severity of climate responses to global warming over time and place, including the possibility of catastrophic tipping points.
Second, much uncertainty surrounds our ability to identify and induce various technological innovations in the future that may shape our policy options.
Third, cognitive limitations severely affect our ability to think rationally about such uncertainties, reflected in various strands of optimism, pessimism, and fatalism, and hence to forge a strong public and political consensus on appropriate policy action.
Collective action problems are pervasive in this context. While much is to be said for delegating decision-making to local communities in order to reflect local values, trade-offs, and policy experimentation, this is likely to engender buck-passing and free riding by shifting the burden of mitigation and abatement policies to other communities up and down the hierarchy of decision-making from the local level up to international governance. Value-laden trade-offs are required between present and future generations; between different communities and sectors in the present generation; and between more and less vulnerable/wealthy countries.
Finally, both across these levels of government and within given levels of government, major policy coordination challenges arise. Effective, coherent, and stable climate change policies are likely to implicate many areas of policymaking that are often treated as occupying largely disparate policy domains. Cumulatively, these challenges are often referred to as ‘a super-wicked problem’.
In a forthcoming paper, I and my co-author, Edward Iacobucci, have focused on climate policy formulation challenges in a Canadian context, against a backdrop of missed or abandoned international commitments or targets over the past two decades or so.
While the different levels of government would be free to reject the recommendations of the Commission, they should be charged with providing a public explanation for diverging from the Commission’s recommendations, in the hope that this will discipline political decision-making and move it beyond soundbites and slogans.
The Commission would become a focal-point for reasoned national debate on climate change policy in Canada – currently sorely missing – and internalize to some extent the politics among interest groups.
