Climate policy upscaling: the role of policy design in removing barriers to stringency

Abstract

Countries must increase the stringency of their domestic climate change mitigation policies if they are to meet their national emission reduction targets. However, governments face many barriers to enhancing the stringency of their climate policies. Understanding the mechanisms through which these barriers to climate policy stringency can be overcome will help policy makers design more-effective policies–including policies that are primed for future increases in stringency, or upscaling. This paper examines Australia’s upscaling of its primary industrial sector mitigation policy–the Safeguard Mechanism–to understand how barriers to stringency were overcome. The paper first identifies barriers to stringency in the existing policy change and climate policy design literatures. It then uses process tracing and a Likert-scale questionnaire administered to Australian climate policy practitioners and experts to empirically examine how initial policy design settings in the Australian case helped to overcome identified barriers, paving the way for the upscaling event. Our findings suggest that higher levels of climate policy stringency can be supported through early policy design choices and a phased implementation approach that weaken barriers arising from the discourse around a policy, legislative hurdles, the time required to deliver policy change, institutional capacity and business resistance. These insights contribute to the growing literature on incremental barrier weakening that can be harnessed to deliver step changes in climate policy stringency. Key policy insights: A stepwise approach to implementation can help direct attention to how a policy could be improved, supporting its later upscaling. Incremental refinement of policies post-implementation can support later upscaling by enabling governments to move quickly when a political window of opportunity emerges. Climate policy stringency can be enhanced through different legislative pathways that face different levels of complexity and friction. Embedding policies in existing frameworks and a phased implementation approach can help to overcome business-resistance and institutional-capacity barriers. Show more