David G. Victor Boeken

For decades the world’s governments have struggled to move from talk to action on climate. Many now hope that growing public concern will lead to greater policy ambition, but progress depends on sound strategy. Yet the most widely promoted climate policy—the use of market-based programs to reduce climate pollution—hasn’t been working and isn’t ready to scale. Danny Cullenward and David Victor show why the elegant theory of markets has failed to have much impact in practice. The reasons, they argue, are deeply rooted in the politics of creating and maintaining effective markets—forces that have caused low prices and led to few climate benefits in nearly every program to date. These problems are structural and won’t disappear with increasing demand for climate solutions. Confronting them requires counterintuitive reforms, but even reformed markets are unlikely to drive the scale of change needed to stabilize the climate. Facing that reality, Cullenward and Victor argue, requires relying more heavily on regulation and industrial policy—strategies that ultimately turn on strengthened government capacities to deliver the benefits markets promise, but rarely deliver.

The book examines the unraveling international response to global warming, particularly highlighting the U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol and challenges faced by other nations in meeting their commitments. David Victor argues that the protocol was unlikely to be effective and discusses how its failure presents opportunities to develop a more viable alternative for addressing climate change. The reissued paperback includes an afterword reflecting on recent developments in the global climate policy landscape.

"Can the world stop climate change? The prognosis is bleak. Most efforts to tackle the problem have focused on treaties that require virtually global consensus, yet meaningful consensus has been elusive because deep cuts in emissions are expensive and antagonize well-organized interests. Predictably, diplomacy has swung between gridlock and superficial agreements with little impact. After three decades of sustained negotiations on global warming, emissions have risen by one third. Stopping climate warming requires that they be cut essentially to zero. Sabel and Victor look to offer a case for optimism by proposing a different strategy: to recast climate change as a problem best addressed piecemeal. Rather than seeking a grand, global bargain, they argue that the problem should be broken down into local challenges. They call this concept "experimentalist governance"-massive simultaneous searches for local solutions that are scalable to the global level, with a focus not on marginal incentives for success but on penalties for repeated, egregious failure. The authors show, through a series of cases, how regulators, firms, farms and NGOs, faced with penalty defaults, are learning to solve some of the knottiest environmental problems; they then propose central mechanisms that could help monitor and review progress, establishing which experiments are working and establish new frontiers for experimentation. While the threat of impending catastrophe has understandably made debate about climate policy increasingly shrill and polarized, Sabel and Victor offer here a guide to institutional design that could finally lead to the politically and economically self-sustaining reductions in emissions that thirty years of global diplomacy has not delivered"-- Provided by publisher