Governance Innovations for Sustainable Development

The Governance Innovations for Sustainable Development initiative examines how policy innovations in low-income settings can allow effective environmental regulation that can best support growth and poverty reduction. The research umbrella is structured to enable significant progress on a set of ongoing field experiments on environmental regulation in India and to support three innovative but early stage projects on other aspects of regulation. The flagship project of the initiative, led by Rohini Pande (HKS) and Michael Greenstone (MIT), is the development and evaluation of a new emissions trading system in India, developed in partnership with India’s Ministry of Environment & Forests, which will constitute the first emissions trading system in the developing world. The Initiative also includes three other research projects using rigorous methods to evaluate the viability of several innovative governance interventions. Greg Lewis (Harvard, Economics) examines whether and how pollution regulation can make the market more competitive, through considering the effect of a carbon tax in a typical electricity market. Margaret McConnell (Harvard, Economics) examines how to make the most effective use of subsidies (on both demand and supply side) to encourage greater use of modern fuel technologies (which have great health and environmental benefits over traditional fuels). Michael Hiscox (Harvard, Government) examines whether and how producers who participate in certification programs improve environmental standards and whether consumers reward such behavior by paying higher prices for certified products.

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