By Matthew Murray

Climate goals increasingly look out of reach for the timelines recommended to stop further climate change. Yet some countries are making more progress than others. 

A new study, “The Political Economy of The Clean Energy Transition,” examines why. It’s co-authored by Alexander F. Gazmararian, a professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, and Dustin Tingley, the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and affiliate of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.

They argue that previous research has often treated international goals and domestic actions as competing forces. Their study instead synthesizes these perspectives into a “credibility framework” that clarifies what has helped governments shift attitudes and expand support for climate goals. 

This framework offers a clearer account of what drives climate policy success and could strengthen efforts globally, especially in developing countries that face steep decarbonization challenges.

The study distinguishes between two forms of credibility. Strategic credibility refers to whether governments have incentives to fulfill their climate commitments, while structural credibility focuses on whether clean energy can deliver growth, jobs, and tax revenue. Gazmararian and Tingley apply this lens to analyze three drivers of “credibility challenges”: institutions, state capacity, and international constraints. The authors intend for this framework to inform research agendas that address the collective action needed for enacting climate change policies in distinct political and economic contexts.

Credibility matters, the authors argue, for explaining how governments can handle the winners and losers of climate policy. Internationally, cooperation can stall since countries face different costs and benefits from climate actions, leading international agreements to rely on tenuous obligatory measures to hold countries accountable for carbon pollution. Domestically, climate policies often harm or help different groups, although these actors can be quite diverse across countries.

For example, certain businesses, such as coal mining, are disproportionately affected by the move away from fossil fuels. Likewise, there are communities with local economies dependent on fossil fuel production. These businesses and voters can erect formidable political challenges to energy transition policies. Consumers, too, can feel or fear the economic pinch of increased costs, like higher electric bills, and vote with their pocketbooks.

Dustin Tingley headshot.
“Climate change, by definition, is a global collective action problem—whose solution depends on domestic politics.”
Dustin Tingley and Alexander F. Gazmararian

However, these costs are only part of the story. There are opportunities for consumers, communities, and businesses that could benefit from clean energy goods and services. Limiting global warming also has benefits in the form of avoided future climate perils, which may become salient for the most vulnerable businesses and communities, which could emerge as a powerful mode of support and constituency building for decarbonization policies. The credibility of climate policies hinges, in part, on delivering visible benefits while mitigating their costs.

While these ideas about domestic distributive politics deepen our understanding of climate politics, the authors pose a key question: “do theories tested with industrialized country evidence apply elsewhere,” particularly in developing countries?

Gazmararian and Tingley argue that the credibility framework helps translate theories first applied to rich nations to the developing world. For example, the authors show how formal and informal systems, which vary across and within the developing world, play roles in building credibility. Institutions that engage in and protect long-term policymaking, consistent and appropriate compensation to support carbon-intensive workers, ensuring businesses have input into future policy decisions, training or retraining workforces into green industries, and secure and established property rights schemes all can serve as practical steps toward building credibility. Credibility measures like these reduce unforeseen or unrepresented risks for businesses that could make investment and transition paths unclear or turbulent, in both developed and developing countries.

The structure and transparency of governance systems are also important in building credibility and represent priorities for scholars and policymakers. Examples include how electoral systems influence how much politicians care about the long-term versus short-term pressures, influencing their credible commitments to climate change reforms. Democratic systems push leaders to be accountable to various political forces, both short and long term, which can help in making commitments more credible once they have endured critique. This transparency and accountability also hold true in corporate regulation where commitments are enforced and monitored by the government or more informal local systems to ensure compliance. Local sanctioning may be more effective in developing contexts where state enforcement mechanisms are potentially weaker.

Gazmararian and Tingley also identify international constraints such as the lack of equity in access to international finance and funding, and the inability of wealthy countries to maintain the commitments to climate finance. The authors see these areas as crucial points that can make or break the credibility of climate reforms in the developing world.

The result of the credibility framework is a broad set of directions and topics that can be fertile territory for research that can help attain climate change goals. From state capacity building to local and international policies to governance questions and capabilities to specific decarbonization reforms such as “grid expansion, renewable deployment, and vehicle electrification,” (p.87)  these approaches all play a role in reaching elusive climate goals. As Gazmararian and Tingley conclude, “[t]o understand the opportunities and challenges that developed and developing countries face in combating climate change requires accounting for the interplay of credibility with domestic and international politics.” (p.89)

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Photograph by Marco Longari/AFP/via Getty Images

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