Feb 21, 2022
Southeast Asia is a significant stakeholder in the global action against climate change, given its growing population, rising greenhouse gas emissions, and vulnerability to climate change impacts. Public policy makers in this region are faced with the challenge of transitioning to cleaner energy sources to enable the attainment of Paris Agreement goals, while also expanding access to affordable and reliable energy supplies. Southeast Asia has one of world’s fastest growing rates of greenhouse gas emissions due to rising fossil fuel combustion, second only to South Asia. As such, it is imperative to decouple its energy consumption from emissions growth. This paper reviews Southeast Asia’s energy sector trends, with a focus on electricity supply and demand vis-à-vis global decarbonization efforts. Based on global and regional best practices, the paper highlights the crucial role that governments and public policy can play in accelerating the region’s clean energy transition, namely through the establishment of mandatory long-term climate and renewable energy targets and binding policies; use of iterative and adaptive power system planning; support for effective market development; financing of pioneering investments and trunk infrastructure; and support for a just and equitable transition.
Dec 28, 2021
This is the introduction to a special issue on ‘Sustainable Commodity Governance and the Global South.’ A broad range of transnational governance initiatives have emerged to respond to social and environmental challenges caused by commodity production. These initiatives – like voluntary sustainability standards and certifications – tend to target commodity producers in the Global South, but are overwhelmingly initiated and managed by organizations from the Global North. The agency and initiative of Southern actors in addressing sustainability challenges in their own backyards remains under-examined. In this introductory paper, we outline a typology of how commodity producers, civil society groups, and governments in the Global South have responded to the challenge of sustainable commodity production. Drawing inductively on the contributions to this special issue, we argue that Southern actors either participate in transnational governance, reinterpret it in their own context, or create their own initiatives entirely. The capacity of actors in the Global South to exert meaningful influence over sustainable commodity governance is relevant to ongoing debates in ecological economics about whether environmental and social goals can be achieved by working within global value chains or whether a wholesale reconfiguration of the global economy is required.
Dec 28, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic is the largest public health crisis in recent history. Many states have taken unprecedented action in responding to the pandemic by restricting international and domestic travel, limiting economic activity, and passing massive social welfare bills. This begs the question, why have states taken extreme measures for COVID-19 but not the climate crisis? By comparing state responses to COVID-19 with those to the climate crisis, we identify the crisis characteristics that drive quick and far-reaching reactions to some global crises but not others. We inductively develop a conceptual framework that identifies eight crisis characteristics with observable variation between COVID-19 and climate change. This framework draws attention to under-considered areas of variance, such as the perceived differences in the universality of impacts, the legibility of policy responses, and the different sites of expertise for both crises. We use this structured comparison to identify areas of leverage for obtaining quicker and broader climate action.
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of scholars and activists expressed confusion at the speed and scale of responses to COVID-19 in comparison to the global climate crisis (Bordoff 2020; Dolsak and Prakash 2020; Galbraith and Otto 2020). Granted, there was, and remains, significant variation in the nature of COVID-19 responses by governments (Hale et al. 2020). However, taken as a whole, the disparity between the two crises is enormous. COVID-19 resulted in national governments closing borders, shutting down workplaces, cancelling sports seasons, and confining citizens to their domiciles. Such actions are unthinkable for most governments as responses to the climate crisis. The question, then, is why have there been immediate and far-reaching state responses to COVID-19 but not similar responses to the climate crisis? After all, the climate crisis has been called a “direct existential threat” by the UN Secretary-General, whereas COVID-19 has an average global case fatality rate of just over 5 percent (Guterres 2018). Why the willingness to move mountains for one crisis but not the other?
We argue that COVID-19 and the climate crisis are different varieties of crisis and that the different characteristics of each crisis lead to different types of governance responses. This may initially appear to be an obvious argument. After all, the timescales of these crises differ dramatically and may auger toward different responses. However, we contend that there are other under-considered differences between these crises that account for their different responses. Enumerating these differences is useful for predicting governance responses to future crises and envisioning how perceptions of the climate crisis might be shifted to engender a faster and farther-reaching response. Our central contribution is a conceptual framework that outlines eight inductively derived crisis characteristics and explains how variation in the value of these characteristics may affect the scope and immediacy of state responses to crises. We argue that the higher the value of these eight characteristics, the more likely it is that a crisis will be met with swift and far-reaching responses. We begin by comparing COVID-19 and the climate crisis across these eight categories. We then describe the relationship between crisis characteristics and political responses. We end by discussing implications for the climate crisis.
Dec 28, 2021
Strategic issue framing is widely regarded as an effective communication strategy to alter public opinion and citizens’ policy support. However, it is unclear to what extent strategic framing can increase support for ambitious demand-side actions and policies that make the cost of mitigation perceptible in citizens’ everyday lives. Taking an exploratory approach, we conducted qualitative interviews and a comparative framing experiment with 9,750 survey respondents from China, Germany, and the United States. We analyzed strategic issue framing effects in two areas known to be key for increasing the sustainability of consumption: meat/fish consumption, and fossil-fuel car usage. Employing both classical linear regressions and advanced Bayesian sparse estimations, we show that in all three countries widespread arguments in favor of reduced meat/fish consumption and car use are unlikely to substantially alter citizens’ concern, willingness to pay, behavioral intentions and policy support for demand-side action. Our findings suggest that in the absence of a broader behavioral change campaign, strategic issue framing alone is unlikely to be effective in changing entrenched attitudes and behaviors. On its own, it is also unlikely to substantially increase public support for demand-side policies to reduce consumption. More careful research is needed to help policymakers understand the role and limits of different strategic framing techniques.
Dec 28, 2021
Mini-grids are growing in popularity as a viable solution to energy poverty in rural, hard to reach areas consisting of Bottom-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) markets. Social enterprises are starting to play a vital role in providing services to this neglected customer group but often face difficulties resulting from rural market imperfections. In this study, we aim to address the following research question: how and to what extent can a mini-grid based social enterprise resolve the technical and organisational challenges associated with providing services in a rural BoP environment? Using Husk Power Systems (HPS) as a case study, our interdisciplinary approach navigates the landscape between social entrepreneurship and socio-technical aspects of mini-grid operations in the rural BoP market. The case study is based on interview evidence with ten HPS employees, three founders and 22 user interviews. We make use of narrative analysis to analyse the interview material. The paper argues that continuous conflicts exist between social and commercial objectives concerning mini-grid operations in the rural BoP markets. As this case study reveals, social enterprises need to manage the socio-technical challenges inherent to mini-grid processes; otherwise, customer affordability and business viability become an unsolvable paradox.
