Readers of ClimatePolicy.org may remember a four-volume assessment of the social science research relevant to global climate change that appeared about a decade ago, entitled Human choice and climate change, edited by Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone. If not, here’s a bit of background. This was a truly extraordinary effort, centered on a Vancouver meeting in 1997, and involving more than one hundred contributors. Especially intriguing was a small satellite document issued with the assessment entitled “Ten suggestions for policymakers.” To quote Rayner and Malone:
“What can public and private decisionmakers learn from a wide-ranging look at the social sciences and the issue of human choice and climate change that illuminates the evaluation of policy goals, implementation strategies, and choices about paths forward? At present, proposed policies are heavily focused on the development and implementation of intergovernmental agreements on immediate emissions reductions. In the spirit of cognitive and analytic pluralism that has guided the creation of Human choice and climate change, we look beyond the present policy priorities to see if there are adjustments, or even wholesale changes, to the present course that could be made on the basis of a social science perspective. To this end we offer ten suggestions to complement and challenge existing approaches to public and private sector decisionmaking:
1. View the issue of climate change holistically, not just as the problem of emissions reductions.
2. Recognize that, for climate policymaking, institutional limits to global sustainability are at least as important as environmental limits.
3. Prepare for the likelihood that social, economic, and technological change will be more rapid and have greater direct impacts on human populations than climate change.
4. Recognize the limits of rational planning.
5. Employ the full range of analytical perspectives and decision aids from natural and social sciences and the humanities in climate change policymaking.
6. Design policy instruments for real world conditions rather than try to make the world conform to a particular policy model.
7. Incorporate climate change into other more immediate issues, such as employment, defense, economic development, and public health.
8. Take a regional and local approach to climate policymaking and implementation.
9. Direct resources into identifying vulnerability and promoting resilience, especially where the impacts will be largest.
10. Use a pluralistic approach to decision-making. ”
In a carefully-crafted, crisply written 40-page document, Rayner and Malone expanded on these statements*. Ten years later, it is worthwhile to take stock, and reassess these statements and supporting analysis. How well have they stood the test of time? What has been their impact on the policy process to date? What about going forward? Do they offer intriguing starting points for policy formulation? Could they guide or constrain the search for viable policy alternatives? How has the status of social science research changed in ten years? The continuing pertinence of these notions is illustrated in recent material such as the following, a comment by Professor Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Center, and School of Environmental sciences, UEA, on the Stern Review, prepared for the British Ecological Society Bulletin. Hulme asks
“But how effective will it [the Stern Review] be and what difference will it make? In ten years time, will we be able to look back and analyse a pre-Stern and post-Stern discourse about climate change, or see the 2006 marking some break-point in climate policy?
I suspect not. To look for the reasons one need do no more than re-wind the clock to 1998 and the publication of the proceedings of the largest co-ordinated exercise yet undertaken by social scientists into examining the implications of climate change for human choice (Rayner and Malone, 1998). A self-proclaimed ‘complement’ to the United Nation’s IPCC, this five year assessment delivered ten suggestions for policymakers in regard to climate change. They deserve wider visibility and recognition [emphasis added]. To understand the limits of The Stern Review let me mention just three of these ten suggestions, all of which emerged from an extended examination of knowledge emerging from the social sciences (and anthropogenic climate change after all has emerged from society, not from nature):
• ‘Recognise that for climate policy-making institutional limits to global sustainability are at least as important as environmental limits’. The Stern Review has very little to say about new institutional arrangements commensurate with the nature of climate change decision-making. The barriers to effective action on climate change is not incomplete science or uncertain analysis, but the inertia of collective decision-making across unaligned or even orthogonal institutions.
• ‘Employ the full range of analytic perspectives and decision aids form the natural and social sciences and humanities in climate change policymaking’. The Stern Review remains dominated by natural science and macro-economic perspectives on decision-making and although some concession to the role of values and ethics is made in the review, the values and ethical judgements made are pronounced rather than negotiated.
• ‘Direct resources to identifying vulnerability and promoting resilience, especially where the impacts [of climate change] will be largest’. The Stern Review continues to place emphasis on linear goal-setting and implementation; a more strategic approach is to focus on measures that promote societal resilience and opportunities for strategic switching, informed by regional and local perspectives.”
ClimatePolicy.org asserts that “Policy choices will likely serve the interests of society most effectively if they are grounded in the best available knowledge and understanding.” Surely that assertion, to be correct, has to encompass the social sciences as well as the natural sciences. Your thoughts and comments?
*The supporting text can now be downloaded here.