Climate Policy Upscaling: The role of policy design in enabling stringency increases

A significant implementation gap exists between countries’ net-zero commitments and the stringency of their domestic climate change mitigation policies. To close this gap, countries will need to implement new, immediately stringent policies; upscale the stringency of policies over time; or both. Given the challenges in implementing immediately stringent policies, a deeper understanding of the processes that lead to and shape climate policy upscaling events—where an existing policy is changed to deliver much stronger climate outcomes—is essential if the target-policy stringency gap is to be closed.

This thesis presents an empirically founded explanation of how climate policy upscaling events emerge and what determines whether they succeed or fail. It uses a mixed-methods qualitative case study approach to understand the causal processes that shape climate policy upscaling events. The thesis first uses an inductive within-case approach to build a new theory of climate policy upscaling. Key elements of the theory are then tested deductively on a broader set of international case studies.

The thesis makes a unique contribution by bringing to light the barriers that hold back climate policy stringency, how the design and implementation of a policy can support its later upscaling through the weakening of these barriers, and what determines the success or failure of a climate policy upscaling attempt. The central finding of the thesis is that initial design decisions and an implement-then-upscale approach hold unique potential to address a number of barriers to climate policy stringency. This finding suggests that decision makers can unlock barrier-weakening processes that would otherwise remain unavailable by designing policies to be optimised for future upscaling.

The thesis is presented in two parts. Part I is an inductive theory-building exercise where a case study of Australia’s 2023 upscaling of its primary industrial sector mitigation policy is used to build a theory of climate policy upscaling. The theory draws on research conducted under the emerging Policy Sequencing Framework, and extends existing knowledge by examining within-policy sequencing processes, where the design and approach to implementation of a climate policy can act to weaken barriers to stringency, supporting the policy’s later upscaling. The empirical evidence for Part I is delivered through process-tracing based on analysis of policy documents, submissions to government consultation processes, and media reporting, as well as through 29 semi-structured interviews, and 23 closed-ended questionnaires completed by climate policy experts central to the Australian upscaling event.

Part II is a deductive theory-testing exercise where three studies spanning five country case studies are used to test elements of the new Theory of Climate Policy Upscaling. Data are drawn from document analysis and 44 semi-structured interviews with policy experts across five country cases. First, Singapore’s 2024 climate policy upscaling event is examined using a least-likely case study approach to test whether the stringency barrier-weakening processes central to the Policy Sequencing Framework and the proposed Theory of Climate Policy Upscaling hold in a political and economic context that has already removed many barriers to stringency. Second, a comparative case study of Canada’s and Switzerland’s upscaling attempts is undertaken to test one of the proposals in the new Theory of Climate Policy Upscaling: that legislative friction can act as a barrier to climate policy stringency. Third, a successful climate policy upscaling event in Ireland is compared to a failed upscaling attempt in France to test the Climate Policy Upscaling Theory’s proposal that the success or failure of an upscaling event is determined by a government’s sensitivity to residual barriers to stringency.  

The thesis concludes by looking forward to how governments and policy practitioners may be able to use the new Theory of Climate Policy Upscaling to design climate policies that are primed for future upscaling. It makes the case that by taking a deliberate and structured approach to policy design that anticipates the need for greater levels of stringency, governments can reduce barriers to more ambitious policy settings, better positioning themselves to progressively close the target-policy stringency gap.