Human-induced climate change is widely regarded as a ‘wicked’ policy problem’, if not a ‘super-wicked’ problem. Wicked problems are characterized by being difficult, if not impossible, to solve because of their complexity, multiple causes, contested problem definitions, and the tendency for all proposed solutions to have serious drawbacks. Climate change mitigation can be viewed as a wicked problem not merely because it has the features of a global collective action problem (with incentives for individual parties to free ride), but also because of four politically salient asymmetries that reduce the incentive for democratic governments to implement effective decarbonization measures – namely, a voting asymmetry, a cost-benefit asymmetry, an interest group asymmetry and an accounting asymmetry.
This presentation explores these four asymmetries with particular reference to the evolution of climate change mitigation policies in Australia andNew Zealand. While the two countries have different economic structures and face somewhat different mitigation challenges, in both jurisdictions powerful vested interests, together with vigorous campaigns by climate skeptics, have been relatively success in thwarting efforts to develop and implement effective mitigation measures. Consideration is given to the potential impact of domestic political constraints in these countries on the quest for a new global climate treaty, and possible strategies for achieving a new political alignment more favourably disposed to rapid decarbonization.
Jonathan Boston holds a Personal Chair in Public Policy at the School of Government, Victoria Universityof Wellington. From mid 2008 until January 2011 he was the Director of the Institute of Policy Studies and was appointed Director of the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies in November 2012. He has published widely in the fields of public management, tertiary education, social policy, comparative government, NewZealand politics and climate change policy, including 27 books and over 190 journal articles and book chapters.
During 1995-2003 he was a member of the New Zealand Political Change Project, based at Victoria University of Wellington and funded by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology. The Project explored the behavioural, institutional and policy impacts of the introduction of proportional representation in New Zealand in 1996. In 2000-02 he served as a member of the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission, and subsequently worked for the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) on the design, implementation and evaluation of the Performance-Based Research Fund. In this capacity he was the primary author of the TEC’s report on the 2003 Quality Evaluation of research performance in NewZealand’s tertiary education sector. During 2012 he served as Co-Chair of the Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty established by the Commissioner for Children.
