Benjamin Cashore is Li Ka Shing Professor in Public Management and Director of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
He specialises in global and multi-level environmental governance, comparative public policy and administration, and transnational business regulation and corporate social responsibility.
In his role as the Director of IES, he focuses on helping governments and private sectors close the gap between policy commitments and actual outcomes through "fit-for-purpose" policy analysis. He joins us to help explain just how that works in the real world.
David Austin: Professor Cashore, could you share some of your thoughts on the way forward for building evidence and research towards stronger policymaking decisions that can better address climate change challenges, especially given the fact that, climate change has forced us to no longer be reactive, but proactive and seek out answers even before the problem occurs?
Benjamin Cashore: Yeah, thank you for that question. It's one that we in the Institute for Environment and Sustainability at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy think about often. And in doing so, we face and reflect on a conundrum which is that as an evidence-based think tank, we have to carefully research what's happened in the past. What are the intervention points that have transformed thinking around problems? And we also need to conduct experiments to see how current public and other citizens respond to various interventions to become part of an effort to decarbonise our behaviours at multiple scales, all of which we know we need to do to address the climate crisis.
The challenge is that none of the actions taken so far we know from the scientists, are consistent with the nature of the problem, which means that we don't yet have the evidence for new policy innovations that have yet to unfold, that have yet to be applied, that have yet to be triggered in some way to attempt to change future behaviours.
So what do you do when the evidence you want to collect happens after the interventions, not beforehand? This is a real conundrum for those that rely on evidence-based policy making that's happened at some point in the past when the goal here is to change future evidence.
So what we do at IES, which is what we call the Institute for Environmental Sustainability, IES or "Eyes", is that we think about how do you draw on that knowledge without being limited by it?
How can you run new experiments that are more likely to have the effect that governments, the private sector and NGOs seek to achieve? And we do this in our Institute through a term called anticipatory policy design, in which you get all relevant knowledge holders into the room. You reflect on the range, the multitude of policy interventions that you might be able to intervene with in some way, and then you run experiments that you think have got the best chance of succeeding so that you can be more effective and efficient in addressing these problems as quickly as possible. And this is important because the climate crisis, the scientists tell us, really has about nine years left to undertake significant reductions in carbon emissions or the world faces, what they call catastrophic effects on the ecology as well as on economic and social systems.
And so how to engage in anticipatory policy design that creates policy innovations that can draw on a wealth of knowledge, but change future evidence, is the question to which IES is devoting the bulk of its attention over the coming months and years.
David Austin: Is there a simple example that you could give us?
Benjamin Cashore: There are actually many examples out there of policymakers who have taken this kind of action. So I'll give you one example, one of the most successful cases that comes to us from Germany, but I can also give you cases that are closer to home as well.
But this one is important because it involves a case of anticipatory policy design that happened around 15 years ago, in which very forward-looking policymakers in Germany had a goal of changing the way consumers, individuals, and the public conceived of and thought about the climate crisis and their own role in helping decarbonise activities.
So what they did, is they said, we would really like to generate increased public demand for low carbon technologies in the form of either solar power or wind generated power. And they knew that if the public could get more involved in these efforts, that could create both the political space but also the economic demand for new technologies, but 15 years ago it wasn't like today. And the public, while they were concerned about the climate crisis, were not as acutely aware of all its dimensions. And so the government said, we don't want to simply respond to what the public is pressuring us to do now. We want to think about what the public wants us to do in 15 years.
And so they created a really innovative policy design mix, as we call it, in policy studies in which they said, okay. We're going to give some incentives to homeowners to put solar panels on their rooftops. Now, this was Germany, not exactly the sunniest place in the world, but they knew that politically getting support from the German public was really important for creating the space for decarbonisation.
So what they did is they created a policy in which they didn't just give subsidies to homeowners, they gave long-term contracts with that subsidy. So what they said was, dear German homeowner, if you put a solar panel system on your rooftop, we're going to give you a subsidy every year to offset the cost of that solar installation. And we're gonna give you a contract that tells you we're gonna pay you every year for the next 20 years to do so.
Now, shifting a subsidy into a contract form cost the government no more money, but it made the intervention much more durable because future governments, to change it, would have to pay compensation costs to those homeowners that purchase those systems and that would make that unlikely to be reversed.
And then the government said, oh, hey German homeowner, if you now produce, and this is the very interesting part, if you now produce more energy, then you consume from this system, we're going to pay you for that energy, not at the wholesale rate, but the retail rate, the higher retail rate that the market was demanding.
Well, those two design tweaks, retail rate and contracts, not just subsidies, meant that this policy was not only sticky over time, they became more and more entrenched and more and more Germans called for participating in this system. Why? Initially it was for economic reasons. The more Germans could wear jackets and keep their temperatures down, the more money they made.
And then as they did this, their neighbours saw their German neighbours making more money by wearing jackets and having solar panel systems. And they then demanded for the system to expand beyond the initial population. But of course, over time this shifted from an economic incentive to a cultural practice.
Germans were now practicing responsible behaviour by having solar panels on their rooftops and by then engaging in low-carbon behaviour internally, they were also generating norms of responsibility individually and collectively. Now, you all know from Economics 101 that the more demand there is for solar panels, the more companies emerge to meet that demand.
And the more companies emerge to meet that demand, the more the costs come down over time, owing to a lower production costs. And this is exactly what happened. You've got the politics changing, the feasibility changing. Germans now supporting the system for moral and normative reasons. No longer simply economic reasons, but companies then emerge to provide this demand.
Now, the best part of this whole story is that this policy design mix, this policy lever that happened 15 years ago becomes so strong and entrenched that now if you are a German citizen and you don't have a solar panel on your rooftop, you're considered not to be an appropriate citizen.
Okay? But it gets even better. Other countries saw this system, what is known in the global world as a feed-in tariff system, but it's a unique policy mix. Other countries saw this system and went, oh, this is really cool. And flash forward, 15 years later, 160 jurisdictions all over the world have adopted some form of this kind of system that Germany first introduced.
And now we have, without any global convention, without any requirement that countries do so, most countries now have some kind of system similar to the one Germany unleashed.
So in IES, we think, okay, that German example is a great metaphorical example. The evidence that norms changed into the future happened 15 years later.
Which means that the German policy makers couldn't rely on empirical evidence of that change. That would've been too late to inform the design, but they could anticipate, they could anticipate that design impact having on German norms and German politics 15 years later. And they did that through thinking about the multiple steps that a really smart design might unleash.
So we now see this happening in the context of, for example, Singapore, within the context of ASEAN. In the last three or four years, the Singapore government has initiated a number of efforts to decarbonise its sectors from transportation to shipping to consumer behaviour to production and consumption of energy systems.
All these things are happening now in Singapore, and IES can play a role in generating design insights of the kind I mentioned in Germany. Little tweaks here and there that seem innocuous, contracts instead of subsidies, that could make the difference in whether or not we, as members of the Singapore community, members of the ASEAN community, or global citizens achieve these 1.52 degrees warming goals set up in the Paris Accord.
Well, it's a very exciting time, and that example is one that's now playing out in multiple spaces, but whether or not we designed smartly enough depends upon generating knowledge collectively around these challenges.
David Austin: It's really encouraging to hear how some smart design and this sort of small tweaks can have such a great effect that will propagate around the world. And I think it's a good stepping off point for my next question. I wanted to refer to something that Dr Vinod Thomas said recently at the launch of his book
Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change. He said, "Having lost decades of inaction, now the time has come when transformative change alone can move the needle, it's not enough to do marginal incremental changes, which are the comfort zone of economists." What do you think about that quote?
Benjamin Cashore: Yeah, I think it's a really important quote, let me say Professor Thomas' book was a wonderful analysis on both the urgency of the questions we're facing, but also the policy tools available to us to achieve these kinds of changes. But I would say the following, a lot of talk is on transformation right now, but actually there's some things we don't want to change at all, we want to maintain.
So for example, almost all countries of the world have adopted the Paris Accords objectives of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 or 2°C above natural levels. So that objective, we don't want to actually transform at all. That's an objective we want to meet.
So we want to therefore transform our behaviours, our policy tools to achieve, maintain, these objectives, but this connection between what we want to be resilient, the 1.52 degrees objective, and what needs to be transformed then becomes a really important distinction to be made and where we go to seek transformations.
And while it's true, we can't do things slowly. With my colleagues, Levin, Auld and Bernstein, the four of us developed this term: Climate change is a "super wicked" problem. What we did say was that transformation will almost always occur through multiple step processes. The German example is a really good one.
It begins with an economic incentive. It ends up as a normative change through multiple steps involving companies, norms, and cultural shifts over time. So this means that transformation and incrementalism aren't necessarily at opposite sides of the coin. If you think about multiple steps that are fast, each of which have their own logics, but then going from a step to step can lead to that kind of change that you want in the tools, in the behaviours to maintain, not transform the objectives we seek to realise on the ground.
David Austin: Thank you. I think that's a really important distinction and a nice holistic context to put that in. Now I'd like to go back to something that you mentioned before when you were speaking about ASEAN and Singapore and Asia as being pivotal actors in the world's climate discussions, actions and contributions. Can you share more about the possibility of IES' role as Asia's new think tank on evidence for research and climate change policy initiatives that are working in this side of the world?
Benjamin Cashore: There are a couple of key points I want to make here. One is a geopolitical point and one is more of a policy design point, but they're related.
So in the geopolitical point, not many people realise, or they've long forgotten the following statistic. If you ask the question, of all the carbon dioxide sitting in the atmosphere right now above natural levels, how much was put there by northern countries? What the old Kyoto Protocol referred to as Annex I countries, those in the North that have largely developed, the answer is 92 per cent of that carbon was put there by the North.
So geopolitically Asia and Southeast Asia have a role in generating awareness of that kind of information. Because it means that the North has to accelerate and double down on its efforts just to get to a level where ASEAN and other countries have yet to go. So the responsibility question becomes really important because right now geopolitically much of the focus on decarbonisation is from the North, on China, on India, and also in Southeast Asia.
And while of course you want attention everywhere, what you don't want to do is inadvertently reverse the arrows about where responsibility and acceleration of activity has to dramatically occur. And so geopolitically one thing IES wants to do is generate the kinds of cross-global conversations where we invite the North to the South and invite the North to Southeast Asia, to understand better realities in the ground here and responsibilities about the climate crisis as well.
What we have right now is we have a lot of attention on what is known as these days as carbon border adjustment taxes, where essentially countries in the North are putting taxes on goods from the South where they feel that a country that's produced those goods hasn't done enough on the climate crisis, but that gets a little bit confusing because the responsibility question is much more complex, especially as the Southern countries seek to develop.
So that's one question and one point that IES can play a role in generating deliberative and meaningful conversations around global challenges and local responsibilities.
But the second is that just as this recognition that Southeast Asia in general, and of course Singapore in particular, is one of the most innovative places in the world, whether you're talking about economic development, social policy dynamics, and now of course activity on decarbonisation. Just as Southeast Asia is innovative, there's a chance now to accelerate that innovation when it comes to decarbonisation, that's very exciting. Because unlike, say, five, 10 years ago there's now a, not just a societal consensus, but intergovernmental consensus that things have to occur quick and, and swiftly to reach these goals. And so we can be involved then in these policy design tweaks that can accelerate these efforts happening at multiple scales, both within Singapore, across different sectors and also across ASEAN.
And that makes us for a very exciting place. Because it means linking, cutting edge research on the evidence out there and the experiments that already being run with cutting edge thinking about how you anticipate future impacts that have yet to occur. But that by bringing all of our collective knowledge sources together, from practitioners to government leaders to academics, we can indeed unleash and uncover innovative solutions.
David Austin: That's fascinating. And based on what you said, I'm gonna skip ahead one question and ask you just to discuss Singapore specifically the fact that it's smaller in size, but you know, it's still a major player and actor on this front. Could you give us a little bit more detail and background on that?
Benjamin Cashore: What's fascinating about Singapore's approach and in the context of ASEAN is that they're working very diligently to marry just as the German government feed-in-tariff program did, economic incentives with decarbonisation. So they work on, for example, how do you leverage green finance for decarbonisation? Now globally, again, green finance and the resources, public and private committed to green finance is really significant right now.
And Mark Carney, former head of the Bank of England, is behind these efforts globally. But, how they get deployed and what they do and how they're drawn upon to decarbonise is where Singapore comes in, and ASEAN for that matter, in a really important way, and that's when the innovation in Singapore is so important to take that general interest and that general resources that are now making their way through the system and leverage them for effective results.
Now even our colleagues in the business school are developing a programme on climate finance. And IES seeks to be part of those conversations around the policy and design aspects of climate finance to be, again, effective and swift. Likewise for significant efforts within Singapore to help ASEAN decarbonise through nature-based solutions. This is a really fascinating project, again, housed at NUS where natural scientists, biologists are looking at how forests store carbon and how then you could generate carbon credits to invest in forest conservation receiving biodiversity benefits, reducing carbon emissions and also gaining livelihoods as well.
That's not an easy question. People have tried before and the complex mix required to have effective and durable results is very challenging. But when you get significant minds together, including the public policy design aspect of these questions that IES brings to the table, I think is where the action can actually happen.
But there's a multitude of efforts underway from how you generate clean drinking water to how you reduce plastics, all of which have some component that could help as part of a broader process, decarbonise across multiple scales.
David Austin: Professor, you mentioned ASEAN. Could you elaborate a little bit further on what kind of collective action ASEAN could take?
Benjamin Cashore: Yeah. This is a really important question because all over the world, countries are forming many clubs of like-minded countries and organisations to facilitate their decarbonisation.
The reality is Singapore is part of ASEAN. ASEAN is a very unique region, and a lot of efforts to decarbonise in this part of the world will require an ASEAN wide response. Just for example, take technologies aimed at what's known as carbon capture and storage. These are emerging technologies, but they hold some potential promise to be part of a decarbonised vision solution.
But the storage part of this has to occur outside Singapore. And this means that some kind of collective cooperative approach in the part of ASEAN countries can regenerate innovative ways to decarbonise that you couldn't do by your individual country level efforts.
Likewise, and this is a really important point, even sources of green energy vary across countries, and so cooperation can help accelerate sharing of decarbonisation activities where different countries have particular advantages. Just for example, it turns out that Singapore has no rivers that it can dam for hydropower. Other countries do. That's simply a natural endowment. So if you want to think about what Singapore can do in the hydro side, that would mean some kind of agreement to import hydropower from other countries, be it Vietnam or Australia or Thailand for that matter.
So that requires cooperation. And that's a really important part of the story because you wouldn't want to compare Singapore to a country that has vast abilities to tap into hydropower. So those kinds of technological solutions that also require financial incentives ultimately required a geopolitical response and the linking of those knowledge sources, geopolitics with technology and finance is a really important part of developing what would either be an effective cooperation agreement or one that ultimately doesn't succeed.
David Austin: What about the financing and investing that needs to take place to support this? What are your views on that and what would you like to share about that?
Benjamin Cashore: Everybody in ASEAN now looks to this potential of financing for both their adaptation and mitigation side of the climate crisis as something that can benefit Southeast Asia. But the problem is how do you do that in a way that attracts capital and deploys it most efficiently and effectively?
And that's where I think Singapore has a competitive advantage because it's known as a place in which innovation occurs. It's a financial hub, and it's known as a place with good governance. And so you know that the resources that are allocated through a Singapore climate hub are likely to be deployed the most effectively, with the least administrative costs compared to other places because they are so much more advanced on that side.
Not to mention, of course the intellectual capital of Singapore being a financial hub in itself. So there, of course, you want to think about each country's value added and how you can draw on these resources to be effective quickly and efficiently.
And that makes Singapore well suited to both doing things internally, but also showing other countries how it's done. So they can also join in this decarbonisation effort that can link these and mobilise these resources to effective results.
I would also add to that the more that Southeast Asia can develop systems that are seen as being trusted, as able to deliver results, the more you can deploy the resources that are committed.
So for both those reasons, this is a very exciting time for the deployment of finance from global sources and then deployed from the Singaporean context. But again, it needs to be done well and right and in an innovative way in which Singapore has the opportunity to lead.
David Austin: There is so much going on here and it's really interesting to hear your take on that. What is the biggest factor contributing to behavioural differences in action for climate change to happen?
Benjamin Cashore: This is the challenge of choosing the one thing because actually, even though we need to reduce the pollution causing global warming at which CO2 is the main pollutant, the actual causes are so multitudinal and across so many sectors that it's hard to identify one thing in particular but rather how do you generate awareness about them all in common purpose?
So whether it's how we think about the aviation sector, including how we as individuals fly to wonderful places to go on vacation to how we think about shipping. And likewise how we use public transportation or ride sharing.
Each one of these choices matters in some way. So that means, of course, you must have this awareness of the problem out there at not just the public policy level, but also the societal level. And what I can say is we're so far advanced from what we were 15 years ago. You know, when Al Gore came out with his presentations on the climate crisis, that was a very different world.
And now we've got massive understandings. That this is a crisis that might begin as an ecological one, but that if not solved is an economic one in the future. So how we do that and generate knowledge about that is now way more advanced. And of course it means education continuing. It means dissemination of knowledge quickly and efficiently is important, and all those things are actually underway.
But more importantly than information alone to me is what can we do? As individuals, a member of society, and as those who are part of governing systems that seek to ask our government leaders to take action. And so in the context of Singapore, I would say one thing individuals can do is to support and encourage the activity that's already happening right now at multiple scales.
One thing we know from our work on policy studies is that oftentimes policies aren't durable, because the attention spans wave or relax. So maintaining awareness of and support for these kinds of policies is one significant step that individuals and citizens can make. But likewise, there are things that we can all do individually on our own.
The products we purchase, the trips we make, our own behaviour can play an important role in generating support and a collective vision.
David Austin: Exactly. Thank you so much.
Benjamin Cashore: Let me just say one last thing though, I think this is a very exciting time, but everybody around the world, citizens, government officials, nobody is pollyannish about this. They realise as Vinod Thomas' book pointed out, that time is running out which is the first key feature of super wicked problems. So this is not a done deal by any means. There's a lot of work to be done and the crisis is getting more and more acute. So there's a chance here to do it well, but it means all of us have to recognise the severity of the problem.
And the deployment of capital, human, financial and design insights is so fundamental now to assessing not whether, but how we can get this thing done.
David Austin: Thank you so much for joining us today. I think that was a really great discussion.
Professor Cashore: My pleasure. Thanks for taking the time. And really glad to be part of these conversations that require multiple lenses and multiple knowledge sources and the integration of which this kind of conversation helps advance.