How to eat an elephant: a bottom-up approach to climate policy

A longstanding, alternative approach is offered to the existing UNFCCC international policy regime as a viable policy option. This ‘bottom-up’ approach has been neglected in policy discourse until now. The alternative approach is a ‘clumsy’ proposal, which emphasizes the ‘direction of travel’ over targets and timetables. It places an immediate emphasis on adaptation and the development of effective measures to minimize global warming through a diverse range of policy actions, originating from the ‘bottom up’ within nations, based on their own institutional, technological, economic and political capacities. Cumulatively, this would lead to a fundamental technological shift in global patterns of energy and land use. It would also encourage practical cooperation among the large emitters to control greenhouse gases and support the formation of regional collaborations on adaptation. Climate change is framed as a strategic challenge rather than an optimizing problem for analysts and policy-makers. Hence, policy is no longer obsessed with issues of leakage and concerns about free-riders, but greater explicit recognition is given to the fact that development is inevitably uneven and that different actors have very different motivations for action and capabilities to contribute to the climate change challenge.