EPRG and Organising Politics research group seminar: Benjamin Cashore - “Climate Policy Thermostats: The Planet’s Last Hope?”

Climate Policy Thermostats: The Planet’s Last Hope?

Why is it that despite 35 years of climate policy experiments across multiple levels of governance, the planet is hurtling towards catastrophic warming? I argue that one uninterrogated explanation is the lack of attention to building analytical policy capacities necessary for imagining policies that have yet to be deployed and anticipating futures that have yet to occur.

The result is that limited attention has been placed on researching, and learning from, highly promising thermostatic systems. Thermostatic systems are worthy of sustained attention because they institutionalize simultaneous processes of change and durability by first achieving, and then maintaining, policy objectives. They operate much like a house’s thermostat, maintaining a pre-established internal objective by automatically triggering adjustments as external conditions change.

This requires advancing two analytical distinctions. First, climate must be treated as a Type 4 (Prioritization) problem, in contrast to the Type 3 (Compromise), Type 2 (Optimization), and Type 1 (Commons) conceptions that have dominated three decades of policy innovations. Second, Type 3 work on path dependency must disentangle those policy elements that must change in order to maintain policy objectives.

I apply these distinctions to identify several design insights that emerge from interrogating cases of policy thermostats in non-climate domains. This leads me to identify the urgent need to build national climate policy thermostats capable of overcoming two key gaps in extant approaches to climate policy: weak compliance mechanisms under the Paris Accord, and bottom-up climate innovations that, in aggregate, have been found to be insufficient for achieving a 1.5/2°C world. I conclude by identifying the urgent need to develop a research agenda on thermostatic institutions capable of helping the world avert the most catastrophic effects of a warming planet.

Note: This talk draws on Cashore’s manuscript under contract at MIT Press, The Environmental Policy Paradox: Why Sustainability Governance is Failing our Planet and What to Do About It, and the paper “Climate Policy Thermostats: The Planet's Last Hope”

Benjamin Cashore

Li Ka Shing Professor in Public Management at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP), National University of Singapore, and Director of LKYSPP’s Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES). He came to NUS in January 2020 from Yale University’s Environment School, where he was a tenured full professor of environmental governance and political science.

Cashore’s major research interests include non-state market-driven (NSMD) global governance; transnational business regulation; corporate social responsibility; the emergence of domestic and international regulatory policies; and the role of firms, non-state actors, and civil society in shaping these trends. His ongoing research focuses on how the interaction of multiple levels of governance—public and private—might evolve, in the global era, to produce durable global environmental governance and sustainability solutions. He pursues this approach through thematic efforts on policy change and policy learning; interventions to ameliorate “super wicked” problems; and the influence of globalization and internationalization on domestic policy processes. His substantive research interests include climate policy, biodiversity/land-use change, and sustainable forest management, largely advanced through the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 13 (climate) and 15 (biodiversity). 

Cashore was selected for the prestigious 2025 distinguished scholar award from the Environmental Studies Section (ESS) of the International Studies Association (ISA) for making significant and lasting contributions to environmental policy and governance research and mentoring. He consistently ranks in the top 1% of scientists world-wide based on citations.