Learning across levels of governance: Expert advice and the adoption of carbon dioxide emissions reduction targets in the UK

Global Environmental Change 20 (2010) 394–401

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Learning across levels of governance: Expert advice and the adoption of carbon dioxide emissions reduction targets in the UK Susan Owens * University of Cambridge, Department of Geography, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN, UK

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Received 25 June 2009 Accepted 2 November 2009

This paper is concerned with environmental governance and policy formation in the area of climate change. Specifically, it examines a decision by the UK Government in 2003 to adopt a demanding, longterm CO2 emissions reduction target, following the advice of one of its longest standing environmental advisory bodies, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. It explores the origins of the Commission’s recommendation and the reasons for its relatively rapid uptake in public policy. It argues that in both cases, a complex mix of structural and contingent, cognitive and non-cognitive factors can be identified, operating at different levels of governance. Finally, the paper reflects on what we might learn from this particular case about policy processes and the role of knowledge and expert advice within them. ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Knowledge Policy Environmental governance Expert advice Climate change UK

1. Introduction: the paradox of slow progress ‘The processes by which policies are formed are exceedingly complex’ (Kingdon, 2003, p. 230). ‘To say that processes are unpredictable does not mean that they cannot be studied’ (Baumgartner, 2006, p. 39). Over the past half-century – the period during which, according to many scholars, a shift from government to governance has been discernible in the Western democracies (see, for example, Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003) – we have often been conscious of what I shall call ‘the paradox of slow progress’. At any one moment, progressive change in environmental governance can seem painfully slow, sometimes even unattainable. But when we look back over periods of a decade or more, and certainly when we compare the current situation with that pertaining at the outset of the ‘environmental revolution’ in the 1960s, we can see that the policy and political landscapes have changed beyond all recognition. Institutions have been radically reformed and, in many cases, created; there have been major developments in legislation and policy instruments; and ‘the environment’ as a category for political action has moved from the periphery to the mainstream. These changes have taken place at all

* Tel.: +44 1223 333399. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0959-3780/$ – see front matter ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.11.001

levels of governance, and often connect or transcend them (Bulkeley, 2005). Taking the long view, we might detect many instances in environmental policy of what Peter Hall (1993) has called ‘third order’ change, in which not just the detail or the instruments but the whole interpretive framework of policy shifts. The processes through which public policies evolve and change are highly significant in the context of the wider themes addressed in this special issue—governance, complexity and resilience. Environmental governance involves intervention, through appropriate policies and practices, in the dynamic and complex relationships binding humanity and the natural world, with the object of maintaining and improving resilience and sustainability. This is very much a case of trying to steer change in complex, multilevel, and dynamic systems (Duit et al., 2009), so that environmental governance can never be a deterministic activity, precisely because of the openness and non-linearities of the environmental and social systems involved. When we consider the webs of interaction connecting these systems at different temporal and spatial scales, we confront a very complex picture indeed, of which our understanding must inevitably remain incomplete. This paper is concerned with policy formation – itself an ‘exceedingly complex’ process, as Kingdon notes – in the area of climate change. My aim is not to consider (except as background) the broad sweep of policy in this domain, but to look in more intricate detail at a marked shift in British (domestic) climate change policy which took place in 2003 after a decade or so of well-meaning but rather sluggish development. Briefly (the details will come later), the

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change involved adoption of a demanding, long-term CO2 emissions reduction target, as proposed a few years earlier by one of Britain’s longest standing environmental advisory bodies, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP, 2000). At the broadest level, then, this paper is concerned with the governance of anthropogenic climate change, often seen as the paradigmatic example of a coupled human–environmental system operating at the global scale. At another level it addresses questions about the formation of public policy, which remains a centrally important aspect of environmental governance. Most specifically, it focuses on the role of expert advice, and considers the significance of knowledge alongside other, sometimes more familiar, factors in processes of policy evolution and change. Knowledge is defined broadly in this context to include evidence, argument and ideas, as well as discursive strategies such as framing (Rein and Scho¨n, 1991). A natural starting point therefore lies in so-called cognitive theories of the policy process, in which knowledge (broadly defined) is seen as an interesting variable in its own right, and which often afford considerable significance to processes of learning, whether these are seen as rationalistic or discursive (see, for example, Haas, 1992; Heclo, 1974; Hajer, 1995; Hall, 1993; Jenkins-Smith and Sabatier, 1994; Majone, 1989; Radaelli, 1995; Sabatier, 1987, 1998; Litfin, 1994). Hugh Heclo, one of the first political scientists to develop such a perspective, famously argued that governments ‘not only ‘‘power’’; they also puzzle’, and described policy-making as ‘an act of collective puzzlement on society’s behalf’ (Heclo, 1974, p. 305). Several decades later we might paraphrase Heclo to say that governance, including the making of public policy, involves both powering and puzzling, but is now conducted rather less ‘on society’s behalf’ and rather more through the involvement of a range of social actors and institutions (including the institutions of policy advice, as will be demonstrated in this paper). As Heclo and many others have shown, cognitive theories do not preclude the selective and strategic use of knowledge in the political processes of policy-making, but nor do they treat knowledge merely as something that is epiphenomenal. Rather, cognitive factors are seen as quasi-independent variables in dynamic interaction with the more familiar categories of power, interests and institutions. The contingency of these interactions goes some way towards resolving the paradox of slow progress, and helps to explain why the policy process itself behaves in a nonlinear way. According to well known frameworks, such as Kingdon’s (2003) ‘process streams’ approach1 and the theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ developed by Baumgartner and Jones (1991, 1993, 2002),2 we should expect to find certain regularities over time but also important elements of randomness and chance in policy dynamics. This makes outcomes in any particular case difficult to predict, as Baumgartner (2006, p. 25) observes in an interesting reflection on complexity: ‘. . . self reinforcing processes are at the core of many policy punctuations, but, like the tropical depression that may or may 1 Kingdon (2003) analysed agenda setting and the generation of alternatives in federal policy making in the United States. Drawing on a ‘garbage can model’ of organisational choice (Cohen et al., 1972), he envisages streams of problems, policies and politics flowing largely independently through the system; policy ideas ‘float around’, for example, not necessarily attached to problems. At ‘critical junctures’, however, which might be brought about by political or exogenous events, or the actions of ‘policy entrepreneurs’, the streams converge and significant policy change becomes possible. 2 Baumgartner and Jones seek to explain why the evolution of public policy is often characterised by long periods of stability punctuated by intensive periods of policy innovation and change. They show that new developments often have little impact on the status quo until there is belated recognition that something needs to be done, and when conditions are right, positive feedback mechanisms can result in dramatic change. Shifting ‘policy images’ (or frames) and shifting venues can contribute to this process.

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not develop into a hurricane, we cannot tell which ones may develop and which ones may dissipate.’ To draw some threads together at this point, we can say that knowledge matters in the policy process (this much is selfevident), but exactly when and how it matters is contingent (and an important subject for empirical investigation) (Radaelli, 1995). In this context, it is appropriate to turn attention to the role of advice and advisory bodies, a role widely acknowledged in cognitive theories of the policy process but often not dealt with in any depth. Yet in modern democracies, expert advice is one of the established mechanisms through which knowledge comes into interplay with interests and power, and this is particularly the case in difficult and contested policy domains such as that of the environment. In this paper, I explore the ‘knowledge-policy interface’ (as it has come to be called3) through a particular example of policy change involving the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, which, as noted above, is an established advisory body in the UK. The knowledge in question, including synthesis, analysis, advice and argument, was formalised in one of the Commission’s substantial reports, published in 2000, and the policy domains were those of energy and the environment; specifically, the report was concerned with policies relating to climate change. My argument revolves around a particular moment of influence: in effect, this paper presents a vignette, and works outwards to identify the factors at work at various levels of governance. In doing so, it responds to the need for intensive studies of the policy process, which might help us understand ‘the interactive and multiplicative effects of the variables that contribute to policy change’ (Baumgartner, 2006, p. 40), and also to the many calls for further, forensic work to elucidate the ways in which ‘powering’ and ‘puzzling’ interact (Hall, 1993, p. 92; see also Bennett and Howlett, 1992; Litfin, 1994; Pielke, 2007).4 2. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and the ‘60 per cent’ recommendation The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (hereafter, ‘the Commission’) was created as an independent, standing advisory body in 1970,5 part of the UK’s institutional response to mounting public and political concern about the environment. Reorganisation of ministries and establishment of expert advisory bodies were common responses to the new political imperatives in many Western countries at that time. The Commission’s remit was to advise government and Parliament on matters concerning pollution and the environment, and it has done so continuously ever since, over a period of nearly four decades. It is an interdisciplinary body – ‘a committee of experts’ rather than an ‘expert committee’ – whose members (usually numbering around 14) have been drawn largely from academia but also from other sectors, and whose working practices have changed surprisingly 3 This familiar metaphor is not entirely helpful because it implies a well-defined boundary between separate spheres. However, scholars of science and technology studies have argued that the boundary between ‘science’ and ‘non-science’ is not defined by essential characteristics but actively constructed and defended by scientists and other groups (Gieryn, 1983, 1995; Jasanoff, 1990, 2006). In terms of science and policy, such ‘boundary work’ is well documented in Sheila Jasanoff’s (1990) groundbreaking research on scientific advisory committees in the United States. An important corollorary of these arguments is that we have to ask not only ‘how does knowledge impinge on policy?’, but how policy and political processes influence our conceptions of valid and authoritative knowledge. These two sets of questions have typically been addressed within different intellectual traditions, though there is much to be gained from recognising their inseparability. 4 This has been characterised as an area in which there has been too little of the detailed empirical research that theory building requires. There have, however, been a number of important contributions (see, for example, Fiorino, 2001; Flyvbjerg, 1998; Haas, 1992; Hajer, 1995; Hall, 1993; Litfin, 1994). 5 The Commission met for the first time on 25th February 1970.

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little over time. The Commission (for the most part) selects its own subjects for investigation, meets once a month over two days (sometimes undertaking additional activities, such as visits), takes written and oral evidence, and prepares reports, which incorporate in-depth analysis and recommendations. There have been around 30 such reports to date, dealing variously with specific pollutants, policy sectors, emergent technologies, and issues of principle in environmental regulation.6 Reception of the Commission’s reports, by governments of different political persuasions, has varied from enthusiasm and prompt action to neglect and inertia, with many shades of responsiveness in between. Overall, however, the Commission has been respected as an advisory body and is widely held to have had a significant (if not always direct) influence on environmental policy, extending in some cases to the European or wider international context (see, for example, ENDS, 2008; Owens and Rayner, 1999; Weale, 1992, 2001). Early in 1997, the Commission, having as usual considered a number of possible alternatives, decided that its next major study would be on the subject of energy and the environment.7 Except for a seminal report on nuclear power and the environment (RCEP, 1976a), a study of oil pollution of the sea (RCEP, 1981) and a limited discussion of acid rain in its wide-ranging tenth report RCEP (1984), it had not previously ventured very much into the energy field.8 The report of the new study, the Commission’s twentysecond, was published in June 2000, and was framed around the question of what changes would have to be initiated in the UK if CO2 emissions were to be reduced by 60 per cent by the year 2050. One of the Commission’s conclusions was that there would be no ‘free lunch’ in energy policy—all of the options considered involved substantial governance challenges. Another was that, contrary to some strongly expressed views within energy policy communities, it would not be impossible to achieve the target reduction in CO2 emissions without a new civil nuclear power programme. But the most radical aspect of the report, and the one that commanded the greatest attention, was the recommendation that: ‘The government should now adopt a strategy which puts the UK on a path to reducing carbon dioxide emissions by some 60% from current levels by about 2050’ (RCEP, 2000, p. 199). This target would be in line with a global agreement based on the principle of ‘contraction and convergence’ – discussed in more detail below – which set an upper limit for the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere of some 550 ppmv9 and with a convergence date of 2050.10 To the Commission’s own surprise, the Government picked up the gauntlet – and did so swiftly in comparison with previous occasions on which reports had significantly challenged the status quo. When the Commission had called for a radical overhaul of pollution control institutions (RCEP, 1976b), for example, and when it had confronted the dominant thinking about agriculture and pollution (RCEP, 1979), its ideas had taken much longer to have effect. But almost immediately after publication of the energy report, the Government set up a review by its own Performance and 6 Further details about the Commission’s work and an annotated list of its reports can be found at http://www.rcep.org.uk. For analysis of its practices, role and influence, see Owens (1995, 2003, 2006) and Owens and Rayner (1999). 7 Minute 7, 2nd meeting 1997, 6th February. 8 One reason is that in the late 1970s this terrain was occupied by another body, The Commission on Energy and the Environment, which was put into abeyance by the then Conservative government in 1981 and abolished a few years later. Another is that, after its dominance in the 1970s and early 1980s, energy became less prominent on the political agenda (except for the issues of privatisation), emerging again as a major issue towards the end of the 1990s. 9 Parts per million by volume. 10 The report made 87 recommendations in total.

Innovation Unit (PIU),11 asking it to set out energy policy objectives for 2050 and to develop a ‘vision and strategy’ for achieving them (PIU, 2002, para 1.4). Thus the long-term perspective adopted by the Commission could be said from the outset to have influenced thinking about the time frame, at least, for energy policy in the UK. The PIU Review was also intended to ‘inform the Government’s response’ to the Royal Commission’s report, and particularly to the 60 per cent recommendation (PIU, 2002, para 1.5). Its output, published in 2002, framed climate change as a critical issue for the energy sector, so that at this stage the Commission’s report had not only influenced the strategic time scale but helped bring about a convergence of energy and climate change policies (Lovell et al., 2009). A White Paper – a formal statement of government policy – soon followed, in which the 60 per cent CO2 emissions reduction target acquired official status (UK Government, 2003a). Paragraph 1.10 of the White Paper is quite clear about the source of this commitment: ‘We . . . accept the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution’s (RCEP’s) recommendation that the UK should put itself on a path towards a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of some 60% from current levels by about 2050’. The 60 per cent target survived intact through rapid developments in, and further convergence of, energy and climate change policies until it was made even more demanding in the Climate Change Act of 2008. Following a recommendation from the then newly established, independent Climate Change Committee, acting at that stage in a ‘shadow’ capacity,12 the 2008 Act embraced an 80 per cent reduction target, in this case covering all Kyoto-relevant greenhouse gas emissions. The rationale was that developments in climate science, analysis of potential impacts, and trends in emissions and atmospheric concentrations now justified a more stringent target than the 60 per cent reduction recommended eight years previously in the Royal Commission’s report (Committee on Climate Change, 2008).13 These are startling developments in policy terms, and they beg a number of questions. Where did the ‘60 per cent’ recommendation actually come from? Why, in spite of its quite radical nature and substantial implications for society and the economy, was it adopted with such alacrity? And in what ways has it made, or is it likely to make, a real difference? What we find when we address these questions is an intriguing complex of motivations, cutting across and connecting difference levels of governance at macro-, meso- and micro-scales and driven by a dynamic interplay of knowledge, interests, institutions and power. These processes – and their relevance to the themes explored in this special issue – will emerge more clearly if we take each of the above questions in turn. 3. Where did the ‘60 per cent’ recommendation come from? The origins of the 60 per cent recommendation in the Commission’s report are interesting. The long-term target for

11 A strategic unit located within the Cabinet Office but working on a project basis across government. The Advisory Group for the Review included Professor Sir Tom Blundell, then Chair of the Royal Commission. Furthermore, the Commission’s Secretary (Dr David Lewis) became a member of the interdepartmental group within Whitehall that dealt with the Energy Review. Such involvement, and an opportunity for the Chair to meet directly with the Prime Minister, are interesting examples of the ‘anchoring’ of ideas within policy communities. (I am grateful to Barbara Czarniawska, Professor of Management Studies at Go¨teborg University, Sweden, for alerting me to this concept.) 12 The Committee was placed on a statutory footing by the Climate Change Act itself. See note 21. 13 The interim period had seen publication of the third and fourth assessment reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2001, 2007) and of the influential, UK Treasury-commissioned Stern Review of the economics of climate change (Stern, 2006).

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emissions reduction was grounded partly in climate change science, partly in ethics and partly in a desire on the part of the Commission itself for visibility. The Commission, as already noted, is an interdisciplinary, largely academic, body of experts. Its members – one of whom at the time of the energy study was a distinguished climate scientist – were of course aware of the prevailing view of the climate science community, reflected in the assessment reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and in the scientific literature more generally, that atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases would have to be stabilised if dangerous anthropogenic climate change was to be avoided. Having reviewed the available evidence, the Commission accepted the dominant scientific perspective (in effect taking ‘the threats posed by climate change as a given’ [ENDS, 2000, p. 19]), and argued that ‘an atmospheric concentration of 550 ppmv of carbon dioxide should be regarded as an upper limit that should not be exceeded’ (RCEP, 2000, para 4.32). Acknowledging that there were great uncertainties, the Commission nevertheless adopted this concentration as a critical threshold and advocated immediate action, invoking a version of the precautionary principle as a rationale: ‘By the time the effects of human activities on the global climate are clear and unambiguous it would be too late to take preventive measures. There is a very strong likelihood that the overall impact will be seriously damaging. There is also the possibility that abrupt changes in the climate system might be triggered and have even more dramatic impacts’ (RCEP, 2000, para 2.36). Interestingly, while this is a classic statement of precaution (taking the likelihood of serious impacts to justify action in the absence of proof of harm), the minutes record a feeling among members that ‘the scientific case for action is now so strong that the response the Commission is advocating is more than ‘‘precautionary’’’.14 At one level, then, the Commission began with the (majority) scientific perspective on what the maximum concentration of carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere ought to be. But it was also persuaded by the principle of ‘contraction and convergence’, promoted by the UK-based Global Commons Institute and brought to the table during the process of taking evidence.15 Grounded in the view that emission quotas should eventually ‘be allocated to nations on a simple and equal per capita basis’ (RCEP, 2000, para 4.47), but accepting that such a state of affairs could not realistically be effected in the short term, the principle is that the per capita allowances of more and less developed countries should gradually converge, and thereafter should contract together. Thus, the Commission’s analysis was shaped by an ethical position concerning ‘fair shares’ of environmental capacity as well as by a scientifically-informed assessment (with its acknowledged uncertainties) of the levels at which that capacity might be breached. In short, it made judgements about a good (global) society as well as about the physical conditions for a resilient human-environmental system (see Duit et al., 2009). In combination, these considerations led to the Commission’s view that the UK, as a wealthy developed economy, would have to reduce its own CO2 emissions substantially, and to the figure of 60 per cent over a period of approximately half a century. The rationale is set out in detail in chapter four of the Commission’s report.

14

Minute 4, 3rd meeting 2000, 28th January. The Global Commons Institute (GCI) gave evidence to the Commission in the course of the study. Information about the Institute is at http://www.gci.org.uk (accessed 23.6.09) and for more detailed discussion of contraction and convergence see Meyer (2004). 15

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There was, however, a third factor behind the genesis of this recommendation. Like most of the Commission’s investigations, the energy study began in earnest once the previous report (Setting Environmental Standards, RCEP, 1998) had gone to press, which meant that the Commission began to concentrate on energy in the summer of 1998. The next stages of the study also followed a familiar path, with the Commission searching for a suitable focus while faced with a mass of information and an enormous number of issues that might potentially be worthy of exploration. As usual, it hoped to say something that would command public and political attention; the minutes record a feeling among members that ‘the Commission’s report must not look like simply one more report on energy’.16 Early on in its deliberations, the Commission considered the idea of taking a challenging, long-term objective as a starting point and working backwards to identify its more immediate policy implications (essentially a backcasting exercise). Such thinking crystallised at the September meeting in 1998, when it was suggested that a possible focus for the study might be ‘. . . to investigate the feasibility of a fossil fuel-free energy policy for the UK in the medium to long term, and to consider what the consequences might be. This would provide a framework for discussing a number of complex issues in an analytical and dispassionate way.’17 This idea had considerable appeal for members, perhaps because it offered a clear and comprehensible focus, with the potential to cut through complexities. In a press release on 23rd September 1998, it was presented as the ‘main theme’ of the energy study, whose focus would now be ‘on the implications of considerably reducing, by the middle of the next century, use of fossil fuels as an energy source in the UK, or even phasing them out completely’ (RCEP, 1998, page 228). The call for written evidence went out on that basis. Much later, and after consideration of written and oral evidence throughout much of 1999, the Commission decided that it would be helpful to develop ‘an illustrative energy balance for the UK in 2050’.18 The purpose of the exercise, which expanded into a range of possible energy balances, was ‘to enable members to assess whether it would be feasible for the UK to manage without using fossil fuels as energy sources’.19 The analysis suggested that this state of affairs would not, in fact, be possible, at least for energy balances considered by the Commission to be plausible. The device proved useful, however, and ultimately four ‘illustrative scenarios’ were presented in chapter nine of the final report. By now these were no longer framed in terms of a phase out of fossil fuels. Rather, they were presented as alternative ways of achieving the 60 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions, which had itself been arrived at by combining the stabilisation objective (550 ppmv) with the principle of contraction and convergence, as outlined above.20 The intention, as the Commission emphasised, was not to indicate any preferred option but ‘to throw light on the broad potential of different approaches and on how they relate to each other’, and thus to ‘stimulate constructive debate’ (RCEP, 2000, paras 9.8 and 9.35). Significantly, all four scenarios envisaged a sharp trend-break in final energy consumption (which declined in 16

Minute 8, 2nd meeting 1999, 3–5th February. Minute 6, 10th meeting 1998, 2–4th September. Minute 15, 12th meeting 1999, 30th September–1st October. 19 Papers prepared by the Secretariat for the December meeting 1999: ‘Energy balances for 2050 – base case and scenarios’, RCP(99)716 and ‘Energy balances for 2050 – policy implications’, RCP(99)716-1, 25th November 1999. 20 The scenarios differed in three main respects: in the level of energy demand; in the extent to which renewable sources of energy would be deployed; and in the requirement for a baseload electricity generating capacity, assumed to be provided either by nuclear power or by fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage. See Chapter 9 and Appendix F of the Commission’s report. 17 18

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absolute terms in three of them), as well as ‘fundamental shifts . . . in the ways [in which] energy is obtained and used’ (RCEP, 2000, para 9.39). Achieving reductions in CO2 emissions on the scale required would, the Commission concluded, be technically feasible. But it would be immensely challenging, and a long-term strategic approach would certainly be required – hence the recommendation that the UK Government should urgently adopt such an approach, embracing the 60 per cent target. From this brief outline, we can see that Commission arrived at its 60 per cent recommendation not only by deploying evidence, ideas and argument, as one would expect of such a body, but also by adopting a discursive strategy which framed the issues in a compelling way, so as not to produce just ‘one more report on energy’. The recommendation was shaped by climate science and politics operating in a global arena; by certain normative commitments, notably the principles of precaution and ‘contraction and convergence’ (both promoted internationally but, especially in the latter case, not universally accepted); by an assessment of the feasibility and implications of radical reductions in emissions for one country, the UK; and by the membership, practices and priorities of an individual advisory body. The ‘inputs’, then, can be traced to macro-, meso- and micro-scales; their convergence in the course of the Commission’s deliberations produced something concrete in the form of a definitive objective; and that objective – the 60 per cent target – caught the political imagination and took on something of a life of its own. To see where the recommendation came from, however, does not in itself explain its unusually rapid acceptance. It is to this intriguing phenomenon that we now turn. 4. Why was the 60 per cent recommendation accepted? If we are to understand why a challenging recommendation was taken up with such alacrity, we need once again to consider processes operating, and ideas circulating, at different scales. This time it is helpful to start in the middle, with national government, where one possible explanation might be that political actors were indulging in a classic NIMTO (‘Not In My Term Of Office’) strategy. For a government keen to demonstrate its green credentials, but not to act too assiduously in the short term, a radical commitment for fifty years hence might seem to be useful – who, after all, would still be there to check on delivery, or to impose any sanctions for failure? By itself, however, the NIMTO account provides too thin an explanation, in spite of its intuitive appeal. Given the magnitude of the changes required, it would not be possible to defer serious action within the UK for very long, and there would be plenty of non-governmental organisations seeking to hold the government to account in the short to medium term. In practice, therefore, institutionalising the longterm target might well be a means of forcing change on a shorter time scale (and we might acknowledge in passing that it was clever of the Commission to propose such a long-term target that a government would not feel immediately threatened). More generously, perhaps, the NIMTO explanation is not obviously compatible with the UK’s acknowledged leadership in climate diplomacy on the international stage, nor with the subsequent adoption of a more stringent target in the Climate Change Act of 2008 and the establishment of an independent Climate Change Committee to set legally binding interim ‘carbon budgets’.21 So we need to look elsewhere for a fuller 21 The Committee was appointed in shadow (non-statutory) form in March 2008, a device that enabled its first report to be produced in time to influence the Climate Change Bill passing through Parliament in that year. The report, as noted in Section 2, recommended an 80 per cent reduction in Kyoto-relevant greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Climate Change Bill gained Royal Assent, passing into legislation as the Climate Change Act 2008 on 1st December. Amongst other measures, the Act incorporated the 80 per cent target and formally established the Climate Change Committee. Initially, at least, the Committee will define ‘carbon budgets’ for three five-year periods, beginning with 2008–2012.

understanding of the government’s acquiescence, and in this context two other possible explanations, both with international dimensions, merit consideration. The first is concerned with wider aspects of energy policy in the UK. During the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative administration had embarked on a determined programme of privatisation of the energy supply industry followed by liberalisation of energy markets – part of the neo-liberal project of ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’. Under Thatcher’s successor, John Major, the Department of Energy had been abolished (in 1992) and its residual functions distributed among the Department of Trade and Industry, the Department of Environment and other bodies. When a Labour government came to power in 1997, it showed little inclination to change the general thrust of these policies. In important respects, therefore, the UK energy sector came to exemplify the fragmentation of institutional landscapes seen by many as characteristic of contemporary polities (Duit et al., 2009). Indeed, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that by the turn of the century the dominant energy policy in the UK had been not to have an energy policy, for the best part of twenty years. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, things were changing. In part this was due to the increasing volume and urgency of the messages on climate change, and in part to the fact that energy security was climbing once again on the policy and political agendas of developed economies. In the UK, security concerns were given special emphasis by the resumption of natural gas imports as the era of self-sufficiency permitted by the gas reserves of the North Sea was drawing to a close. Thus another possible explanation for the receptiveness of the government to the Commission’s report was that the time was ripe, after a long period of ‘rolling back’, for the British state to re-engage with the energy sector, at least in terms of its broad strategic direction. The fact that the White Paper of 2003 was the first energy policy statement since 1967 to adopt anything like a comprehensive approach lends tentative support to this view. There was, arguably, a third factor. Firm acceptance of the 60 per cent recommendation came early in 2003, in the Government’s formal response to the Commission’s energy report (UK Government, 2003b) and in the Energy White Paper (UK Government, 2003a) mentioned in Section 2 above. Both were published in February of that year. This rather frenetic activity on energy and climate change was taking place in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, which began in late March 2003 and constituted a major ‘external event’ of the kind recognised by many analysts of the policy process. If the Blair and Bush administrations were clearly, and controversially, at one on this particular aspect of foreign policy, perhaps it was useful from the point of view of British domestic and European politics to demonstrate that there were important issues on which Britain and America differed. In a speech on sustainable development delivered on 24th February, the day on which the Energy White Paper was also published, Tony Blair seemed to do just that.22 Arguing that there could be ‘no genuine security if the planet is ravaged by climate change’, and that the Kyoto Protocol, rejected by the Americans, was ‘not radical enough’, he called for more urgent, co-ordinated action. The speech was widely reported, and was interpreted in some quarters as a distancing of the British from the American position on climate change. For The New York Times, for example, it constituted a (gentle) criticism of President Bush ‘for failing to do more to

22 The text of the speech is at http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page3073 (accessed 27.5.09). It was delivered in London at the launch of the Government’s annual progress report on sustainable development (Defra, 2002). The Prime Minister used the speech to draw attention to the measures set out in the Energy White Paper, and some of the arguments behind them. He referred explicitly to the Royal Commission’s 60 per cent recommendation.

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combat the damaging effects of greenhouse gases’, and signalled ‘clear disagreement with Britain’s foreign policy ally’ on this issue (Alvarez, 2003, p. 13). In similar vein, a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) briefing reported the speech under the headline, ‘Blair moves away from US on global warming’ (UNEP, 2003, p. 7). There is evidence, then, that the Commission’s report was timely in part because developments in the political stream made the ground fertile for policy change (Kingdon, 2003). But if we look closely we can see that the most proximate factors, such as publication of the report and the energy policy and geopolitical considerations outlined above, were not the only ones at play. Most obviously, both the Commission and the UK Government were moving along in a broad stream of ideas, and they were not alone in contemplating far-reaching policy responses to what was seen by many as the unprecedented threat of climate change. For over a decade there had been a gradual build up, in the problem and policy streams, of scientific evidence, advocacy, and international diplomacy, accompanied by significant (if cautious) developments in national and international legislation (see Section 5). Thus the measures adopted within the UK in the wake of the Commission’s report built upon a number of pre-existing climate-related initiatives.23 Also undoubtedly influential were the more diffuse, longer-term trends associated with ecological modernisation, including the shift towards precautionary, proactive approaches in environmental policy and the growing belief that green technologies could help reconcile economic growth and ecological integrity. The latter conviction was much apparent, for example, in the speech delivered by Tony Blair in February 2003, and later in both the Stern Review on the economics of climate change (Stern, 2006) and the Climate Change Act of 2008. The Commission is often credited, in official discourse and in the wider literature (see, for example, Anderson et al., 2008), with the long-term emissions reduction target that was adopted in 2003. But the discussion so far suggests that it would be too simple to say that expert advice ‘caused’ the policy change. The 60 per cent target, as shown in Section 3, can be traced to various sources, and when we look at its uptake we find a complex picture involving structural and contingent, cognitive and non-cognitive variables. These include the evolution of ideas and norms in environmental policy, the accumulation of evidence and argument on climate change, circumstances in other policy domains, and external events. What we can say, however, is that the Commission helped focus attention on a specific target at a particular political moment. In doing so, and indeed in producing its report at all, it contributed to positive feedback (Baumgartner, 2006) in the convergent energy and climate change domains, while other (cumulative and contingent) factors made it expedient for the government to adopt a challenging, longterm emissions reduction target at that time. 5. Conclusions and reflections What can this case tell us about the policy process, and about the roles of knowledge and expert advice within it, bearing in mind 23 The UK’s first Climate Change Programme (Department of the Environment, 1994), published under the then Conservative government, aimed to achieve a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. The ‘dash for gas’ by the newly privatised electricity supply industry made this target relatively easy to achieve (and helped the UK to adopt a pro-active stance in the international arena). The Blair Government (as promised in Labour’s 1997 election manifesto) adopted a target of a 20 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2010, going beyond the UK’s commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, and a draft programme to achieve these targets (including fiscal measures) was issued in 2000 (DETR, 2000), just as the Royal Commission was finalising its energy report. However, the Commission thought it highly unlikely that the proposed measures would be sufficient to meet their objectives, commenting in its report that there was ‘something of a hole in the government’s climate change programme’ (RCEP, 2000, para 5.59).

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that conclusions from any intensive vignette must necessarily be modest? Certainly the developments outlined above are in line with theories of policy-making that see it as a complex, non-linear affair, with unpredictable outcomes in specific cases. In Kingdon’s (2003) terms, we could say that the problem and policy streams, in which evidence and proposals had been building up over a number of years, converged with developments in the political stream at a particular moment, providing an opportunity for significant change; and we might argue that a ‘policy window’ (Kingdon, 2003, p. 20) was opened, perhaps even constructed, by a persuasive report from an authoritative advisory body. The findings clearly show that evidence, ideas, argument and framing all mattered in the unfolding of events, as envisaged in cognitive perspectives on the policy process. Certainly, it is difficult to account for the genesis of the 60 per proposal, or its acceptance by government, without invoking the science of climate change. Other ideas were important too, notably the principle of ‘contraction and convergence’, which was already ‘floating around’ in the policy stream (as Kingdon would have it), and was picked up and channeled by the Commission in arriving at its recommendation. (Interestingly, though, this aspect of the rationale for the 60 per cent target was not explicitly endorsed by the government, which argued in its response to the Commission that contraction and convergence was ‘only one of a number of potential models for global agreement’ [UK Government, 2003b, p. 3].) Undoubtedly, in addition, a crucial factor in the impact of the Commission’s report was its framing around a simple, ‘headline’ target and a set of indicative energy scenarios. The former cut through complexity while the latter showed how an ambitious objective might, over half a century, be achieved. This act of framing reminds us that the relationship between knowledge and policy has discursive, as well as rationalistic dimensions, and that discourse can sometimes be critical in the dynamics of policy change. Knowledge was not enough, however, even when broadly defined. In the story of the 60 per cent target it was always intertwined with interests, institutions and power and – as illustrated in Section 4 – with events. Both the genesis and fate of the proposal involved the intersection and interaction of environmental, political and cognitive processes operating at micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, to the point that they may be difficult to disentangle. ‘In practical experience’, as Sheila Jasanoff (2006, p. 43) reminds us, ‘scales of analysis and action are frequently scrambled together’. And what should we say about policy advice? What function(s) did the Commission perform, and how influential was its energy report in the evolution of climate policy in the UK (and possibly beyond)? The account offered here suggests that the Commission (as on many previous occasions) played multiple roles, acting simultaneously as knowledge broker, conduit, discursive agent, advocate and policy entrepreneur. Certainly, it synthesised scientific and other forms of knowledge, acting as a broker in the sense used by Litfin (1994: 4) – an intermediary between researchers policy-makers – and (to a more limited extent) as a broker of policy alternatives, as described by Pielke (2007). Significant in this role was the Commission’s standing as a respected and authoritative body: the knowledge and arguments that it ‘brokered’ enjoyed a special legitimacy, even if they had been presented many times before. But the Commission was much more than an intermediary, or neutral analyst, or conveyer of ‘advice’. For one thing, a number of its members were themselves embedded in epistemic and policy communities in the fields of energy and climate change, so that we might think of the Commission as an agent of learning at the intersection of different networks. Importantly also, the Commission took on an advocacy role in the energy report, explicitly attempting ‘to redirect the . . . attitudes, preferences, or cognitive beliefs’ of policy makers

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(Majone, 1989: 38). And in producing ‘not simply one more report on energy’, it adopted a discursive strategy and showed itself to be an effective policy entrepreneur, most obviously in helping to shape the policy window that enabled process streams to converge. It is possible, of course, perhaps even likely, that a radical policy commitment something like the one adopted would eventually have emerged in the UK even in the absence of the Royal Commission’s report. Reductions of the order of 60 per cent were in the air, policy responses were in flux, and Britain was not alone in contemplating ambitious objectives.24 So we could interpret the developments of 2003 as an escalation in policy, rather than a case of ‘overshoot’, where a stable policy gives way suddenly to a build up of pressures and is thereby dramatically changed (Baumgartner, 2006). On the other hand, the move was quite dramatic, and was a precursor to subsequent developments which made the UK the first country in the world to adopt a legally binding long-term framework to cut carbon emissions.25 We can speculate, but it is, in fact, impossible to say whether, or when, these policy changes might have happened without the Royal Commission’s report and the particular combination of events and trends outlined in Section 4 of this paper. Finally, it is worth remembering that the adoption of radical policies does not in itself lead to successful implementation, and that sometimes, precisely because of the complexities in environmental, social and technical systems, such policies become subject to the law of unintended effects. It is (as the saying goes) too soon to tell whether increasingly ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets in the UK will have the desired effect over the intended time scale: if a week is a long time in politics, then forty years is something of an eternity. At the time of writing, there are competing priorities in the face of a global economic crisis, and it is unclear whether environmental issues will become less prominent on the political agenda, as precedents in the 1970s and 1980s suggest, or whether an ecomodernist discourse, which sees tackling climate change as an integral part of recovery, will prevail. There are also many unresolved tensions and inconsistencies. In January 2009, for example, in a move that critics find difficult to reconcile with its climate policies, the UK Government approved in principle a major expansion of Heathrow Airport. We also know that, within the complexities of hybrid socio-technical systems, both social practices and technical structures can be deeply resistant to change. It might even be that the very framing of climate policy in terms of physical parameters, emissions reductions and control – a frame readily adopted by the Commission – will itself be subject

24 The work of the IPCC, pointing towards the need for deep cuts in emissions from developed economies, had already been an important influence on policy debates, nationally as well as internationally (IPCC, 1996, 2001; RCEP 2000; UK Government, 2003b). For example, the German Advisory Council on the Environment (Sachverststa¨ndigenrat fu¨r Umweltfragen, SRU), a body with some similarities to the Royal Commission, had called for 40 per cent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in Germany by 2020, a target adopted conditionally (assuming European Union commitments) by the German Government in 2002 and unilaterally in 2007 (for discussion, see Koch and Hey, 2009). Sweden had adopted an objective of reducing aggregate emissions to less than 4.5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per capita per year by 2050 (from around 7.8 tonnes in 2002), with further reductions to follow (Swedish Government Bill 2001/02: 55, Sveriges Klimatstrategi [The Swedish Climate Strategy]). It is interesting that on 25th February 2003, the day after the launch of the UK Energy White Paper, Tony Blair wrote jointly with the Swedish Prime Minister, Go¨ran Persson, to Costas Simitis, Prime Minister of Greece and incoming President of the Council of the European Union, urging that ‘[t]he EU should take the lead amongst developed countries in signalling our intention to become a truly low-carbon economy by 2050 through a significant reduction in carbon emissions in the order of 60%’. The text of the letter is at http:// www.number10.gov.uk/Page3093 (accessed 9.6.09). 25 See http://www.defra.gov.uk/ENVIRONMENT/climatechange/adapt/legislation (accessed 24.6.09).

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