In the international climate change policy process, there has historically been a significant emphasis on cost-benefit analysis. This reflects the view that, if action to reduce GHG emissions is necessary, it is best to identify the least-cost way of achieving this. In the global context, cost-benefit analysis has been invoked to consider both how much effort should be taken towards near-term emissions reduction and where this should be done. The logic is that it makes sense to keep reducing emissions for as long as, and wherever, the benefit of doing so exceeds the cost. Reflecting the issues identified above—increased recognition of uncertainty, the shift from predictive to adaptive-based approaches and, indeed, the overall pressure to reframe the climate change challenge—in recent years, there is greater awareness of the strengths and limits of cost-benefit analysis as an approach to informing climate change policies (Masur & Posner, 2011). This partly involves bringing long-recognised problems in cost-benefit analysis to bear and partly reflects the distinctive characteristics of the climate change problem (Weitzman, 2009). At global level, cost-benefit analysis seeks to compare the costs of reducing emissions of GHGs with the benefits of doing so. The benefits of reducing emissions are usually estimated to be the damage avoided by limiting the extent of climate change. This is known as the ‘social cost of carbon’. Estimating the ‘economic damage function’ turns out to be extremely difficult and inevitably requires very significant assumptions, rather than the input of reliable data. In all cost-benefit analysis, future benefits and costs need to be discounted using a social discount rate. For climate change, which is a very long-term phenomenon, the choice of discount rate has a huge impact on the outcome of cost-benefit analysis. But there are alternative approaches to choosing a discount rate and these unavoidably involve ethical judgements about the relative importance of future generations as opposed to the present generation. One leading British climate change expert concludes that ‘for all these reasons—a global-scale phenomenon affecting the distant future and with uncertain consequences, many of which have no market value—the application of conventional cost-benefit analysis to climate change policy becomes at best very difficult and worst impossible’ (Hulme, 2009: 116).
In addition to these general problems, it is important to think carefully about the role of cost-benefit analysis in a policy area where the key need is not only to assess existing policy possibilities, but also search for new ones. We summarise some thinking on this in Box 3.1. These limitations of cost-benefit analysis have led many
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analysts to prefer a range of other decision analysis frameworks. In their paper entitled ‘When We Don’t Know the Costs or the Benefits: Adaptive Strategies for Abating Climate Change’, Lembert et al. (1996) call for an ‘adaptive strategy’. They highlight the similarities between adaptive strategy and Shell’s scenario planning and the US army’s assumption based planning (Dewar, 2002).
Box 3.1: Limits of Cost-benefit Analysis as an Option-Generating Device
Richardson draws attention to limitations of cost-benefit analysis when seen as a scientific and objective tool of policy decision. He fears that cost-benefit analysis can limit intelligent deliberation about how best to use resources. While it makes sense to estimate the costs and benefits of possible policy measures, this should be used as part of a process of practical intelligence and democratic policy deliberation. Cost-benefit analysis can limit rather than expand rational deliberation because it presupposes that all the significant deliberation, on possible policies and how we value their benefits and costs, has already been done. In the ordinary process of practical reasoning we do not think of preferences being fixed independently of deliberation; our preferences and goals are reformulated as we proceed.
Consequently, he suggests that an over-reliance on cost-benefit analysis, especially in its economic- theoretic sense, can block the use of practical intelligence. First, by focusing on the calculation of the costs and benefits of given proposals, it can fail to generate new solutions and alternatives. Second, it can fail to resolve conflicts between the many ends and values we hold. Deliberation involving competing ends or values will often find ways of respecifying one or all of them so as to relieve their conflict in specific contexts. This will often yield a principled compromise. Indeed, one of the best examples of this is the initially paralysing conflict between environmental protection and economic growth, modified by the development of thinking about ‘sustainable development’ and ‘green growth’. Third, by taking ends—and, indeed, means—as fixed it lacks a provision for reformulation of them. But this is precisely what we do in most practical problem-solving. In summary, Richardson’s concern is with ‘cost-benefit analysis’s limitations as an agenda-setting and option-generating device’ (Richardson, 2000: 1000).
In the light of the increased recognition of uncertainty and the various strengths and limits of cost-benefit analysis, we believe that it is important to think carefully about the best forms of policy analysis and policy development for Irish climate change policy. We discuss this in Section 3.5.5 below and in more detail in Chapter 9.
3.4.3
A Richer and More Realistic View of Attitudinal and
Behavioural Issues: Practices, Norms and Technologies
The dominant framing of the climate change challenge also involves a particular understanding of the attitudinal and behavioural issues that arise. The main policy thrusts reflect the hierarchical and linear framing of the issue, with the emphasis being on binding international agreements and, in order to drive down emissions, efforts to price carbon through taxes or carbon trading regimes. Within this context, attitudinal and behavioural issues are minimal, and consist mainly of the challenge of communicating the urgency of policy action to governments; once that it achieved, it
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is assumed that we can rely on the cost-minimising behaviour of market actors. Since countries adopt many policies beyond pricing carbon, a range of other attitudinal and behavioural issues inevitably tend to arise. The dominant approach to science, policy analysis and policy shaped the way these issues were understood and addressed. Attitudes and associated behaviours are seen as awkward realities that give rise to market failure and create limited or perverse responses to policy instruments. The underlying attitudes are seen as largely given; they need to be understood in order that policy can be designed in a way that takes account of them. In some cases, behaviour might be modified by provision of information, reflecting what is known as an ‘information-deficit’ model.
Linear models of behaviour change underpin the dominant approach. Much of the conventional literature supposes that individuals make decisions by calculating the individual costs and benefits of different courses of action and choose the most rational (economic) option. It assumes that people are largely self-interested and rational (Jackson, 2005). The most prevalent, the ‘information deficit’ model of attitudes and environmental behaviour, assumes that educating people about environmental issues with the ‘right’ information will lead to more pro- environmental behaviour (Burgess et al., 1998; Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002).
While this model has evolved and become more sophisticated in recent years, and increasingly recognises that choices are often irrational, its variants, such as behavioural economics, would still seem to view attitudes, outside forces and behaviour in a linear fashion, easily directed by external drivers like price, persuasion, suggested reminders or ‘nudges’, or that they are obstructed by ‘barriers’ and people’s limitations (Shove, 2010a). Despite evidence of this model’s ineffectiveness to change behaviour, it is pervasive across climate change policy initiatives (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002: 241).
Although other models have emerged in the social science literature, these have not yet been widely adopted at a policy level. Hargreaves argues that, ‘the persistence of such linear models of behavioural correction is perhaps partly explained because they render policy responses relatively straightforward’ (Hargreaves, 2010: 81). A key example is providing information for an individual to make choices. They fit well with the language of individual behaviour and personal responsibility and provide a policy template for intervention (Shove, 2010b).5 Social change is thought to depend
on values and attitudes (A), which are believed to drive the kinds of behaviour (B)
5 However, there is increasing recognition at a policy level that only looking at attitudes and
behaviour will not be effective in the longer term. The European Commission has issued a call for social research on climate change that is explicit about the need to go beyond the behavioural perspective in order to address structural changes in consumption and production (Shove, 2010b: 55).
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that individuals choose to adopt (C)—sometimes know as the ‘ABC’ Model (ibid.). The Stern review in 2007 emphasised the removal of barriers to behavioural change as one of three required policy elements for climate change (Stern, 2007). While there is no doubt that human behaviour is central to climate change, focusing on barriers alone will not be sufficient.
The ‘ABC’ Model can be effective in changing attitudes and, to a lesser extent, behaviour, but it is limited because it fails to take into account individual, social and institutional constraints (Blake, 1999), or habits and social norms (Jackson, 2005). More profoundly, it does not recognise the social embeddedness of decision-making, in which individual choices are continually being shaped and reshaped by the social contexts in which they take place (Moloney et al., 2010: 7616). It also fails to recognise how people become ‘locked’ into specific behaviour patterns through institutional factors outside their control (Jackson, 2005). Pro-environmental behaviour is also determined by the complex interplay of many other factors, such as time, convenience and comfort (Lavelle & Fahy, 2012). The dominant approach falls short because there is no simple relationship between attitudes, engagement and behaviour change (Upham et al., 2009).
While attitudes alone do not predict behaviour change, they do play a role in how people respond to the environment and climate change policy. In that regard, Irish people are already concerned about climate change and consider it to be one of the world’s most serious problems. A special Eurobarometer survey on climate change found that on a scale of one (least) to ten (most serious), Irish respondents ranked the seriousness of climate change at 7.0 (7.1 EU-27 average).6 Another recent survey
noted that most (82 per cent) of Irish people believe that their personal behaviour could make a difference in the environment and that they needed to behave in a more environmentally friendly way (58 per cent) (Lavelle & Fahy, 2012).7 This level of
both concern and willingness to engage with environmental issues suggests that there is greater potential for behaviour change in Ireland, with a more sophisticated understanding.
6 Many report (66 per cent) taking personal action to respond such as recycling or buying energy
saving products (EU average is 53 per cent). Over a third, 39 per cent, of Irish respondents consider responsibility for action lies with national governments (EU average is 41 per cent) and 31 per cent consider it a collective responsibility (higher than EU average of 23 per cent) (TNS Opinion & Social 2011).
7
The 2011 Consensus lifestyle survey of 1500 households reported that 86 per cent were concerned about environmental issues (n=1,289).
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