Latin American Elites Favour Polycentric Governance in Climate Change Agreements

• In Event: Policy Networks

Abstract

Scholars and policy-makers generally assume that climate change mitigation requires global scale governance. However, the international provision of public goods involves high transaction costs and is particularly vulnerable to free riding and poor monitoring. Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom argued that a decentralised approach to climate governance could address these issues by fostering trust among members of the civil society and generating the local knowledge necessary to effectively implement climate policies. Although her proposal has received significant attention in academic circles, there is little evidence whether citizens support polycentric arrangements to tackle global warming. Here we run a conjoint experiment with elite members of 10 Latin American countries (n = 651, comparisons = 7,968) and ask respondents to evaluate 6,000 possible climate change agreements that vary across six dimensions. We find that Latin American elites strongly prefer polycentric regimes to centralised ones, and the result is robust across countries and elite types. These findings not only suggest novel ways to craft accountable, democratic climate change mitigation agreements, but also offer new insights on how to integrate interventions at the local and international levels.

Authors

• Danilo Freire, Brown University

• Umberto Mignozzetti, Fundação Getulio Vargas

• David Skarbek, Brown University