Rethinking Climate Policy: Lessons from the Pandemic

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

The pandemic, and the governmental attempts to address it at the federal, state, and local levels, has made visible a range of policy challenges in other policy areas as well. Covid-19 has reminded us that governance failures can be multi-dimensional, occurring in the quality of our decision-making, the scale of our solutions, and the inequity within our outcomes. Given what has stemmed from the pandemic and the numerous policy responses, this roundtable intends to discuss the lessons learned that might be relevant to advance equitable and effective climate change policy in the US and beyond. Critical to this discussion is an awareness by all participants that their own research is connected to the work of other participants in ways worthy of exploration. Each participant will comment on equitable and effective climate change policy from their own perspective while also aiming for integration and cross-fertilization with the views of other on the roundtable. Climate change has already shown itself to have disproportionate outcomes if governance structures are not focused on equity, as Abel will discuss. Daley will focus on how health inequities are shaped by climate change and by policy responses to climate change. Cities are at the forefront of policy actions meant to combat climate injustices, as Krause will attest. And as Harrison will argue, the impacts of Covid on climate change policy do not end at the US border and there is much to learn from the Canadian case. The topics to be raised in this roundtable do not stand in isolation. Rather they are connected in numerous ways that the participants will draw out. In so doing the participants of the round table will also draw out further lessons of how to restructure our climate change political science.

Sub Unit

• Division 39: Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics

Chair

• Mark C. Stephan Washington State University, Vancouver

Presenters

• Dorothy Daley University of Kansas

• Rachel M. Krause University of Kansas

• Kathryn Harrison University of British Columbia

• Holly Peterson Louisiana State University