Carlo C. Jaeger

The psychology of denial concerning climate mitigation measures: evidence from Swiss focus groups

Various studies of public opinion regarding the causes and consequences of climate change reveal both a deep reservoir of concern, yet also a muddle over causes, consequences and appropriate policy measures for mitigation. The technique adopted here, namely integrated assessment (IA) focus groups, in which groups of randomly selected individuals in Switzerland looked at models of possible consequences of climate change and questioned specialists as to their accuracy and meaning, revealed a rich assembly of reactions. Respondents were alarmed about the consequences of high-energy futures, and mollied by images of low-energy futures. Yet they also erected a series of psychological barriers to justify why they should not act either individually or through collective institutions to mitigate climate change. From the viewpoint of changing their lifestyles of material comfort and high-energy dependence, they regarded the consequences of possible behavioural shift arising from the need to meet mitigation measures as more daunting. To overcome the dissonance created in their minds they created a number of socio-psychological denial mechanisms. Such mechanisms heightened the costs of shifting away from comfortable lifestyles, set blame on the inaction of others, including governments, and emphasised doubts regarding the immediacy of personal action when the e!ects of climate change seemed uncertain and far away. These ndings suggest that more attention needs to be given to the social and psychological motivations as to why individuals erect barriers to their personal commitment to climate change mitigation, even when professing anxiety over climate futures. Prolonged and progressive packages of information tailored to cultural models or organised belief patterns, coupled to greater community based policy incentives may help to widen the basis of personal and moral responsibility. 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Public Participation in Sustainability Science: A Handbook

Part I. Concepts and Insights: 1. Citizenship participation in sustainability assessments Bernd Kasemir, Carlo C. Jaeger and Jill Jager 2. Contexts of citizen participation Clair Gough, Eric Darier, Bruna de Marchi, Silvio Funtowicz, Robin Grove-White, Angela Guimaraes Pereira, Simon Shackley and Brian Wynne 3. Models as metaphors Jerry Ravetz Part II. Experiences with IA-Focus Groups: 4. Collage processes and citizens visions for the future Bernd Kasemir, Urs Dahinden, Asa Gerger Swartling, Daniela Schibli, Ralf Schule, David T...bara and Carlo C. Jager 5. Citizen interaction with computer models Urs Dahinden, Cristina Querol, Jill Jager and Mans Nilsson 6. Citizens reports on climate strategies Cristina Querol, Asa Gerger Swartling, Bernd Kasemir and David T...bara Part III. Further Forms of Participation: 7. Venture capital and climate policy Bernd Kasemir, Ferenc Toth and Vanessa Masing 8. COOL: exploring options for CO2 reduction in a participatory mode Willemijn Tuinstra, Marleen van de Kerkhoff, Matthijs Hisschemoller and Arthur Mol 9. Expert stakeholder participation in the Thames region Thomas E. Downing, Karen Bakker, Kate Lonsdale, Neil Summerton, Erik Swyngedouw and Consuelo Giansante 10. On the art of scenario development Chris Anastasi Part IV. Future Perspectives: 11. From projects to program in integrated assessment research Marjolein B. A. van Asselt and Jan Rotmans 12. Citizen participation and developing country agendas Kilaparti Ramakrishna 13. Linking the citizen to governance for sustainable climate futures Susanne Stoll-Kleemann, Tim ORiordan and Tom R. Burns.

Integrated assessment of sustainable development: multiple perspectives in interaction

Integrated assessment (IA) is a maturing research approach aiming at providing decision support on complex environment-related problems. Although interdisciplinary research is a pre-condition for IA, in order to reach the goals that IA has set it is necessary to go beyond interdisciplinary research efforts alone. There are two major reasons for this: the nature of democratic decision-making, and the nature of complex issues. The views held by stakeholders and the public at large are an integral part of democratic decision-making processes. Integrated assessments, which aim to support decision-making in an appropriate and relevant way, should therefore synthesise interdisciplinary scientific insights with a wide variety of societal views. Furthermore, this paper argues that the sustainability issues with which IA is concerned are complex problems, in the sense that they cannot be fully described or solved in any unique way. One of the reasons for this is the essentially contested character of the concept sustainable development. Against this background, the search for techniques of articulation and interaction of multiple perspectives is a major challenge for the IA community. Where the nature of democratic processes asks for taking into account views of a diversity of actors, the nature of the issues considered demands that multiple perspectives are included in integrated assessments. Decision support building on a single scientific description is therefore not at all sufficient for addressing complex problems in a democratic decision-making context. To this end, this paper argues that it seems promising to develop techniques that combine scientific assessment tools with public participation methods. In order to contribute to the search for such new IA techniques, this paper discusses some new avenues in IA modelling, and the application of a well-established social scientific tool, namely focus groups, in integrated assessment.

Risk management and integrated assessment

Integrated Assessment (IA) is the pursuit of a research program generated by the limitations of traditional forms of risk management. This claim can be justified by the following argument. Over the last decades, analysts and practitioners have brought to maturity a large array of tools for risk management. Most of them rely on combining judgments of utility with judgments of probability. This is the approach of the Rational Actor Paradigm (RAP). With many environmental problems, however, RAP‐based tools have run into considerable practical and theoretical difficulties. In response to these difficulties, a series of alternative approaches to practical risk management and to the theoretical understanding of risk have been elaborated. They try to embed the rational choices of individual actors studied by RAP into a broader framework of social rationality. This task can be approached by distinguishing situations where an actor holds unambiguous judgments of preference and probability from situations characterized by ambivalent judgments. RAP can handle the former, but not the latter. Problems whose management requires a combination of widely differing scientific disciplines are especially likely to involve ambivalent judgments of probability. The study of such problems constitutes the research program of integrated assessment. It involves three main tasks: developing IA models which can represent ambivalent expectations and evaluations, developing IA models which use such representations to study non‐marginal changes of social systems, and developing procedures of participatory IA which enable researchers to engage in an iterative exchange with various stakeholders.

Focus groups in integrated assessment: A micro‐cosmos for reflexive modernization

Abstract Like every society, todays global society has a body of knowledge which is taken for granted in everyday life. This knowledge, which is organized around the prospect of modernization, is currently challenged in several ways. One of these challenges concerns the risks of global environmental change. We investigate the hypothesis that the conceptual machinery of modernization is experiencing a far‐reaching transformation whose outcome may be labelled as reflexive modernization. For this purpose, we propose a new methodology based on focus groups embedded in a process of integrated environmental assessment. The methodology yields promising results which are consistent with the hypothesis. They point to further implications of the hypothesis of reflexive modernization which are both interesting for theoretically oriented research and relevant for policy‐making.

Power shifts: the dynamics of energy efficiency

Induced technical change is crucial for tackling the problem of timing in environmental policy. However, it is by no means obvious that the state has the ability to impose its will concerning technical change on the other relevant actors. Therefore, we conceptualize power in a non-linear model with social conflict and induced technical change. The model shows how economic growth, business cycles and innovation waves interact in the dynamics of energy efficiency. We assess three different ways of government control: energy taxes, energy and labor subsidies, and energy caps. Energy taxes help to select more energy efficient technologies. However, a successful selection of such technologies presupposes that they are available in the pool of technologies. As for energy subsidies, their existence helps to explain why in contemporary economies labor productivity grows faster than energy efficiency. With an energy cap, the social network of the relevant agents may be stabilized via social norms. It seems plausible that innovation waves comprise several business cycles and that such a wave is currently in the making. Proposals to postpone policies for improving energy efficiency increase the risk of energy inefficient lock-in effects.

Financing transition in an adverse context: climate finance beyond carbon finance

The Cancun conference decided to establish a Climate Green Fund (CGF) to help developing countries align their development policies with the long-term UNFCCC objectives. This paper clarifies the links between the two underlying motives: the first, technical in nature, is the necessity to redirect the infrastructure instruments in these countries (energy, transportation, building, material transformation industry) to avoid lock-in in carbon-intensive pathways in the likely absence of a significant world carbon price in the coming decade; the second, political in nature, is the interpretation of the CGF as a practical translation of the notion of the common but differentiated responsibility principle, since the funds are expected to come from Annex 1 countries. This paper shows why this latter perspective might generate some distrust given the orders of magnitude of funds to be levied in Annex 1 countries especially in the context of the financial crisis and major constraints on public budgets. It then explores the basic principles around which it is possible to minimize these risks by upgrading climate finance in the broader context of the evolution of the financial and monetary systems. After exploring how such links could help make climate policies that contribute to reducing some of the imbalances caused by economic globalization by reorienting world savings and reducing investment uncertainty, it sketches how this perspective might be palatable for the OECD, the major emerging economies and fossil fuel exporters.

Procedural leadership in climate policy: a European task

In the process which has led to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the European Union played an active role, In those years, the long-run perspective of European climate policy was geared to the idea of a carbon tax, while the US and OPEC formed a blocking coalition, Meanwhile, the US has adopted a more open attitude to climate policy, but it is highly unlikely that a substantial carbon tax will be implemented in the US in the foreseeable future, Forming a political consensus around this instrument has proved very difficult in Europe as well, Clearly, a fresh approach to climate policy is warranted, We argue that this approach should consist of putting into place a process of sequential decision making which is flexible, innovative and participatory, Such a process would lead beyond existing alternatives of taxation and regulation as defined by a seemingly omniscient political authority, Its rationale lies in the recognition of a cost barrier which can be surmounted by the combination of patient multilateral negotiation, innovative business initiatives, and resonance with public opinion, The European Union is in an excellent position to take on a leading role in establishing such a process, Europes special opportunity lies in the fact that her citizenry is supportive of ambitious climate policy as nowhere else in the world, Furthermore, the current situation of the European economies invites, and even demands, fresh thinking about the economic opportunities offered by a transition to sustainability

Climatic risks and rational actors

Abstract The present state of research suggests that substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions could be achieved only by introducing some kind of greenhouse tax at very high levels. Such measures are unlikely to be realized for both economic and political reasons. We argue that a way out of this impasse can be found if a misleading assumption is corrected. This is the assumption that a system involving a multitude of rational actors operating on interdependent markets has only one possible equilibrium. The global economic system may, in fact, be able to attain several different equilibria. This leads to a peculiar kind of uncertainty, which so far has been studied mainly in quantum mechanics. The possibility of multiple equilibria implies that large reductions of carbon emissions could be feasible without massive longrun increases of fossil fuel prices. It also implies that a decision about a target for greenhouse gas emissions cannot be taken by means of economic optimization.

Public Participation in Sustainability Science: Frontmatter

Part I. Concepts and Insights: 1. Citizenship participation in sustainability assessments Bernd Kasemir, Carlo C. Jaeger and Jill Jager 2. Contexts of citizen participation Clair Gough, Eric Darier, Bruna de Marchi, Silvio Funtowicz, Robin Grove-White, Angela Guimaraes Pereira, Simon Shackley and Brian Wynne 3. Models as metaphors Jerry Ravetz Part II. Experiences with IA-Focus Groups: 4. Collage processes and citizens visions for the future Bernd Kasemir, Urs Dahinden, Asa Gerger Swartling, Daniela Schibli, Ralf Schule, David T...bara and Carlo C. Jager 5. Citizen interaction with computer models Urs Dahinden, Cristina Querol, Jill Jager and Mans Nilsson 6. Citizens reports on climate strategies Cristina Querol, Asa Gerger Swartling, Bernd Kasemir and David T...bara Part III. Further Forms of Participation: 7. Venture capital and climate policy Bernd Kasemir, Ferenc Toth and Vanessa Masing 8. COOL: exploring options for CO2 reduction in a participatory mode Willemijn Tuinstra, Marleen van de Kerkhoff, Matthijs Hisschemoller and Arthur Mol 9. Expert stakeholder participation in the Thames region Thomas E. Downing, Karen Bakker, Kate Lonsdale, Neil Summerton, Erik Swyngedouw and Consuelo Giansante 10. On the art of scenario development Chris Anastasi Part IV. Future Perspectives: 11. From projects to program in integrated assessment research Marjolein B. A. van Asselt and Jan Rotmans 12. Citizen participation and developing country agendas Kilaparti Ramakrishna 13. Linking the citizen to governance for sustainable climate futures Susanne Stoll-Kleemann, Tim ORiordan and Tom R. Burns.