The Contemporary Social Contract and Conditions of Climate Policy Intractability

The 1987 Montreal Protocol serves as a high-water moment of public trust and international climate policy consensus and remains the only treaty to receive universal ratification by all 196 United Nations member states. Recent research demonstrates that the Montreal Protocol has substantially reduced ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and facilitated the long-term repair of the ozone layer, substantially impacting surface cooling projections in the time since its implementation (Goyal et al. 2019; Young et al. 2021). Given the success of the Montreal Protocol, some have suggested that the framework should be adopted and extended to develop international policy responses to GWCC. A 2020 report by the Montreal Protocol Implementation Committee contends that the Montreal Protocol is an “already-operational instrument” with “existing processes” that may help generate the policy momentum for a “Global Pact for the Environment” (66). However, a static extension of the Montreal Protocol framework, without a consideration of the factors that influence public trust and contribute to the presence of intractability, would ignore constraints on the CSC that are necessary to address within any effort to organize an ambitious international climate policy consensus.

Examining the unique features of the Montreal Protocol, Haas (1992) found that trust in the epistemic community was integral to the one-of-a-kind global climate policy consensus, writing, “The epistemic community was the only competent scientific group at hand which could interpret the uncertainty surrounding policymaking about ozone-depleting substances,” and adding, “news of the environmental crises not only publicized the community’s opinions but also reinforced the value of its policymaking input” (223). Albrecht and Parker (2019) describe the scientific discovery of the “ozone hole” as a “dramatic focusing event” that resulted in increased “global public attention to the problem of ozone depletion” and “created a sense of urgency about the need for a robust global policy solution” (311). The findings of the epistemic community were vaunted in news coverage that ultimately pressured the largest producer of CFCs, DuPont, to move to a non-CFC-emitting substitute and drove policymakers to respond to public attention with consensual action. In a content analysis of news reports related to ozone between 1979 and 1985, Howland, Becker, and Prelli (2006) found that “scientists command the bulk of news attention regarding the stratospheric ozone problem, and that is an important form of power,” adding, “they had the ear of policy making bodies” (221). In the three decades following the Montreal Protocol, there have been several attempts to generate international climate policy consensus and considerable efforts made to direct public attention to the escalating consequences of exceeding “climate guardrails” (Hansen et al. 2015). However, alongside declivities in public trust, the epistemic communities’ contributions to news coverage of climate science have been diminished, and oppositional partisan positions have hardened. A review of nearly six hundred New York Times news articles from 1980 to 2018 finds that “basic climate facts appear … with vanishingly small frequencies” and reports that “the vast majority of climate-change news articles contained none of the five basic climate facts” (Romps and Retzinger 2019, 6). Chinn et al.’s (2020) review of US climate change news from 1985 to 2017 finds that media has grown increasingly polarized, with coverage of partisan perspectives increasingly outnumbering coverage of scientific expertise. These findings suggest that factors associated with public trust, including decreasing public trust in media, increasing political polarization, and the circumvention of scientific expertise, have mitigated the strength of the epistemic community’s recommendations and diminished the public’s readiness to accept commitments to international climate policy.

In the time since the Montreal Protocol, observable declines in public trust have strained individuals’ reciprocal commitments to institutions associated with media, government, and science. A wide range of available data sources can be brought together to convincingly demonstrate the significant declines in public trust and changing characteristics of political polarization associated with imbalances in the CSC. General Social Survey (GSS) data from 1972 to 2014, collected from more than three thousand Americans every two years, illustrates a considerable decline in the public’s confidence in government, as well a growing distrust in institutions associated with media and press (Hooghe and Oser 2017). The Centre for Democracy’s 2020 Global Satisfaction with Democracy Report finds that “dissatisfaction with democracy has risen over time, and is reaching an all-time global high, in particular in developed democracies” (Foa et al. 2020, 1). Although Pew Research reports show that Americans’ public trust in science remains higher than indicators of trust in media, business, and elected officials, “there are particularly sizable gaps between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to trust in scientists whose work is related to the environment” (Funk et al. 2019, para. 3). Hamilton, Hartter, and Bell (2019) observe that “the association between climate-change views and sociopolitical identity is so strong, statistically, that climate-change questions might effectively serve as proxies for political identity itself” (2). By incorporating and aggregating measures of public trust from existing data sets, scholars can identify factors that reduce the public’s willingness to commit to climate policies for the greater global good. In future research, the inclusion of metrics associated with public trust in government, media, and science can be used to examine constraints on the CSC and encourage practices that confront instances of intractability and promote consensus.

Efforts to operationalize the CSC in various policy contexts could be useful for identifying the factors that have led to the erosion of public trust in institutions associated with media, government, and science. By aggregating a wide variety of existing data sets into different construct variables reflective of instances of intractability, scholars could better examine how declivities in public trust impact policy outcomes. Additional research is needed to develop an empirical strategy to investigate how public trust moderates the influence of the epistemic community and impacts climate policy outcomes. Policy scholars should take up existing indicators of trust in media, government, and science to better examine and explain instances of policy intractability. Drawing on dual sets of data, one focused on “metrics of public trust” and the other on “policy-specific metrics,” scholars can conduct exploratory statistical analyses to identify the strength of relationships between the many factors considered. Methods of confirmatory factor analyses and sequential equation modeling (SEM) could be used to identify the strength of associations between particular indicators of public trust and policy outcomes. The integration of a wide range of potential variable conditions would enable exploratory analyses to identify relevant factors previously excluded from models of the policy process. In instances where the assumptions of parametric tests have been violated or there are shortcomings in the available data, the application of nonparametric statistical tests (such as Kendall’s tau-b and Spearman’s Rho) could be used to assess monotonic relationships between data sets. Nonparametric tests are especially instructive when examining the strength and direction of associations that exist between variables and among a range of prospective factors.

Using existing survey data and organizational policy reports, including the Edelman Trust Barometer, OECD Reports, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020, and the World Values Survey (WVS), among many others, scholars can identify relevant indicators of trust in media, government, and science to integrate into their examinations of the policy process (see table 1).

The integration of measures of public trust enables researchers to use econometric analyses to find relationships between aggregated data sets and indicators specific to a particular policy issue. Drawing on longitudinal country-specific data, scholars may seek to explore policy relationships over time. In the context of climate policy, future research might consider how the conditions of public trust associated with the high-water mark of the Montreal Protocol compare to the contemporary conditions of climate policy challenges. Developing comparative analyses, policy scholars might choose to discern between countries with greater and lesser follow-through on international climate policy commitments to explore those “enabling factors” that “motivate constituent support for public policies and influence citizens’ willingness to limit individual freedoms in exchange for greater social security and assurances of collective wellbeing” (Groff 2022, 1). In doing so, research might compare country-specific data associated with environmental policy indicators and climate policy outcomes, including measurements of greenhouse gas emissions, assessments of resource productivity, and reports of public favorability associated with domestic and international climate policy (see table 2). Reliable data for these metrics can also be aggregated from existing institutional databases and organizational reports such as the Climate Action Tracker, the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), OECD reports, and the 2020 Renewable Energy Ratings, among many others. As just one example, the OECD’s Environment at a Glance Indicators (2022) report includes thirty-eight relevant metrics. In addition to measures of greenhouse gas emissions, the report includes country-by-country calculations associated with the “share of renewables in the production of electricity,” “environmentally related tax revenue,” and “share of climate change mitigation technologies.” Along with others not listed here, the integration of these dual data sets could be used to compare countries’ climate progress and performance in association with factors of public trust to better explain instances of intractability and identify practices that promote international climate policy consensus.

Efforts to identify the enabling factors of the CSC will confront an expanding interdisciplinary scope that presents three challenges. First, to the project itself, the depth and breadth of the available analytic connections are seemingly endless, and scholars must prioritize those that most effectively address the questions posed by the program of research. Second, to the scholar, the process of conducting interdisciplinary work requires the ability to bring together different analytical concepts to identify new areas of research. Here, the opportunity to identify novel conceptual collaborations and/or develop important methodological contributions is a promising reward for these efforts. However, this novel or experimental work brings up a third challenge related to scholarly reception. Although there are a number of academic journals and popular press publication outlets that promote interdisciplinary and exploratory research, the diverse combination of literature may challenge the reviewers’ areas of expertise and problematize foundational disciplinary assumptions. To overcome these three challenges, it is important that researchers aggregating a wide range of data sets make a concerted effort to develop a clear explanation for why particular variables were chosen, present a transparent description of their methodological processes, and seek out opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations and contributions. Moreover, it will be increasingly necessary that academic publication outlets facilitate the publication of exploratory studies and encourage the types of interdisciplinary collaboration needed to identify best practices for building public trust and forging consensus under conditions of intractability.

Although the Montreal Protocol remains a high-water mark of global policy consensus, policy makers should not even begin to contemplate its use as a contemporary framework without first acknowledging the constraints on the CSC that have contributed to climate policy intractability. It is important to acknowledge that declines in public trust undermine consensus and reduce the public’s willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. While the Inflation Reduction Act provides a brief moment of climate optimism, its commitments to reducing greenhouse gases fell along partisan lines and remain subject to the caprice of future administrations that may overturn and reverse any gains. Future research examining the conditions that lead to intractability can be used to identify practices that restore confidence in epistemic communities, nudge intransigent publics toward urgent policy reforms, and promote consensus in international climate policy deliberations.

When declining indicators of government trust merge with distrust in media and science, the social contract is jeopardized, and the likelihood of issue freeze and policy stalemate is magnified. The concern is that the conditions of intractability beget more intractability; as intransigent opposition ferments, media misinformation, political polarization, and science denial undermine the effective workings of the policy process and further compromise public trust. In the context of GWCC, this cyclical effect is particularly concerning. The longer it takes for developed nations to organize an ambitious climate policy consensus, the more difficult it will be to adequately address pressing environmental concerns, and the more likely it is that existing forms of partisan opposition to climate policy will become entrenched. As it is, several developed countries are expected to fail to meet their nationally determined contributions (NDCs), and only 28 percent have signaled a commitment to “ratchet up” their NDCs in the next round (Climate Watch 2022). For these reasons, it is particularly important to understand the factors of intractability that continue to stagnate international policy commitments to address GWCC.

Attention to the health and strength of the CSC—and its many enabling factors—may provide alternative avenues to circumvent intractability and encourage the kind of reforms necessary for robust climate policy in the future (Groff 2022). In future research, the inclusion of measures of public trust can be used to better understand the factors that influence the role of the epistemic community and impact compliance with policy process outcomes. Among the factors that influence public trust, measures of political polarization function as a moderating factor as increased trust in media can be associated with political polarization. In these instances, even when indicators of trust in media are high, partisan polarization may erode confidence in policy action and contribute to intractable climate policy conditions that reduce the likelihood that developed nations will commit to international policy actions that require individual and institutional sacrifices. Although media misinformation, political polarization, and science denial are often independently associated with instances of intractability, it is necessary to develop a more sound empirical strategy to collectively examine factors that constrain the CSC. The exploration of a wide range of variables and data sets can serve to enhance the validity of the concept and extend its consideration to diverse policy contexts. The examination of metrics associated with public trust is particularly necessary in instances where the policy process appears to be making little progress. Additional research is needed to consider how intransigent opposition associated with GWCC, immigration, reproductive health rights, and other long contested policy issues is exacerbated by declines in public trust.

Stephen P. Groff is an economist and governor of Saudi Arabia’s National Development Fund. He was previously ranking vice-president of the Asian Development Bank. Groff also served as deputy director for development co-operation at the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and as deputy vice-president for operations at the Washington, DC-based Millennium Challenge Corporation. He has also worked for the US Agency for International Development, for the US Refugee Program, and as a US Peace Corps volunteer. He is a graduate of Yale College and the Kennedy School at Harvard University and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

None to declare.