A meeting of the minds

Articles

Friday, 04 February 2011 11:31

Researchers from two sides of the planet met to investigate how best business can contribute to climate change governance in areas of limited statehood

Recently, researchers from two sides of the planet joined together in Cape Town to formalise one truly formidable question: Why and how does business contribute to climate change governance in areas of limited statehood?

Over a two-day workshop – led by Ralph Hamann from the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, and Tanja Börzel from the Department of Political Science at Free University Berlin – the researchers analysed opportunities and challenges for climate change mitigation and adaptation in Africa and Europe. Specific focus was on a governance perspective, analysing the interactions between governments and organisations, particularly businesses.

“Climate change is already presenting organisations in both the public and the private sector with significant challenges, but we still do not know very much about why and how organisations proactively and decisively respond, especially in very diverse contexts,” says Hamann.

Workshop participants sought to respond to the gap in systematic comparative research on why climate change mitigation and adaptation initiatives, public and private, are effective in some circumstances and not in others in terms of their ability to deliver social and environmental benefits simultaneously.

The project – a three-year collaborative research project funded by the German BMBF and South African National Research Foundation, which is not only designed to result in valuable contributions to the academic literature, but also in recommendations to policy decision-makers throughout Africa, Europe and beyond.

“From a policy perspective, the project addresses the vital question of how to respond to climate change in terms of both mitigation and adaptation in a manner that better understands the interactions between public policy and business strategy and organisational change,” says Hamann.

Attention was given to particular characteristics of climate change: the scientific and social complexities that determine why climate change presents such difficult challenges.

“Climate change is indeed a ‘wicked problem’ because of the high degree of uncertainty in the causal relationships between different parts of the system, including the climate system itself, but more so if we consider the interface between the climate system, the socio-economic system and the political governance system,” says Hamann. He adds that contributing to the “wickedness” is that different stakeholders have fundamentally different perspectives on the problem and there is little previous experience that is helpful in dealing with climate change, as the scale and nature of the problem are unprecedented.

And dealing with the problem is becoming more and more an imperative, particularly for South Africa.

“On the one hand, South Africa is a very high emitter of greenhouse gases per capita, due to its reliance on coal as an energy source, and on the other hand, it will be very severely affected by climate change through water stress and food insecurity,” Hamann says.

South Africa presently plays a predominant role in international climate change negotiations and will be hosting next year’s COP17, the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to be held in Durban – a conference many consider to be pivotal.

Though the country is at the forefront of climate change discussions, it seems slow to address the problem itself; a problem shared in all nations with “limited statehood”.

“Companies have been slow to adopt strategic responses to climate change, particularly in Africa, but this is not necessarily a sign of non-compliance, as state policy has been slow to move on this in Africa,” says Hamann. “Areas of limited statehood are those geographical or thematic areas, in which political institutions are unable or unwilling to hierarchically adopt and enforce collectively binding rules and protect or provide collective goods.”

He says there are market-based incentives for companies to respond to climate change, but even these rely on states to create and enforce appropriate parameters. South Africa’s Renewable Energy Feed-in Tariff programme, for instance, has a corollary in Germany that has worked well for many years, and initiatives related to carbon trading, such as the Clean Development Mechanism, have greatly benefited countries such as China.

So it is important to figure out whether such approaches can be made to work better in African countries as well.

“These mechanisms drive governance.

“South Africa designed a similar approach recently, but it isn’t really working – this is part of our interest in this project,” says Hamann. “Broadly, we will be looking at institutional drivers like regulations and norms, as well as competitive concerns: means for companies to develop a competitive advantage through strategic responses to these issues.”

The project, informally known by those involved as “the climate change governance project”, leverages the knowledge of the two institutions, uniquely bringing together management theory and political science.

“The partnership is significant in that, from a practical perspective, we can learn from each other and also we are able to compare European and African circumstances in terms of governance. The Germans bring in particular the political science perspective,” says Hamann.

“Climate change governance has to do with maintaining the ‘public service’ provided by a stable climate and ensuring the cost-effective and fair socio-economic adaptation to unavoidable climate changes.”

At the workshop, three key areas of “green” governance were identified: energy supply and demand, water pollution and consumption, and risk management.

The success of the first workshop has established a firm base for the project, and a second workshop to be held in Berlin is already being arranged. For now, each of the project’s participants has been invited to develop an abstract of a chapter to address the question: Why and how does business contribute to climate change governance in areas of limited statehood?

Guided by the conceptual framework developed at the first workshop, the researchers will undertake a range of research projects in South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Germany, and possibly China.

This is a unique approach to an unavoidable issue, and its effectiveness will be determined by the openness by governments and corporations to address, internally and externally, the wicked problem that is climate change affecting the global, collective future. As Hamann remarks: “The responsibility falls on everyone, after all.”

Gareth Coetzee

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