Empirical identification of feasible and strategic climate policies

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Abstract
The political and institutional feasibility of implementing climate policy appears as a key impediment to accelerating climate action. Drawing on a rich dataset of climate policies introduced globally over the last 50 years, this paper explores global patterns in climate policy adoption to understand how climate policy feasibility is shaped by countries’ existing policies and institutional capacity. By constructing a ‘Climate Policy Space’ network based on the co-occurrence of climate policies across countries, we show that climate policy adoption is path-dependent, and therefore predictable: countries are significantly more likely to introduce policies that require similar institutional capacity and policy know-how to policies they have previously introduced. Exploiting this finding, we construct empirically validated ‘Climate Policy Feasibility Frontiers’ which, for a given country, identify policies that are (1) likely to be easiest to introduce; (2) have the greatest advantages in terms of capacity building and therefore facilitate further climate action; and (3) have the largest emissions reduction potential. As a complement to traditional cost-benefit analysis, such feasibility frontiers can inform more realistic and strategic climate policy prioritization across countries.

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