By Zachary Dove, DSG Research Fellow and PhD Candidate at UCSC
Experts and assessments generally agree that solar geoengineering (SG) research requires governance. However, there is also widespread agreement that existing forms of governance – international law, national environmental regulations, and scientific norms – collectively fall short of sufficiently managing all of the risks and challenges associated with SG.
How can the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering (DSG) work collaboratively with others to build this governance, particularly in a way that ensures communities and countries that are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change—and therefore most likely to be impacted by SG—are empowered to play a leading role in decision-making about whether and how SG is researched, developed, or used?
Our newly published article, “Building Capacity to Govern Emerging Climate Intervention Technologies,” aims to inform these efforts by refocusing attention on scholarship and practice toward the concept of governance capacity building. The article was recently published in the open-access journal Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. The full text of our article can be found here. I co-authored the article with DSG’s Dr. Shuchi Talati, the Founder and Executive Director of DSG, as well as Dr. Sikina Jinnah, Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Center for Reimagining Leadership at UCSC.
As a PhD Candidate in Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), my dissertation research investigates how various forms of engagement are used to govern SG research, and how these engagement practices can contribute to – or degrade – justice in this contentious and controversial field.
I became interested in SG and its governance near the beginning of my PhD in 2018, after thinking about and participating in social movement activity in the climate issue area. I wanted to become familiar with an emerging technology that seemed to hold the potential to transform climate politics. I quickly became fascinated by the high stakes, risk-risk tradeoffs, expert and public controversy, and ethical dilemmas associated with SG and the growing attention towards it.
Our article builds off the research I did when I joined DSG as a Research Fellow. That research aimed to inform DSG’s approach to capacity building by drawing on existing knowledge and experience on capacity building in the development and environmental issue areas more broadly. Capacity building can be thought of as a process of building or strengthening the knowledge, skills, and resources people need to accomplish their goals, and has long been a core area of work involving aid agencies, NGOs, academics, international institutions, and governments within the development, environment, and climate issue areas.
As we argue in the article, regardless of whether people think SG should or should not be researched, developed, or ultimately deployed, everyone should agree on the need to build our capacity to govern SG.
This work is needed to help ensure that the capacities required to oversee and manage SG research and assessment activity are widely available as communities and countries make critical decisions about SG.
The most recent international deliberations on solar geoengineering at the Sixth United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) highlight the importance of beginning this work now: SG is not something we might make decisions about in the future. Critical decisions are already being made, and so governance capacities are needed now.
What is governance capacity building?
Our article focused on what we call governance capacity building, which can be thought of as one broad way to approach capacity building. In short, governance capacity building refers to a process of strengthening the knowledge, skills, tools, and practices that enable individuals, organizations, communities, and countries to implement or engage in governance, in this case of SG. This includes capacities that enable groups to design and implement forms of governance. For example, a national environmental ministry that wishes to create a permitting process to regulate outdoor experiments related to SG will need certain forms of knowledge, skills, and resources to design, implement, oversee, and enforce a permitting process.
However, governance is not just about implementing it – sometimes, people need to engage in governance processes that other actors have initiated. For example, say the environmental ministry that is designing the permitting process wishes to consult the public about the design of the permitting process, to improve its design by integrating public views and knowledge and to build public trust in the permitting process by ensuring all relevant risks and concerns are adequately addressed. Members of the public would need certain forms of capacity to understand, on some level, SG and outdoor experiments, as well as capacities that enable them to discuss SG with others and to effectively communicate their perspectives to policymakers.
Non-governmental organizations and other civil society organizations might also wish to facilitate national discussion on the permitting process, or to help ensure that policymakers take into account their members’ views or interests. This would also require certain forms of capacity – to facilitate broad and inclusive discussion and to communicate societal views to policymakers, and to engage in policy advocacy.
Importantly, this work involves strengthening existing capacities, rather than building new ones from scratch.
Broadening how we think about capacity building: It’s not just about the science (though it is critical)
When we look at what sort of capacity building is discussed in the academic literature on SG governance and what capacities existing efforts aim to build, it’s clear that the focus so far has been on scientific capacity building, which aims to build scientific and other research capacities in scientists and researchers primarily by funding scientific research and facilitating collaboration and scientific community-building.
To be clear, scientific capacities are crucial because they help us understand and assess SG and therefore make more informed decisions about it. As such, scientific capacities (in addition to other forms of knowledge) are a critical set of capacities that are required to effectively govern SG.
However, scientific capacities are not sufficient on their own, as non-scientific capacities—such as the capacity to formulate national interests and to participate in international negotiations in pursuit of those interests — are also needed to make decisions about SG research or deployment. Scientific expertise is needed to support these activities, and yet scientific expertise by itself does not enable, for example, the crafting and implementation of policy that effectively manages conflict between SG and mitigation, nor the identification of public values at stake and the shaping of SG to respect and support them.
What makes capacity building successful?
Leadership from vulnerable communities is integral to a widely agreed element of what makes capacity building successful, meaning capacity remains with recipients over long periods of time. Experts and practitioners are in agreement that ownership of the process and outcome of capacity building by recipients is the key to success, meaning the recipients of capacity building efforts are empowered to decide, for example, what capacities need strengthening and what are the best ways to do so within their local context. Under this vision, capacity building is imagined to be a sustained process that comprehensively strengthens many types of capacities across all sectors of society and is driven and owned by the countries and communities whose capacities are to be built. In our article, we call this the new model of capacity building. Actors, primarily in the Global South, have imagined this new model to overcome well-known limitations with what we call the classic model of capacity building, which revolves around the use of short-term, ad hoc, and uncoordinated technical training or workshops.
What can capacity building practitioners, including DSG do?
If there is one takeaway from decades of research and experience with capacity building, it is that capacity building is not an easy task. Our article provides several recommendations for how DSG and others can create inclusive and effective capacity building programs. For example, we highlight that successfully planning and facilitating these programs requires, in itself, several important capacities, such as understanding the local context and identifying where capacities already exist. Donors and providers of capacity building programs need to take seriously the need to build their own capacities to successfully facilitate capacity building programs. In other words, there is a need for capacity building for capacity building – to build capacity to be able to build capacity effectively elsewhere.
Overall, DSG and others must build a range of capacities that enable them to assess whether and how their capacity building efforts are successful and if not, to identify what changes are needed to successfully build locally owned and durable capacity systems.
Ongoing questions
Our article does not provide all the answers. We faced several important questions and challenges that will require sustained experimentation and attention to address.
A critical task is to figure out how to sufficiently transfer ownership of capacity building processes and outcomes to its recipients, including when capacity building efforts are initiated and funded by organizations based in the Global North. Implementing joint decision-making and co-creation is crucial, but even this is easier said than done. The unequal power dynamics at play hold the potential to stifle even genuine attempts to establish relationships based on shared responsibility and mutual respect. We hope that the early and conscientious attention towards relationship and trust building practiced by DSG can build towards this.
Overall, our article provides a path forward for how scholars and practitioners can use the governance by engagement concept to enable inclusive and effective SG governance activities. Governance capacities must be available prior to when they are needed. As research funding and discussion of SG quickly ramps up and as decision points become more frequent, governance capacity building needs to be discussed, planned, and initiated now.