Comparative Climate Change Policy and Federalism: An Overview

This commentary provides an overview of the four papers in this issue of Review of Policy Research on the politics of climate change. The papers all address in one way or another aspects of how federal‐type systems are dealing with the collective action and multilevel governance issues of climate change policy. The comparative study of federal systems provides insight into how domestic authority is so often overlapping and divided when dealing with greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Federal arrangements offer a rich array of norms, institutions, and practices for tackling these problems. Federal systems grapple continuously with the kinds of issues that are the most intractable in the climate change case, such as overcoming interregional differences of interests and values. A common federal feature is competition among subnational governments and between them and national or federated governments over climate change policy, which has been especially significant in the United States and in Canada in the relative absence of national action––although soberingly, the whole is as yet nowhere near as great as the sum of the parts. More significant, but rarer is the achievement of tighter coordination in federal systems achieved through intergovernmental co‐decision, as seen in the European Community and Australia. This has been accomplished in large part due to a consensus among all intergovernmental parties on the nature of the problem and congruence with the existing international regime, characteristics missing in the North American context.